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IN 1772, LONDON THEATREGOERS FLOCKED to the Haymarket Theatre to see Samuel Foote’s new play, The Nabob. It told the story of Sir Matthew Mite, a dissolute employee of the East India Company (EIC) who returns to England intending to use his ill-begotten fortune to marry into an aristocratic family and buy a seat in the House of Commons. Sir John Oldham, a respectable aristocrat who has fallen on hard times, is in debt to Mite, who wants to marry his beautiful daughter Sophy. Mite is a gambler: ‘profusely scattering the spoils of ruined provinces’ and ‘voluptuously rioting in pleasures that derive their source from the ruin of others’. He confesses to wanting to set up a seraglio guarded by ‘three blacks from Bengal’ and threatens to send Oldham to a debtors’ prison if he can’t make Sophy his wife. In the end, Oldham’s cousin Thomas Oldham stumps up the £10,000 that Mite is owed, saving the family seat – and Sophy’s honour.
Nabob is a corruption of the Persian word nawab, meaning governor. As the English public’s indignation towards the Company’s barbaric business practices grew in the 1770s, the word was applied to rapacious employees like the fictional Mite. The object of Foote’s play was the most rapacious of them all, Robert Clive, who rose through the EIC’s ranks, amassing a fortune so large it astonished his contemporaries.
Clive was nineteen when he disembarked at Madras in 1744 to take up the position of junior tally clerk. He was the eldest of thirteen children from a family of minor gentry. As a boy, he was known for being ‘out of measure addicted’ to fighting, a trait that would serve him well on the subcontinent. His starting pay was a mere £5 a year, but if he survived the climate and life-threatening tropical diseases, he stood a good chance of progressing to a junior merchant, councillor or even governor. In one of his first letters home, the young Clive said his aim was nothing more than ‘to provide for myself & … being of service to my Relations’. The culture of the EIC would not allow for such modesty.
Knighted for his victories in southern India and Bengal, Clive arguably did more to lay the foundations for the British Empire in eighteenth-century India that any other individual.
By the time of Clive’s arrival, the ‘Honourable Company’, as it was later known, had grown from a small trading entity to a highly profitable publicly listed corporation with more than a dozen ‘factories’ (the word derived from the Portuguese feitoria, meaning fortified trading post) scattered around the coast of India and along its major waterways. Senior merchants were known as factors and junior employees such as Clive as writers. Just a few dozen permanent employees operating out of a cramped office on Leadenhall Street in London would ultimately run a corporation that controlled half the world’s trade and whose customs receipts provided the British exchequer a tenth of its total revenue. Between 1600, the year in which the company was granted its charter by Queen Elizabeth I, and 1833, ships sailing under the Company’s colours made about 4600 voyages from London to Asia. By the end of the eighteenth century, the size of the EIC’s armed forces was double that of Britain’s.
The rise and fall of the EIC has been well covered by historians, including most recently by William Dalrymple, who describes its gradual takeover of India as ‘a corporate coup unparalleled in history’: ‘the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia … almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history’.
When eighty hard-headed businessmen met in London in 1599 to establish the EIC, they set their sights not on India but on the spice trade with the Indonesian archipelago. Their main competitor was the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie or VOC, which had ten times the capital base and was hauling in huge profits from the Spice Islands. After being soundly beaten in several skirmishes with Dutch traders keen to protect their monopolies, the Company decided it was better to cut its losses than persevere. As a fallback, India was a tempting prize. It was closer to home and manufactured the world’s finest textiles.
In 1608, Captain William Hawkins landed in Surat, on India’s western coast, becoming the first commander of an EIC vessel to set foot in India. He immediately departed for a year-long journey to Agra, the imperial capital of the Mughal Empire. But his gifts, which consisted of meagre bundles of cloth (the rest had been stolen by an agent working for the Portuguese), failed to inspire Jahangir. Instead of being granted a farman, or imperial directive, giving the Company trading rights throughout the Mughal Empire, he returned with only the emperor’s present of an Armenian Christian wife.
