9
The sixteenth century had belonged to Spain and Portugal and, when their crowns merged, it would have seemed that the combined empire would be unassailable for a long time. However, their supremacy would be challenged before the century was over by two newcomers—the Dutch and the English. In 1580, Francis Drake returned to England after circumnavigating the world. He not only brought back a ship filled with Spanish booty and spices from the Indies but also information that the Portuguese hold on the Indian Ocean was not as secure as had been previously thought. A few years later, the English sank the Spanish Armada and with it the myth of Iberian maritime supremacy.
The English decided that it was time to stake a claim on the spice trade. A fleet of three ships was sent out under the command of James Lancaster in 1591.1 The ships bypassed India and made directly for the Straits of Malacca. The English did not even pretend to trade but simply plundered Portuguese and local ships before heading back. On the way home, however, disaster struck—two of the three ships were wrecked in a storm and all the ill-gotten cargo was lost. The smallest of the three ships somehow limped back with just twenty-five survivors, including Lancaster himself. Thus ended the first attempt by the English to insert themselves into the Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, the Dutch also sent out a number of fleets and these consistently returned with valuable cargoes. English merchants watched this with envy and decided that it was worth another shot and Queen Elizabeth I was petitioned for a royal charter. It was granted on New Year’s Eve in 1600 and set up as ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’; we know it now as the East India Company. The Dutch merchants similarly banded together to form the United East India Company (also known by its Dutch initials VOC). Both of these entities would grow to become among the largest and most powerful multinational companies ever seen.
The Dutch Hand
In February 1601, the English East India Company (EIC) sent its first fleet of four ships. Despite the disasters of the previous attempt, Lancaster was once more put in charge. He again bypassed India and headed directly for South East Asia but this time he landed in Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra. The English were received with great warmth by the Sultan. This should not be surprising given that the Portuguese, exhorted by the likes of Francis Xavier, had been making brutal raids on the Acehnese from their base in Malacca. The Sultan hoped that the English would provide a counterbalance to Portuguese naval power. Thus, Lancaster and his men were treated to buffalo fights, tiger fights, elephant fights and grand feasts. No doubt they also sampled the Acehnese aqua-party: the guests were seated on stools submerged in a river or lake with water up to their chests. Servants paddled between them serving spicy delicacies and fiery arrack. European visitors who attended these parties were known to die from ‘a surfeit taken by immeasurable drunkenness’.2
The English fleet now made its way down the Straits of Malacca pillaging Portuguese ships along the way to Java. The Dutch already had a settlement in Java—at a place called Bantam, where they could control the alternative route through the Sunda Strait. Much to their annoyance, the local ruler also allowed the English to set up a base at the same place. Soon, the English were using Bantam to send out ships for the spice-growing islands further east. In 1610, an English ship made its way to the nutmeg-growing Banda islands. When the ship arrived at the main island of Neira, it found that the VOC had already set up shop and had forcibly imposed a monopoly on the locals.
Faced with Dutch hostility, the English decided instead to trade with two tiny outlying islands—Pulau Ai and Pulau Run—where the locals had so far resisted Dutch pressure. Just to provide some perspective on scale, Pulau Run was a mere 700 acres of nutmeg plantations and did not even have enough water or rice to sustain its small population. The local chiefs were so afraid of the VOC that they threw themselves under English protection. Thus, Ai and Run became the first colonies of the English East India Company! It is a measure of the commercial importance attached to these islands that King James I would proudly proclaim himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’.
The English soon discovered that their claims on the islands had to be actively defended against the VOC and its notoriously cruel Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen. Made Governor-General at the age of thirty, Coen would lay the foundation for Dutch power in the East and was strongly opposed to English presence in the Spice Islands. In 1616, the English sent out an equally young Captain Nathaniel Courthope with two ships to the Bandas in order to establish a permanent presence. He and his men landed a battery of brass cannons on Pulau Run and proceeded to build a small fort using exposed coral rock. The Cross of St George was proudly flown to make a point to the incensed VOC Governor who watched the proceedings from Dutch-held Neira and Lonthor.
