The Anarchy

by William Dalrymple

  Up to now, gold bullion had represented 75 per cent of the EIC’s imports to Bengal, and was the source for much of the ‘prodigious ancient riches of the province’. But now the Company no longer had to ship anything from Britain in order to pay for the textiles, spices and saltpetre it wished to buy and export: Indian tax revenues were now being used to provide the finance for all such purchases. India would henceforth be treated as if it were a vast plantation to be milked and exploited, with all its profits shipped overseas to London.91

  As a result, in the words of Richard Becher, the new Company Resident in Murshidabad, ‘the first Consideration seems to have been the raising of as large Sums from the Country as could be collected’ – in other words simply to secure as large a revenue as possible through land taxes, and then to transfer that surplus to London bank accounts.92

  For Clive and his shareholders it was another triumph: ‘Fortune seems determined to accompany me to the last,’ Clive wrote to his friend and biographer, Robert Orme. ‘Every object, every sanguine wish is upon the point of being completely fulfilled, and I am arrived at the pinnacle of all that I covet, by affirming the Company shall, in spite of all the envy, malice, faction and resentment, acknowledge they are become the most opulent company in the world.’93 To Clive’s immense personal profit, the value of EIC stock climbed dramatically, nearly doubling in value in eight months.

  But for the people of Bengal, the granting of the Diwani was an unmitigated catastrophe. The Nawab was no longer able to provide even a modicum of protection for his people: tax collectors and farmers of revenue plundered the peasantry to raise funds from the land, and no one felt in the least bit responsible for the wellbeing of the ordinary cultivator. Merchants and weavers were forced to work for the Company at far below market rates; they also seized by force textiles made for their French and Dutch rivals. Merchants who refused to sign papers agreeing to the Company’s harsh terms were caned or jailed or were publicly humiliated by being made to rub their noses on the ground.94 A few years later, in 1769, Becher recorded, ‘it must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company to the Diwani, the condition of the people of the country has been worse than it was before; yet I am afraid the fact is undoubted. This fine country, which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary government, is now verging towards ruin.’95 The economic indicators were all bad, he wrote, and growing daily worse: land revenues had been declining since the Diwani was handed over, coin was short and Bengal’s internal trade was shrinking.96

  Ghulam Hussain Khan, by far the sharpest observer of his time, was quick to realise what this would mean on the ground. Firstly, it signified the effective extinction of his entire social class. The Mughal nobility, whose power had ultimately rested on their expertise as cavalrymen, were now effectively unemployed as the Company replaced them with infantrymen they recruited largely from rural Hindu Rajput and Brahmin backgrounds. Long before anyone else had thought through the full effects of this new corporate colonialism and its infantry warfare, Ghulam Hussain Khan was lamenting the fate of ‘the remaining stock of the ancient nobility … who in these hard times have not one single resource left under the canopy of the Hindostany heaven … Numbers therefore have already quitted their homes and countries, and numbers unwilling to leave their abodes, have made a covenant with hunger and distress, and ended their lives in poverty in the corner of their cottages.’

  He estimated that these changes would throw between 40,000 and 50,000 troopers out of employment across Bengal and Bihar, besides dispersing ‘the thousands and thousands of merchants’ who followed ‘that numerous cavalry’. This is turn had an important economic and civilisational effect: ‘The even more numerous artisans whom the noblemen had always kept busy, sometimes in their own houses’ found their patrons no longer capable of sustaining them or their in-house kar-khanas. Alternative employment was hard to find, for ‘the English are now the rulers and masters of the country’ and ‘because their arts and callings are of no use to the English’, the artisans could only thieve or beg.

  As these rulers have all their necessaries from their own country, it follows that the handycraftsmen and artificers of this land suffer constantly, live in distress, and find it difficult to procure a livelihood sufficient to support their lives. For as the English are now the rulers and masters of this country, as well as the only rich men in it, to whom can those poor people look up for offering up their productions of their art, so as to benefit from their expenses? It is only some artificers that can find livelihood with the English, such as carpenters, silversmiths, ironsmiths &c.97

  Moreover, wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, the Company’s conquests represented an entirely different form of imperial exploitation from anything India had previously experienced. He articulated, long before any other Indian, both what being a subject colony entailed, and how different this strange and utterly alien form of corporate colonialism was to Mughal rule. ‘It was quickly observed that money had commenced to become scarce in Bengal,’ he wrote. Initially no one knew whether ‘this scarcity was owing to the oppressions and exactions committed by the rulers, or the stinginess of the public expenses, or lastly of the vast exportation of coin which is carried every year to the country of England.’ But it rapidly became clear that the drain of wealth was real. It soon became common ‘to see every year five or six Englishmen, or even more, who repair to their homes with large fortunes. Lakhs upon lakhs have therefore been drained from this country.’98

  This, he wrote, was quite different from the system of the Mughals, who though also initially outsiders, determined ‘to settle forever [in India] and to fix the foot of permanency and residency in this country, with a mind of turning their conquest into a patrimony for themselves, and of making it their property and inheritance’:

  These bent the whole strength of their genius in securing the happiness of their new subjects; nor did they ever abate from their effort, until they had intermarried with the natives, and got children and families from them, and had become naturalized. Their immediate successors having learned the language of the country, behaved to its inhabitants as brothers of one mother and one language … [Hindus and Muslims] have come to coalesce together into one whole, like milk and sugar that have received a simmering.99

  In contrast, he wrote, the British felt nothing for the country, not even for their closest allies and servants. This was why those Indians who initially welcomed the British quickly changed their minds because ‘these new rulers pay no regard to the concerns of Hindustanis, and suffered them to be mercilessly plundered, fleeced, oppressed and tormented by those officers of their appointing’.

