by Jon Wilson
By April 1800, men commanded by this recent ally of the East India Company had driven the British out of a thirty-mile swathe of territory in every direction from Manjeshwar, capturing forts and collecting money from villagers. British forces pushed back. Munro eventually forced the insurgents to retreat to their fort at Vittala itself. Holed up in his home town, Ravivarma surrendered, believing that the Company would be lenient to its one-time ally. But Munro had other ideas. On 22 August, with three relations and five other men, Ravivarma was hanged from Light House Hill, the highest point in the nearby city of Mangalore. ‘We may now, by making an example of him and his associates, secure [K]anara from internal disturbances in the future,’ Munro argued.3
Munro’s solution to chaos and violence was to introduce martial law, disarm the population and dispossess the local rajas. ‘Till it is done,’ he said, ‘our Conquest is not complete.’4 But there was a paradox. The British had no power to dispossess on their own. Their domination depended on the Company’s ability to enlist new allies and support other Indian sources of power. The soldiers who defeated Ravivarma were not East India Company recruits but retainers of Kumar Heggade, a rival of Ravivarma’s from the town of Bantwal, only twelve miles north of the rebel chief’s base. Kumar had his own aims, which did not necessarily mesh with the Company’s. Allying with the Company gave him money and the possibility of building his own independent authority in place of a local rival that might, in the future, allow him to confront British power.5
Tigers
Thomas Munro’s description of anarchy in Kanara was written in a letter to the new Governor-General, Richard Wellesley. Wellesley arrived at Calcutta in 1798. There, he joined his younger brother, Arthur, later more famous as the Duke of Wellington. The sons of a Protestant Irish musician and politician, the Wellesleys were from a family whose everyday life was about the domination of people who had no formal power; but they had not made empire their destiny. Richard graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, before beginning a political career in Dublin and then Westminster. Arthur, nine years younger, went to a horse-riding school in France, before his elder brother bought him an army commission in Ireland. Growing up in an upper-class Protestant Irish family at a time of political turmoil gave them a keen sense of the fragility of political authority. Richard Wellesley only became Governor-General because the British government seemed under threat in his native, embattled Ireland. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, had originally wanted Lord Cornwallis to return to the subcontinent, but the threat of revolution in Ireland led him to appoint the empire’s greatest troubleshooter there instead, and to send Wellesley to India.
When he arrived in the subcontinent Wellesley consciously styled the office of Governor-General on that of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, building a grand new Palladian government house in Calcutta, putting the established Anglican church on display and creating a new college to instil a greater sense of discipline in Company officers. Designing a form of government that C. A. Bayly called ‘proconsular despotism’, Wellesley’s aim was to subordinate Company India to a far more absolutist style of rule. In the process, he helped forge a new kind of Tory politics, flexible in religious dogma and economic doctrine but insistent that authority needed to be visibly asserted to stop society from breaking down. This way of thinking was pessimistic about the quick decay of all forms of order if power was openly challenged. The new Tory imperialism created a different form of government in newly conquered British territory compared to the Whig system of private property rights introduced to the East India Company’s eastern lands.6
The French Revolution was critical to this mentality. France had degenerated into political violence when the Wellesleys were in their formative years, their teens and early twenties. The revolution seemed to prove how quickly the social order could collapse without a strong military elite. The Wellesleys learnt the need to be liberal on questions like free trade and religious toleration if political authority was to be maintained. Later, as the Duke of Wellington and briefly Prime Minister, Arthur Wellesley faced an onslaught from fellow Tories for giving Catholics the vote. But in Britain and India Wellesleyan politics was ruled by the belief that any diminution in the power of the state and the elite that ruled it would unleash anarchy.
