The Anarchy

by William Dalrymple

  The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company’s control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west. The Company, which had started off as an enterprise dominated by privateers and former Caribbean pirates, had already transformed itself once into a relatively respectable international trading corporation, with a share price so reliable its stock was regarded almost as a form of international currency. Now the Company was transformed a second time, not just as a vehicle of trade operating from a scattering of Indian coastal enclaves, but as the ruler of a rich and expansive territorial empire extending across South Asia.

  For this, above all, was the moment this corporate trading organisation succeeded in laying the ground for its territorial conquest of India. A business enterprise had now emerged from its chrysalis, transformed into an autonomous imperial power, backed by a vast army, already larger than that of the British Crown, and was poised now to exercise administrative control over 20 million Indians. A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: ‘Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.’65 The result was what Adam Smith would call ‘a strange absurdity’ – a Company State.66

  When, twenty years later, the tea merchant and traveller Thomas Twining stopped his boat trip up the Ganges to visit the now deserted site of the Battle of Buxar, he wrote in his diary that ‘here then may be said to terminate the extraordinary series of military achievements which brought the finest parts of Asia under the dominion of British merchants, who first appeared in the character of needy adventurers on the coasts of India. There are, perhaps, few events in history more remarkable than these transactions. Results so disproportionate to the means which produced them seem quite inexplicable.’67

  Twining had a point. The Company had gambled everything – and won. The Mughal Empire now lay at its feet, comprehensively defeated, and the stage was set for the most extraordinary corporate takeover in history.68

  In the days following the Company victory at Buxar, the three Mughal confederates that had joined forces suffered very different fates.

  In the course of the headlong flight from Buxar, Mir Qasim was freed by Shuja from his imprisonment. But stripped of both his power and his fortune, and hunted by the unforgiving Company for his part in the Patna Massacre, this most capable of rulers never again found a place for himself in the kaleidoscope of eighteenth-century Mughal politics. He drifted across Hindustan and eventually died in poverty on a smallholding near Agra. At his funeral, his children were said to be unable to afford a winding sheet for their father.69

  Shuja ud-Daula, characteristically, opted for the path of military resistance. As Munro’s Company battalions marched deeper into Avadh, he fought a string of mounted guerrilla raids against his pursuers, but was gradually pushed further and further into the margins, shedding his followers, while Major, now General Carnac appropriated Shuja’s Faizabad mansion as his personal residence. The Company finally cornered Shuja at the great fortress of Chunar, but he escaped as it was being stormed, to fight, and to lose, one last battle against the Company, at Kora, on 3 May 1765. Thereafter he spent several months on the run across his old dominions, before taking shelter among the Rohilla Afghans of the Doab.

  In the end it was his urbane French soldier of fortune, Jean-Baptiste Gentil, who negotiated his surrender that July. Gentil pointed out to the Company that, under British protection, a defeated Shuja could be reinstalled to provide a useful buffer state between the rich lands of Bengal and the lawless anarchy of the contested lands around Delhi, which continued to pass, chaotically and bloodily, between rival Afghan and Maratha armies.

  Assured of his life and liberty, Shuja eventually gave himself up. He arrived out of the blue in Munro’s camp, sitting in his outsized palanquin with an escort of only 200 horsemen.70 ‘It was about four o’clock in the afternoon,’ wrote Gentil, ‘and the general was still dining, and, as is the English custom, passing the port after the dessert. The cloud of dust raised by the horses of the Nawab-Vizier’s cavalry escort caused the alarm to be raised, the drums sounded, and everyone rushed to their post. But at that moment two runners arrived and announced the Nawab-Vizier’s arrival.’71

  To his surprise Shuja found that ‘the English gentlemen took off their hats, and showed all marks of respect, according to the custom of their country and behaved with great affability. They stood before him, closing their hands together [i.e. clapping].’72 He was reinstated in a reduced version of his old kingdom, under the watchful eye of a British Resident and guarded by a regiment of Company sepoys, for whose presence he had to pay a huge subsidy, in addition to an immense war indemnity of Rs5 million.*73

  The Emperor Shah Alam, meanwhile, did his best to patch up relations with the Company, with whom he had been in secret correspondence throughout the Buxar campaign. From his point of view, Buxar was a battle fought between three of his servants, all of whom had sworn fealty to the Mughal throne, and was therefore a conflict in which he must remain neutral. Throughout the battle, he remained in his tent, determined to show his disapproval of what he regarded as Shuja’s foolishly confrontational strategy.74

  Shortly after Buxar, as Shuja and his army fled into Avadh to continue their fight, Shah Alam and his Mughal bodyguard lingered near the battlefield and sent out messengers to Munro seeking an accommodation. As had happened after his defeat at Helsa eighteen months earlier, Shah Alam played a deft hand, understanding that he was much more use to the Company as an ally than an enemy.