Hawkins was followed seven years later by Sir Thomas Roe, who arrived at the Mughal court carrying camel-loads of presents, including English mastiffs and hunting dogs, crates of red wine and a state coach. England’s main competitors were the Portuguese. Although they had been in India as traders for almost a century, their standing with the Mughals was shaky. Muslim pilgrims wanting to travel to Mecca for the Haj relied on Portuguese shipping: before boarding a vessel, they needed a passport issued by Portugal that was stamped with idolatrous images of Jesus and Mary. Roe’s arrival coincided with English victories in two skirmishes with Portuguese vessels. With British help, Roe promised, Jahangir would become ‘lord of the seas’.
Once again there was no farman, but the emperor obliged Roe by granting permission for a trading post in Surat. On his return to England, Roe offered the Company’s directors the following advice: ‘Let this be received as a rule that, if you will profit, seek it at sea and in quiet trade; for without controversy it is an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India.’
Over the next several decades, the EIC’s presence in India grew steadily. Madras was acquired from a local ruler in 1639, and in 1661 Bombay, with its magnificent harbour, was ‘gifted’ to Charles II as part of the marriage dowry he received from Catherine of Braganza.
Trade boomed. By 1680, the EIC’s 2000 stockholders were receiving an annual dividend of 50 per cent, a level repeated in 1682, 1689 and 1691. Although its fortunes varied over the subsequent decades, the Company would remain crucial to the English economy. In 1700, it shipped over half a million pounds of goods from India and accounted for 13 per cent of England’s imports. Textiles had overtaken spices as the main trading commodity, with fine Indian cottons from Bengal, Gujarat and the Coromandel and Konkan finding ready markets in Southeast Asia, East Africa and Safavid Persia. ‘Indian cloth started functioning as currency in Africa, a wage good in Southeast Asia, and a fashion article in Europe,’ writes the scholar Giorgio Riello.
In what has become a depressingly familiar scenario, the greater the turnover, the larger the scope for corporate malfeasance. In 1693, the EIC’s governor and the lord president of its council were impeached for insider trading and using funds to buy off parliamentarians who had threatened to clip the Company’s wings.
It was not the first time the Company had overstepped the mark. In 1688, its bellicose governor in London, Sir Josiah Child, disregarded Roe’s advice about ‘quiet trade’ and foolishly decided to take on the 100,000-strong Mughal war machine. Responding to complaints that Mughal officials were extorting money from English traders at its factories in Bengal, Child sent two ships carrying a total of 308 soldiers up the Hooghly River to teach them a lesson. When the ships made landfall, their soldiers were picked off by Mughal sentries as easily as if they were ‘swatting flies’. On India’s western coast, a company official, who was also called Child, decided to pick a similarly disastrous fight against Mughal shipping. What became dubbed the ‘Children’s War’ led to the loss of the Company’s factories in Bengal, Bombay and Surat. Officials had to go begging to Aurangzeb to restore their trading rights. They were reinstated only after the payment of a massive indemnity and the promise of better behaviour in the future.
In 1690, Job Charnock, the chief of the Company’s operations in Bengal, returned to the Hooghly to select a new site for a settlement. Charnock’s choice – on the river’s east bank near a cluster of villages – had few fans. ‘For the sake of a large shady tree … he could not have found a more unhealthful place on all the River,’ ship captain Alexander Hamilton wrote shortly after the settlement’s establishment. Although the population had grown to around 1000 by 1692, Hamilton noted that there were already 460 deaths registered, among them Charnock’s. What his soldiers christened Golgotha would become the site of Calcutta, the imperial capital of the British Raj.
Described by Aurangzeb as ‘the Paradise of Nations’, Bengal was by far the richest province in India and the single most important supplier of goods from Asia to Europe. After travelling through eastern India in 1657, Bernier declared Bengal’s ‘fertility, wealth and beauty’ far greater than Egypt’s, which was considered at the time ‘the finest and most fruitful country in the world’. Portuguese, Dutch and French companies had also set up trading posts on the Hooghly.
Calcutta in the early seventeenth century. Known today as Kolkata, it is one of the world’s largest urban conglomerations, with a population of 15 million.
Like the EIC’s other factories, Charnock’s trading post depended on the goodwill of local rulers for its survival. By the early eighteenth century, it had become apparent that goodwill was no substitute for security. To ensure the post’s protection, British officers commanded small armies primarily of locally trained soldiers or sepoys. These armies were expensive to maintain, requiring revenue, which meant setting up an administrative structure to collect taxes, which in turn necessitated courts and a justice system. A trading empire gradually acquired the attributes of a state.
