by Simon Schama
It was not all bugles and bombast at Madras or Calcutta, however. For the prospects of British business in India had been transformed by the calico revolution in Europe. During the last third of the seventeenth century, virtually all social classes other than the rural poor discovered lightweight Indian fabrics – brilliantly dyed and figured silks for the well-to-do, and cottons, printed, painted or plain, for everyone. Calicoes and the more expensive silk-cotton mix chintzes changed lives. For the first time, materials other than heavy woollens and linens were available at prices to suit almost every income level. Calicoes, whether in bold prints or sheer gauzy muslins, were strong yet soft and, most important of all, were washable. No part of the male or female, adult or child’s body, including the most private, was untouched by them. ‘Few think themselves wel-dresst,’ wrote one observer, ‘till they are made up in calicoes, both men and women, in calico shirts, neckcloths, cuffs, aprons, nightroyls, gowns, petticoats, hoops, sleeves and india-stockings.’ In London, as hundreds of thousands of pieces were sold every year, dividends at last became serious, and Company stock soared. Predictably, success bred resentment. Silk weavers at home angrily petitioned the government, and ‘calico-chasers’ mobbed wagons full of the textiles. The government responded by banning imports other than goods for re-export and plain fabric, which could be patterned up at home. But despite the ban, unofficial calico trading went on, and there was certainly enough demand in continental Europe for the rosier forecasts of business to seem realistic.
The only problem was India. An onward and upward commercial trajectory – the realization of the blue-water empire of trade, unencumbered by costs of territorial conquest or government – presupposed the stable and hospitable business environment provided by the omniscient dominion of the Mughal empire. Although the emissaries of the Stuart monarchs and the first generations of merchants who came to the Mughal court resented the lordly superiority of their emperors and privately still believed their empire to be a peculiar mixture of barbarism and voluptuous decay, they needed its authority to hold the ring against their European competitors and maintain their protection against extortionate local potentates. But in the historical mind-set of men like Sir Josiah Child, putting the Company’s trust, not to mention its inventory, into the safe-keeping of a permanent, stable Mughal government was a dangerous delusion. Either empires were on their way up (British) or they were on their way down (Mughal). The rebellion of the Hindu Maratha cavalry war-lords in central and western Bengal, led by their charismatic prince Shivaji, had persuaded Child that the decline of the Mughals was indeed going to be swift and irreversible. Their passing would leave great holes in the structure of their empire to be occupied by some potential adversary, either native or European, to British interests. Child’s conclusion was for the Company to act before it was acted on, and believing the Mughals to be seriously weakened in the west he launched a disastrous military action in the 1680s. It succeeded only in ruining their establishment in Surat, provoking the blockade and virtual abandonment of Bombay and a grovelling submission to the Emperor Aurangzeb.
Child’s understanding of the changes taking place in India was grotesquely misinformed, save the one truism that there was indeed change. The Mughal empire was far from being on its last legs. Nor was the only alternative to its government some sort of howling barbarian anarchy: Huns in turbans about to plunge India into its Dark Ages. Ruled by the descendants of Tamerlane and Ginghiz Khan, it had evolved from a Turkic horseback warrior state into one of the great sedentary Muslim civilizations. At its height, under the Emperor Akbar I in the second half of the sixteenth century, it governed virtually all of north and central India through a unified system of law based on the Islamic Shari’a and on a centralized, Persian-language administration. Great palaces were built, none more extraordinary than Fatehpur Sikhri; and the Arabic and Persian court culture produced a great flowering of poetry and painting. But although the authority of the Mughals owed a great deal to the fearsomeness of their cavalry and artillery, to the lustre of their court and the energy and probity of their administration, they were governing an immense territory, major parts of which were not Muslim but Hindu. Their success at containing disaffection, then, rested on a careful balance between central authority – not least that of the omnipotent aura of the emperor himself, said to be infused directly with the light of God – and the co-opting of regional princes and peoples.
The key to that collaboration was the land tax, equal to as much as a third of the livelihood of India’s many million farmers and peasants. In return for his obedience and military cooperation, the emperor would assign to a subordinate governor, or nawab, the land revenue of a particular province. After delivering to the imperial treasury the empire’s portion (in silver, naturally), and after paying the costs of assessment and collection, the nawab would be free to enjoy what was left. Similarly the nawabs – of Bengal or Awadh, for example – contracted in advance with hereditary collectors, the zemindars, for the amounts due from their respective territories. They too made money from the difference between the sum due on their contract and what they could actually extract from the cultivators. In similar fashion, the empire actively encouraged the development of sophisticated and specialized commercial centres around its dominions, so that Bengal indigo or Gujarati cottons often travelled along the great trunk roads to far-distant urban markets.
For a century this seemed a magically self-sustaining system. But after the death of the combative Aurangzeb a decided shift occurred in the delicate equilibrium between central and local power. The drift towards greater regional autonomy was accelerated by the empire’s evident inability to defend itself against the onslaught of brutal horseback invasions from both the Afghans and the charismatic Persian despot Nadir Shah, who in 1739 sacked Delhi in a storm of elaborately horrific cruelty: Nadir Shah watched enthroned before the city gates as throats were slit and bodies mutilated. Within central and western India itself the imperial armies were unable to prevent the Marathas from consolidating their power. And the various tribal raids on India were worse for being hit-and-run expeditions, their perpetrators uninterested (unlike the original Mughals) in settling amid the conquered and establishing something more than a cycle of extortion.