Despite this act of defiance by the English, it soon became clear that the Dutch had the muscle to impose a blockade on Pulau Run. As the months rolled by, supplies began to run low for not just the English garrison but also for the locals. Using local traders, Courthope sent back increasingly desperate appeals for help to his superiors in Bantam but, unfortunately, the East India Company’s commanders were distracted by their own internal bickering and by a siege of the new VOC headquarters at Batavia (i.e. Jakarta). When the siege failed, most of the English fleet inexplicably sailed home without sending relief to Pulau Run. Thus, the blockade on Nathaniel Courthope and his men tightened. When a feeble attempt was eventually made to resupply them, the Dutch were easily able to block it. Matters became worse when rains failed in 1618. The island’s water reserve fell precariously low and was teeming with so many tropical parasites and worms that it had to be drunk through clenched teeth. In this way, three and a half years passed and the English garrison continued to be depleted by disease and poor nutrition. It is a testimony to the young captain’s leadership that his men and the locals stood by him despite the extremely strained situation. Indeed, the dwindling English garrison and its Bandanese allies were able to fend off repeated Dutch attempts to land troops on the island.3
Eventually, things became so desperate that Courthope decided to risk making a trip to a nearby Dutch-held island in order to secure food supplies from sympathetic islanders. Unfortunately, his small boat was discovered and he was killed. His men and local allies, however, continued to hold out till Coen arrived with a huge fleet in April 1621. His first targets were the Bandanese on the Dutch-held islands whom he accused of violating the VOC monopoly. What followed can only be described as genocide. Of the 15,000 islanders, barely a thousand survived death or deportation.4Many of those deported to Batavia would be tortured and killed.
Coen now turned his attention to Pulau Run where a dozen English soldiers were still holed up. Despite the willingness of the Bandanese to fight to the last man, the English had had enough and they surrendered when five hundred VOC soldiers landed on the island. This was the end of the EIC’s first colony. Coen would continue to systematically tighten his control over the East Indies by using brutal tactics to terrorize both European rivals and the native population. In 1624, fifteen Englishmen based in Ambon, in the Maluku islands, would be tortured and decapitated on trumped-up charges. Known as the Ambon Massacre, it would cause a furore in England. In 1641, the Dutch would evict the Portuguese from Malacca and thereby secure control over both the routes to the Spice Islands.
The heroic resistance of Nathaniel Courthope, nevertheless, had established a territorial claim that would have a curious unintended consequence. When England and Holland signed the Treaty of Brenda in 1667, they agreed to swap two islands—the Dutch got Pulau Run in the East Indies in exchange for the somewhat larger island of Manhattan in North America. This brings us to one of the most important findings of history—never invest in real estate based on past performance. I can visualize how seventeenth-century real estate consultants, armed with two hundred years of data on nutmeg production, would have made the case that the Dutch got the better deal!
The Company Cities
The English East India Company had initially focused on South East Asia rather than on India. Other than the Dutch, its major problem was that there were few takers for English goods in the region. Given that the English were famous for their woollen broadcloth, one is puzzled as to why the EIC had such difficulty selling their wares in the steamy Spice Islands; perhaps a badly run advertising campaign for woollens. As a result, the English found that they had to constantly cough up bullion in exchange for spices. This was the same problem that the Romans had faced fifteen hundred years earlier. The EIC discovered, however, that South East Asia had an insatiable demand for Indian cotton textiles and that one could make a profit by participating in intra-Asian trade. Soon they also found a market for Indian textiles back in Europe. Indian cotton would become so popular that wool producers would force the imposition of tariff and non-tariff barriers on their import. Thus, more than black pepper, textiles were the reason that the EIC decided to build permanent establishments on the Indian mainland.
The English soon set up warehouses in Machilipatnam on the Andhra coast, Hugli in Bengal and Surat in Gujarat—all modest establishments. Sir Thomas Roe led an embassy to the court of Mughal emperor Jahangir. However, as business grew, the EIC decided that it was necessary to build fortified settlements that could be defended against both Indian rulers as well as European rivals. The first of these was Madras (now Chennai). As already mentioned, a small strip of coastline was acquired from the local ruler in 1639 by the EIC agent Francis Day. It was an odd choice as it was neither easily defensible nor did it have a sheltered harbour. Ships had to be anchored far from the shore and boats had to ferry people and goods through heavy surf. It was not uncommon for boats to overturn and cause the loss of life and property. Contemporary gossip had it that Day chose the site as it was close to the Portuguese settlement at San Thome where he kept a mistress. Thus, we must thank this unnamed lady for the location of one of India’s largest cities.5
The English built a fortified warehouse on the site and grandly christened it Fort St George. However, it was initially a modest affair and the fortifications that one sees today were built in the eighteenth century. Visitors should definitely make a trip to the museum which contains a reasonably good collection of old maps, photos and cannons; it also explains how the fort evolved over time. The rest of the site is today a random mix of colonial-era buildings and government office blocks. Some of the old buildings are re-used in curious ways—for instance, the old armoury is now the canteen and one can sip coffee in a long, dark windowless hall with thick walls designed to withstand heavy bombardment. If you wander to the back of the fort, you will find that significant stretches of eighteenth-century ramparts have survived despite the neglect. I found a group of construction workers damaging a part of the old wall as they built a new toilet facility—symbolic at many levels.
