The Anarchy
Page 55
94
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, pp. 465–6.
95
Ibid.
96
Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, p. 100.
97
Firminger and Anderson, The Diaries of Three Surgeons of Patna, p. 38.
CHAPTER 5: BLOODSHED AND CONFUSION
1
BL, Or. 466, Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Muhammad ‘Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, pp. 700–2.
2
Walter K. Firminger and William Anderson, The Diaries of Three Surgeons of Patna, Calcutta, 1909, p. 40.
3
Ibid., p. 24.
4
Syed Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, Seir Mutaqherin, Calcutta, 1790–94, vol. 2, pp. 473–4.
5
Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Muhammad ‘Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, p. 703.
6
Ibid., p. 704.
7
Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism, New Delhi, 2003, p. 277; Nicholas Shreeve, Dark Legacy, Crossbush, 1996, pp. 11–12.
8
Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, Paris, 1822, pp. 216–18.
9
Luke Scrafton, Observations on Vansittart’s Narrative, London, 1770, pp. 48–9.
10
Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Muhammad ‘Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, pp. 710–13.
11
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 496.
12
Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Muhammad ‘Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, p. 710.
13
Ibid., p. 711.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid., p. 715.
16
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, pp. 218–21.
17
Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Muhammad ‘Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, p. 708.
18
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, pp. 226–7. I have gone with Gentil’s account as he seems to have been an eyewitness. There are, however, conflicting accounts of the deaths of the Jagat Seth: for example, Ghosha says that they were mercilessly killed by the Nawab himself. ‘They were attended by their faithful servant (Khidmatgar) Chuni who could not be persuaded on any account to leave them, and when Kasim Ali [Mir Qasim] was shooting them with arrows he stood before them, so that, he fell first and then the two cousins.’ See Lokanatha Ghosha, The Modern History of the Indian Chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars, &c, Calcutta, 1881, p. 346.
19
Firminger and Anderson, The Diaries of Three Surgeons of Patna, p. 1.
20
Sir Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India, London, 1947, p. 54.
21
Shreeve, Dark Legacy, p. 16.
22
Ibid.
23
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, pp. 227–34.
24
Shreeve, Dark Legacy, p. 18.
25
Julia Keay, Farzana: The Woman Who Saved an Empire, London, 2014, p. 48.
26
Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Muhammad ‘Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, p. 713.
27
Unlike the Black Hole, the Patna Massacre is almost forgotten. We hardly read about it in history books in Britain and it is completely absent from Indian history books.
28
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 518.
29
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 35.
30
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 514.
31
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 35.
32
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 512.
33
The Bhausahebanci Bhakar, quoted in Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, Delhi, 2003, pp. 232–3.
34
Quoted by Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, 4 vols, New Delhi, 1991, vol. 2, p. 316.
35
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, pp. 528, 558.
36
Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932, 38v–39r.
37
Ibid., 39r.
38
Ibid., 40v–41r.
39
Naga Gossains were not unfamiliar with musketry and some even fought on horseback, according to Ghulam Hussain Khan, describing Rajendragiri’s defence of Allahabad in 1751, though it is true that they excelled at close-quarter combat. William Pinch details the evolution of their military style in chapter two of Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, Cambridge 2006. It is difficult to get a firm sense of the distribution of arms among Naga soldiers, but see the description of the prolonged sanyasi/fakir insurgency in Bengal in David N. Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History’, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 98, no. 1 (January–March 1978), pp. 61–75.
40
CPC 1, items 2130–1, 2136; Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Shuja ud-Daula, vol. 1, 1754–1765, Calcutta, 1939, p. 182; Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818’, in Peter Marshall, The Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 1998, pp. 518–19.
41
Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932, 41v.
42
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 530.
43
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 531.
44
Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932. 42v.
45
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 530.
46
Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932. 42v.
47
Ibid., 43v.
48
Ibid., 43v–44r.
49
Ibid., 44r.
50
Ibid.
51
René-Marie Madec, Mémoire, ed. Jean Deloche, Pondicherry 1983, p. 71.
52
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 565.
53
Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932, 44r.
54
Ibid., 45v.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid., 45r.
57
Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Shuja ud-Daula, vol. 1, p. 232.
58
Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, 1989, p. 111.
59
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 258–9.
60
Ibid.
61
Madec, Mémoire, p. 74.
62
Fakir Khairud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932, 45v.
63
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 530.
64
Ibid.
65
The Late Reverend John Entick et al.,The Present State of the British Empire, 4 vols, London, 1774, vol. IV, p. 533.
66
Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty & the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Cambridge, 2011, p. 3.
67
Thomas Twining, Travels in India One Hundred Years Ago, London, 1983, pp. 144–5.
68
For the domestic political background at this time, see James Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III, Princeton, 2009.