In India the attitude of Richard and Arthur Wellesley quickly meshed with the views of a group of men of a militaristic disposition who had passed these tumultuous years fighting and trying to build British political power in India. At the centre of the Wellesley circle were Thomas Munro and John Malcolm, two soldiers who had been stationed in India since the 1780s and who worked closely with Arthur Wellesley in the aftermath of the Mysore war. Like the Wellesleys, Malcolm and Munro came from civilian families with little connection to empire. John Malcolm’s father was a tenant farmer from the Scottish borders, Thomas Munro was the son of a Glasgow merchant who made money trading across the Atlantic Ocean but whose prospect of wealth was blocked by American independence. Instead of having its own tradition and ways of life, soldiering for these men was an instrument for imposing the power of the British state, as well as a way to make a name and some money. The Wellesleys, Munro and Malcolm all had fortunes to amass or to restore.
These men were connected with a younger group of civilian officers who articulated a less hawkish variation of the same set of ideas, among them Neil Edmonstone (son of a Scottish MP), Mounstuart Elphinestone (son of a Scottish laird) and Charles Metcalfe (the only one with previous Indian connections, from an Anglo-Irish family of Company soldiers). They shared a similar style, valuing quick action rather than contemplation or conversation, prizing blunt, frank and often forceful responses, guided by a strong sense of the imperilled nature of political power. They all thought British rule in India was based on violence and the display of violence; the Wellesley circle never imagined Indians would ever accept British rule by consent. As the by-then knighted Sir John Malcolm, political agent with Arthur Wellesley during the Maratha wars and later Governor of Bombay, wrote in 1832, ‘our Eastern empire . . . has been acquired, and must be maintained, by the sword’. ‘[W]e never can expect active support in the hour of danger from the mass of the population of India. A passive allegiance is all these will ever give to their foreign masters.’7
Richard Wellesley arrived as Governor-General in April 1798. Within eight months, he put the East India Company’s sword into action against the state of Mysore. Ruled by the Hindu Wodeyar family since the early seventeenth century, Mysore controlled a large swathe of territory as part of the Mughal political system. That role was broken when the brilliant leader of the Maratha army, Haidar Ali, staged a coup in 1761 and took control of the state. From the beginning, this expansionist military regime was seen as a threat to British interests in southern India. Particularly worrying was the possibility of an alliance with France.
French craftsmen had built the mechanism inside the famous life-size toy tiger that is now on display in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The tiger, a symbol of the Mysore regime, has sunk its fangs into the throat of a prostrate European man, and it roars when it bites. Wellesley was worried that France and India would collaborate in more than symbolic craftwork, fearing particularly that the French navy would invade western India from its base at Mauritius to join up with Mysore and drive the British from southern India.
Even before he landed in Calcutta in May 1798, the new Governor-General Richard Wellesley decided the East India Company would only be safe if Haidar Ali’s son and successor, Tipu Sultan, was drawn into war, defeated and forced to hand over at least the western coastal lands to the British. In February 1799 Wellesley organized a 26,000-strong army to march from Madras, to join 20,000 troops belonging to the Nizam of Hyderabad marching from the north and a British group of 4,000 from the west. The march was slower than anticipated because of the amount of equipment to be transported: battering machines and mining gear, thousands of bullocks loaded with rice and wheat as well as senior officers’ luxurious t
ents and silver-plated table sets. The Company’s armies arrived at Tipu’s capital of Sriringapatam in April. The city survived a month’s siege, but on 2 May the Company managed to blow a series of big holes in the walls of the fort and then, over the next two days, fought their way into the city. Tipu was seen shooting from the battlements with hunting rifles, but was killed in the fighting, his still warm body later found in a room full of corpses. Inside the palace, soldiers found Tipu’s mechanical tiger, and three of the real beasts, caged and starving.8