The next major settlement was Bombay which was acquired from the Portuguese as part of the dowry when King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza. Bombay was then a group of small islands and the king leased them to the EIC in 1668 for ten pounds per annum. Unlike Madras, it already had a small but functioning settlement and also a good harbour. As a naval power, the English would have found its island geography easier to defend. Given the unpredictable demands of the Mughal governor in Surat and raids by Maratha rebels led by Shivaji, the EIC’s agents soon preferred to operate out of Bombay. Thus, a more substantial fort was built on the main island—in the area still known as the Fort. However, a series of smaller fortifications were also maintained at various strategic points. One surviving example is Worli Fort that was built to defend the northern approach. To get there today one has to walk through the narrow lanes of a former fishing village but the fort itself has been recently restored. From the top one gets a panoramic view of Mahim Bay and of the recently built Bandra-Worli Sea-Link. One can immediately see why this would have been a good location for a cannon battery. I stood on the ramparts at sunset and imagined myself an English gunner keeping a suspicious eye on the Portuguese in Bandra.
The third major EIC settlement was built in Bengal. Yet again, the decision was taken because the English found their position in the old river port of Hugli untenable due to conflicts with the Mughal governor. When peace was finally declared after an abject apology from the English, they were allowed to return and set up a new establishment. In 1690, the EIC’s agent Job Charnok returned to a site that he had identified on the westernmost channel of the Ganga and bought the rights to three villages from the local landlords, the Mazumdars, for Rs 1300.6 This is how Calcutta (now Kolkata) was founded. Note that it was not a completely rural area and merchant families like the Setts and Basaks already had significant businesses here.
The English soon build Fort William—this is not the star-shaped eighteenth-century fort that is used today as the Indian Army’s eastern headquarters but its predecessor that was built on the site now occupied by the General Post Office. Nonetheless, the proximity of the Mughals and later the Marathas made the EIC directors in London nervous. The humid, swampy terrain, moreover, took a heavy toll on the Europeans and even Job Charnok died within three years of founding the outpost. It is worth mentioning that each of the above EIC settlements soon attracted a sizeable population of Indian merchants, clerks, labourers, sailors, artisans, mercenaries and other service providers. Thus, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta each developed a thriving ‘black town’ where the Indians lived.
Of course, the English were not the only Europeans building trading posts during this period. The French East India Company, a relative latecomer, would build a number of outposts including a major settlement in Pondicherry (now Puducherry). This was established right next to the Roman-era port of Arikamedu although it is doubtful that eighteenth-century French colonizers knew or cared about this ancient link to Europe. Pondicherry would remain a French possession till the 1950s and still retains a strong flavour of French influence.
Nevertheless, my favourite example of a European settlement from this era is the Danish fort in Tranquebar. Yes, even the Danes were in the game. Tranquebar (or Tharangambadi) is south of Pondicherry and very close to the old Chola port of Nagapattinam. It was here that Danish admiral Ove Gjedde built Fort Dansborg in 1620, well before the English and French forts. Despite this early start, the Danish East India Company was never able to make a success of its operations in the Indian Ocean and Tranquebar sank into obscurity. Therefore, unlike Madras or Bombay which grew into large cities, Tranquebar retains the atmosphere of a remote outpost. Walking along the shore, one can still imagine a homesick Dane scanning the horizon for ships that would take him back.
