Hyderabad and the Maratha Confederacy might well have congratulated themselves on choosing the right side and participating in the humbling of their most intractable foe. But the wars initiated by the wider American War had consequences for these native powers as well. For the Marathas, however, while peace with the British brought short-term advantages—the defeat of Mysore and expansion of Confederacy territory into Tipu’s former domains—it was a strategic blunder in the long term, a crucial opportunity lost. The early 1780s represented, in the words of one historian, the “most favourable opportunity for the Marathas to destroy the EIC.” If, instead of making peace with Hastings, the Marathas had joined with Mysore and France, the British might well have been driven out of India altogether. British resources were already stretched perilously thin by the American War, and by the 1780s Haidar Ali was holding down the forces of both Madras and Bombay, with the two presidencies only hanging on by dint of the greater resources of Bengal. At this juncture, Maratha intervention, especially an attack on Calcutta, would likely have doomed Madras and Bombay, leaving the Company with a rather precarious foothold, reduced resources, and a concerted enemy alliance. British prospects in India would have been bleak indeed.42
The clashes between Britain, the Marathas, Hyderabad, Mysore, and France that convulsed India in the late eighteenth century, had been the result of both long-term trends and the immediate geopolitical context of the wider American Revolution. Since the beginning of Mughal decline in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a number of dynamic regional successor states had been developing and expanding, aided by local economic growth and administrative reorganization. As these states developed and grew, they pursued similar strategies of centralization, revenue extraction, and military growth, spurred on by competition with each other. Though they all developed organically over a long period of time, there was no binary opposition between the European and Indian successor states that emerged, and little difference in the methods and policies they employed. Thus, by the mid-eighteenth century, the East India Company was merely one of a number of centralizing, modernizing, expansionist, imperialist states that emerged.
With states like Bengal, Oudh, Mysore, Hyderabad, the Maratha Empire, and the French and British East India companies all expanding, searching for greater revenue, greater control over land and trade, and greater military power, warfare was always likely. Fighting had regularly occurred in India in the decades before the American Revolution, and would continue for decades after, but although the Anglo-French, Anglo-Mysore, and Anglo-Maratha wars of these years were not the final confrontation between these European and Indian imperial powers, they were decisive in shifting the balance of power toward the British. When the wars broke out in the 1780s, there was every reason to believe that the British might be driven out of many of its Indian strongholds, or at least contained and restrained; there was every reason to believe that Mysore or the Marathas might emerge as the foremost power in the subcontinent, or at least secure a lasting detente with their European neighbors; and there was every reason to fear that the French might well become the only European power in India worth the name. When peace came in 1784, despite Tipu Sultan’s confidence and Britain’s fears of decline, the balance of power had irreparably shifted.
Unbeknownst to Tipu, the American War had ruined his French allies, who abandoned him when war resumed, leaving him without the material and naval support he so desperately needed. But Tipu had undermined his own position as well. His fractious relationship with his neighbors—the Marathas, Hyderabad, Travencore—exacerbated by his consistently expansionist agenda and his heavy-handed treatment of religious minorities, deprived him of crucial local allies and ensured that when Msyore went to war with Britain in the 1790s, it would do so as an isolated, besieged power. By turning the wars of the late eighteenth century into a confessional struggle, Tipu alienated potential allies instead of creating a pan-Indian alliance against the British. For most of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, India was a geographical expression, not a focus of common identity or national cohesion. The British were not seen as imperial oppressors of some nascent united India, but rather as simply one in a long line of overlords that had ruled parts of the subcontinent for centuries. Indeed, before the reforms of the late eighteenth century, the British had consciously modeled their rule on indigenous precedents, adopting native law, finance, and administration. Their armies, courts, and civil service employed scores of Indians and, until the nineteenth century, interference with native religion was intentionally minimal.
