All of these were potentially grave charges. But Hastings was nevertheless by far the most responsible and sympathetic of all the officials the Company had yet sent to India. From his early twenties, his letters had been full of outrage at the unprincipled way Company officials were exploiting India and mistreating Indians. He had many close Indian friends and regarded himself as an honourable champion of justice for the people of Bengal. He had railed and campaigned against those who were plundering the country and wrecking the Bengali economy and he did his best to set it on a more prosperous and sustainable path. He took concrete measures to make sure there was no repetition of the terrible famine of 1770, including building the great Gola in Patna, which survives to this day. His successor said that in Bengal he was by far the most popular of all the British officials in India, ‘positively beloved of the people’.17
Nor did he even look the part: far from being an ostentatious and loud-mouthed new-rich ‘Nabob’, Hastings was a dignified, intellectual and somewhat austere figure. Standing gaunt at the bar in his plain black frock coat, white stockings and grey hair, he looked more Puritan minister about to give a sermon than some paunchy plunderer: nearly six feet tall, he weighed less than eight stone: ‘of spare habit, very bald, with a countenance placid and thoughtful, but when animated, full of intelligence.’
As a result of Francis’s influence, the Articles of Impeachment were full of demonstrable fantasies and distortions, which traded on the ignorance of the audience about the issues and personalities involved. They were also badly drafted and lacked the necessary legal detail. Many of the more entertaining speeches were little better than ad hominem rants, mixing falsified history and unproved innuendo. Hastings did not begin his career as ‘as a fraudulent bullock contractor’. Chait Singh of Benares was not, as alleged, ‘a sovereign prince’. Hastings had not been the one declaring war on the Marathas. He had never given orders ‘to extirpate the Rohillas’. The Begum of Avadh’s eunuchs were never scourged.18 It took Hastings’ defence many weeks even to begin correcting the multiple errors of basic facts which the prosecution had laid out.
If anything, the Impeachment demonstrated above all the sheer ignorance of the British about the subcontinent they had been looting so comprehensively, and profitably, for thirty years. Indeed, some of the charges were almost comically confused: the illiterate and piratical Rohilla Afghan warlord Hafiz Rehmat Khan, for example, was conflated by Burke with the fourteenth-century mystical Persian love poet Hafez, who had been dead in his grave for 400 years by the time of the Impeachment.19
Few were surprised when, after seven years, on 23 April 1795, Hastings was ultimately cleared of all charges. But it scarred the final decades of his life, leading to what he described as ‘years of depression & persecution … Besides crimes of the most atrocious lies which were alleged against me, I was loaded by all the managers in succession, through the whole course of their pleadings in the trial, with language of the foulest abuse, aggravated by coarse and vulgar epithets, of which there had never been any examples in the jurisprudence of this or any other country.’20
The trial, however misconceived and misdirected, did have one useful outcome: to demonstrate that the Company’s many misdeeds were answerable to Parliament, and it helped publicise the corruption, violence and venality of the EIC, so setting the stage for further governmental oversight, regulation and control. This was a process which had already begun with the 1773 Regulating Act and had been further enhanced by Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which made the Company’s political and military transactions subject to government supervision. It eventually culminated in the outright nationalisation of the Company seventy years later in 1858, but by 1784 the writing was already on the wall. In that year Alexander Dalrymple, the Company’s now retired hydrographer, put it with utmost clarity and confidence: ‘The East India Company must be considered in two lights’, he wrote, ‘as commercial and political; but the two are inseparable: and if the politics are not made subservient to the commerce, the destruction of the Company must ensue.’21
Amid all the spectacle of Hastings’ trial, it made sense that the man sent out to replace him was chosen by Parliament specifically for his incorruptibility. General Lord Charles Cornwallis had recently surrendered the thirteen American Colonies of the British Empire over to George Washington, who had immediately declared it a free and independent nation.
Cornwallis’s mission was now to make sure that the same never happened in India.