Skull and Bones
The proliferation of these settlements may give the impression that the various East India Companies were well-oiled machines and always making large profits. The reality was that they made big profits in some years and large losses in others. Wars, shipwrecks and fluctuations in commodity prices poked holes in their balancesheets. The English East India Company, for instance, nearly went bankrupt on some occasions. One of its perennial problems was that its employees were often more interested in their private trade than in pursuing the company’s larger interest. The EIC officially allowed some private trade in order to compensate for the low salaries it paid, but its agents often misused the company’s infrastructure and networks to further private deals. Thus, the company bore the costs and individuals pocketed huge profits. This is how Elihu Yale, the Governor of Madras, amassed a large personal fortune before being removed from his post on suspicions of corruption. Part of this ill-gotten wealth was used to fund the university that bears his name. Thus, one of North America’s leading universities is built on money garnered through dodgy deals in the Indian Ocean.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, a new problem arrived in the form of European pirates operating in the Indian Ocean. Their origins were in the culture of privateering in the Atlantic where different European monarchs granted commissions to private parties to carry out acts of piracy against rival states. The English, for instance, would use privateers to great effect against the Spanish in the Caribbean. However, once this culture of piracy had been established, it was not long before well-armed European pirates began to expand their operations into the Indian Ocean, often out of bases in Madagascar. Perhaps the most successful of these was Captain John Avery (also known as Henry Every) who would become a legend and an inspiration for the likes of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard.7
Born in Plymouth, England, Avery had served as a junior officer in the Royal Navy. In 1693, he signed up for a privateering expedition aimed at French shipping in the Caribbean and was assigned to the forty-six-gun flagship. The owners of the ship, however, did not pay the crew on time and Avery led a mutiny that took over the ship and renamed it the Fancy. Using the ship’s firepower, they now looted and pillaged their way down the Atlantic before heading for the secluded harbours of Madagascar. The original mutineers had been British but along the way they had picked up Danish and French sailors who had volunteered to join the pirates. They now set their sights on the shipping that passed between India and the Yemeni port of Mocha (it was famous for its coffee exports).
The Fancy headed for Bab-el-Mandeb but when it arrived there it found small sloops, also flying English colours, waiting for the Mocha fleet. They were privateers from Rhode Island and Delaware with licences to raid enemy shipping in the Atlantic but had decided to try piracy in the Indian Ocean. Seeing Fancy’s firepower, they agreed to work for Avery and they hunted like a pack of wolves over the next few months. One of the ships they captured was the Fath Mahmamadi, bigger than the Fancy but armed with only six guns. The ship belonged to the wealthy Surat merchant Abdul Gafoor and yielded 50-60,000 pounds worth in gold and silver, enough to purchase the Fancy many times over!
Just two days later, the pirates came across the enormous Ganj-i-Sawai, owned by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb himself. The ship was heavily armed and confidently prepared to put up a fight. However, as the battle began, one of the Mughal cannons exploded and killed several of the ship’s gunners. Just then, the Fancy fired a full broadside that knocked over the main mast of the Ganj-i-Sawai and turned the main deck into a disarray of rigging and sail. Amidst the confusion, the pirates boarded the crippled ship and took it over. The Mughal captain would later be accused of cowardice.
According to stories that would later circulate in the taverns in England, the ship was carrying the stunningly beautiful granddaughter of the Mughal emperor. Avery immediately proposed and, on receiving her consent, married her on board the captured ship. Her gaggle of beautiful handmaidens were similarly married off to various members of the pirate crew.8 This is the origin of several Hollywood scripts. The reality was that Avery presided over an orgy of violence and several women preferred to kill themselves by jumping into the sea. The treasure they found on the Ganj-i-Sawai is said to have been worth 150,000 pounds in gold, silver, ivory and jewels. The pirate ships next headed for the island of Reunion where they shared out the loot before heading their separate ways. Avery and his crew would head for Nassau in the Bahamas where they too split up. Some of the pirates would be later apprehended but the captain himself simply vanished. Thus, Avery would become a legend. For the next couple of decades, rumours would circulate among the world’s sailors that Avery made his way back to Madagascar where he lived with the Mughal princess in a heavily fortified pirate hideout. This legend would inspire a new generation of pirates.
Perhaps no one suffered more from all this piracy than Abdul Gafoor, the wealthiest merchant of Surat and owner of the largest trading fleet in the Indian Ocean. He repeatedly complained to the Mughal authorities who, in turn, accused the European companies of aiding the pirates. The Ganj-i-Sawai incident was the last straw and the Mughal governor of Surat demanded that the Dutch and English East India Companies provide ships to patrol the Mocha–Surat passage. The Europeans were also forced to pay compensation to Indian merchants who lost their ships to European pirates.9Sustained pressure did eventually have some impact on piracy and several pirates, including Captain Kidd, were executed in the early eighteenth century.
The Merchant’s Daughter
One of the important power shifts of the seventeenth century was the decline of the Portuguese. This was partly due to the entry of other Europeans in the Indian Ocean and partly due to the fact that local rulers adopted cannons and learned to deal with European military tactics. The Portuguese lost Hormuz to the Persians in 1622 and shifted their base to Muscat in Oman that was defended by two mud forts—Mirani and Jalali—both built on craggy rock outcrops overlooking the harbour. The forts still exist and can be seen standing on either side of the Sultan’s Palace. The palace is a relatively recent construction and old photos show that till the middle of the twentieth century, the old city spilled right up to the water’s edge between the two forts.