On New Year’s Eve 1716, an enfeebled Mughal emperor, Farrukh Siyar, was finally bullied into issuing a farman granting the EIC full trading rights. Dubbed the ‘Magna Carta of the Company in India’, it was celebrated among its directors as granting ‘such favour as had never before been granted to any European nation’. The Company was now inducted into the political hierarchy of Mughal India through a direct relationship with the emperor. Half a century later, Clive would use the decree to justify the overthrow of Bengal’s nawab.
With its main settlements at Pondicherry, a day’s sailing south of Madras, and at Chandernagore, about 24 kilometres north of Calcutta, the EIC’s chief challenger was the French Compagnie des Indes, founded in 1664. For much of the eighteenth century, Anglo–French rivalry in continental Europe would be played out by their respective trading companies in India. The outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) coincided with power struggles in South Indian states that had become independent of Mughal rule. This gave both companies the opportunity to intervene politically and militarily in what were purely domestic affairs.
The architect of this policy was Joseph-François Dupleix (1697–1763). Described by the English scholar Lawrence James as ‘a man of dynamic energy who combined ambition, cupidity, Anglophobia and belligerence in roughly equal parts’, Dupleix would become Clive’s chief rival. In 1742, he was transferred from Chandernagore to assume the governorship of French possessions on the Coromandel Coast. When Britain’s fleet threatened Pondicherry in 1745, he appealed for protection to the nawab of the Carnatic, an independent state to the north of Madras with its capital at Arcot. The attack on Pondicherry never materialised, but the appeal was a game changer. As Thomas Macaulay, one of Dupleix’s earliest biographers, wrote, the Frenchman had recognised ‘it was possible to found a European empire on the ruins of the Mogul monarchy’.
Favourable trading rights were just one of the factors that determined the EIC’s fortunes in India. Promising to hand over territories, local rulers increasingly looked to the British and French for support in their battles with competing kingdoms. The revenue raised by the Europeans from these territories would be ploughed into bolstering their respective militaries. Even when not officially at war, the British and French supported competing Indian princes to wage proxy conflicts on their behalf.
Local rulers quickly learned the advantages of such support. Using small corps of highly disciplined troops trained in European methods of attack and defence, English-and French-led forces could accomplish what had once taken enormous Indian armies months or even years to achieve. Handsomely remunerated soldiers of fortune from America, Ireland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Poland and even Armenia came to play a pivotal role in changing the face of warfare in South Asia.
CLIVE AND THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL LEGEND
The first Indian ruler to engage a military force under the command of a European commander in exchange for a grant of territory was Muzaffar Jung (c.?–1751), the grandson of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Nizam ul-Mulk’s death in 1748 had set off a four-year succession crisis that saw six sons and one grandson compete for the throne of South India’s richest and most powerful state. Muzaffar Jung was proclaimed the new Nizam in an elaborate ceremony at Pondicherry in 1750 after French-led troops defeated his rival, Nasir Jung (1712–1750). Dupleix’s choice of Pondicherry over Hyderabad was significant. He wanted to remind the Muslim world that power had passed from the Viceroy of the Deccan to the French. In return for his support, Muzaffar Jung declared Dupleix the viceroy of the whole of southern India from the Krishna River to Cape Comorin. The Frenchman now ruled 30 million people with almost absolute power.
Jung’s rule was never recognised by the Mughal emperor in Delhi, and he lasted a mere six weeks on the throne before being killed in an ambush. But by engaging the French, he had set a precedent that would change India’s political map forever. From now on, those Indian rulers wanting to maintain power with the help of English-led troops had to pawn off swathes of territory and pay for subsidiary forces stationed in their states ostensibly for protection against internal and external aggression. They were also expected to host a British ‘Resident’ at their capital who would have the final say in matters such as royal marriages and successions. Prevented from pursuing independent foreign or military policies, these Indian rulers found themselves mere surrogates of empire-builders in London.
Dupleix’s adventurism proved his undoing. In 1754 he was relieved of his post by the French naval commander Charles Robert Godeheu de Zaimont, who had been dispatched to India to patch up relations with the English. That left the arena clear for Clive, who had quickly risen up through the Company’s ranks and had developed a reputation as a military strategist and brilliant leader.