Arthur Wellesley was appointed military governor of Tipu’s lands. His first act was to shoot the tigers: ‘[T]here is no food for them, and nobody to attend them, and they are getting violent.’ Unable to tame three angry big cats, Arthur Wellesley nonetheless acted as sovereign over this territory at a few strategic sites. A combination of punitive violence and attention to the interests of elites quickly secured peace and order in the towns of Mysore and Sriringapatam themselves. Soldiers patrolled the streets, looters were summarily hanged, court rituals were re-established and property secured. Wellesley went door to door to reassure prominent citizens of Mysore. Within four days, the bazaars had reopened and were stocked with goods.9
But these tactics could only work for short periods of time and over small areas. Beyond its capital, the East India Company’s conquest of Mysore brought increased chaos and violence. British power imposed authority on a small enclave where trade, troops and officials were centred, and then only targeted forces that offered a major challenge to the East India Company’s power beyond. The aim of victory was merely to restore ‘the peace and safety of the British foundations of India’, as Wellesley put it. There was no practical effort to protect the livelihoods of the people they ruled. Beyond the small zones the British controlled the situation was anarchic. Violence was fuelled by the dispersal of men with guns in both Mysore and the East India Company’s army. Local chiefs like Ravivarma used this plentiful military labour force to build their own independent power, using their soldiers to violently subdue tracts of countryside. Beyond its ordered enclaves, British power oscillated inconsistently between anxious efforts to extirpate any potentially insurgent armed force, and the desperate attempt to cultivate alliances, between what the historian Mesrob Vartavarian calls ‘terror tactics and strategic concessions’.10
Together, these conflicts involved greater violence and bigger armies than those which conquered large, stable states like Mysore or the Marathas. In northern Kerala, to the south of Kanara, Raja Pazhassi Varma gathered local Muslim and Hindu warriors (Nairs and Mapillas) and Pathans who had been disbanded from Tipu’s army to challenge British power. They were eventually only suppressed after thousands of British troops chased them through forests in 1805.
The British response was often brutal, but was also shaped by the Company’s limited power. The so-called ‘Poligar wars’ of 1799–1801 (poligar is a word from the Telugu palegadu or Tamil palaiyakkarar, or head of a military camp) saw the Company try to subdue chiefs who had captured castles and imposed their power over the local countryside around Tirulnelveli in the south-east.
The greatest poligar leader, Kattaboma Nayakkar, was hanged in October 1799 in front of an ‘assembly’ of other leaders. In the months afterwards British officers imagined this ‘unparalleled triumph to the cause of order’ had frightened forty-two poligars into demolishing their forts. The British wrote pompously celebrating their now absolute authority, the Collector of the region suggesting that ‘the rebellions have been subdued . . . the oppressed have been upheld and exalted . . . and the extinction of divided authority has restored the fairest province of the Carnatic.’ But with 20,000 poligar troops in arms against the British, the Company had little power to impose its will. Within two years of Kattaboma’s death the Company was ‘disconcerted’ that forts once supposedly demolished had ‘risen from the ground’, ‘as if by the wave of a magician’s wand’ and were being used against the Company in a second wave of rebellion.11
After spending eighteen months in Kanara, Thomas Munro was transferred to take charge of the Ceded Districts, a tract of land where once again the British capture of territory was followed by an uprising. Now the region of Andhra Pradesh called Rayalaseema, the Ceded Districts were 26,000 square miles of thin, dry, gravelly soil, which had been transferred from the Nizam of Hyderabad in compensation for the Company’s help in defeating his enemy Tipu. As in Kanara and Tirulnelveli, local lords used the recent political turmoil to increase their power. Eighty poligars with perhaps 30,000 retainers refused to submit to the Company’s government, engaging in what Munro described as ‘predatory warfare’. They were joined by disbanded unpaid soldiers from the Nizam of Hyderabad’s army.