  The English have a custom of coming for a number of years, and then of going away to pay a visit to their native country, without any of them shewing an inclination to fix themselves in this land. And as they join to that custom another one of theirs, which every one holds as a divine obligation: that of scraping together as much money as they can in this country, and carrying these immense sums to the Kingdom of England; so it should not be surprising that these two customs, blended together, should be ever undermining and ruining this country, and should become an eternal bar to it ever flourishing again.100

  As Macaulay later put it, the Company looked on Bengal ‘merely as a Buccaneer would look on a galleon’.101 It took five years for the full effects of this regime of unregulated plunder to become apparent; but when it did so the results were unparalleled in their horror. The stage was now set for the great 1770 Bengal famine.

  * £65 million today.

  * £520 million today.

  * Over £1 million today.

  * £325 million today.

  * The Bhausahebanci Bhakar even tells how Shuja was born in miraculous circumstances when a fakir gave his barren mother a fruit to eat. She promptly ‘became fecund and like Kumara Rama and Polika Rama the child was endowed with surpassing strength’. Quoted in Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrah
manyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, New York, 2003, pp. 232–3.

  * £65 million today.

  * £210 to £315 million today.

  * £325,000, which equals £34 million today.

  6

  Racked by Famine

  The monsoon of 1768 brought only the lightest of rains to north-east India. Then the following summer, 1769, no rain fell at all. Instead, the intense heat continued unabated, the rivers dwindled, the tanks dried and the pukhurs – the fish ponds at the centre of every Bengali village – turned first to sticky mud, then to dry earth, then to dust.

  The Company officials dotted around rural Bengal watched the deepening drought with concern, realising the effect it would have on their revenues: the rice lands had ‘so harden’d for want of water that the ryotts [farmers] have found difficulty in ploughing and preparing it for the next crop,’ wrote one, and the fields of rice, ‘parched by the heat of the sun are become like fields of straw’.1

  The price of rice rose steadily, week by week, until it had multiplied five times. By October, as drought began to turn to famine, ‘great dearth and scarcity’ was reported at Murshidabad.2 By November, the farmers were stated ‘to be totally incapacitated to cultivate the valuable crops of Cotton and Mulberries … which usually succeed the rich rice harvest’.3 A month later, Mohammad Reza Khan, who now ran the Murshidabad administration, reported to Calcutta that things were so desperate that the hungry labourers had begun to ‘sell their children to raise money, much less do they spare their effects and cattle. The plough consequently stands still, and numbers of them desert their homes.’4

  The first to go hungry were the landless ‘labourers, the workmen, the manufacturers and people employed in the river [boatmen]’ as they ‘were without the same means of laying by stores of grain as the husbandmen’.5 These, the rural artisans and the urban poor, unprotected and with no safety net, were the first to sicken from malnutrition, then, one by one, to begin dying from starvation or disease. By February 1770, when around 70 per cent of the usual rice crop had been lost, and the price of rice was ten times its normal rate, the hunger started to become much more widespread.

  James Grant, who was stationed up country, near Rajmahal, reported a growing deprivation in his district: ‘In the country, the highway and fields were strewed, in towns, the streets and passages choked with the dying and the dead,’ he wrote. ‘Multitudes flocked to Murshidabad, [where] 7,000 were daily fed for several months; the same practice was followed in other places; but the good effects were hardly discernible amidst the general devastation … It was impossible to stir abroad without breathing an offensive air, without hearing the frantic cries, and seeing numbers of different ages and sexes in every state of suffering and death … At length a gloomy calm succeeded.’6

  ‘All through the stifling summer of 1770, the people went on dying,’ wrote Sir William Hunter. ‘The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyers of children could be found. They ate the leaves of the trees and the grass of the field; and in June the Resident at the durbar affirmed that the living were feeding off the dead. Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-ridden wretches poured into the great cities … [so that soon] the streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and the dead.’7

  By June 1770, the devastation was unfolding across the entire province. Five hundred a day were now dying of starvation in the streets of Murshidabad.8 Rice was scarce even in Calcutta, where 76,000 died on its streets between July and September. ‘The whole province looked like a charnel house,’ reported one officer. The total numbers are disputed, but in all perhaps 1.2 million – one in five Bengalis – starved to death that year in what became one of the greatest tragedies of the province’s history.9