Despite the shift to Muscat, the Portuguese found that their position was not secure. Led by Imam Nasir ibn Murshid, the Omanis had regrouped in the interiors and were steadily reclaiming the coastline. The Portuguese were left only with Muscat when Murshid died in 1649. He was succeeded by his cousin, the equally aggressive Sultan ibn Saif who wanted to capture this last outpost. Unfortunately, this proved difficult as long as the Portuguese controlled the harbour and could resupply themselves from Goa. This problem was solved by a very unusual turn of events.
The Portuguese depended on an Indian merchant called Naruttam to supply their provisions. He had a beautiful daughter that the Portuguese commander Pereira coveted. Naruttam and his daughter were not keen on the match but Pereira kept up the pressure. At last, under threat, the merchant agreed and requested some time to prepare for a grand wedding. Meanwhile, he convinced the authorities that Mirani fort needed to be cleared out so that he could do some repairs. Using this as the pretext, Naruttam removed all the provisions from the fort and then informed Sultan ibn Saif that the garrison was unprepared for a siege. The Omanis attacked immediately and took the fort and the town in 1650.10 Thus, an Indian father’s determination to protect his beloved daughter led to the demise of the Portuguese in Oman.
In India, the Portuguese were similarly squeezed out by the Mughals and later by the Marathas. Pushed out of their base in Hugli, they were reduced to piracy in Bengal and withdrew to Chittagong where they formed an alliance with the Arakanese king Thiri who believed that he was Buddha and destined to unite the world under him. Thus, we have yet another of those impossible combinations of history—a Burmese Buddhist imperialist and Portuguese Catholic pirates. Together they carried out murderous raids into the riverine delta of Bengal that would remain imprinted in local memory for generations. The Bengali expression ‘harmad’ meaning ‘notorious freebooter’ is said to be derived from the word ‘armada’.11
As they lost control over the spice trade, the Portuguese were reduced to trading in African slaves although they were not above kidnapping Indian children and selling them in faraway markets. A particularly intriguing case is that of an eleven-year-old girl, Meera, who was kidnapped from India’s west coast and then sold to the Spanish in Manila. She was then taken to Mexico where she is remembered as Catarina de San Juan. She came to be considered a popular saint although her veneration was explicitly prohibited by the Inquisition. Her life is an amazing tale of how a young girl adapted herself to survive all alone in a distant land and in very difficult circumstances.
The Portuguese had also established themselves in Sri Lanka and had built a strong base in Colombo. They even managed to baptize Dharmapala, the ruler of the nearby kingdom of Kotte (effectively a suburb of Colombo and now the official capital of the country). This success, however, led to growing resentment when Dharmapala confiscated all the lands owned by Buddhist and Hindu institutions and gifted them to the Franciscans. The anger rose when Dharmapala bequeathed his kingdom to the Portuguese crown.12 The Sinhalese resistance was led by Rajasimha, the ruler of a rival kingdom, who united a sizeable part of the island under his rule before turning on the foreigners. Although he repeatedly pushed the Portuguese back to Colombo, he was unable to take the fort because it could be continuously resupplied by ship from Goa. After Rajasimha, however, the Sri Lankan resistance collapsed and the Portuguese were able to expand control over much of the coastline. The Sinhalese now withdrew to mountain strongholds around Kandy. They became even more isolated when the Portuguese took over the Tamil kingdom in Jaffna thereby cutting off communications with traditional allies in southern India.
Given its difficult situation, it is not surprising that the Kingdom of Kandy entered into an alliance with the Dutch in 1638. Together they evicted the Portuguese from Sri Lanka. However, as the Sinhalese may have feared from the beginning, they had only exchanged one foreign colonizer with another. Over the next century, the Dutch would use their base in Sri Lanka to slowly expand control over the Indian coast, especially the pepper ports of Kerala. Perhaps the VOC dreamed that in the long run it could extend control over large parts of India as it had done in Indonesia. However, the world’s most powerful multinational company was thwarted by the remarkable Marthanda Varma, ruler of the small kingdom of Travancore in the southern tip of India.
