It is from those times must be dated the sinking of rents, the decrease of husbandry, the distress of the people and their detestation of their Rulers. Nor was anything else thought of, but how to bring money to hand by any means whatever. This and this alone became the utmost ambition of all ranks.
It was in such an enfeebled state of the Empire, that there arose a new sort of men, who so far from setting up patterns of piety and virtue, squandered away the lives and properties of the poor with so much barefacedness, that other men, on beholding their conduct, became bolder and bolder, and practised the worst and ugliest action, without fear or remorse. From those men sprung an infinity of evil-doers, who plague the Indian world, and grind the faces of its wretched inhabitants …
Evils are now arisen to such a height, as render a remedy impossible. It is a consequence of such wretched administrations that every part of India has gone to ruin. So that, comparing the present times with the past, one is apt to think that this world is overwhelmed with darkness.145
But what appeared to be the end of an era in Delhi looked quite different in other parts of India, as a century of imperial centralisation gave way to a revival of regional identities and regional governance. Decline and disruption in the heartlands of Hindustan after 1707 was matched by growth and relative prosperity in the Mughal peripheries. Pune and the Maratha hills, flush with loot and overflowing tax revenues, entered their golden age. The Rohilla Afghans, the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Jats of Deeg and Bharatpur all began to carve independent states out of the cadaver of the Mughal Empire, and to assume the mantle of kingship and governance.
For Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur and the other Rajput courts, this was also an age of empowerment and resurgence as they resumed their independence and, free from the tax burdens inherent in bowing to Mughal overlordship, began using their spare revenues to add opulent new palaces to their magnificent forts. In Avadh, the baroque palaces of Faizabad rose to rival those built by the Nizam in Hyderabad to the south. All these cities emerged as centres of literary, artistic and cultural patronage, so blossoming into places of remarkable cultural efflorescence.
Meanwhile, Benares emerged as a major centre of finance and commerce as well as a unique centre of religion, education and pilgrimage. In Bengal, Nadia was the centre of Sanskrit learning and a sophisticated centre for regional architectural and Hindustani musical excellence.
To the south, in Tanjore, a little later, Carnatic music would begin to receive enlightened patronage from the Maratha court that had seized control of that ancient centre of Tamil culture. At the other end of the subcontinent, the Punjab hill states of the Himalayan foothills entered a period of astonishing creativity as small remote mountain kingdoms suddenly blossomed with artists, many of whom had been trained with metropolitan skills in the now-diminished Mughal ateliers, each family of painters competing with and inspiring each other in a manner comparable to the rival city states of Renaissance Italy. In this scenario, Guler and Jasrota stood in for San Gimignano and Urbino, small but wealthy hilltowns ruled by a court with an unusual interest in the arts, patronising and giving refuge to a small group of utterly exceptional artists.
However, the two powers which would make most use of the opportunities presented by the descent of the Mughal heartlands into Anarchy were not Indian at all. In Pondicherry and Madras, two rival European trading companies, alerted to Mughal weakness and the now deeply divided and fragmented nature of authority in India, began to recruit their own private security forces and to train and give generous wages to locally recruited infantry troops.
As the EIC writer William Bolts later noted, seeing a handful of Persians take Delhi with such ease spurred the Europeans’ dreams of conquests and Empire in India. Nader Shah had shown the way.
In the young French settlement of Pondicherry, on the warm, sandy Coromandel coast south of Madras, news of Nader Shah’s invasion was being closely followed by the Compagnie des Indes’ ambitious and dazzlingly capable new Director General, Joseph-François Dupleix. On 5 January 1739, even before Nader Shah had reached Karnal, Dupleix wrote, ‘We are on the eve of a great revolution in this Empire.’
The weakness of the Mogol government gives ample grounds to believe Nader may very soon be master of this Empire. This revolution if it takes place, can only cause a grand derangement to trade. However it can only be advantageous to Europeans.146
Dupleix had arrived in India as a young man, and had risen through the ranks as his employer, the French Compagnie des Indes, slowly grew and prospered. For the French had been relatively late to realise the possibilities inherent in trading with India. It was not until 1664 that they had set up a rival to the EIC; eight years later, they had founded Pondicherry, successfully bribing the Marathas to leave it alone on their periodic raids into the Carnatic.