It should come as no surprise that many people in the Hindu majority of India thus saw little practical difference between the British ruling class and the Persianate ruling classes that had held sway in Bengal or Benares, or still ruled in Mysore, or Hyderabad. Like the British, these overlords spoke a different language, practiced a minority religion, often married among themselves, and maintained communications and cultural ties outside of India. Moreover, like the British, they ruled in a largely similar manner, focusing on extraction of land revenue for the building of armies. Given their rather minuscule numbers in India, the British could only succeed with some degree of consent from the people they ruled. This they generally secured, not because they offered some better alternative to the rule of native states, but because they offered basically the same thing. For most Indians, there was little distinction to be made between British and native rulers in the eighteenth century. All were rapacious to some degree, all were centralizing and expansionist, all attempted to placate their people by ruling along long-standing indigenous lines. Tipu failed and the British succeeded in the wars of the period not because of British exceptionalism, but because of the very unexceptional nature of British rule in India. The American War, however, would prove to be a turning point, the moment when the balance of power shifted toward Britain for good, and the moment when British rule began to diverge sharply from the established norms of the subcontinent. The American War thus transformed British India from an indigenous state to a European imperial possession.
For thousands of Hindus and Mangalorean Christians held by Tipu Sultan, the trials of captivity would not end with the peace of Paris in 1783. As many as 12,000 Kodava Hindus had taken advantage of the Third Anglo-Mysore War to escape in 1792, but for many other prisoners it would take the fall of Tipu Sultan and his fortress capital of Sriringapatam to secure their freedom. In 1799, the Marquess Wellesley, the new governor-general, seized upon a flimsy pretext to put an end to the tedious machinations of Tipu Sultan once and for all. An army was sent to Mysore, led by George Harris, David Baird, and the governor-general’s brother, the future Duke of Wellington, and in May 1799, Tipu’s capital fell after fierce fighting. When the smoke cleared, the Tiger of Mysore’s broken body was found among the dead. With his long-wished-for demise, the men and women held in captivity for more than a decade were finally released. Of the up to 80,000 Christians taken prisoner in the 1780s, only between 10,000 and 25,000 remained to be freed. According to Francis Buchanan, sent to survey these newly acquired territories, as many as 15,000 were returned to Mangalore and 10,000 emigrated to Malabar, where the first British collector in the region, Thomas Munro, helped to restore some of the lands taken from them so many years before. Those Kodava and Nair Hindus who had not previously escaped, were freed as well, though many had converted to Islam and could not, or did not, wish to return to their former religion. For these targeted religious groups, the price of the war that began in America had been not only long years of captivity, but also the decimation of their peoples and their way of life. They would continue on as best they could, but the price of the war had been steep.43
For Eliza Fay, the experience of Calicut and the specter of William Ayers would continue to haunt her through the subsequent years. Even after reaching the safety of Calcutta, she kept abreast of news from Malabar, giving aid to West, one of Ayers’ abused subordinates when he fled to Bengal, and recording with ra
ncorous relief in February 1781 that:
Sudder Khan [sic] and Ayers our chief enemies have both closed their career of wickedness. The former died of wounds received before Tellicherry; and the latter having repeatedly advanced close to the lines of that place, holding the most contemptuous language and indecent gestures towards the Officers; setting everyone at defiance and daring them to fire at him, (I suppose in a state of intoxication, miserable wretch!) was at length picked off . . . Too honourable a death for such a monster of iniquity. My hope was, that he would have been taken prisoner, and afterwards recognized and shot as a deserter.44
