The Anarchy

by William Dalrymple

  There were some people who stood in the road and asked of all who passed where the Bargis were. Everyone replied – I have not seen them with my own eyes. But seeing everyone flees, I flee also.

  Then suddenly the Bargis swept down with a great shout and surrounded the people in their fields. They snatched away gold and silver, rejecting everything else. Of some people they cut off the hand, of some the nose and ears; some they killed outright. They dragged away the most beautiful women, who tried to flee, and tied ropes to their fingers and necks. When one had finished with a woman, another took her, while the raped women screamed for help. The Bargis after committing all foul, sinful and bestial acts, let these women go.

  After looting in the fields, they entered the villages and set fire to the houses. Bungalows, thatched cottages and temples, they burned them all, large and small. They destroyed whole villages and roamed about on all sides plundering. They bound some people, with their hands behind their backs, others they threw to the ground and while they were on their backs on the ground, kicked them with shoes. They constantly shouted, ‘Give us rupees, give us rupees, give us rupees.’ When they got no rupees, they filled their victims’ nostrils with water, or drowned them in tanks. When they demanded money and it was not given to them, they would put a man to death … Bungalows, thatched-roofed houses, Vishnu-mandapas, they burned them all, large and small … Every Brahman or Vaishnava or sannyasi whom they saw they killed, and they slaughtered cows and women by the hundreds.30

  What was a nightmare for Bengal turned out to be a major opportunity for the Company. Against artillery and cities defended by the trained musketeers of the European powers, the Maratha cavalry was ineffective.31 Calcutta in particular was protected by a deep defensive ditch especially dug by the Company to keep the Maratha cavalry at bay, and displaced Bengalis now poured over it into the town that they believed offered better protection than any other in the region, more than tripling the size of Calcutta in a decade. According to a Kashmiri soldier named Abdul Karim, who visited Bengal during this period, the Marathas made a point of not attacking any of the different European strongholds along the Hooghly: ‘The European soldiers are superior to those of any other country,’ he wrote, ‘of which the Marathas are so sensible that although Calcutta abounds with all kinds of Europe merchandise, and it has no fortifications, whilst the number of European inhabitants is but inconsiderable, and the Marathas swarm like ants or locusts, they have never made any attempt upon that quarter, from the dread that Europeans would unite their forces for mutual defence. The Europeans excel in the use of cannon and muskets.’32

  Among the refugees were those who would go on to found some of the city’s most illustrious dynasties such as Nabakrishna Deb and Ramdulal Dey.33 But it was not just the protection of a fortification that was the attraction. Already Calcutta had become a haven of private enterprise, drawing in not just Bengali textile merchants and moneylenders, but also Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwari entrepreneurs and business houses who found it a safe and sheltered environment in which to make their fortunes.34 This large Indian population also included many wealthy merchants who simply wanted to live out of the reach of the Nawab’s taxation net. Others took advantage of the protection of the British fleet to make trading expeditions to Persia, the Gulf and eastwards through the Strait of Malacca to China.35 The city’s legal system, and the availability of a framework of English commercial law and formal commercial contracts, enforceable by the state, all contributed to making it increasingly the destination of choice for merchants and bankers from across Asia.36

  As a result, by 1756 the city had a fabulously diverse and polyglot population: as well as Bengalis, and Hindu and Jain Marwari bankers, there were Portuguese, Armenians, Persians, Germans, Swedes and Dutch, some – judging by an early census – with sophisticated and sometimes bizarre skills: watch- and clockmakers, painters, pastry cooks, goldsmiths, undertakers and wig fabricators.

  The Black Town – the Indian section of Calcutta, with its countless temples and mosques and bustling vegetable markets – was even more chaotic, dirty and swampy than the White Town. Nevertheless, visitors from other parts of Asia wrote of the settlement with great admiration. According to one Persian traveller, a learned Sayyid named Abdul Lateef Shushtari, ‘Calcutta has replaced Hoogly which is now frequented only by Dutch ships. [White Town] contains many 2–3 storey houses of stone or brick and stucco, painted and coloured like marble.’