The legend that became ‘Clive of India’ was first formed during the siege of Arcot in 1751. A city of 100,000, Arcot was the capital of the Carnatic, the coastal region to the north of Madras, which had been ruled by Nizam ul-Mulk’s deputy, Anwar-ud-Din. When he was killed in battle in 1749, the French supported their stooge, Chanda Sahib (? –1752), to become the new nawab. To prevent the succession and avoid a scenario where the French and their puppet ruler in the Carnatic would encircle Madras, Clive proposed attacking Arcot. With a force of only 200 European soldiers and 300 Indian sepoys, Clive managed to take Arcot’s fort. Forces under the command of Chanda Sahib’s son and bolstered by 150 French soldiers surrounded the fort and used heavy artillery to bombard the English positions. Despite losing almost half his men, Clive held off the combined French and Indian troops for fifty-three days until reinforcements arrived from Madras.
Like the later defenders of Jalalabad, Lucknow and Chitral, Clive’s men epitomised ‘the doggedness and steady courage of the British race’, James enthuses. ‘Those who manned the ramparts were presented as defenders of order and civilisation and their strongholds were breakwaters around which surged the waters of chaos and barbarism.’ As the governor of Madras, Thomas Saunders, announced to the directors in London, Arcot had shown the weakness of the Indians: ‘’Tis certain any European nation resolved to war on them with a tolerable force may overrun the whole country.’
In 1753, Clive left for England, returning two years later as deputy governor of Fort St David at Cuddalore, south of Madras. For once, the French and English were at peace, but the deceptive calm was about to be shattered. On 16 August 1756, news reached Madras that Calcutta had fallen to the nawab of Bengal’s army, and upwards of 100 English prisoners had died in a prison cell dubbed the Black Hole.
Calcutta had by then grown into a thriving port with a population of some 400,000, only a small fraction of whom were British. The city far outshone nearby trading posts belonging to the French, the Dutch and the Danes. Relations between the European traders and Nawab Alivardi Khan (1671–1756) had been cordial and mutually beneficial. The nawab’s death in 1756 coincided with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. English and French company directors responded to the news from Europe by ordering the reinforcement of their respective garrisons.
The enhanced fortifications unnerved Alivardi Khan’s successor, Siraj ud-Daula (1733–1757), who saw them as a threat to his power and ordered them to be stopped. The French obliged but the British ignored his demand. When ud-Daula’s envoy went to negotiate an end to the standoff, he was slapped by a British officer and expelled. On returning to his capital, Murshidabad, he reportedly told Siraj: ‘What honour is left to us, when a few traders, who have not yet learnt to wash their bottoms reply to the ruler’s orders by expelling his envoy.’ When a last-ditch appeal from ud-Daula urging the English to ‘behave themselves like merchants’ failed, he assembled a large army and marched southwards to Calcutta.
Although there was plenty of warning of his advance, hubris got the better of Calcutta’s defenders and they did little to prepare for its defence. Military officers wanted houses close to Fort William demolished to allow a better field of fire, but the owners refused, believing they would never get compensated. By 16 June 1756, ud-Daula’s forces had reached Dum Dum, the site of today’s international airport, prompting scenes of chaos and panic in the fort, where 2500 mainly British residents of the city had sought shelter. As the enemy soldiers closed in, there was a rush to escape on one of the twenty-odd vessels moored in the river. Among those who fled was the city’s governor, Roger Drake.
Within hours the nawab’s men had taken control of Fort William, but instead of killing the remaining defenders, they rounded them up. Ud-Daula promised the prisoners that ‘not a hair of their heads’ would be hurt. But when a blind drunk English sailor shot dead a Mughal solider who was plundering their valuables, the mood changed. All of the survivors were herded into the fort’s tiny punishment cell, measuring 4.3 by 5.5 metres, with only one small window and hardly any water.
‘DEPLORABLE DEATHS’
The mythology of the Black Hole owes much to an account of the incident by the garrison’s British commander, Josiah Holwell (1711–1798). According to Holwell, when the door of the cell was unlocked ten hours later at 6am, corpses were piled up inside and only twenty-three of the prisoners were still alive. He referred to the experience as ‘a night of horrors I will not attempt to describe, as they bar all description’. After returning to England the following year, he published A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen and Others, Who Were Suffocated in the Black Hole. More recent estimates put the number of people imprisoned as low as forty-three. Siraj ud-Daula did not order the prisoners to be shut in the Black Hole and knew nothing about it until afterwards.