The King and the Captain
Marthanda Varma is a little-discussed figure in history books but without his determined opposition to the VOC, it is possible that this book would have been written in Dutch rather than in English. He was born in the royal family of what was a very tiny kingdom. As per the matrilineal custom of the Nair clans, he inherited the crown from his maternal uncle in 1729 at the age of twenty-three. His problem was that the Dutch tightly controlled the pepper trade on which the prosperity of Kerala depended.13 The locals were unable to put up any resistance because the region was divided into very small kingdoms. Even within the kingdoms, the king had limited say as power was dispersed among the Nair nobility.
Rather than rely on the old feudal levies, Marthanda Varma began by building a standing army drilled in modern warfare. He also began to take over neighbouring kingdoms one by one. Not surprisingly, the rulers of these kingdoms appealed to the Dutch who repeatedly warned Travancore. Eventually, the VOC Governor of Ceylon dispatched a sizeable force of Dutch marines that landed at the small port of Colachel and marched on the royal palace in Padmanabhapuram in 1741. Marthanda Varma was away but returned in time to defend his capital. The Dutch were now chased back to Colachel where they suffered a humiliating defeat. The Battle of Colachel was a turning point and Dutch power in the Indian Ocean would go into steady decline. Not till the Japanese navy defeated the Russians in 1905 would another Asian state decisively defeat a European power. Colachel is today a small nondescript fishing town and the site of the surrender is marked by a pillar. When I visited the town in December 2013, the pillar commemorating this major military victory was standing neglected amidst heaps of construction debris.
Marthanda Varma’s palace at Padmanabhapuram has survived in better condition and is an excellent example of Kerala’s traditional wooden architecture. It also contains a painting showing Marthanda Varma accepting the surrender of the Dutch commander Eustachius de Lannoy. Interestingly the king offered to hire Lannoy as a general provided he trained his army on European lines. The Dutch captain accepted the offer and would loyally serve Travancore for over three decades. He would not just modernize the army but also build a network of forts using the most advanced European designs of that time. One of the best preserved of these is Vattakottai Fort, just outside the town of Kanyakumari. Built at the edge of the sea, it provides excellent views of the surrounding coastline. One will see a large number of wind turbines turning nearby, an odd reminder of the windmills of Lannoy’s country of origin.
The army trained by Lannoy would help Travancore further expand the kingdom to as far north as Cochin (Kochi) and would help break the Dutch monopoly. Half a century later, it would help Travancore defend itself against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. For his energetic leadership, Lannoy would earn the title of ‘Valiya Kapithaan’ or Great Captain from his men.14 One can visit his grave at Udaygiri Fort that he built not far from the royal palace. The inscription is both in Latin and Tamil, a fitting reflection of his dual identities. Amazingly, an army unit that had fought for Marthanda Varma against Lannoy at Colachel survives in the Indian Army as the 9th Battalion of the Madras Regiment. According to newspaper reports, the regiment recently arranged to take better care of the memorial pillar.
Company’s Empire
While the Dutch were being squeezed by Travancore, the English and the Portuguese were up against another source of indigenous resistance. After the death of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the empire had quickly unravelled and a large part of it was taken over by the Marathas. They had begun their rebellion against the Mughals as mountain guerrillas but were quickly developing capability in other forms of warfare. In 1712, Kanhoji Angre was appointed the Surkhail or Grand Admiral of the Maratha navy. He is often dismissed as a pirate in the writings of Europeans but he was a legitimate official of the Maratha empire and had every right to impose control over the Konkan coast. When the English resisted, he detained a number of EIC ships and forced them to pay a fine. He did the same to the Portuguese.
The reason Angre was able to impose his will on the Europeans was that the Marathas had learned to challenge them at sea. A favourite tactic was to use smaller but fast and manoeuvrable vessels to approach a European ship from astern in order to avoid the cannon broadside. Sometimes they would also tow a larger cannon-laden vessel that would direct its fire at the sails and rigging in order to disable the ship. While the European gunners were trying to extricate themselves from the tangle of rope and canvas, the faster Maratha boats would close in and board the ship.15
The EIC initially agreed to Angre’s demands but were soon found to be violating various conditions. Accusations and counter-accusations flew thick and fast, and Bombay began to prepare for war. A large fleet was assembled in 1718 and sailed down to Angre’s main base at Vijaydurg, a formidable fortress built on a rocky peninsula jutting into the Arabian Sea. The attack was a total failure and the siege was lifted after just four days. The English and the Portuguese would try repeatedly to capture Vijaydurg over the next few years without any success. Eventually, the EIC called for help from the Royal Navy and in 1722, Vijaydurg was attacked by the large combined fleet of the EIC, the Royal Navy and the Portuguese. Yet again, the attackers failed to make a dent and were forced to withdraw. Except for the English, the Europeans would make their peace with Angre one at a time.
