The Anarchy

by William Dalrymple

  As the clouds of smoke began to disperse the survivors peered down over the terrace of the Fort to see a succession of boats being rowed steadily upstream, while a single elephant loaded with treasure was lumbering up the riverbank. After almost three months, Ghulam Qadir had finally departed, taking with him everything he had plundered, along with nineteen of the senior princes, including Prince Akbar, as hostages. The badly wounded Shah Alam he left behind in the Red Fort, apparently hoping he would be incinerated by the explosion he set off as a final parting present to the Mughals.130

  Anupgiri, perhaps guilt-stricken at having deserted his post nine weeks earlier, was one of the first into the Fort; with a small party of men, he shinned up a rope let down by one of the princes, opened the gates to the rest of the army and began extinguishing the fires. As they did so, the surviving members of the royal family began to emerge from their hiding places. The sight shocked even the most battle-hardened members of the relief force. Unkempt, smoke-blackened, skeletal and dirty, the princes and princesses gathered around their rescuers and sobbed with relief.

  The sight of the Emperor was even more traumatic. He had somehow managed to barricade himself into his prison cell and had to be cajoled out by Rana Khan.131 He initially refused all treatment. When a surgeon was sent to dress his wounds, he ‘turned out the surgeon, and flung the ointment for his eyes on the ground, saying “many of my children and grandchildren have already died of hunger and thirst, and now we are also waiting for death.”’132

  While Rana Khan took charge of the Emperor and his fort, bringing in food and water, as well as a number of barbers to trim the imperial beards, the Begum Sumru and de Boigne set off in search of Ghulam Qadir and his treasure. The Rohilla was heading towards Pathargarh but had only made it as far as the fort of Meerut when, on 12 December, the pursuing forces caught up and surrounded him. Without the provisions to withstand a siege, he decided to abandon his hostages and try and break out that very night, ‘attended by 500 horse, who were still attached to him. At their head, he rushed out of the fort and charged the enemy so vigorously that though every endeavour was made to take him prisoner, he made his way through the whole line, and accomplished his escape.’133

  He did not get far. Like Siraj ud-Daula, he had made himself too notorious to slip away unnoticed. ‘In the darkness of the night his companions lost him,’ wrote Khair ud-Din. ‘He went one way and they went another.’

  He endeavoured to find them but did not succeed. The road was full of water and mud, and the horse putting his foot into a hole, rolled Ghulam Qadir into a ditch. The night was dark, and the way bristled with thorny acacias, so that he knew not what way to turn. When morning came, seeing some inhabited place, he proceeded thither. On reaching the habitation, he put his head into the house of a Brahmin. But the Brahmin, in days gone by, had suffered at the hands of the ruffian, and his village had been ravaged. His oppressor was now in his power, and having invited him in, he made the door fast.134

  The Brahmin sent a message to his zamindar, who in turn alerted the Marathas. At noon, Scindia’s men rode into the village and surrounded the house. They then seized Ghulam Qadir, bound him and locked him in a cage. They despatched him on a humble bullock cart, with chains on his legs and a collar around his neck, to Scindia’s headquarters, ‘guarded by two regiments of sepoys and a thousand horse’. For a while Ghulam Qadir was displayed in his cage, suspended in front of the army, to be jeered at and mocked.135 Then, ‘By the orders of Scindia, the ears of Ghulam Qadir were cut off and hung around his neck, his face was blackened, and he was carried around the city.’

  The next day his nose, tongue and upper lip were cut off, and he was again paraded. On the third day, he was thrown upon the ground, his eyes were scooped out, and he was once more carried round. After that his hands were cut off, then his feet, then his genitals and last of all, his head. The corpse was then hung, neck downwards, from a tree. A trustworthy person relates that a black dog, white around the eyes, came and sat under a tree and licked up the blood as it dripped. The spectators threw stones and clods at it, but still it kept there. On the third day, the corpse disappeared, and so did the dog.136

  Mahadji Scindia sent the ears and eyeballs to the Emperor Shah Alam in a casket as a congratulatory gift. He then had Mansur Ali Khan, the head eunuch who had let the Afghans into the fort, ‘trampled to death under the feet of an elephant’.137 But by this stage, Shah Alam had ceased to worry about this world. When the Begum Sumru came to pay her respects, she found him sitting serenely amid the charred debris of the Shah Burj, quietly reciting from the Quran. He had already composed a couplet that he recited to her:

  The winds of calamity have been unleashed by our mutilation

  Our imperial rule has been cruelly laid waste

  The exalted Sun (Aftab) of Kingship once illuminated the heavens,

  Now we lament the darkness of our ruin as dusk descends upon us

  That misbegotten son of an Afghan scattered our royal dignity

  Who now, except God, could befriend us?

  We suckled the spawn of a serpent, we nurtured him

  But in the end, he became our executioner

  Rife with danger are the riches and honours of this world

  Now Fate has rendered our sufferings eternal

  Now that this young Afghan has destroyed the dignity of my State,

  I see none but thee, Most High!

  Lord, have pity on me,

  A sinner.

  * £33.8 million today.

  * Over £1 million today.

