by Jon Wilson
From the late 1780s the East India Company’s new system brought a British-style bureaucracy to Rangpur; before then the area had been governed from the old Mughal settlement of Ghoraghat. Rangpur was chosen because it was the site of a Company warehouse where goods were bought, sold and stored on the route to China. By the early nineteenth century a population of perhaps 15,000 were housed in 3,000 buildings made of mud and straw, and forty-two of brick. They were serviced by ten shops, seven Hindu temples and six mosques. The Company’s practice of siting its administrative offices away from the marketplace or landholder’s house meant that Rangpur was merely a cluster of administrative and commercial buildings separated by fields, a settlement without the civic life of a normal town.47
The British district officers who arrived in the 1790s tried to fix the rights of both farmers and landholders with new pieces of paper, insisting that the exact amount written down was paid every month. The new system cut the bonds of mutual obligation that connected peasant and lords and was resisted by all classes. Landholders complained about the new system in a collectively organized petition. The landholders’ criticism was that unless the Company was more lenient in its revenue demands they would have to use violence to collect it, and that would cause peasants to flee. As they put it, ‘to use any coercive measures to secure payment would cause a desertion among the Ryotts [peasants], and be productive of infinite losses.’ The Company’s new system meant ‘our Estates have been subjected to sale and we are reduced to the distress of disposing of our effects and taking loans from bankers.’ The District Collector was sympathetic, but the Board of Revenue refused to allow a deduction in the revenue demand. When the Collector tried to sell land, some landholders tried to resist by less polite means. Early one morning in October 1798, the Collector’s office was burnt to the ground, ‘with the whole of the records therein deposited’. With no records, British officers were unable to calculate how much land should be sold to pay arrears of revenue. Despite the protestations of the old landholders, auctions were held and land sold. Between 1793 and 1810, in sales that took place every month, large chunks of every one of Rangpur’s twelve main estates were cut up and sold.48
Some of eastern India’s great nineteenth-century families built their livelihoods by buying estates in Rangpur. Krishna Kanta Nandy was Warren Hastings’ agent and bought an estate in the district to add to lands scattered throughout the rest of Bengal. Rai Danishmand Nityananda was a weaver who ended up as assistant to the Commercial Resident at Rangpur, and one of the region’s great magnates. Darpanarayan Tagore was diwan to another British officer, grandfather of the merchant and political leader Prosanna Kumar Tagore. As the importance of landed families having a visible, political presence in the countryside died out, Rangpur’s greatest landholders spent most of their time in the city of Calcutta. For these bhadralok (the word means polite people, and was used to refer to Bengal’s elite) families, authority and prestige no longer came from being a leading figure in local society. Rather, it was about taking part in the cultural life of the province’s metropolis. Landholders even started to pressure the government from the city, not the countryside. After the deaths of his grandfather and father, Prosanna Kumar Tagore was the largest landholder of Rangpur district and the driving force behind the Landholders’ Association, a body for upholding landholders who had benefited from the permanent settlement; it was founded in 1838 in Calcutta. Prosanna Kumar became a lawyer and clerk to the Governor-General’s council, and bequeathed some of his fortune to support a series of lectures in law. His son converted to Christianity, was disowned by his father and became India’s first British-trained barrister, being called to the bar from Lincoln’s Inn in 1862. For these men, buying real estate was simply a financial transaction, a sensible investment with a regular return according to rules written at the place where they thought power lay, Calcutta.49
One of the most fervent criticisms of the new system came from a man who had spent many years in Rangpur too. Rammohan Roy was perhaps nineteenth-century Bengal’s most important intellectual, a translator, newspaper proprietor, political and religious reformer, described variously as ‘the father of modern India’ and India’s first liberal. Rammohan was born in the 1770s, into the Brahmin family of a minor Mughal official and small-time landholder in western Bengal. In his late twenties he was employed as translator and broker for a succession of British officers, eventually working in Rangpur for the Collector John Digby from 1809. Digby worked closely with Rammohan for a decade, describing him as a man of ‘industry, integrity and education’, from a ‘respectable family’.50 He lobbied hard to have Rammohan appointed to the official position of diwan, the most senior Indian official in a district, and paid him privately when the Board of Revenue refused. Unusually for the times, their relationship was a reciprocal one. Digby enjoyed Rammohan’s connections to Rangpur’s Indian elite, and Rammohan learnt English and Greek, and began to read European political philosophy and works on religious reform with his employer.51