  Houses stand on the road and allow passers-by to see what is happening inside; at night camphor candles are burned in upper and lower rooms, which is a beautiful sight. There is no fear of robbers nor highwaymen, no one challenges you where you are going nor where you have come from; all the time, big ships come from Europe and China and the New World filled with precious goods and fine cloths, so that velvets and satins, porcelains and glassware have become commonplace. In the harbour at Calcutta there are constantly over 1000 large and small ships at anchor, and the captains fire cannons to signal arrival or departure …37

  Whatever their many vices, wrote Shushtari, the English welcomed and rewarded talent: ‘the English have no arbitrary dismissal,’ he noted, ‘and every competent person keeps his job until he writes his own request for retirement or resignation. More remarkable still is that they take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of Muslims and Hindus, mixing with the people. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.’

  Intermarriage, he wrote, was common, though the Indian women who took European partners were, he maintained, rarely respectable: ‘The women of people with no future, of corrupt Muslims, of evil Hindus, who of their own desire enter into the bonds of wedlock with the English, they do not interfere with their religion nor compel them to leave purdah veiling; when any son born of the union reaches the age of 4, he is taken from his mother and sent to England to be educated.’

  The Englishmen shave their beards and moustaches, and twist hair into pig-tails. They scatter a white powder to make their hair look white, both men and women do this, to lessen the difference between old and young. Neither men nor women remove pubic hair, accounting comely to leave it in its natural state. And indeed, most European women have no body-hair, and even if it does occur, it is wine-coloured, soft and extremely fine.

  By reason of women going unveiled, and the mixed education of boys and girls in one school-house, it is quite the thing to fall in love, and both men and women have a passion for poetry and compose love poems. I have heard that well-born girls sometimes fall in love with low-born youths and are covered in scandal which neither threats nor punishment can control, so their fathers are obliged to drive them out of the house. The streets are full of innumerable such once-well-bred girls sitting on the pavements.

  Brothels are advertised with pictures of prostitutes hung at the door, the price of one night written up with the furnishings required for revelry … As a result of the number of prostitutes, atashak [gonorrhoea] – a severe venereal disease causing a swelling of the scrotum and testicles – affects people of all classes. It spreads from one to another, healthy and infected mixed together, no one holding back – and this is the state of even the Muslims in these parts!38

  Shushtari was not alone in being suspicious of Calcutta’s rakish English inhabitants. They had come east with just one idea: to amass a fortune in the quickest possible time, and most had little interest in either the mores of the country they were engaged in trade with, or indeed in the social niceties of that which they had left behind. The many Company servants and soldiers who arrived annually in Calcutta – typically, penniless younger sons of provincial landed families, Scots who had lost their estates or their fortunes (or both) in the Jacobite 1745 uprising, squaddies recruited from the streets of the East End, down-at-heel Anglo-Irish landowners and clergymen’s sons – were all prepared to risk their lives and travel thousands of miles to the impossible climate of Bengal’s undrained marsh and steaming jungle, hazarding what was very proba
bly an early death for one reason: if you survived there was no better place in the world to make your fortune.

  For Calcutta was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in minutes in a wager or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year.39 The constant presence of mortality made men callous: they would mourn briefly for some perished friend, then bid drunkenly for his effects – his horses and buggies, his inlaid ivory Vizagapatam furniture, even his Bengali bibis.40 This meant the city tended to be full of young men: Roger Drake, for example was only thirty when he was appointed Governor.