On arrival in Calcutta in August 1786, Cornwallis inherited a far more flourishing Bengal than the famine-wrecked dustbowl which had greeted Hastings fourteen years earlier.
This was at least partly the result of the reforms Hastings had brought in. Calcutta itself had turned into a boomtown with a population of around 400,000, more than double that at the time of Plassey. Now known as the City of Palaces or the St Petersburg of the East to its British inhabitants, and the Paradise of Nations, Zannat-al-Bilad to the old Mughal aristocracy, the Company’s bridgehead in Bengal was unquestionably the richest, largest and most elegant colonial city in the East: ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture,’ wrote the newly arrived William Hunter, ‘and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is.’22
The city was prosperous and fast growing. All it lacked was proper planning regulations: ‘It is not without astonishment and some irritation that a stranger looks at the city of Calcutta,’ wrote the Comte de Modave. ‘It would have been so easy to turn it into one of the most beautiful cities in the world, by just following a regular planned layout; one cannot fathom why the English failed to take advantage of such a fine location, allowing everyone the freedom to build in the most bizarre taste, with the most outlandish planning. With the exception of two or three properly aligned streets, the rest is a labyrinth of winding narrow lanes. An effect, it is said, of British liberty, as if such liberty were incompatible with good order and symmetry.’23
Nor was it just the British who did well out of this new boom or who lived extravagantly: Bengali merchant and money-lending dynasties also flourished. The Mullick family, for example, had rambling baroque palaces strewn around the city and used to travel around Calcutta in an ornate carriage drawn by two zebras. But the boom reached down to benefit more humble Bengali labourers, too: by the end of the 1780s, their wages had risen by around 50 per cent in a decade.24
The finances of Bengal were in fact in a healthier state than they had been since the time of the Aliverdi Khan in the 1740s and 1750s: by the end of the decade, Cornwallis was able to report back to London that revenues exceeded expenditure by £2 million. After meeting deficits elsewhere, this left £1.3 million for the ‘investment’ to purchase export goods, which Cornwallis estimated would sell in London for £2.4 million.*25 After a period on the edge, the Company was now back in business and making a healthy profit. Part of these profits came from the successful introduction of new cash crops like sugar, opium and indigo, but much was simply due to the natural fecundity of Bengal, which always produced large surpluses of rice each year. The same Bengali agricultural revenues which had once sustained the Mughal Empire now sustained the Company Raj.26
It was not just agriculture and land revenues which had turned around. Trade was flourishing, too. Since the low point of the Company’s near bankruptcy in 1772, exports from Bengal had grown fivefold and now exceeded Rs15 million, or around £5 million. There was every sign that this looked likely to continue.27 Fine Bengali textiles – especially cotton piece goods, muslins and fine silks – were selling well, to the tune of Rs28 million* annually, as was Malwa opium and Gujarati cotton; but the biggest success story was tea from China.28 By 1795, tea sales had doubled in less than a decade to 20 million pounds (9,000 tons); one former director of the EIC wrote that it was as if tea had become ‘the food of the whole people of Great Britain’.29 The only thing holding back further growth was the question of supply: ‘the de
mand for Bengal goods exceed double the quantity that can be procured,’ Cornwallis reported back to London.
As a result, the shortages of bullion which had paralysed the Bengal economy in the 1770s were now long forgotten: the Calcutta mint was now striking Rs2.5 million** of coins each year.30 In every way, the Company holdings in eastern India – the Three Provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa – were now effectively the richest of all the regional post-Mughal successor states dotted around South Asia, with resources many times greater than any of their rivals.