69
Keay, Farzana, pp. 53, 89.
70
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, pp. 583–4.
71
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 259.
72
Sadasukh Dihlavi, Munkatab ut-Tawarikh, trans. Sir H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India Told By Its Own Historians, London, 1867, vol. VII
I, p. 408.
73
Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British 1720–1801, Berkeley, 1980, p. 73.
74
Amar Farooqui, Zafar, and the Raj: Anglo-Mughal Delhi, c. 1800–1850, New Delhi, 2013, pp. 8–9.
75
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 571.
76
Shah Alam II to the Council, n.d., received in Calcutta 6 Dec 1764, NAI, Foreign Department Secret Consultations, 1764, 2A, 738; CPC 1, lv, p. 353.
77
K. K. Dutta, Shah Alam II & The East India Company, Calcutta, 1965, pp. 28–9.
78
Bengal Despatches, February 1764, quoted in Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India, London, 1974, p. 205.
79
Percival Spear, Master of Bengal: Clive and his India, London, 1975, pp. 130–1.
80
Clive to Carnac, 7 May 1762, quoted in Bence-Jones, Clive of India, p. 208.
81
Bence-Jones, Clive of India, p. 208.
82
H. V. Bowen, ‘Lord Clive and speculation in East India Company stock, 1766’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), pp. 905–20. For two other excellent essays on Clive’s loot and its fallout back home: Bruce Lenman and Philip Lawson, ‘Robert Clive, the “Black Jagir” and British Politics’, in Historical Journal, vol. 26, no. 4 (December 1983), pp. 801–29, and C. H. Philips, ‘Clive in the English Political World, 1761–64’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 12, no. 3/44, Oriental and African Studies Presented to Lionel David Barnett by His Colleagues, Past and Present (1948), pp. 695–702.
83
BL, OIOC, BL G37/4/1, f. 42; Barnett, North India Between Empires, p. 74.
84
Dutta, Shah Alam II & The East India Company, p. 38.
85
Clive and Carnac to Council, 14 July, quoted in Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Shuja ud-Daula, vol. 2, 1765–1775, Calcutta, 1939, p. 10; Barnett, North India Between Empires, p. 75.
86
Quoted in Bence-Jones, Clive of India, p. 219.
87
Clive to Sykes, 3 August 1765, quoted in Barnett, North India Between Empires, p. 74.
88
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, pp. 9–10. Sheikh Itesamuddin, who was involved in writing the text of the Treaty of Allahabad with another munshi, reported that Shah Alam with tears in his eyes told Clive and Carnac, who were getting ready to leave after the signing of the Treaty, that they were abandoning him among his enemies without a thought for his safety (Shigurf Namah 1825:5). See Mirza Itesamuddin, Shigurf Namah-i-Velaet, translated from Persian to English by James Edward Alexander (London, 1827). Itesamuddin travelled from the subcontinent to England in 1767 to place Shah Alam’s request before King George III of England. Quoted in Jeena Sarah Jacob, ‘The travellers’ tales: The travel writings of Itesamuddin and Abu Taleb Khan’, in William A. Pettigrew and Mahesh Gopalan, The East India Company, 1600–1857: Essays on Anglo-Indian Connection, London and New York, 2017, p. 141.
89
Ghulam Husain Salim, Riyazu-s-salatin, pp. 398, 413–14.
90
George Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, New Delhi, 1986, vol. 2, p. 335.
91
The question of the relative importance of Company imports of bullion to the Bengal economy is contested – see Rajat Datta, Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialisation in Rural Bengal, c1760–1800, New Delhi, 2000. So is the question of to what degree the Company ruthlessly asset-stripped Bengal. As Peter Marshall put in a letter to me, ‘You can certainly make a case that “India would henceforth be treated as if it were a vast plantation to be milked and exploited, with all its profits shipped overseas.” But I do not think you cannot ignore that there was a rhetoric of just rule in the EIC going back to the seventeenth century and that the directors try, however ineffectually, to enforce it after 1757. Their failure to do so is the ostensible reason for increasing state intervention. Unrelenting plunder would ruin Bengal and, a maxim endlessly repeated, kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. The [directors tried to ensure that the] goose must be carefully looked after. Many of the articulate servants in India certainly shared this rhetoric, Hastings most obviously. You can say, reasonably, that considerations of good governance repeatedly gave way, especially in times of emergency, to the imperatives to maximise resources, but I do not think that you can deny that they existed.’ With many thanks to PJM for his kindness in looking over my manuscript and for all his encouragement and assistance over many years.
92
Bowen, Revenue and Reform, pp. 111–12; Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, p. 125.
93
Bence-Jones, Clive of India, p. 221.