A MOST SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS DEAL
The Black Hole would come to symbolise barbarity of the Indians in the minds of English policymakers and be used to strengthen the case for British rule. In the short term, the atrocity would become a rallying cry for the recapture of Calcutta and then the rest of Bengal. In January 1757, a British naval force took the city with little difficulty. But instead of returning to Madras, Clive pushed on to capture the French trading post at Chandernagore, leaving the British in control of the region. The stage was now set for the decisive Battle of Plassey.
Most historians dismiss Plassey as a mere skirmish. A morning cannonade was followed by a severe monsoonal storm that put most of the nawab’s ammunition out of commission, while the British protected theirs with tarpaulins. A spontaneous attack caused by the overenthusiasm of a British officer ended in victory for Clive’s forces. On paper, 800 Europeans and 2000 local troops had routed an enemy force of 50,000 men, but in reality ud-Daula never stood a chance. Traders and nobles wanting to get rid of the nawab had enlisted the support of his commander-in-chief, Mir Jafar (c. 1691–1765), who held back his forces just when they were needed. Bankrolling the conspirators were the Jagat Seths, the biggest financiers in Bengal, who had lost faith in ud-Daula providing the security needed for trade to flourish. Their involvement prompted the English historian Nick Robins to refer to Plassey as ‘more of a commercial transaction than a real battle’. Rather than being considered as the first step in the creation of the British Empire in India, Plassey ‘is perhaps better understood as the East India Company’s most successful business deal’.
Clive rewarded Jafar with the governorship of Bengal, though he was essentially a puppet ruler. Siraj ud-Daula was hunted down and murdered near his capital, Murshidabad. Aged just thirty-two, Clive found himself the conqueror of Bengal – and a very rich one at that. Despite strict instructions from London to repulse French attacks and not pick fights with local rulers, Clive had taken things into his own hands, seeing the opportunity for personal enrichment and political and economic gain for the Company. In a single stroke, he had netted £2.5 million for the Company and £234,000 for himself, making him one of the wealthiest men in England.
Clive returned to England in 1760 a hero, leaving as his successor Black Hole survivor Josiah Holwell. Eager to exploit the potential succession crisis that followed the death of Jafar’s son, Holwell wanted to take over the administration of Bengal. But this was opposed by the Company’s directors, who decided to make Jafar’s son-in-law Mir Qasim (?–1777) the new ruler. When Jafar tried to resist the move, he was deposed.
The British soon came to regret their support for Qasim. The newly installed nawab dismissed local officials suspected of collaborating with the Company, increased revenue demands, harassed English shipping and began reorganising his forces along European lines with the help of two Christian mercenaries: Walter Reinhardt, an Alsatian soldier of fortune, and the Isfahani Armenian Khoja Gregory. After receiving reports that Qasim had killed Company prisoners and their Indian allies at Patna, the EIC’s council in Calcutta formally declared war on the nawab on 4 July 1763 and vowed to put Jafar back on the throne.
To reverse the losses of Plassey and restore Bengal’s independence, Mir Qasim created an alliance between the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II (1728–1806) and the nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula. Shah Alam had been reinstated to the throne in Delhi after Afghan forces led by Ahmad Shah Durrani defeated the Marathas at the decisive battle of Panipat, north of Delhi, in 1761. When the emperor’s overtures to the British to support him in return for granting the Company the diwani, or fiscal administration, of Bengal were rejected, he entered into an alliance with Mir Qasim.
As the tripartite army began its march on Calcutta, British sepoys under the command of Major Hector Munro rode out to meet them. To make doubly sure there would be no desertions on the British side, those Company sepoys who refused orders ‘were strapped to cannons by their arms, their bellies against the mouths of the guns, which were then fired in front of their quaking colleagues’. For only the second time in the Company’s history, its soldiers were engaged in fighting Mughal troops. The Battle of Buxar, which saw the defeat of the three great armies of the Mughals, left the EIC the dominant force in northeast India: ‘At Buxar all that still remained of Mogul power in northern India was shattered.’ It was ‘perhaps the most important battle the British ever fought in South Asia’, writes British historian John Keay.
At a humiliating ceremony in Clive’s tent at Allahabad, Shah Alam handed over the diwani of Bengal. The collection of taxes, once the domain of Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, was now subcontracted to the Company. What had been a company of ‘foreign merchants’ was transforming itself into a capitalist colonial state – creating laws, administering justice, assessing taxes, making peace and waging wars. It became the first trading company to mint coins, monetising its reserves of gold bullion and making it easier to conduct trade.