In its first incarnation, the Compagnie lost substantial amounts of money and in 1719 it had to be refounded by the brilliant Lowland Scots financier John Law de Lauriston, who had fled from London to France after a duel and rose to become an adviser to the Regent Orléans. Law combined two small insolvent French Indies companies and raised enough money to make it a going concern. But the Compagnie des Indes remained permanently underfunded. Unlike the EIC, which was owned by its shareholders, from the beginning the French Compagnie was partially a royal concern, run by aristocrats who, like their king, tended to be more interested in politics than trade; Dupleix was relatively unusual in that he was interested in both.147
In 1742, aged nearly fifty, Dupleix moved south from running Chandernagar, the French base in Bengal, to take over as both Governor of Pondicherry and Director General of the Compagnie in India. As one of his first acts he got De Volton, his representative at the Mughal court, to petition the Emperor to make him a Nawab with the rank of 5,000 horse, and to give the French in Pondicherry the right to mint coins. When both wishes were instantly granted, Dupleix began to understand how far Mughal authority had been weakened by Nader Shah’s invasion.148
He made immediate plans to increase the Compagnie’s military capability, and for the first time took the initiative to begin training up locally recruited Tamil-, Malayali- and Telugu-speaking warriors in modern European infantry tactics.149 By 1746, two regiments of ‘cypahes’ (sepoys) had been formed, drilled, uniformed, armed and paid in the French manner. As his military commander, Dupleix appointed the talented Charles-Joseph Patissier, Marquis de Bussy, who had just moved from Ile de Bourbon – modern Mauritius – to Pondicherry as military ensign for the French Compagnie. Together the two would take the first steps to entangle the European trading companies in regional post-Mughal politics.
By the time Dupleix arrived in Pondicherry he had already made himself a mercantile fortune, and was keen to add to it. Like many of his British counterparts, he made more money through private trading schemes, often in partnership with Indian traders and moneylenders, than he did from his official salary. He therefore had a strong interest in both Companies remaining neutral as growing Anglo-French rivalry in Europe made war between the two increasingly likely.
France in the 1740s had by far the larger economy, double that of Britain; it also had three times the population and the largest army in Europe. Britain, however, had a much larger navy and was the dominant power on the seas; moreover, since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it had more advanced financial institutions built with Dutch expertise, and capable of raising large amounts of war finance very quickly. Both sides therefore had reason to believe that they could win a war against the other. Dupleix was keen that none of this should get in the way of his profitable trading operations. Consequently, as soon as news belatedly arrived from Europe that Britain and France had joined the War of Austrian Succession on opposing sides, Dupleix approached his EIC counterpart in Madras, Governor Morse, to assure him that the French in Pondicherry would not be the first aggressors.
Morse would personally have been happy to agree to such a pact of neutrality, but he knew what Dupleix did
not: that a Royal Navy squadron had already been despatched eastwards and that it was expected any day. He therefore equivocated and told Dupleix he had no authority to make such a pact. The squadron arrived in February 1745, and promptly attacked and seized a number of French ships, among them one in which Dupleix had a large financial interest.150
Dupleix made an attempt to secure compensation from Madras. But after being rebuffed he made the decision to strike back and get redress by force. He summoned a rival squadron from the French naval base at Ile de Bourbon, and sent his chief engineer, a Swiss mercenary named Paradis, to assess the defences of Madras. A month later he wrote to Mauritius that the ‘garrison, defences and governor of Madras were, alike, pitiable’. He then set about repairing the walls of Pondicherry with his own funds, while assuring his secretary, Ananda Ranga Pillai, that ‘the English Company is bound to die out. It has long been in an impecunious condition … Mark my words. The truth of them will be brought home to you when you, ere long, find that my prophecy has been realised.’151
His reinforcements – around 4,000-strong and including several battalions of highly trained African slave troops and some state-of-the-art siege artillery – arrived in early September. Immediately, Dupleix took the initiative. His new regiments of sepoys and the African and French reinforcements from Mauritius were all sent north on troop transports overnight, supported by eight men-of-war. Landing just to the south of Madras, near St Thomas Mount, they then marched quickly north, moving in to invest the city from the opposite direction to that from which they were expected. In this way they appeared without warning behind the British lines and to the rear of the EIC defences. The siege began on 18 September with such an immense bombardment of mortars that the EIC’s nervous chief gunner, Mr Smith, died there and then of a heart attack.