Rammohan moved to Calcutta when Digby retired in 1815. As the East India Company’s monopoly on trade was abolished in 1813, and restrictions on press freedom lifted in 1818, these years saw the short-lived blossoming of a cosmopolitan civil and literary culture in the East India Company’s capital city. Rammohan was at the centre of this liberal life. From the pages of his newspapers and the podium of Calcutta Town Hall he supported a succession of classically liberal causes: freedom of the press, free trade, the security of property held by both men and women and the spread of trial by jury. His arguments were designed to instil self-confidence in Indians, to create more space for them to rule themselves and to create better connections between wealthy Indians and the East India Company’s bureaucracy which, Rammohan argued, treated Indians like strangers and did not understand the country or its people well.52
As a jealous observer from Bombay complained, these years saw rich Indians and Britons together create in Calcutta a ‘community of feeling’ which spawned a spate of Anglo-Indian ‘societies, meetings, projections’. A ‘current of healthy sympathy and sentiment seems to pervade the monied mass’. Like other members of his liberal political milieu, Rammohan was friends and collaborator with British traders, journalists and lawyers, a group who were interested in creating a life for themselves in India outside the rigid structures of the Company and who were equally keen to create of a free civil society in Bengal. His closest friend was Dwarkanath Tagore, grandfather of the poet Rabindranath and another Rangpur zamindar who created a firm to trade in coal in collaboration with a British merchant, John Palmer. Dwarkanath noted that British power was exercised differently in Calcutta compared with the countryside. It was their collaboration with ‘merchants, agents and other independent English settlers’ which made sure Indians who had moved to Calcutta were in a better condition than ‘their countrymen in the mofussil’, Dwarkanath argued. Both Rammohan and Dwarkanath saw one solution to Bengal’s poverty as the migration of more Britons to India, a cause both men backed against opposition from both the East India Company and Indians more anxious about British power. Their argument was that the Company would take India’s districts seriously if British citizens lived there; that British rule would no longer contribute to chaos and poverty if the physical distance separating ruler and ruled was broken down by European settlement.53
Rammohan travelled to Britain, in 1831, as an emissary of the Mughal emperor, Akbar II. By then, Akbar’s world had shrunk to no more than an enclave surrounded by British officers in Delhi. In Rammohan he had a man who understood both Indian politics and the workings of the East India Company to make the case for a larger subsidy before the King and ministers in London: Rammohan spoke Persian and Arabic, as well as English, Sanskrit and Bengali.
In Britain, the East India Company blocked Rammohan’s official mission by claiming he was a British subject, so could not be an official of the Mughal empire. But between his arrival at Liverpool in April 1831 and his death
at Bristol two and a half years later, Rammohan was feted by radicals and royalty alike and made into an exotic celebrity of whom everyone wanted to catch a glimpse. Despite always insisting he was indeed a British subject, Rammohan was seated with the foreign ambassadors at the coronation of William IV. Despite the Company’s misgivings, he was received as the Mughal emperor’s emissary by the new King.54 The Whig politician Thomas Macaulay, soon to leave for a senior official position in India himself, wrote of waiting until midnight for Rammohan to arrive at a party before leaving ‘in despair’ when he failed to show up. The aged utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested Rammohan stand as a Member of Parliament ‘to subdue the prejudices of colour’, an option Rammohan seriously considered.55
During this brief moment of Anglo-Indian civility, Rammohan articulated a thoroughgoing critique of the way British officers governed India. As historian C. A. Bayly noted, Rammohan thought Cornwallis had enshrined ‘a social contract between government and incipient civil society’. In a series of submissions to the House of Commons, Rammohan argued that the contract had been broken; its breakdown had made the condition of India’s rural poor deteriorate during the previous forty years. Rammohan’s solution was to force the Company’s government out from its dark offices to be visible and accountable to an Indian public sphere that extended into the mofussil, into towns like Rangpur, as well as Calcutta.