  * £52 million today.

  * Almost £16 million today.

  ** £3 million today.

  * £9 million today.

  * £195 million today.

  * See Syed Mustafa Bareilwi, Ghulam Qadir Ruhela, Lahore, n.d., p. 55. Afzari and the Ibratnama both have Ghulam Qadir threatening to rape the women of the Mughal harem – ‘to take them as concubines and fuck them at will’ – additional evidence that at the time Ghulam Qadir was not thought of as a eunuch.

  * The modern equivalences of these sums are: Rs40 lakh = £52 million; Rs2 lakh = £2.6 million.

  * Najafgarh, a town in south-west Delhi, is named after him. So is the road next to his tomb south of Jor Bagh.

  * Namak parvardah: brought up and supported at the expense of Shah Alam.

  † William Pinch in Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, Cambridge, 2006, p. 2, believes Anupgiri colluded with Ghulam Qadir and was already in correspondence with him.

  ** £15.6 million today.

  * £3,250 million today.

  ** £9 million today.

  8

  The Impeachment of Warren Hastings

  At noon on 13 February 1788, while Ghulam Qadir was preparing for his assault on Delhi, in London huge crowds had gathered outside Parliament to witness the members of the House of Lords process into Westminster Hall to impeach Warren Hastings.

  Tickets for the few seats reserved for spectators changed hands for as much as £50,* and even then so many people wished to attend that, as one of the managers of the impeachment noted, the audience ‘will have to mob it at the door till nine, when the doors open, and then there will be a rush as there is at the pit of the Playhouse when Garrick plays King Lear … The ladies are dressed and in the Palace Yard by six [in the morning], and they sit from nine to twelve, before the business begins … Some people, and I believe, even ladies, have slept at the coffeehouses adjoining Westminster Hall, that they may be sure of getting in the door in time.’1

  In addition to the 170 lords, there were bewigged and ermined judges, black-robed lawyers for both sides, and 200 members of the House of Commons. The Queen, ‘dressed in fawn-coloured satin, her head dress plain, with a very slender sprinkling of diamonds’, took her place in the Royal Box, along with her son and two of her daughters, the Duchess of Gloucester, and other attendants, among them the Dukes of Cumberland, Gloucester and York. The Prince of Wales was there with Charles James Fox
. Among those who queued for admission were the great society actress and courtesan Sarah Siddons, the painter Joshua Reynolds, the diarist Fanny Burney and the historian Edward Gibbon.

  For all the theatre of the occasion – indeed one of the prosecutors was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan – this was not just the greatest political spectacle in the age of George III, it was the nearest the British ever got to putting the Company’s Indian Empire on trial. They did so with one of their greatest orators at the helm – the Anglo-Irish Whig statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke, supported by his no less eloquent and much more radical rival, Charles James Fox.

  Warren Hastings stood accused of nothing less than the rape of India – or as Burke put it in his opening speech, ‘with injustice and treachery against the faith of nations’:

  With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration … With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country … with a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious, exercise of his powers … in overturning the ancient establishments of the country … With cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name … Crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men – in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper – in short, nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, a heart blackened to the very blackest, a heart corrupted, gangrened to the core … We have brought before you the head, the Captain General of Iniquity – one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.2

  Hastings, Burke explained, was, quite simply, a criminal: ‘He is a robber. He steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he extorts.’ He was ‘a professor, a doctor upon the subject’ of crime.3 Worse was to come. Hastings, said Burke, was also ‘a rat’, ‘a weasel’, ‘a keeper of a pig stye, wallowing in corruption’. ‘Like a wild beast, he groans in corners over the dead and dying.’4

  Every bit as bad as the man was the institution he represented. Because it was a Company, a corporation, that was governing Bengal, there were, believed Burke, none of the usual checks and balances which could make national government just and legitimate: ‘The East India Company in India is not the British nation,’ he declaimed. ‘When the Tartars entered China and into Hindoostan, when all the Goths and Vandals entered Europe, when the Normans came into England, they did so as a Nation.’

  The Company in India does not exist as a Nation. Nobody can go there that does not go in its service … They are a Nation of Placemen. They are a Republic, a Commonwealth, without a people … The consequence of which is that there are no people to control, to watch, to balance against the power of office …

  Out of this has issued a species of abuse, at the head of which Mr Hastings has put himself against the authority of the East India Company at home and every authority in the Country … He has corrupted his hands and sullied his government with bribes. He has used oppression and tyranny in place of legal government; and instead of endeavouring to find honest, honourable and adequate rewards for the persons who served the public, he has left them to prey upon it without the slightest degree of control.5

  Burke then paused for effect, before launching into his thunderous climax:

  I impeach, therefore, Warren Hastings, Esquire, of High Crimes and Misdemeanours. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonoured. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste. I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation and condition of life.6

  Burke’s opening speech alone took four days. In it he alleged widespread use of torture by the Company in its ruthless search for plunder, and he accused Hastings of ‘geographical morality … as if when you have crossed the equatorial line all the virtues die’. Natural law, he said, meant that justice and human rights were universal: ‘the laws of morality,’ he declared, ‘are the same everywhere, and there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in England which would not be an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and the world over.’7

  Company rule, he continued, had done nothing for India, except to asset-strip it: ‘Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost to India for ever. Every other conqueror … has left some monument behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our domination, by anything better than an ouran-outang or the tiger … [The Company appears] more like an army going to pillage the people under the pretence of commerce than anything else … [Their business is] more like robbery than trade.’8 Now, he argued, it was the duty of those gathered in judgement to ensure that corporations, like individuals, must be held accountable to Parliament.