  Most found that Calcutta was an expensive town to live in: keeping a decent house in Bengal at this time cost around £1,000 per annum* and almost all of Calcutta’s European inhabitants were to some extent in debt to Indian moneylenders.41 On 3 January 1754, a young Scot, Stair Dalrymple, fresh from North Berwick, wrote home to his MP father Sir Hew that, ‘everything here is double the price it is at home. With the best economy in the world it is impossible but to be extravagant. No sooner did I arrive here than my ears were stain’d with this melancholy truth, of which I have been told by all the Gentlemen in the place. Nothing is what you imagined it to be … I have built many castles in the air.’ With ‘good economy’ he thought he might be able to make his annual salary pay for six months’ living expenses. Earlier he had written, ‘I expect to be here fifteen or twenty years at least. In that time I may be made Governour. If not that, I may make a fortune which will make me live like a gentleman.’42

  Amid all these frantic attempts at money-making, Drake’s Calcutta Council had forgotten one major consideration: the importance of maintaining the city’s defences. The fort walls were visibly crumbling, the guns rusting and new buildings had encroached on all sides of the battlements, in several cases looking down over the fortifications. Moreover, there was only a very limited militia to call up in case of attack: around 260 soldiers and officers, only one-quarter of whom were actually British – the rest were Portuguese, Italian, Swiss and Scandinavian mercenaries. The experiments made in Madras during the Carnatic Wars of training up the local warrior castes as sepoys had not yet been introduced to Bengal. As Captain David Renny reported, ‘Calcutta is as deficient of military stores, as it is of soldiers’:

  we have no good gun carriages. There are neither small arms nor cartouch boxes enough for the militia … The Company wrote out by the Delawar last year, to put the place in a better state of defence, but they were not in cash for such works, there was no proper Engineer, and tho money if wanted could be borrow’d, yet that is what our Company is extremely averse to. Ammunition is in the utmost bad order, no Cartridges of any kind ready: the small quantity of Grape[shot] in store, had lyen by so long, that it was destroy’d by the Worms; no shells filled nor Fuses prepared for small or great … We have but a small quantity of [gun] powder, and the greatest part of that damp.43

  The French were well aware of these weaknesses. Jean Law, the brother of Jacques who was defeated by Clive in the Carnatic Wars, was the director of the French factory at Kasimbazar, the commercial centre on the southern edge of the Bengali capital, Murshidabad. He wrote how Calcutta’s ‘fort was small, and rather badly constructed and without a moat. Its walls are overlooked by many houses and its garrison was … far too few to defend it.’44

  In London, the directors were also anxiously aware of this obvious vulnerability, and as war with France loomed ever closer they sent out an additional fifty-nine cannon to Calcutta, and again advised the Council to begin work on strengthening fortifications immediately. In 1756 they wrote to ask Drake whether any work had been completed in upgrading the defences, urging that he quickly make whatever repairs were necessary, ideally with the approval of the Nawab, Aliverdi Khan, ‘or at least with such connivance of the Nawab’s officers as you shall judge effectual as their consent’. It was not just the French threat that concerned them. ‘The death of the Nawab is an event that may on account of his great age be daily expected and it is highly probable that it may be attended with great confusion and troubles in the province before another can be securely seated; we therefore recommend to you whenever it happens, to take all prudent measures to preserve our possessions, effects and privileges.’45

  It was some weeks later in 1756 that the repairs and rebuilding actually began, and Drake ignored his instructions to seek the Nawab’s permission, having been advised by William Watts, who ran the English factory of Kasimbazar, that ‘it is far from being certain that he [Aliverdi] will take any notice of our making Calcutta defensible … though we may be assured that his previous leave [to make repairs] could not be obtained without a considerable sum of money. Your Honour should therefore determine to set about fortifying without applying for leave.’46

  But the Nawab’s intelligence service was more efficient than either Drake or Watts realised. Within days, the old Nawab, Aliverdi Khan, had received a full account of Drake’s repair programme and summoned his grandson and heir apparent to discuss the proper response to this attempt to subvert Mughal authority by these impudent merchants. The grandson’s name was Siraj ud-Daula.

  The city of Murshidabad, the capital of late Mughal Bengal, lay three days’ sailing from Calcutta up the Bhagirathi, one of the two headstreams of the Ganges.