Rammohan argued that India needed to return to its tradition of justice being meted out in public. He was insistent that the Company publicize its actions by printing and posting notices across the countryside, at marketplaces, ferries and police offices. He argued that courts needed to be constructed for large numbers of people ‘hearing and witnessing the whole proceedings’ and the minutes published. Rammohan doubted the ability of British officers, troubled by ‘the heat of the climate’ and Indian languages they found difficult to understood, to make good judgements on their own. In reality, Rammohan argued, Indian officers were collecting revenue and deciding disputes. But low pay and no scrutiny meant it was hardly surprising corruption was rife. Rammohan wanted to Indianize the collection of revenue entirely, appointing distinguished local men as revenue officers at a third of the cost of Europeans and placing their actions in public view. Redundant British officers would be transferred to ‘some other department, or allowed to retire on a suitable pension’. The only British officer to stay in the countryside would be the judge who would administer justice on a bench alongside two Indian assessors. Rammohan’s challenge to the Company was that a stable and powerful British government in India needed to be visible and accountable to Indians, and give ‘natives’ positions of ‘trust and responsibility’ within the state. Rammohan’s argument was that the system of government established in the 1790s had failed to enlist Indian allies.56
Rammohan’s project was to civilize the Company’s authoritarian style of rule by forcing it to share power with local Indian elites as well as British merchants, in the process spreading the propertied cosmopolitanism they had created in Calcutta into the countryside. Rammohan’s plan echoed Warren Hastings’ attempt to return to a Mughal constitution and limit British power by Indian officers. In Rammohan’s own day, a few Britons tried to imagine greater political union with Indians. The Governor-General in post during Rammohan’s last two years in India, Lord William Bentinck, spoke in a language suffused with talk of regenerating Indian public life. These were mere words. In fact, Bentinck spent most of his time dealing with the deficit caused by the collapse of Bengal’s rural economy, most controversially cutting the pay of soldiers. Nonetheless, when he left Bengal Bentinck was feted by educated Bengalis as ‘the man who first taught us to forget the distinction between conquerors and conquered and to become, in heart and mind, in hopes and aspiration, one with Englishmen’.57
The everyday practice of empire beyond India’s cosmopolitan capital cities still relied on precisely that distinction. For most of the East India Company’s hierarchy, maintaining a separation between Britons and Indians was essential to the assertion of European power in a conquered society. For them, there could be no alliance even with the new men their system of government had created. British rule depended on distance even if that meant the Company sacrificed any chance of exercising effective power into the countryside.
The argument Rammohan made about creating a more inclusive regime was taken seriously in parliament and in London garden parties. But it always ran up against the anxieties of the colonial bureaucracy. In British India’s districts, British officers were too keen to insist that every member of the local population subordinate themselves to the British hierarchy to listen to criticism. Symptomatic was the treatment meted to Rammohan when he passed the Collector of the district of Bhagalpur, Sir Frederick Hamilton, on 1 January 1809. Rammohan was in a closed palanquin, so didn’t salute. The British officer stopped him, shouted at him for not paying proper respect to an imperial official, and then thrashed one of his servants. Rammohan wrote to the Governor-General complaining about being ‘degraded by a representative of the supreme political power’ and Hamilton was mildly reprimanded. But Rammohan’s complaints to the Governor-General blocked his career in the Company’s administration. In practice, Company officials were not even willing to negotiate with people who wanted to be their allies.58
6
THEATRES OF ANARCHY
In May 1799, 150 soldiers commanded by Raja Ravivarma Narasimha Domba Heggade destroyed the temple of Manjeshwar, removing its ornamental chariots and many sacks of gold. Situated in the Kanara region halfway between Bombay and the southern tip of India, the temple is a central shrine for the Gaudi Saraswati Brahmins, a mobile community of merchants and bureaucrats scattered along India’s western coast. The destruction of Manjeshwar temple occurred a few days after a moment of British conquest supposed to bring peace and order to the area. The temple’s destruction suggests British victory did not bring an end to fighting.