Madras had a garrison of only 300, half of them Indo-Portuguese guards who had no wish to fight and die for their British employers. The other half were an untrained militia of portly, pink-faced British merchants. Within three days, having lost many of his troops to desertion, Governor Morse sought terms. On 20 September, after the loss of only six EIC lives and no French casualties at all, Madras surrendered to the French. Ananda Ranga Pillai gave a rather more colourful version of events in his diaries than the slightly unheroic events perhaps warranted: ‘The French,’ he wrote, ‘hurled themselves against Madras as a lion rushes into a herd of elephants… They captured the Fort, planted their flag on the ramparts, and shone in Madras like the sun which spreads its beams over the whole world.’152
The most significant incident in this war, however, took place a month later. The Mughal Nawab of the Carnatic, Anwar ud-Din, was furious with Dupleix for ignoring his orders by attacking Madras without his permission, and then insulting him by refusing to hand over the captured town to his authority. He had no intention of allowing a trading company to defy his rule in this manner, so he sent his son, Mahfuz Khan, with the entire Mughal army of the Carnatic, to punish the French.
On 24 October 1746, on the estuary of the Adyar River, Mahfuz Khan tried to block the passage of 700 French sepoy reinforcements under Paradis. The French beat off an attack by the 10,000 Mughal troopers with the help of sustained musketry, their infantry drawn up in ranks, file-firing and using grapeshot at close quarters in a way that had never before been seen in India. Ananda Ranga Pillai was again an eyewitness. ‘M Paradis made a breastwork of Palmyra trees, on the strip of sand next to the sea,’ he wrote,
and formed the soldiers and the sepoys into four divisions. He ordered each to engage a separate body of the enemy. He placed himself at the head of the foremost party. On this, three rockets and four cannon were fired by the Muhammadans. Their contents fell into the river, and caused no damage. The French then opened a volley of musketry on the enemy, killing numbers of them.
The Muhammadans threw down their arms and fled, with dishevelled hair and dress. Some fell dead in the act of flight. The loss thus caused to them was immense. Mafuz Khan also ran on foot, until he reached his elephant, and mounting this, quickly made his escape. He and his troops did not cease their flight until they reached Kunattur. The rout was general, so much so that not a fly, not a sparrow, not a crow was to be seen in all Mylapore.153
Another account – written by the court historian of the Nawabs of the Carnatic – claimed that the French attacked at night and ‘since the Nawab’s army had not the least suspicion of a night attack, they were unready, so the Mughal army got confused in the darkness’. Whatever the truth, the Battle of Adyar River proved a turning point in Indian history. Only two French sepoys were killed, while Mughal casualties were over 300. For the first time, techniques of eighteenth-century European warfare, developed in Prussia and tested on the battlefields of France and Flanders, had been tried out in India. It was immediately clear that nothing in the Mughal armoury could match their force.