  Along with the great weaving centre of Dhaka, it was one of two cities in Bengal that in 1756 was still substantially larger than Calcutta; indeed, according to some estimates its population was roughly comparable to that of London. From it, Nawab Aliverdi Khan ran what was by far the richest province of the Mughal Empire, though how far that empire still existed in more than name in 1756 was now a matter of debate. The Nawab had ceased to send the annual revenue payments to Delhi after the onset of the Maratha invasions in the 1740s, and although those invasions had now ceased the revenue payments to Delhi had not resumed.

  Aliverdi Khan, who was of mixed Arab and Afshar Turkman stock, had come to power in 1740 in a military coup financed and masterminded by the immensely powerful Jagat Seth bankers, who controlled the finances of Bengal. The Jagat Seths could make or break anyone in Bengal, including the ruler, and their political instincts were usually as sharp as their financial ones. In this case, as so often, the Seths had chosen their man well: Aliverdi proved to be a popular and cultured ruler; he was also an extremely capable one. It was his bravery, persistence and military genius which had succeeded in keeping the Maratha invasions at bay, something few other Mughal generals had ever succeeded in doing. He managed this partly by simple military efficiency, but also by ruthless cunning: in 1744, he lured Bhaskar Pandit and his Maratha officers into negotiations, and used the occasion to have his Afghan general, Mustafa Khan, assassinate the entire Maratha leadership in the tent where the peace negotiations were to take place.

  In Murshidabad, Aliverdi Khan created a strong and dazzling Shia court culture, and a stable political, economic and political centre which was a rare island of calm and prosperity amid the anarchy of Mughal decline. Many talented Mughal émigrés – soldiers, administrators, singers, dancers and painters – migrated here from the increasingly turbulent and violent streets of Shahjahanabad. As a result, under Aliverdi’s rule Murshidabad became one of the great centres of the late Mughal arts.47

  The celebrated Delhi artists Dip Chand and Nidha Mal led an émigré painting atelier where the Murshidabad court artists soon developed an instantly recognisable regional style, with the wide expanse of the Ganges invariably running smoothly in the background. Many of these images displayed a wonderful new naturalism that rejoiced in bustling riverside village landscapes full of temples and mosques, shaded by mango and kadambar groves, while farmers with ploughs and traders with scales wandered past, bowing to dreadlocked, tiger-skin-clad holy men. To one side passed nobles on caparisoned elephants and prin
ces in palanquins. All the while, up and down a riverbank dotted with the tall fans of Palmyra palms, fishing canoes and Company sloops slipped past the gorgeously gilt and sickle-shaped royal Murshidabad harem barges as they plied their way across the Bhagirathi to the Mughal gardens of Khushbagh.48

  In one of these court miniatures, painted no later than 1755, Aliverdi’s son-in-law Shahamat Jang enjoys an intimate musical performance by a troupe of hereditary musicians, or kalawants, from Delhi, who were clearly regarded as prize acquisitions because they are all named and distinctively portrayed. Seated waiting to sing on the other side of the hall are four exquisitely beautiful Delhi courtesans, again all individually named.49

  Among the many who emigrated from the ruined streets of Delhi at this time was the Nawab’s cousin, the brilliant young Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, for whom Aliverdi Khan was a great hero. In the Seir Mutaqherin, or Review of Modern Times, his great history of eighteenth-century India, by far the most revealing Indian source for the period, Ghulam Hussain paints an attractive portrait of a cat-loving epicure who loved to fill his evenings with good food, books and stories: ‘His attention was so intensely given to maintaining the peace and security of his subjects, and of the farmers especially, that none of them can be said to have been so much at ease on their father’s knees or their mother’s lap’:

  He understood the arts, was fond of exquisite performances, and never failed to show his regard to the artistes, knowing how to reward those who excelled in the arts. Fond of the pastime of witty conversation, he was himself excellent company; so far as to be equalled by hardly any of his contemporaries. A prudent, keen general and a valorous soldier, there are hardly any virtues or qualifications he did not possess …