News that the Company had been granted the diwani sent its shares skyrocketing between 1767 and 1769. But these bountiful times were fleeting. Answerable only to its shareholders, the Company had no stake in the just governance of the regions it now ruled over. The failure of the monsoon in 1769 severely affected rice crops in Bengal and Bihar, forcing the commodity’s price five times higher in some places. Millions were on the verge of starvation. By June 1770, there were reports of villagers feeding on corpses. No effort had been made to stockpile surpluses. Instead, Company officials were accused of making massive profits by hoarding grain and controlling distribution. As the British writer Michael Edwardes succinctly described it: ‘A lust for gold inflamed the British, and Bengal was to have little peace until they bled it white.’
A massive 1818 canvas by the artist Benjamin West captures the moment when Shah Alam handed a scroll to Robert Clive that transferred tax-collecting rights in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the East India Company.
As the famine worsened, the company’s land revenues fell precipitously, forcing its directors to ask the British government for a bailout of £1.4 million to avoid bankruptcy. So important was EIC to Britain’s economy that the bailout request sent the share market crashing. With 40 per cent of members of parliament holding Company stock, a rescue package was never in doubt, but the price was steep. The Regulating Act placed the EIC under government supervision. A governing council appointed by parliament and based in Calcutta was charged with the day-to-day running of the Company. The interests of the EIC and the state were now intertwined. The Act marked the beginning of British colonial rule in India.
As the company had continued to acquire territory, its administration was divided between three ‘presidencies’ – Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. One of the key provisions of the Regulating Act was the establishment of the post of governor-general, based in Calcutta, who was given authority over the presidencies of Bombay and Madras. The first governor-general was Warren Hastings, a controversial figure whose greatest sin, according to one historian, was that ‘he loved India too much’. To hold the Company to account, Hastings wanted British sovereignty to be exercised through Indian officers and systems of government. Justice would be dispensed by Indian judges, and Indian officials would negotiate matters relating to land-holdings. His vision was too radical for its time, and if implemented would have been reversed by his successors. His most lasting legacy was encouraging the study of Indian history and languages, such as Sanskrit. It was under Hastings that Orientalists, such as William Jones and Charles Wilkins, did their pioneering work, translating Hindu epics and linking Sanskrit to the Indo-Āryan group of languages. But for all his philanthropy and idealism, Hastings was still a nabob who saw his primary role as generating wealth for the Company, its shareholders and himself. Under Hastings, Bengal’s salt and opium production was monopolised for the Company’s benefit, and the first shipment of opium was smuggled to China in defiance of a long-standing import ban.
When Hastings returned to England in 1785, he expected to be welcomed by his peers for putting the EIC’s affairs in order. Instead, he found himself under attack by members of parliament, notably the corporation’s most vocal critic, Edmund Burke. To the Anglo–Irish Whig politician, the Company was the ‘kingdom of magistrates’, ‘separated both from the Country that sent them out and from the Country in which they are’. Within two years of his return from India, Burke managed to get Hastings impeached. He was charged with twenty-two articles, including extortion, bribery, corruption and waging an unprovoked war against the Rohillas. After a marathon impeachment trial lasting seven years, Hastings was acquitted of all charges.
His replacement as governor-general was Lord Cornwallis (1738–1835), who, in 1781, had overseen the surrender of Yorktown in the American War of Independence. Cornwallis was the exact opposite of his predecessor. An army man with a deep distaste for trade, he described the Company’s presence in India as ‘a system of the dirtiest jobbing’. Setting out to reform the administration, and stamp out corruption and nepotism, he divided the Company into commercial and political wings. Based on his belief that ‘every native of Hindustan I verily believe is corrupt’, he Europeanised the services. ‘No person, the son of a Native Indian, shall henceforward be appointed by this court to Employment in the Civil, Military, or Marine Service of the Company,’ he declared.
Cornwallis also sought to bind the fate of India’s landed elites closer to the Company by fixing the amount of revenue paid by large landlords, or zamindars, at a permanent rate. The move was also meant to boost agricultural production because every extra rupee earned would be retained by the landlord. Zamindars also bore responsibility for collecting revenue from those peasants who worked on their lands, previously the burdensome task of British officials. The dominance of trade in the Company’s affairs was now usurped by its administrative arm.