Munro asked his superiors for military command of the region to put into practice the same strategy as in Kanara, to dispossess and then impose British power directly on village society by forcing villagers to pay rent directly to the Company. Again he wanted to use brute force against the poligars. ‘I am convinced that it is possible to expel them all and to hang the great part of them,’ he said. Munro was not made a general, so could not hang all those he wanted to, but he was assisted by thirty-six companies of soldiers, ‘with a due proportion of guns and artillery’, making a total of at least 5,000 troops with which to impose British power. They did so with highly visible displays of force. The fort of the old, blind chief of the village of Vemulakota was violently captured in May 1801. Six months later the fort of Ternakal was taken after two weeks of fighting. Together these two minor and forgotten moments of pacification saw greater casualties to the Company than the Battle of Plassey, with 233 Company troops lost. In response, some local chiefs did submit, and some were pensioned off. Others disappeared into the wilds or to the tribal districts of central India, and a few carried on fighting. Operations to suppress insurgency after the supposed moment of ‘conquest’ were more violent than conquest itself, and still left British authority shaky.12
Armed republics
Interspersed through this violence Munro led a team of British and Indian officers moving from village to village assessing how much tax each farmer needed to pay, hearing complaints and collecting cash. Thomas Munro was putting into practice a new style of rule, pioneered in Kanara and then developed in the Ceded Districts and beyond. This was the ‘raiyatwar’ system. Instead of using landlords to oversee taxation and maintain order, the system dispossessed local chiefs and then created new institutions for collecting revenue directly from peasants, or raiyats, hence the system’s name.
Munro’s system was a dramatic break with both pre-British practice and the way the East India Company did things in the early years. It relied on the deployment of military force on an unprecedented scale. It also involved the British employing a much larger cadre of Indian revenue officers to survey land and collect money directly from peasants. In each district, the Collector’s job changed from distant oversight to the active, everyday assertion of British power. It relied on the Company’s hierarchy giving district officers an unprecedented amount of discretion. As Munro put it in his usual ironic way, the system would only work if his superiors could ‘trust my supposed skill in discerning what they were made of by catichising them on revenue and lanaterising their physiognomies’.13
Implausibly, Munro claimed these new armies of soldiers and bureaucrats were merely returning India to the norms of ancient Indian society. Here, Munro made an entirely novel set of arguments about the nature of landed society in India. In the reports he sent to Madras’s Board of Revenue from Kanara, he argued that chiefs like Ravivarma Narasimha Domba Heggade were usurpers who had illegally seized land. The real owners, according to Munro, were the peasants who lived in homesteads scattered throughout Kanara’s countryside, and who cultivated the soil. There were, Munro argued, documents proving that peasants had enjoyed secure property rights and paid a low, fixed rate of rent for 350 years before Mysore’s invasion. Most of these ‘black books’ had been conveniently des
troyed by Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, but Munro said enough of them survived to prove the point. In the Ceded Districts, there were no black books. But there, too, Munro claimed ancient precedent for his dispossession of local lords and the reconstruction of a social order based on the supposedly natural, quiet industry of peasant proprietors.
Munro’s arguments about how an imperial power could govern the war-torn lands of southern India initiated one of the most powerful ideas about India, that India was a society of self-sufficient villages. As Munro’s friend Sir Charles Metcalfe later wrote, ‘village communities are like little republics, having nearly everything that they can want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations’. ‘They seem to last where nothing else lasts’, Metcalfe continued. The notion that the real India lay in autonomous villages not towns would become one of the most powerful myths about South Asia, driving British policy in the late nineteenth century as well as the attitude of nationalists like M. K. Gandhi. In the early 1800s, it was an entirely new idea.14
This concept of village India emerged in very peculiar circumstances. It was an idea that described a society fractured by war. Peasants looked as if they led entirely ‘independent’ lives because they cut themselves off in times of crisis, retreating behind village walls to protect themselves from violence wrought by the marauding armies of the East India Company, Mysore or the Marathas. Officers like Munro mistook a peculiar practice for the permanent state of things. They did so conveniently, to justify a strategy which removed argumentative political intermediaries who seemed a dangerous threat to British power. The myth of village India depicted the country as a place without local political leaders, as an essentially unpolitical society inhabited by peasants who wanted nothing more than to cultivate their fields in peace. This was a picture not of India as it actually was but as the British wanted it to be.