All this meant that the Company state was able to keep building its army and apportion over £3 million annually to military expenditure, a sum no other South Asian power could possibly match.31 From 2,900 sepoys in 1757 after Plassey, the Bengal army had grown to around 50,000 men by the arrival of Cornwallis.32 The Company also had the pick of the best candidates in the military labour market since it paid its sepoys significantly more, and more regularly, than anyone else: Bengal army sepoys classed as ‘gentlemen troopers’ earned around Rs300 a year, while their equivalents in Mysore earned annually only Rs192 (four times the Rs48 Tipu paid an ordinary soldier); those in Avadh earned annually as little as Rs80.*33 As Burton Stein nicely put it: ‘The colonial conquest of India was as much bought as fought.’34
These sepoys were in turn supported by a sophisticated war machine, run out of the armouries of Fort William and the arms factories of Dumdum. When in 1787 the Hyderabadi minister Mir Alam spent several months in Calcutta he was amazed at the scale of the Company’s Calcutta military establishments. He was particularly impressed by the arsenals he saw in Fort William: ‘Three hundred thousand muskets hung up in good order and easy to collect, ammunitions factories hard at work, and two to three thousand cannons in place with five to six thousand more in reserve and ready for use.’35 Forty years earlier, in 1750, the Company had been a trading corporation with a small security force and a few crumbling forts; by 1790 it had effectively transformed its Indian holdings into a tightly run fiscal-military state guarded by the most powerful army in Asia.
So when, in 1791, war once again loomed with Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Cornwallis’s armies could now draw on unprecedented manpower, weaponry and military materiel. There was good reason for the Company generals to be confident: if war with Tipu was unavoidable they would now have a good opportunity of avenging their abject defeat at Pollilur twelve years earlier.
In 1783, Haidar Ali of Mysore had died of a suppurating tumour ‘the size of a dinner plate’ on his back. His son Tipu moved quickly to take over his father’s throne.
The Governor of Madras called Tipu ‘the youthful and spirited heir of Haidar, without the odium of his father’s vices or his tyranny’.36 According to one British observer, Tipu, now thirty-three, was ‘about 5ft 7ins in height, uncommonly well-made, except in the neck, which was short, his leg, ankle and foot beautifully proportioned, his arms large and muscular, with the appearance of great strength, but his hands rather too fine and delicate for a soldier … He was remarkably fair for a Mussulman in India, thin, delicately made, with an interesting, mild countenance, of which large animated black eyes were the most conspicuous feature.’37
On his deathbed, Haidar had written to Tipu with advice to his son on the art of good government. He warned him that the Company would attempt to exploit any weakness in the succession: ‘The greatest obstacle you have to conquer is the jealousy of the Europeans,’ he wrote. ‘The English are today all-powerful in India. It is necessary to weaken them by war.’
He suggested that Tipu’s best chance of doing this lay in dividing and ruling: ‘The resources of Hindustan do not suffice to expel the English from the lands they have invaded. Put the nations of Europe one against the other. It is by the aid of the French that you could conquer the British armies, which are better trained than those of India. The Europeans have surer tactics; always use against them their own weapons.’
He then bade his son farewell and good luck: ‘If God had allowed me a longer career, you need only have enjoyed the success of my enterprises.’
But I leave you for achieving them rich provinces, a population of twelve million souls, troops, treasures and immense resources. I need not awaken your courage. I have seen you often fight by my side, and you shall be the inheritor of my glory. Remember above all that valour can elevate us to the throne, but it does not suffice to keep it. While we may seize a crown owing to the timidity of the people, it can escape us if we do not make haste to entrust it to their love.38
Tipu was already one of the most feared and admired military commanders in India: able and brave, methodical and hard-working, he was above all innovative, determined to acquire the arsenal of European skills and knowledge, and to find ways to use them against his enemies. Tipu had already proved his capacity to do this on the battlefield, defeating the Company not only at Pollilur but also twice more since then: in 1782, he had annihilated another British army under Colonel John Braithwaite just outside Tanjore and then, a year later, immediately before his accession, ambushed and destroyed a third Company column on the banks of the Coleroon River. The surprise was that within a few years Tipu showed that he was just as imaginative in peace as he had been in war.