Kanhoji Angre died in 1729 and his descendants would harass the EIC for the next two decades. On one occasion, Tulaji Angre would engage a fleet of no less than thirty-six ships. However, the internal politics of the Marathas came to the EIC’s rescue. Tulaji Angre had been part of the faction opposed to Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao who was the supreme leader of the Marathas. In 1756, Vijaydurg found itself under siege with the EIC fleet blockading it from the sea and the Marathas from land. The fort and its harbour fell after heavy bombardment from land and sea. Although the Marathas would remain powerful on land for another half a century, they would no longer be a factor in the Indian Ocean.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, with the Portuguese and Dutch in decline, the British had emerged as the strongest naval power in the Indian Ocean. However, the directors of the EIC would have still baulked at the idea of a land empire beyond a few fortified bases along the coast. It was the French, their main rivals, who first attempted to control inland territory. The key person behind this new strategy was Joseph Francois Dupleix, the Governor of Pondicherry. Note that at this time, the British and the French were at war in Europe but their companies in India had initially refrained from attacking each other. This changed when a British fleet plundered French ships in the Straits of Malacca in 1745. Dupleix immediately requested support from the French naval base in Mauritius. When reinforcements arrived the following year, the French marched on Madras and captured it without much difficulty.
The EIC now complained to the Nawab of Arcot who was the Mughal governor of the area (although by this time the Mughal empire was rapidly dissolving). The Nawab arrived in Madras with a large force but was decimated by French cannon. It was a clear demonstration of the sharp improvements in military technology that were taking place in Europe as it approached the Industrial Revolution. With the largest British settlement under his control and the Indians in awe of his firepower, it would have seemed that Dupleix was in a position to dramatically expand the French territory. However, he was repeatedly undermined by his colleagues and superiors. In 1749, he was forced to hand back Madras to the British as part of a peace deal in Europe.
Dupleix was not yet done, however. Within a year he had managed to place his own candidates as rulers of Hyderabad and the Carnatic coast. Just when the Maratha navy was being tamed on the west coast, the French seemed to have taken control of the east coast. The two European companies began to prepare for war and both recruited a large number of Indian soldiers and drilled them in modern warfare. What followed was a series of engagements known as the Carnatic Wars. The mounting cost of these wars would eventually force the French to recall Dupleix. Meanwhile, the British hand would be strengthened by a decisive victory over the ruler of Bengal in 1757. The British would occupy the French settlement of Chandannagar in Bengal and a few years later would also take over Pondicherry. Both of them were later returned to French rule as part of a peace deal but they would never regain their former importance.
Anyone with even a passing interest in Indian history would have heard of the Battle of Plassey in 1757 where British troops led by Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. Clive had 800 European soldiers, 2200 Indian sepoys and a contingent of artillerymen. The Nawab’s army had 35,000 infantrymen, 15,000 cavalry, 53 cannons and also a small French contingent. This would appear like a big numerical advantage except that a large segment of the Nawab’s army, led by the turncoat Mir Jafar, did not take part in the battle. The French contingent put up some resistance, as did the men led by two loyalists Mir Madan and Mohanlal. However, unsure of how many troops he still controlled, Siraj-ud-Daulah fled the battlefield (later he would be captured and killed). The British losses were ‘4 English soldiers killed, 9 wounded, 2 missing, 15 sepoys killed, 36 wounded’.16 One of the most decisive victories in history was not much more than a skirmish. Mir Jafar became the new Nawab of Bengal but no one was in any doubt that it was Robert Clive who was in charge. This is how the East India Company came to control a major chunk of Indian territory.
The Battle of Plassey has a curious but almost forgotten epilogue. On hearing about Clive’s victory, the Dutch decided that they could revive their fortunes by making a surprise attack on Calcutta. It is quite possible that Mir Jafar had secretly encouraged them. So in 1759, the VOC sent a fleet of seven ships from Batavia (now Jakarta) carrying 300 European and 600 Malay soldiers. They made their way up the river but were routed by the British. It is not clear what the Dutch were thinking but it should have been obvious that Calcutta was not Pulau Run of a hundred years earlier.
Tipu Sultan—Tiger or Tyrant?
Despite their success in Bengal and control over the sea, the British were far from being the masters of India. The Marathas would remain the biggest threat to their hegemony for another half a century till they were finally defeated in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–18. The East India Company also had to contend with the hostility of a number of other rulers such as Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore. Tipu is often portrayed as a great patriot in Indian history textbooks for having opposed British colonization but his record is not so straightforward. While it is true that he fought the British, he was constantly trying to subjugate other Indians—the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad, Travancore, the Kodavas of Coorg to name just a few. He was also considered a usurper by many of his own subjects.