THE ROAD TO SUPREMACY
While the Battle of Buxar had secured the Company’s hold over eastern India, its interests in west and south of the subcontinent faced a series of threats from the 1760s onwards. The most formidable challenges came from the kingdom of Mysore and from the Maratha Confederacy. Both used French arms and officers in their respective armies, making them dangerous proxies for French power in India. It would take four wars to defeat Mysore and three to defeat the Marathas, culminating in Britain’s supremacy in India in 1818.
This crucial chapter in India’s history begins with the capture of Mysore in 1761 by Hyder Ali (c. 1720–1782). Destined to become a thorn in the Company’s side, Ali was a brilliant tactician. His artillery included camel-mounted rockets with a range of up to 2 kilometres. He even had a small navy, commanded at different times by English and Dutch mercenaries, comprising several warships and smaller transport vessels. A visionary ruler, he established a state trading company and encouraged investors to buy shares in it. He also explored setting up ‘factories’ in the Ottoman Empire and in Pegu in Burma.
Fearful that Ali would turn his sights on Madras, British soldiers marched on Mysore in 1767 but were beaten back for the first time since Josiah Child’s disastrous campaign against the Mughals a century earlier. In 1780, Ali joined forces with the Nizam of Hyderabad and launched a lightning strike on the suburbs of Madras ‘surrounding many of the English gentlemen in their country houses, who narrowly escaped being taken’. Meanwhile, his son Tipu Sultan (1751–1799) engaged the British at Polilur, near modern-day Kanchipuram. Almost half of the eighty-six English officers leading a contingent of British and Indian sepoys were killed, together with 280 rank and file soldiers and 1700 sepoys. It was Britain’s worst defeat in India to date.
The loss at Polilur coincided with the trouncing the British received at Yorktown, prompting widespread dismay in England. ‘India and America are alike escaping,’ predicted the anti-imperial Whig Horace Walpole. A senior Company army officer warned parliamentarians that Britain’s foothold in India was ‘more imaginary than real’. If there were to be more defeats like Polilur, the Indians ‘will soon find out that we are but men like themselves, or very little better’. The fears were not unfounded. After their reverses in the Second Anglo–Mysore War, one in every five British soldiers stationed in India was a prisoner of the Indians. Stories of forced circumcisions, slavery and torture incensed the British public.
Ali’s death in December 1782 left Tipu the undisputed ruler of Mysore. In Britain, Tipu would be vilified in plays, cartoons and other media, cast as an ‘intolerant bigot’ and fanatical Muslim tyrant bent on persecuting Christians and driving Europeans from the Indian subcontinent, long after his death. A more subtle reading of his rule shows that he was a social reformer who recognised the importance of trade and sound administration. Under his watch, liquor, prostitution and female slavery were banned, as was polyandry. All this mattered little to the British. After two humiliating defeats, the crushing of Mysore became an obsession.
Cornwallis would wait three years after arriving in India to seek Britain’s revenge, but once he set his sights on the Tiger of Mysore, there was no going back. In 1789, supported by Maratha and Hyderabadi forces, he encircled Tipu’s capital, Seringapatam, in the southeast. After holding out for almost a year, Tipu was forced to accept a humiliating set of terms, including an eight-figure indemnity and the surrender of almost half his territories, which were shared among the British and their allies.
One of the items brought back to London after Tipu’s defeat and installed in the EIC’s headquarters was a wooden automaton showing a near-life-size tiger eating a British soldier. Built by Indian artisans, French toy manufacturers and Dutch organ makers, it was Tipu’s favourite toy. A crankshaft on the body of the tiger would cause the automaton to emit a deep roar, while the man would wave his arms and wail. Stories of Tipu’s atrocities involving tigers and Englishmen only increased the automaton’s notoriety, and it became the centrepiece of the newly created East India House Museum.
Tipu’s defeat did little to halt the growing influence of the French in India. The Nizam of Hyderabad and the Maratha Peshwa of Pune had switched sides and were now engaging French mercenaries to train their soldiers. Back in Europe, Britain and France were at war yet again.