Though she had lived through the wars and escaped the clutches of such a traitorous villain as Ayers, she could never fully return to the hopeful days of her outward journey. Her marriage had failed, leaving her alone in Calcutta while Anthony returned to Britain to join the chorus baying for Hastings’ blood. Undaunted, she attempted to make a go of it on her own, but in 1782 returned to Britain. After an extended and difficult passage home, Eliza finally reached British waters in February of 1783. It had been four years since she had first left for India and three years since she found herself in the clutches if William Ayers. It must have been with a sense of dreadful irony then that so close to home, Eliza found herself once more in captivity when her ship was “taken for an American” vessel and “we forlorn creatures set down at once as prisoners.” The peace treaty between Britain and her former colonies had been signed, but this crucial information had yet to reach every ship in the Channel fleet. The mistake was quickly rectified, but the trauma of the event was more difficult to shake. Eliza Fay had arrived in India an unwitting prisoner of the war that had come to engulf the globe, and perhaps it was only fitting that she returned to Britain once more as a prisoner of the war now ended.45
The year 1782 would also prove to be a fateful one for Dean Mahomet. Early in the year Captain Baker and his men had been sent to Benares to arrest three men charged with the murder of a prominent Brahmin. It should have been a relatively straightforward task, but in the days and weeks following the arrival of Baker and his troops, Calcutta began to receive reports and complaints that rather than arresting the suspected murderers, Baker was instead extorting money from the entire village. Baker was later cleared of the charges, but given the tensions in the region after the deposing of Chait Singh and the metropolitan criticisms of Hastings’ corruption and mismanagement, such accusations were not taken lightly. Baker was thus recalled to Calcutta in disgrace. Humiliated by this stain of corruption and by the very public vote of no confidence in his command, Baker promptly resigned his commission and made plans to leave India and return to Ireland.46
Dean Mahomet decided to join him, desiring to see the world and for fear of being left without his friend and patron. The friendship between Baker and Mahomet was real and deep, but it also seems likely that Mahomet was becoming disillusioned with the violence that permeated India in these years and his role in it, and increasingly unsure of how he fitted into the world of his birth. Mahomet had risen as far as it was possible for an Indian to rise in the British army. Nonetheless, he resigned his commission and in January 1784 embarked on the Fortitude for England. The voyage was uneventful, with nothing to report other than “several kinds of the finny inhabitants of the liquid element” and a storm between Madras and the Cape. At St. Helena, where they stopped briefly to resupply, they met Warren Hastings’ wife Marion, sent to England ahead of the under-fire, soon to resign governor-general, and the remains of Sir Eyrie Coote, military hero of so many of the Company’s wars in India. The presence at St. Helena of Warren Hastings’ beloved wife and the body of one of the great generals of Indian conquest presaged the end of an era—a retreat from the free-wheeling, swashbuckling days of eighteenth-century conquest, but also a retreat from the ideals of a British India concerned with understanding and preserving indigenous forms of governance. Dean Mahomet had played his role in this era and its eclipse, but when he arrived at Dartmouth in September 1784 or Cork a few months later, his was not a homecoming or a retreat but a new beginning. He arrived in Britain not as part of an imperial retreat, but instead as part of an advance of the empire into the heart of Britain itself. No longer was the British Empire to be something that happened beyond the familiar realms of domestic British consciousness. The empire was becoming central to British lives and British imaginations, a fact brought forcefully and spectacularly to the fore by the trial of Warren Hastings and the reforms that followed, but likewise a fact more modestly embodied by Dean Mahomet.47
Mahomet was 25 when he arrived at Cork at the end of 1784. It was an almost entirely alien world, but the patronage of Godfrey Baker and his family eased his entrance into Irish society. With Baker’s support Mahomet began studying English language and literature, which fortuitously brought him into contact with Jane Daly, a fellow student and the teenage daughter of a Protestant gentry family. The pair eloped in 1786, but the rather hurried marriage seems to have been largely accepted in Cork. Godfrey Baker died that same year, after which the young couple lived on the estate of Godfrey’s brother William, recently returned from his own service with the Bengal army. Mahomet seems to have been employed by William Baker in some capacity, as an estate manager rather than a servant, and maintained his own home, as was reported by Abu Talib Khan, a fellow member of India’s Muslim service elite who visited William Baker in 1799. The relationship with the Bakers must have soured, however, for in 1807, after twenty-three years in Cork, Mahomet moved his growing family to London.48