Tipu Sultan came to the throne in 1782 on the death of his father Hyder Ali. Hyder Ali had usurped the throne of Mysore from the Wodeyar dynasty that he served as a military commander. Over the next few years, Tipu crushed all dissent within his kingdom as well as took over the smaller kingdoms adjoining Mysore. The Karnataka coast and the Kodavas of Coorg (now Kodagu in Karnataka) soon found themselves under savage assault. The indiscriminate cruelty of Tipu’s troops is not just testified in both Indian and European accounts but also in the letters and instructions that Tipu himself sent to his commanders on the field:17
You are to make a general attack on the Coorgs and, having put to the sword or made prisoners the whole of them, both the slain and prisoners, with the women and children, are to be made Mussalmans . . . Ten years ago, from ten to fifteen thousand men were hung upon the trees of that district; since which time the aforesaid trees have been waiting for men . . .
Around 1788, Tipu Sultan turned his attention on the Kerala coast and marched in with a very large army. The old port city of Calicut was razed to the ground. Hundreds of temples and churches were systematically destroyed and tens of thousands of Hindus and Christians were either killed or forcibly converted to Islam. Again, this is not just testified by Tipu’s Sultan’s enemies but in his own writings and those of his court historian Mir Hussein Kirmani.18 Interestingly, one of the things that Tipu loudly denounced in order to justify his cruelty was the matrilineal customs of the region.
Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands of refugees began to stream south into Travancore. Tipu now used a flimsy excuse to invade the kingdom founded half a century earlier by Marthanda Varma. Travancore’s forces were much smaller than those of Mysore, but Lannoy had left behind a well-drilled army and a network of fortifications. A few sections of these fortifications have survived to this day and can be seen north of Kochi, not far from where the ancient port of Muzeris once flourished. Tipu’s army was repeatedly repulsed by the Nair troops but Travancore knew that it was up against a much larger military machine and was forced to ask the EIC for help.
The British responded by putting together a grand alliance of Tipu’s enemies that included the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad and, in 1791, they marched on Mysore. Within a few months, the allies had taken over most of Tipu’s kingdom and were bearing down on his capital Srirangapatna. Eventually, he was forced to accept humiliating terms—half his kingdom was taken away and he was made to pay a big war indemnity. Given his record of reneging on treaties, the EIC kept two of his sons hostage till he paid the indemnity.
Friendless in India, Tipu now began to look for allies abroad. It is known that he exchanged letters with Napoleon and had great hopes of receiving support from the French. He also wrote to the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul and urged a joint jihad against the infidel British. The problem was that Napoleon had occupied Egypt and the Ottomans considered the French the real infidel enemies and the British as allies! The Ottoman Sultan’s reply, later published in the Madras Gazette, makes the point clearly: ‘We make it our special request that your Majesty will please refrain from entering any measure against the English.’19
British intelligence was fully aware of what Tipu was doing and decided to finish him once and for all. The allies again marched on Srirangapatna in 1799. The Mysore army was a shadow of its former self and the allies had little difficulty in reaching the capital. After three weeks of bombardment, the walls were breached. Tipu Sultan died fighting, sword in hand. The allies would restore Mysore to the old Wodeyar dynasty from whom Tipu’s father had usurped the throne. Napoleon would do little to rescue his ally but the siege of Srirangapatna would bolster the reputation of a thirty-year-old British colonel named Arthur Wellesley. Now remembered as the Duke of Wellington, he would defeat Napoleon sixteen years later at Waterloo.
The Srirangapatna fort lies on a river island just off the Bangalore–Mysore highway. The final siege is so well documented that one can wander around the area and get a very good feel of how the last weeks unfolded. Tipu’s personal effects were taken by the victors and most of them were shipped to England where they can be seen in various museums.
Tipu died a warrior’s death, defending his fort to his last breath. Moreover, despite the extreme cruelty towards Hindus and Christians in Kerala and Coorg, there are also instances of his making generous grants to temples. His critics will argue that most of these were given after his defeat in 1791. It is difficult to say if this was a genuine change of heart or a tactical retreat by a cornered bully desperately looking for new friends. Still, given his record of brutality towards fellow Indians, it is difficult to think of him as a great freedom fighter. At best, he belongs to the shades of grey that mark a lot of history.