The fourth and final Mysore War was executed by Richard Wellesley (1760–1842), an uncompromising empire-builder who arguably did more than Clive to establish the British hegemony in India. The decision to declare war followed the discovery that Tipu was in communication with the French at Île de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean. In 1797, more than fifty French soldiers stationed in Seringapatam were reported to have formed a Jacobian Club and proclaimed the rights of man – though recent research has dismissed this as British propaganda. News of Napoleon Bonaparte’s intended invasion of Egypt prompted fears that the French ruler might use Egypt as a springboard for an invasion of India with the connivance of local rulers, such as ‘Citoyen Tipu’. Although Nelson’s smashing of the French fleet at Abukir Bay in August 1798 neutralised the threat, it did not stop Wellesley marching on Seringapatam.
After a month-long siege, 24,000 British troops, supported by a similar number of soldiers belonging to the Nizam of Hyderabad, successfully stormed the city. When Tipu’s still-warm body was found, his jewelled sword-belt had been looted. As Wellesley would later recall, there was so much booty that ‘every soldier had to relieve himself of the burden by throwing away a portion of it’. Inside Tipu’s palace, soldiers found three live tigers and a mechanical one.
Following Tipu’s death, the Marathas were the last remaining barrier to Wellesley’s empire-building plans. Once capable of forming a powerful united front, the Marathas had never recovered from their defeat by Afghan forces at Panipat. Although they were split into sometimes competing kingdoms, the most powerful of which were the Holkars of Indore, the Scindias of Gwalior, the Gaekwads of Baroda and the Bhonsles of Nagpur, they were still capable of intervening militarily in much of the subcontinent. The presence of French soldiers of fortune employed as military advisers added weight to Wellesley’s determination to defeat them once and for all.
In 1803, Wellesley and his political agent, John Malcolm (1769–1833), marched from Srirangapatnam to Pune. Along the way they sought allies from among local chiefs and eventually arrived at the city with a combined force of 40,000 soldiers. After taking Pune without a fight, they chased down Scindia, Holkar and Bhonsle forces in a cat-and-mouse campaign across northern India, capturing Delhi in the process. Seated on the diamond-and-jewel-studded Peacock Throne commissioned by Shah Jahan was the blind and ageing Shah Alam, a king in title only. So enfeebled was Shah Alam that Wellesley decided it was more prudent to allow him to live out his days than depose him. When he died in 1806, the British allowed his son Akbar Shah to succeed him, but real power in the old Mughal capital for the next five decades would remain firmly in the hands of a British intermediary or Resident, who oversaw all aspects of the administration.
The capture of Delhi and subsequent signing of peace treaties with the Scindias, the Bhonsoles and the Holkars left the East India Company the strongest power in India. But the Marathas would prove to be stubborn foes. Soldiers loyal to Gwalior’s ruler continued to harass British forces, promoting Wellesley to demand more funds to bolster his war machine. Viewing Wellesley’s territorial aspirations as unbecoming of the head of a trading company, the EIC’s directors turned him down. When Prime Minister William Pitt accused him of acting ‘imprudently and illegally’, he quit.
The third and final Anglo–Maratha war was unlike any military encounter the British had faced in India before. Their chief foes were bandit armies made up of Pindari warriors recruited by the Maratha ruling houses. On horseback and armed with spears, the Pindaris ravaged the countryside of central India, plundering villages for sustenance, and launched raids on Company outposts. Alongside them were Afghan marauders. To suppress these twin scourges, in 1817 the Company began assembling the largest army ever seen in India – 110,000 troops, including 20,000 irregular soldiers lent by Indian allies. Operating in scattered groups over thousands of square kilometres of often inaccessible terrain, the Pindaris were an elusive foe. As Malcolm complained, ‘Nowhere did [the Pindaris] present any point of attack … Their chief strength lay in their being intangible.’ After a sustained British onslaught, most of the Pindaris and Afghans simply disappeared, only to re-emerge in later years as highway robbers. But as a fighting force, they were no longer the threat they once were. One by one, the ruling houses of the Marathas submitted to British hegemony.
The year 1818 marked the beginning of British supremacy in India, but as the British Indologist Jon Wilson writes, it was ‘a comma, not a full stop, a moment of hiatus rather than a termination of a process’. Peace in British India would always be a violent enterprise. ‘The submission of Indian leaders to the expansion of British money and violence was reluctant, edgy and conditional,’ Wilson continues. ‘The defeat of the Marathas did not mean conquest.’