Europeans had long suspected they were superior to the Mughals in tactical prowess, but they had not appreciated how great this advantage had become due to military developments in the previous half-century since 1687 when the pike-wielding Jacobean troops of Sir Josiah Child were quickly overwhelmed by Aurangzeb’s Mughal troopers. But the wars of late seventeenth-century Europe had seen rapid development in military tactics, particularly the widespread introduction of flintlock muskets and socket bayonets to replace pikes. The organisation of the infantry into battalions, regiments and brigades made continuous firing and complex battlefield manoeuvres by infantry a possibility. The standard infantry tactic was now a bayonet charge after devastating volley firing, supported by mobile and accurate field artillery. The invention of screws for elevating the guns gave the artillery greater precision and increased the firepower of the foot soldiers, giving them an edge in battle against cavalry. The Battle of Adyar River, the first time these tactics were tried out in India, had shown that a small body of infantry armed with the new flintlock muskets and bayonets, and supported by quick-firing mobile artillery, could now scatter a whole army just as easily as they could in Europe. The lesson was not forgotten. The trained sepoy with his file-firing muskets and hollow squares, and supported by artillery quick-firing grape and canister shot, would be an unstoppable force in Indian warfare for the next century.154
Even before witnessing the Battle of Adyar River, Ananda Ranga Pillai had told Dupleix that 1,000 such French soldiers with cannon and mines could conquer all of south India. Dupleix had replied that half that number, and two cannon, would suffice.
In the years that followed, both men would have ample opportunity to test this idea.
In 1749 news came from Europe that the War of the Austrian Succession had ended, and that at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle it had been agreed that Madras should be restored to the EIC.
Peace, however, now proved more elusive: the dogs of war, once let slip, were not easily brought to heel. Rather than disbanding his new sepoy regiments, Dupleix decided to hire them out to his Indian allies, and to use them to gain both land and political influence.
The new Governor of Madras, Charles Floyer, wrote the following year that ‘in spite of peace, affairs are more embroiled than ever during the war owing to the artifices of Dupleix, who so hates the English as to be unable to refrain from underhand acts of hostility’.155 The directors in London agreed that the Company must not again let down its guard: ‘Experience has proved that no Regard is paid by the French to the neutrality of the Mogul’s Dominions’,
and that were the Country [Mughal] Government willing to protect us, they are not able to do it against the French, who have little to lose, and are prone to violate the Laws of Nations to enrich themselves with plunder … You have orders to make yourselves as secure as you can against the French or any other European Enemy … His Majesty will support the Company in whatever they may think fit to do for their future Security; for though a Peace is now made with France, no one knows how long it may last, and when war breaks out, it is always too late to make Fortifications
strong enough to make Defence against an Enterprising Enemy, as happened in Madras.156
Soon both the British and the French were intriguing with the different states in the south, covertly offering to sell their military assistance in return for influence, payments or land grants. In 1749, in return for a small trading port, the EIC became involved in its first attempt at what today would be called regime change, taking sides in a succession dispute in the Maratha kingdom of Tanjore. The attempted coup was a miserable failure.
Dupleix, however, had much more success as a military entrepreneur. His clients had to pay for their European weapons and troops in land grants and land revenue collection rights that would enable the French Compagnie to maintain its sepoys and finance its trade from Indian revenues rather than importing bullion from Europe. Dupleix sold his services as a mercenary first to one of the claimants to the throne of the Carnatic, and then, in a much more ambitious move, despatched the Marquis de Bussy to Hyderabad to take sides in the succession crisis that had followed the death of the region’s most powerful Mughal overlord, Nizam ul-Mulk, as his sons fought for control of the Nizam’s semi-detached fragment of the Mughal Empire. Dupleix was handsomely rewarded for his assistance with a present of £77,500, the high Mughal rank of Mansab of 7,000 horse – the equivalent of a Dukedom in Europe – the rich port of Masulipatnam and a jagir (a landed estate) worth £20,000.* Selling the services of his trained and disciplined troops, he soon realised, was an infinitely more profitable business than dealing in cotton textiles.
Dupleix’s generalissimo, the Marquis de Bussy, who also made a fortune, could hardly believe the dramatic results his tiny mercenary force achieved as he marched through the Deccan: ‘Kings have been placed on the throne with my hands,’ he wrote to Dupleix in 1752, ‘sustained by my forces, armies have been put to flight, towns taken by assault by a mere handful of my men, peace treaties concluded by my own mediation … The honour of my nation has been taken to a pinnacle of glory, so that it has been preferred to all the others in Europe, and the interests of the Compagnie taken beyond its hopes and even its desires.’157
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