  When Burke began to describe the violation of Bengali virgins and their mothers by the Company’s tax collectors – ‘they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies’ – several women in the audience fainted. According to Macaulay, ‘the ladies in the galleries, unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence, were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling bottles were handed around; hysterical sobs and screams were heard; and Mrs Sheridan was carried out in a fit.’9

  Sheridan himself then took over, further outlining the prosecution case and holding forth for four more days. He too took a prolonged tilt at Hastings’ alleged moral darkness which he compared to ‘the writhing obliquity of the serpent … shuffling, ambiguous, dark, insidious’. As for his employers, the Company, they combined ‘the meanness of a pedlar and the profligacy of pirates … wielding a truncheon in one hand, and picking a pocket with the other’.10

  His speech was widely regarded as one of the greatest feats of oratory of his day. Even the Speaker was rendered speechless. At the end of his impassioned performance, Sheridan whispered, ‘My lords, I have done’, and swooned backwards, landing in Burke’s arms. ‘The whole house – the members, peers, strangers – involuntarily joined in a tumult of applause … There were few dry eyes in the assembly.’11 Gibbon, alarmed at his friend’s condition, went around the following day to check if Sheridan was all right: ‘He is perfectly well,’ he noted in his diary. ‘A good actor.’12

  Some of the Prosecution’s charges and insights – such as the idea of universal human or ‘natural’ rights – were important, even profound.13 Much of the rest was terrifically entertaining and scandalous. The only problem was that, thanks to the machinations of the ever-vindictive Philip Francis, Parliament had impeached the wrong man.

  Earlier in his career, Burke had defended Robert Clive against parliamentary enquiry, and so helped exonerate someone who genuinely was a ruthlessly unprincipled plunderer. Now he directed his skills of oratory against Warren Hastings, a man who, by virtue of his position, was certainly the symbol of an entire system of mercantile oppression in India, but who had personally done much to begin the process of regulating and reforming the Company, and who had probably done more than any other Company official to rein in the worst excesses of its rule.

  The impeachment had been Philip Francis’s final revenge on the man who had shot him during their duel and whom he had continued to hate with an obsessional passion. As soon as he recovered from his duelling wound in October 1780, Francis had given in his resignation a
nd caught ship to London. There he used his new Indian wealth to buy a parliamentary seat and begin lobbying to bring Hastings down.

  In February 1782, he found a sympathetic ear in Edmund Burke, then a rising Whig star. Burke had never been to India, but part of his family had been ruined by unwise speculation in East India stock. Together Burke and Francis worked on a series of Select Committee reports exposing the Company’s misdeeds in India. Before he met Francis, Burke had described himself as ‘a great admirer’ of Hastings’ talents.14 Francis quickly worked his dark magic to change that. By April 1782, he had drawn up a portentous list of twenty-two charges against Hastings which Burke then brought to the House.15 In May 1787, after five years of obsessive campaigning to blacken Hastings’ name and reputation, Burke and Francis persuaded Parliament that there was enough evidence to impeach him. On the 21st, the recently returned Hastings was taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-Arms, who passed him on to Black Rod. He was then made to kneel at the bar of the Lords, bow his head and hear the charges against him.

  Hastings was certainly no angel; and the EIC under his rule was as extractive as ever. After Francis’s departure, Hastings began to take a more old-fashioned, pseudo-monarchical and even despotic idea of his powers, something Burke particularly disliked.16 Moreover, during the military crisis of the early 1780s, in the aftermath of victories by the armies of Tipu and the Marathas, when it looked as if the Company might easily be driven out of India, Hastings had been forced to raise money quickly to fight the war and to save Madras and Calcutta. He chose to raise it by pressuring the Company’s princely allies to contribute, and he used some extremely dubious means to gather the sums he needed. These included bullying the Nawab of Lucknow, Asaf ud-Daula, forcefully to strip the wealth of his purdah-bound aunts, the Begums of Avadh. He also personally used strong-arm tactics on Chait Singh, the Raja of Benares, an intervention that caused a local uprising and nearly cost Hastings his life. There were other dubious decisions, too. In particular, Hastings had failed to intervene with a pardon to save the life of Nandakumar, a former Diwan of the Nawab of Bengal, who had faked evidence of Hastings’ corruption which he handed to Philip Francis. Nandakumar had then been sentenced to death for forgery by Hastings’ old Westminster schoolfriend, the Calcutta Chief Justice, Sir Elijah Impey. This opened Hastings up to charges of failing to prevent what Burke and Francis viewed as the convenient ‘judicial murder’ of a whistleblower.