  The famine did not touch the entire province, and in eastern Bihar the situation was slightly better; but in the worst affected districts, fully one-third of all the peasants died, and two-thirds of the old Mughal aristocracy were ruined. Half of all the rural artisans perished. The Hughli was full of swollen bodies, floating slowly downstream to the sea, its banks littered with corpses where ‘dogs, jackals, vultures and every bird and beast of prey grew fat and unwieldy on the flesh of man’.10 ‘The oldest inhabitants say they never remembered anything like it,’ reported Clive’s successor as Governor, Henry Verelst.11

  By July 1770, when it was clear that the rains had disappointed for a third year, Mohammad Reza Khan was writing to his masters in Calcutta not only of the vast numbers of dead and dying, but also of the fires sweeping through the tinder of the empty granaries. Disease killed many others, including an outbreak of smallpox which carried away the young Nawab, Saif ud-Daula: ‘How can I describe the misery of the people from the severe droughts and the dearness of the grain?’ he wrote. ‘Lakhs of people are dying daily … When the whole country is in the grip of a famine, the only remedy is the mercy of God.’12

  In reality, there were other remedies to hand which did not require divine intervention. Famines had been a baleful feature of Indian history from time immemorial, whenever the rains failed. But for centuries, and certainly by the time of the Mughals, elaborate systems of grain stores, public works and famine relief measures had been developed to blunt the worst effect of the drought. Even now, some of the more resourceful and imaginative Mughal administrators took initiatives to import rice and set up gruel kitchens.13

  Ghulam Hussain Khan was especially impressed by the work done by Shitab Rai, the new Governor of Patna. Shitab Rai had been the deputy of Raja Ram Narain and had narrowly escaped death when his master was executed by Mir Qasim. Now he showed himself to be the most effective administrator in the region: ‘Shitab Rai, melted by the sufferings of the people, provided in a handsome manner for the necessities of the poor, of the decrepit, the old and the distressed,’ wrote the historian. ‘In that dreadful year, when famine and mortality, going hand in hand, stalked everywhere, mowing down mankind by the thousands, Shitab Rai heard that the grain was a little cheaper, and in greater plenty in Benares, and set apart a sum of thirty thousand rupees,* and directed that the boats and rowers belonging to his household should bring regularly to Patna, three times a month, the grain provided at Benares.’

  This grain being landed at Patna was sold at the Benares price, whilst the boats were despatched for another trip; by which management there were always boats landing and boats loading. In this manner, during the whole time the famine lasted, his boats, divided in three squadrons, were constantly employed in bringing corn, which his people sold at the original price, without loading it with the charges, losses and transport, and it was purchased by the hungry, who flocked to his granaries from all parts.

  But as there were still vast numbers that could not afford to purchase grain so dear, he ordered them to be divided into four groups, and lodged in four gardens, surrounded by walls, where they were watched, almost as prisoners, by guards, but daily attended as patients by a number of clerks who kept an account of them, and were assisted by a number of servants, who at stated times used to come loaded with victuals ready dressed for the Mussalmen, and with a variety of grain and pulse and a sufficiency of earthen vessels, and of firewood, for the Gentoos [Hindus], and at the same time several ass-loads of small money, beside a quantity of opium, bhang [hashish], tobacco and a variety of other such articles, were distributed severally to each person, according to the kind he was accustomed to use; and this happened every day and without fail.

  On the report of such generosity, the English and Dutch [in Patna] took the hint, and on his example, lodged the poor in several enclosures, where they were regularly fed and tended. In this manner, an immense multitude came to be rescued from the jaws of imminent death … But [elsewhere in Bengal] such a proceeding never came to anyone’s head. Indeed some who had been appointed overseers of the poor proved so intent on their own int
erest, that so far from working to procure plenty of grain, they were foremost in the use of violent methods to engross it. Whenever any loaded boat chanced to come to the market, the grain was dragged away by force.14

  A few Company officials did their best to help the starving. In several places, the hoarding and export of rice was successfully prevented.15 In Murshidabad, the Resident, Richard Becher, ‘opened six centres for the free distribution of rice and other supplies’. He also warned the Calcutta Council about the dire consequences of failing to provide for the starving, and noted that the normally peaceful highways had become unsafe and that highway robberies, once unknown, were now occurring every day as the desperate and needy struggled to find ways to survive.16 The Governor of Calcutta, John Cartier, also worked hard to alleviate the distress in the Company’s capital: he maintained ‘a magazine of grain with which they fed fifteen thousand every day for some months, and yet even this could not prevent many thousands dying of want. The streets were crowded with the most miserable objects, and there were 150 dead bodies picked up in a day, and thrown into the river.’17

  But in many of the worst affected areas, Company efforts to alleviate the famine were contemptible. In Rangpur, the senior EIC officer, John Grose, could only bring himself daily to distribute Rs5* of rice to the poor, even though ‘half the labouring and working people’ had died by June 1770 and the entire area was being reduced to ‘graveyard silence’.18 Moreover, the Company administration as a whole did not engage in any famine relief works. Nor did it make seed or credit available to the vulnerable, or assist cultivators with materials to begin planting their next harvest, even though the government had ample cash reserves to do so. Instead, anxious to maintain their revenues at a time of low production and high military expenditure, the Company, in one of the greatest failures of corporate responsibility in history, rigorously enforced tax collection and in some cases even increased revenue assessments by 10 per cent.