94
Om Prakash, ‘From Market-Determined to Coercion-based: Textile Manufacturing in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1800, Leiden, 2013, pp. 224–41.
95
Dutta, Shah Alam II & The East India Company, p. 45; Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, p. 125; Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London, 2016, p. 115.
96
Quoted in John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Cambridge, 1993, p. 195.
97
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, pp. 3, 46, 192–3, 202–4. See also the brilliant analysis of Khan’s observations in Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818’, in Marshall, The Eighteenth Century, pp. 514–15. Also P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c. 1750–1783, Oxford, 2007, p. 260.
98
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, pp. 158–213. Talking about the annual drain of wealth from Bengal, the Company’s whistleblower Alexander Dow wrote: ‘They [the Company] began to drain the reservoir without turning into it any stream to prevent it from being exhausted’, quoted in Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, Durham, NC, 1983, p. 33.
99
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, pp. 158–213.
100
Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 32, 181, 194–5.
101
Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, p. 224.
CHAPTER 6: RACKED BY FAMINE
1
OIOC, SCC, P/A/9, 29 November 1769. There is a large body of scholarship on the terrible Bengal famine of 1769–79. The best work on the Bengal famine and its effects in rural Bengal can be found in Rajat Datta, Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialisation in Rural Bengal, c1760–1800, New Delhi, 2000, chapter five, pp. 238–84. Rajat Datta argues that while military conquests, political dislocations and Company exactions certainly contributed to the vulnerability of peasants, there had been a major shift in agriculture and the economy under the Company which contributed to the intensity of the famine. Bengal’s prosperity was vulnerable and ecologically it was undergoing major changes. The flow of the rivers was moving eastward and cultivation was spreading eastward too. While the west of Bengal was drying out, which made it desperately vulnerable to famine if the rains failed, the east was flourishing. It escaped the 1769–70 famine, although as Datta shows, flooding was to devastate it later.
Bengal had witnessed a long intensification of wet rice cultivation under the Nawabs. This was a long-drawn-out process of ecological transformation whereby the eastern Bengal delta constituted an agrarian frontier where provincial Mughal officials had directly encouraged forest clearing, water control and wet rice cultivation from the later sixteenth century up to the middle of the eighteenth century. See J. F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World, Berkeley, 2003, p. 33.
The pioneering work in this field has be
en done by Richard Eaton who, in his study of the Bengal frontier, argues that the provincial Mughal officials deepened the roots of their authority in the countryside through encouraging intensive wet rice cultivation at a time when the Mughal power in Delhi was steadily diminishing. This patronage system, introduced by the Nawabs, which had played a decisive role in the steady growth of food grains, ended in 1760 with the paramountcy of the East India Company in the Bengal region. See Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760, Berkeley, 1993, p. 5.
Datta’s account emphasises the expansion of the regional market in grains which may have made peasants more exposed to price shocks. He also makes an important point about the geographical imbalance of the famine, which he believes was more severe in western Bengal and Bihar and practically non-existent in eastern Bengal. Therefore to speak of all-Bengal mortality and to peg it at 10 million is not possible. The veteran historian of the EIC, Peter Marshall, largely agrees with Datta’s account. In a letter to me he wrote: ‘The entrenched assumption, from contemporary polemics to our own times, is that British conquest ruined Bengal. I suppose that I belong to a minority opinion, most authoritatively expounded by Rajat Datta, which is sceptical of the decisive influence of the British, let alone of specific individuals, on the fortunes of the province. There of course can be no doubt that Bengal was potentially a highly fertile and productive province. It had developed a sophisticated commercialised economy … The British stimulated commercialisation by the growth of their export trades and of the great conurbation at Calcutta. Did their access to political power have adverse affects? Probably. They may well have taxed more severely, even if they had no capacity to extract directly from the mass of peasants. They regulated some trades, such as high-quality textiles or salt, to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of indigenous merchants and artisans, but the huge grain trade was surely beyond their capacity to interfere in significantly. On the whole, I doubt whether the British either “caused” the famine or what you seem to see in Chapter Eight as the recovery of Bengal under Hastings and Cornwallis … I think Bengalis largely made their own history … I would not credit Hastings with the recovery of Bengal, since I do not think it was in his or any other British individual’s capacity to bring about such a thing.’
These are clearly complicated matters, involving ecological as well as economic history, and the jury remains out. I have tried to argue here,however, that whether or not the Company was directly responsible for the famine, or whether ecological factors played a more important role, its incompetent response made the famine in West Bengal much more deadly, while its excessive tax collecting hugely exacerbated the sufferings of the Bengalis under its rule – which was certainly the opinion of many observers, both Indian and British, who wrote accounts of the disaster at the time.