  Shortly after the battle was over, and ‘as soon as the Nawab Vizier was seen fleeing along the other side of that river, the Emperor, who was thereby left at liberty, sent for the English, despatching robes of honour for Munro, Mir Jafar and Vansittart, and so opening negotiations. They, finding so fair a pretence for advancing their own affairs, doubled their pace and joined him in a few hours.’75

  The Emperor wanted the Company to know that Shuja was not his friend, even threatening that if the vizier and the British were to come to terms, ‘I will go to Delhi, for I cannot think of returning again into the Hands of a Man who has used me so ill.’76 Munro, meanwhile, was well aware what a puppet Shah Alam could give to the Company’s expansionist ambitions in terms of a Mughal seal of legitimacy: ‘To avoid giving any umbrage or jealousy of our power to the King or nobles of the Empire,’ he wrote to Calcutta, ‘we will have everything done under the Sanction of his Authority, that We may appear as holding our Acquisitions from him, and acting in the War under his Authority.’77

  Under Company protection, and personally escorted by his former adversary General Carnac, Shah Alam headed first to Benares, and hence to Allahabad, where the Company lodged him in the magnificent old Mughal fort built by his ancestor Akbar at the auspicious confluence of the Yamuna and the Ganges. There he awaited the arrival of the man whom the directors had despatched from London to Calcutta to clean up the mess created by the greed of their unruly servants, on the basis that the best gamekeeper is a former poacher.

  This was the now newly ennobled and increasingly portly figure of Robert Clive, Baron Plassey.

  News of the war against Mir Qasim and the fact that Bengal was once again ‘a scene of bloodshed and confusion’ had reached the Company London headquarters in Leadenhall Street in February 1764; tidings of the Patna Massacre followed soon after. There was talk of defeats, mounting military expenses and financial chaos, which in turn produced a panic among investors and a run on the stock market. The Company’s share price quickly fell 14 per cent.78 At a shareholder meeting, one anxious investor proposed Clive’s immediate return to Bengal as both Governor and Commander-in-Chief.79 The sharehol
ders voted through the resolution unanimously.

  Since he had arrived back in England, Clive had quickly succeeded in achieving two of his greatest ambitions: a seat in Parliament and a peerage, albeit an Irish one, which was then considered much less grand than one in England, which gave the holder a place in the Westminister House of Lords. He had bought land and collected estates, squabbled with the directors of the Company and quickly got bored: ‘We are not so happy in England as you imagine,’ he wrote to Carnac in May 1762. ‘Many of us envy your way of life in India.’80 So when he was offered the governorship of Bengal, with unprecedented powers to reform the government and settle Company control over great swathes of Asia, he did not hesitate. At sundown on 4 June 1764, he sailed out of Portsmouth on the Kent for his third posting in India. He left his wife and children at the quayside, and was accompanied instead by a French chef, a band of four musicians and twelve dozen chests of champagne.81

  As ever, Clive’s sense of timing – or perhaps his luck – was uncanny. When the Kent docked at Madras in April 1765, news was immediately brought on board of Munro’s victory at Buxar, the occupation of Avadh and the death of the recently restored Mir Jafar. Aware of the positive effect this would have on the Company’s share price, Clive’s first action was to write secretly in cipher to his agent in London to mortgage all his property and to buy as many Company shares as possible.82 Next he wrote to the directors. As ruthless and incisive as ever, he realised how radically this news changed the entire political landscape: ‘We have at last arrived at that critical Conjuncture, which I have long foreseen,’ he wrote to the chairman of the EIC. ‘I mean that Conjuncture which renders it necessary for us to determine whether we can, or shall, take the whole [Mughal Empire] to ourselves.’

  Mir Jafar is dead, and his natural son is a Minor. Shuja Dowla is beat out of his Dominions; we are in possession of them, and it is scarce a hyperbole to say that the whole Empire is in our hands … Can it be doubted that a large Army of Europeans would effectually preserve to us the Sovereignty, as I may call it, not only by keeping in awe the ambition of any Country Prince, but by rending us so truly formidable, that no French, Dutch or other Enemy could ever dare to molest us?

  We must indeed become Nabobs ourselves in Fact if not in Name, and perhaps totally without disguise …We must go forward, for to retract is impossible … If riches and stability are the objects of the Company, then this is the method, the only method, we now have for attaining and securing them.83

  The new Governor finally arrived back in Calcutta on 3 May 1765, exhausted from a voyage which had taken nearly a year. But he knew that before he could rest he must head straight up country to sort out the unstable and potentially explosive power vacuum in Hindustan which had remain unfilled and unresolved since Buxar. ‘Peace on a firm and lasting foundation must be established if possible,’ he wrote to Carnac. ‘And to attain that object, I conclude it will be necessary to march straight up to you at camp, not to continue long there, but to enter into some treaty with the King.’84 He turned quickly around, and left Calcutta for Allahabad on 25 June.

  His first appointment was with Shuja ud-Daula. Clive appreciated the logic of the solution Gentil had first proposed: that rather than taking the whole of Avadh directly under Company administration, a much wiser course would be instead to reinstate a grateful Shuja as the Company’s puppet-dependant and milk him of his resources, while nominally taking him under protection.