Ravivarma was the chief of Vittala, a fortified temple town twenty-five miles inland from Manjeshwar. For the last forty years of the eighteenth century this small kingdom, together with the rest of the area now forming the state of Karnataka, came under the rule of Mysore, the regime built by the brilliant generals Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan after 1761 whose growth the British fought in a succession of wars between 1767 and 1799. Ravivarma’s family had sporadically enlisted in Mysore’s military projects, his great-uncle briefly embracing Islam as well as Haidar Ali’s power. By the last Anglo-Mysore war Ravivarma was an ally of the British. His troops were supplied with British guns and those guns helped defeat Tipu Sultan. But British conquest did not bring peace. The guns the Company gave were turned first against Manjeshwar temple and, eventually, against British power.
Historians usually see the period between 1798 and 1818 as the final British conquest of India, a time when the East India Company’s domination was successfully asserted throughout the subcontinent. These were indeed years when the Company subjected all the territory along India’s great coastlines and rivers to British power, leaving only a few regimes in the dry hinterland in Indian hands. But to punctuate these two decades with the dates of battles and assume they mark the history of the consolidation of imperial rule is to mistake the Company’s rhetoric for reality. The British imagined peace only came with total domination, but that was never possible. In reality, after every conquest British power always seemed shaky and fragile.
Manjeshwar is part of the coastal strip of land along the sea which stretches from Goa to the tip of India, and which has always been hard for states to subdue. Just like the territory around Anjengo further south, the Kanara region around Manjeshwar was a land of assertive warrior-communities which successfully resisted invasions of Mughal and Maratha armies for generations. The arts of violence were finely cultivated; this was the home of kalarippayyatu, one of the world’s oldest martial arts. Yet by the 1790s, its elaborate swords and shields had been replaced by muskets and cannons
. Expensive war between the British and Mysore had brought a far less civilized form of conflict to the neighbourhood that lingered far longer than the theoretical moment of British conquest.1
When the British expelled the Mysore regime from Kanara they found a society up in arms. ‘Everything is fear and distrust – a man when a stranger asks him the road eyes him with suspicion, or starts back and draws a knife to defend himself.’ Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Munro was sent to Kanara to settle the province and collect revenue in the months after Tipu’s defeat. Munro suggested that men were armed ‘not merely both with matchlocks and swords, but with flintlocks which they have either purchased or received as allies of one of the various European settlements of the coast’. It was not rare for people to walk with unsheathed weapons in the street. Farmers tilled the soil with guns strapped to their backs. Munro thought local rulers like Ravivarma used the chaos of war to extend their own power. ‘[P]etty chiefs . . . look anxiously forward to times of confusion and weakness in order to render themselves masters of some district or other,’ he wrote.2
That was exactly what Ravivarma tried to do. The warlord thought his alliance with the British meant he would be allowed to extend his control over local institutions, including temples. Perhaps he also felt challenged by centres of Hindu piety he could not control. Whether the British gave him tacit permission to raid the temple or not, the action brought an enraged response from local Brahmins who lobbied Thomas Munro to act. By the beginning of 1800, Munro believed Ravivarma’s independence was a threat to the East India Company. He thought that British security depended on chiefs ‘leaving the practice of arms’ and instead taking up ‘habits of order and industry’. When Munro asked Ravivarma to hand over his guns, he refused. Instead of acquiescing to a quiet life and a Company pension under the civil government of the British, Ravivarma joined up with other local leaders, sent emissaries to Kanara’s village assemblies and called on peasants to gather and fight the British.
