I. THE JOLLY BUCCANEERS
The arrival of the Europeans—The British Conquest—The Sepoy Mutiny—Advantages and disadvantages of British rule
IN many ways that civilization was already dead when Clive and Hastings discovered the riches of India. The long and disruptive reign of Aurangzeb, and the chaos and internal wars that followed it, left India ripe for reconquest; and the only question open to “manifest destiny” was as to which of the modernized powers of Europe should become its instrument. The French tried, and failed; they lost India, as well as Canada, at Rossbach and Waterloo. The English tried, and succeeded.
In 1498 Vasco da Gama, after a voyage of eleven months from Lisbon, anchored off Calicut. He was well received by the Hindu Raja of Malabar, who gave him a courteous letter to the King of Portugal: “Vasco da Gama, a nobleman of your household, has visited my kingdom, and has given me great pleasure. In my kingdom there is abundance of cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and precious stones. What I seek from your country is gold, silver, coral and scarlet.” His Christian majesty answered by claiming India as a Portuguese colony, for reasons which the Raja was too backward to understand. To make matters clearer, Portugal sent a fleet to India, with instructions to spread Christianity and wage war. In the seventeenth century the Dutch arrived, and drove out the Portuguese; in the eighteenth the French and English came, and drove out the Dutch. Savage ordeals of battle decided which of them should civilize and tax the Hindus.
The East India Company had been founded in London in 1600 to buy cheap in India, and sell dear in Europe, the products of India and the East Indies.* As early as 1686 it announced its intention “to establish a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come.”3 It set up trading-posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, fortified them, imported troops, fought battles, gave and took bribes, and exercised other functions of government. Clive gayly accepted “presents” amounting to $170,000 from Hindu rulers dependent upon his guns; pocketed from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140,000; appointed Mir Jafar ruler of Bengal for $6,000,000; played one native prince against another, and gradually annexed their territories as the property of the East India Company; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Parliament, and killed himself (1774).4 Warren Hastings, a man of courage, learning and ability, exacted contributions as high as a quarter of a million dollars from native princes to the coffers of the Company; accepted bribes to exact no more, exacted more, and annexed the states that could not pay; he occupied Oudh with his army, and sold the province to a prince for $ 2,500,0005—conquered and conqueror rivaled each other in venality. Such parts of India as were under the Company were subjected to a land tax of fifty per cent of the produce, and to other requisitions so numerous and severe that two-thirds of the population fled, while others sold their children to meet the rising rates.6“Enormous fortunes,” says Macaulay, “were rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this.”7
By 1857 the crimes of the Company had so impoverished northeastern India that the natives broke out in desperate revolt. The British Government stepped in, suppressed the “mutiny,” took over the captured territories as a colony of the Crown, paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India.8 It was plain, blunt conquest, not to be judged, perhaps, by Commandments recited west of Suez, but to be understood in terms of Darwin and Nietzsche: a people that has lost the ability to govern itself, or to develop its natural resources, inevitably falls a prey to nations suffering from strength and greed.
The conquest brought certain advantages to India. Men like Bentinck, Canning, Munro, Elphinstone and Macaulay carried into the administration of the British provinces something of the generous liberalism that controlled England in 1832. Lord William Bentinck, with the aid and stimulus of native reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, put an end to suttee and thuggery. The English, after fighting III wars in India, with Indian money and troops,9 to complete the conquest of India, established peace throughout the peninsula, built railways, factories and schools, opened universities at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Lahore and Allahabad, brought the science and technology of England to India, inspired the East with the democratic ideals of the West, and played an important part in revealing to the world the cultural wealth of India’s past. The price of these benefactions was a financial despotism by which a race of transient rulers drained India’s wealth year by year as they returned to the reinvigorating north; an economic despotism that ruined India’s industries, and threw her millions of artisans back upon an inadequate soil; and a political despotism that, coming so soon after the narrow tyranny of Aurangzeb, broke for a century the spirit of the Indian people.