In London he worked in the vapor baths of the fabulously wealthy Scottish nabob Basil Cochrane, where he later claimed to have introduced “shampooing” or therapeutic massage to Britain. After two years with Cochrane, Mahomet struck out on his own and opened the Hindoostanee Coffee House on the corner of George Street and Charles Street, near glitzy Portman Square. Catering to British gentlemen who had lived or worked in India, the Hindoostanee Coffee House served Indian cuisine in rooms decorated to appeal to the nostalgia of its Orientalist clientele. Mahomet’s restaurant was well received, but it never quite gained a stable customer base, leading to Mahomet’s bankruptcy in 1812. In search of a fresh start, in 1814 Mahomet and his family relocated to the burgeoning seaside resort of Brighton. Under the patronage of George IV, who had recently completed the renovation of his Brighton Pavilion in faux oriental splendor, the once sleepy port had become a fashionable destination for wealthy holiday-makers and elites searching for trendy medical cures. With his exotic background and experience with medicinal baths, Mahomet was well placed to take advantage of Brighton’s boom, and established himself as “shampooing surgeon” to the smart set. Between 1816 and 1841 he became the successful proprietor of a series of bath-houses known for their Indian décor and eastern cures. As his business flourished he emerged as a popular fixture of Brighton society, rising to become royal shampooing surgeon to both George IV and William IV and appearing regularly at Brighton Pavilion in the garb of an Indian prince, a costume of his own design, before his death in 1851.49
As the life and career of Dean Mahomet so vividly attests, the costs and benefits of the American Revolution for those living in the Indian subcontinent were much more ambiguous. Imperial warfare in Asia both lifted individuals out of poverty and brought rulers and villagers alike to their knees. Like Mahomet, tens of thousands found opportunity in the armies that plagued the country, while others found only suffering and ruin in their wake. On the one hand, the British conquest of India that gathered steam in the late eighteenth century could not have been accomplished without the active support and service of thousands, perhaps millions, of Indian people, many of whom directly benefited in the process. On the other hand, millions suffered, losing their lives, lands, and livelihoods as a result. This ambiguity is perhaps fitting. There was no single Indian perspective, no one Indian culture nor one Indian experience. As such, there was no real sense of us versus them, Indian versus European. Loyalty to native dynasties,
who often differed from their people in religion, culture, and language had always been tenuous and conditional. Europeans had been on the scene since before the arrival of the Mughals and had been serious players in Indian politics for nearly two centuries by the 1770s, merely one power among a multitude. If they could see the future of centralized oppressive exploitation they might indeed have felt differently, but in the context of the late eighteenth century, the nature of the struggle between the British, French, Mughal, and Maratha Empires, and the Kingdom of Mysore depended almost entirely on personal circumstances and experience.
For Mahomet too, the consequences of the war were ambiguous. The East India Company army provided him with an opportunity to rise through the ranks to a position of command and opened a path to a successful life as an author and businessman in Ireland and England. But at the same time, his long association with the British alienated him from his family and his country, making him a stranger in his own land. His migration to Europe was thus both the pursuit of a path previously closed to Indians, but also a reaction to the reality that he now stood apart, not really British, and yet not entirely Indian either. For the only Indian in Cork and Brighton, his experience of the imperial civil war must have been bittersweet.
9
CONVICT EMPIRE
On April 16, 1794, Westminster Hall was packed nearly to bursting. A curious multitude had gathered day after day since February 1788 to witness one of the most celebrated trials of the age, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, eighteenth-century Britain’s foremost empire builder and the one-time Governor-General of India. The trial was a celebrity affair, a public spectacle of self-righteous oration and politically motivated accusation that filled London’s many newspapers and occupied the gossip of coffee-houses and drawing rooms across the nation. The onlookers who crowded into every corner of the hall were well rewarded for their trouble. For 148 days they were transfixed by the thunderous rhetoric of Edmund Burke—who led the prosecution—and the caustic quips of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles James Fox, and Philip Francis as they condemned Hastings for corruption, malfeasance, and judicial murder.
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