  On 2 August Clive met the penitent Shuja ud-Daula at Benares and told him of these plans. Shuja, who had only three months before faced total ruin, could not believe his luck, and made his personal gratitude and loyalty to Clive abundantly clear. Soon afterwards, a delighted Clive wrote to his Council that ‘if due sensibility of favours are received, an open confidence and many other valuable principles are to be found amongst Musalmans, Shuja Dowlah possesses them in a higher degree than we have elsewhere observed in the country.’85

  Next Clive determined to add a final political flourish of his own. He decided that a small portion of Shuja’s former dominions around Allahabad and Kora would be turned over to support Shah Alam as an imperial demesne. Vague promises would be made about supporting the Emperor’s long-dreamed-of return to Delhi, while taking in return the offer of financially managing the three rich eastern provinces of the Emperor dominions – Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This was the granting of what in Mughal legalese was known as the Diwani – the office of economic management of Mughal provinces.

  This not only gave a veneer of Mughal legitimacy for the Company’s conquests, it also potentially gave the EIC the right to tax 20 million people, and generate an estimated revenue of between £2 million and £3 million a year* – a massive windfall by eighteenth-century standards. Seizing the many riches of Bengal with its fertile paddy fields and rice surpluses, its industrious weavers and rich mineral resources, opened up huge opportunities for the Company and would generate the finance to continue building up the most powerful army in Asia. The vast revenues of Bengal, which had for so long powered the Mughal exchequer, could, Clive knew, make the Company as unassailable as the Mughals had once been – and provide the finance for perhaps, one day, conquering the rest of the country.

  Negotiations between Shah Alam’s advisers and those of Clive began on 1 August. On the 9th, the Governor’s state barge docked at Allahabad fort, where Clive complained of being ‘tormented by bugs and flies’. Here, for the first time, he met the young Emperor whose ‘grave deportment bordered on sadness’.86

  Though the main outlines of the deal had already been settled, negotiations continued for three more days, while Shah Alam held out for a larger payment from the Company. It was, for once, Clive who gave way: ‘I think 20 [lakh rupees, £26 million today] is more than sufficient [a pension for the Emperor],’ he wrote. ‘However, as we intend to make use of his Majesty in a very extra-ordinary manner for obtaining nothing less than a sanad [formal legal order] for all the revenues of the country, six lakhs of rupees will be scarce worth disobliging the king, if he should make a point of it.’87 The final terms were agreed on the evening of 11 August.

  On the following morning, the 12th, the Emperor was enthroned on a silk-draped armchair, perilously perched upon Clive’s dining-room table. The ceremony, which took place inside Clive’s tent, did not last long. As Ghulam Hussain Khan puts it: ‘A business of such magnitude, as left neither pretence nor subterfuge, and which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors and able negotiators, as well as much parley and conference with the East India Company and the King of England, and much negotiation and contention with the ministers, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass or a beast of burden.’88

  It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d’être, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment.

  Even though the Company’s military power was now placed within a ritualised Mughal framework, the radical change on the ground brought about by what the Company referred to as the Treaty of Allahabad was immediately apparent. As the Riyazu-s-salatin noted shortly afterwards: ‘The English have now acquired dominion over the three subahs [provinces] and have appointed their own district officers, they make assessments and collections of revenue, administer justice, appoint and dismiss collectors and perform other functions of governance. The sway and authority of the English prevails … and their s
oldiers are quartering themselves everywhere in the dominions of the Nawab, ostensibly as his servants, but acquiring influence over all affairs. Heaven knows what will be the eventual upshot of this state of things.’89

  In fact, the upshot was very quickly clear. Bengal was now plundered more thoroughly and brutally than ever before, and the youthful Bengal Nawab was left little more than a powerless, ritualised figurehead: ‘Nothing remains to him but the Name and the Shadow of Authority’ was how Clive put it.90 He and a succession of his descendants might survive for a time as nominal governors in their vast riverside palaces in Murshidabad, but it was the EIC that now openly ruled, and exploited, Bengal. Clive took great care to distance the EIC from the humdrum affairs of daily administration: even the existing methods of revenue collection were maintained, run out of Murshidabad offices that were still entirely staffed with Mughal officials. But frock-coated and periwigged British officials were now everywhere at the apex of the administrative pyramid, making all the decisions and taking all the revenues. A trading corporation had become both colonial proprietor and corporate state, legally free, for the first time, to do all the things that governments do: control the law, administer justice, assess taxes, mint coins, provide protection, impose punishments, make peace and wage war.

  From now on, the land revenues of those portions of India under the Company corporate control were to be conceived simply as gross profits for the EIC which would, as Clive wrote, ‘defray all the expenses of the investment [the goods bought for export to London], furnish the whole of the China treasure [the money used to buy tea from China] and answer all the demands of all your other settlements in India, and still leave a considerable balance in your treasury besides’.