Tipu began to import industrial technology through French engineers and experimented with harnessing water power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today. He introduced irrigation and built dams so that even his British enemies had to admit that his kingdom was ‘well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities [including Bangalore] newly founded and commerce extended’.
More remarkably still, he created what amounted to a state trading company with its own ships and factories. Regulations issued to Tipu’s ‘commercial department’ survive, providing details of a state trade in valuable commodities such as sandalwood, silk, spices, coconut, rice, sulphur, and elephants imported into and exported from Srirangapatnam. Trade centres were established in thirty places in Mysore and other places on the western coast as far north as Kutch, as well as in Pondicherry and Hyderabad. Officials were encouraged to recruit suitably trained assistants to run such markets, and each was to be placed under oath according to their religion. Capital for trade was to be provided from the revenue collected by state officials and provision was made for accepting deposits of private persons as investments in the state trade with fixed returns. Other factories were established at Muscat and dotted across the Persian Gulf. Tipu even asked his ambassadors to Ottoman Istanbul to secure for him the ijara – farm – of Basra so that, like the Europeans, he could establish an overseas settlement which would be a base for his vessels.39
Keeping in mind his father’s advice to win the love of his subjects, Tipu went out of his way to woo and protect the Hindus of his own dominions. From the beginning of his reign he had loaded the temples of his realm with presents, honours and land. Few of his chancery records survive, but from the temple archives of the region we know, for example, that in 1784 he gave a land grant to one Venkatachala Sastri and a group of Brahmins, begging them ‘to pray for the length of his life and prosperity’. A year later he sent the temple complex of Melkote twelve elephants and a kettledrum, while also sending a Sanskrit verse recording his grant of lands ‘to the temples and Brahmins on the banks of the Tungabhadra’. So it continued at the rate of at least three or four major endowments or gifts of money, bells, pensions, villages, jewels or ‘padshah lingams’ per year, for the rest of his reign, mostly in return for requests for prayers, pujas ‘for the success of the King’s armies’ or temple processions.40
But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most generous patronage, as a stash of correspondence discovered within the temple in the 1950s bears witness. Tipu put on record his horror at the damage done to the temple by a Maratha Pindari raiding party during a Maratha invasion of Mysore: ‘People who have si
nned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds,’ wrote Tipu. ‘Those who commit evil deeds smiling, will reap the consequences weeping. Treachery to gurus will undoubtedly result in the destruction of the line of descent.’41
Sending a large sum of cash and a consignment of grain ‘for the consecration of the goddess Sarada’, and to ‘feed one thousand Brahmins’, Tipu asked the Swami ‘please to pray for the increase of our prosperity and the destruction of our enemies’. Shortly after this, he sent another note, along with a present of an elephant, writing that ‘wrong-doers to gurus and our country will soon perish by the grace of God! Those who took away elephants, horses, palanquins and other things from your monastery will surely be punished by God. Cloth for the Goddess has been sent. Please consecrate the Goddess, and pray for our welfare and the destruction of our foes.’42
This was not just a matter of statecraft. Tipu, despite being a devout Muslim and viewing himself as a champion of Islam, thoroughly embraced the syncretic culture of his time and believed strongly in the power of Hindu gods. In his dreams, which he diligently recorded every morning in a dream book, Tipu encountered not only long-dead Sufi saints, but also Hindu gods and goddesses: in one dream sequence, there are references to him finding himself in a ruined temple with idols whose eyes moved: one talked to him and as a result Tipu ordered the temple rebuilt.43 It is recorded that Tipu made all his troops, Hindu and Muslim, take ritual baths in holy rivers ‘by the advice of his [Brahmin] augurs’ in order to wash away cowardice and make them superior in battle to the Marathas. Tipu also strongly believed in the supernatural powers of holy men, both Hindu and Muslim. As he wrote in 1793 to the Swami of Sringeri: ‘You are the Jagatguru, the preceptor of the world … in whatever country holy personages like you may reside, that country will prosper with good showers and crops.’44
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