In the circumstances, it was inevitable that the Muslim officials and administrators to whom the empire had entrusted the government of whole regions should look out increasingly for themselves and their immediate subjects. Driven by both necessity and ambition, the nawabs of Bengal and Awadh, formidable men like Alivardi Khan and Shuja-ud-Daulah with their own provincial courts at Murshidabad and Faizabad, which disposed of revenue, law enforcement and soldiers, inevitably became more self-sufficient. Though they still thought of themselves as loyal to the emperor, they made their own offices hereditary and appointed their own men to their governments, irrespective of Delhi’s wishes. Instead of responding to orders from the imperial treasury as to how much of the land revenue they were to keep and how much to pass on, they themselves increasingly decided on the shares.
As the struts and armature of the empire began to shake loose, it was these local potentates who became the focus of European attention in bids to outmanoeuvre or exclude their competition. In Bengal the late-comer but energetic French Compagnie des Indes had established a trading settlement at Chandernagor, and its ambitious governor, Joseph, Marquis de Dupleix, courted the nawab in Murshidabad to get an edge on his British rivals in Calcutta. Naval vessels from both countries – summoned, it was said defensively – began to manoeuvre for position and, once the War of the Austrian Succession (in which, in the line-up of European alliances, Britain and France were on opposing sides) began in earnest, to exchange fire. In 1746, in return for the capture of French ships, the French under Bertrand-Francis La Bourdonnais, operating out of their factory at Pondicherry, captured Madras, the jewel of the Company’s possessions, and held it for two years. At the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle it was returned to the East India Compan
y amid scenes of jubilation at Fort St George. But the initial skirmishing had escalated the struggle. For no one had taken Josiah Child’s instruction that the achievement of profit was conditional on the exercise of power more seriously than Dupleix.
When Dupleix made his first intervention in the internal politics of southern India, he was in fact merely applying the kind of conventions used by the French with the native tribes of North America to sustain and reinforce their position. But in India they looked much more ominous. When the most powerful figure in the region, the Nizam of Hyderabad, died, a contest was triggered for control of the Carnatic. Dupleix backed Chanda Sahib, a veteran administrator, and was prepared to support him with regular French troops and Indian levies. Should he prevail, the British could look forward to the end of Madras and their calico fortunes. In competition they gave their support to Muhammad Ali Walahjah, the son of a mercenary soldier. Even more fateful for the future, Dupleix planned to finance his campaign with the proceeds from local land taxes. He insisted to his understandably anxious directors in Paris that the purpose of all this was ultimately commercial: that the creation of a fiscal–military power in south India was the last thing he intended. It would work out otherwise, though – and not for the French, but for their enemies.
The odds on the British prevailing in this struggle must have been steep. For a start, the credentials of their candidate to govern a predominantly Hindu, southern territory were not strong. Muhammad Ali was, as his name suggests, a Muslim, and his family came from northern India. But, famously, there appeared in Madras in the 1740s someone who, even as he built a personal empire that, by comparison, made Dupleix’s strategy look timid, likewise protested that he was just the loyal servant of the East India Company. Robert Clive had never really been meant for trade. In Market Drayton in Shropshire he had been so ungovernable a child that his beleaguered parents, over-burdened with a swarm of offspring, had sent him away to relatives in Manchester. He liked it, but it didn’t like him. Back in Market Drayton the adolescent Clive pelted passers-by from the church steeple and ran a minor extortion racket against local shopkeepers, who were obliged to fork over to Clive’s gang in order to protect their stores from pillage and destruction. He was, obviously, good material for Company service in India and ended up, nineteen years old, in Diamond Pitt’s Madras on the lowest rung of the hierarchy: the writer. For some years Robert Clive clerked away, bunking down in the sweaty collegiality of the bachelor boys, hating every minute (‘I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country’), pining for Manchester and relieving the tedium with the standard distractions of arrack, cockfights, fistfights, gambling and (unless he was an unlikely exception) sex. The opium habit that, in all likelihood, ended up contributing to his death thirty years on, almost certainly began then and there. In the broiling heat his manic swings between elation and depression (virtually a job qualification for British empire-building) became wilder. Twice he tried to end it all with a pistol pressed to his temples. Twice – the story goes – the gun jammed.
In the war with the French, in which they and the British respectively acted, ostensibly, for Chanda Sahib and Muhammad Ali Walahjah, Clive’s gangsterish intelligence and brutality found the perfect career opportunity. Careless of life, beginning with his own, he took chances that no one a little saner would ever have contemplated, gambling that if they came off he would be a god to his soldiers. When the French besieged the bastion of Trichinopoly rock, instead of marching directly on it Clive ordered a counter-march of his tiny troop of Indian and European soldiers to invest the fortress of Arcot and then dared the French to come and get it. They rose to the bait, drawing troops away from Trichinopoly and spending two months failing to take Arcot while Clive defended the stronghold to the last sepoy! It was not necessarily the turning point of the war, but it was a spectacularly tough feat of endurance, and it made him, at twenty-five, a Company hero. It also had the desired effect of allowing a British force to relieve the siege of Trichinopoly, capture Chanda Sahib and have him beheaded in the shadow of the rock. Dupleix’s credibility in France collapsed; the British installed Muhammad Ali Walahjah as the nawab of the Carnatic and were guaranteed the domination of southeast India.
But what for? For the dividend, of course; for the Company; what else? Clive and his fellow-soldiers always insisted that the force they were applying was just enough to pre-empt the Company from being locked out of whole commercial territories by the French. Even by the operational standards of the twentieth, never mind the eighteenth, century, a carefully measured degree of intervention could be justified as sound business practice in a part of the world where free trade and perfect competition were fantasies, and where abstaining from intervention was to cede the field to one’s adversary. And there were, always, interested Indians – rival potentates, bankers and brokers, disaffected generals and revenue lords – ready to encourage the British, piggy-backing the redcoats to fortune and power. The danger, of course, for both the Company in London and the Indian opportunists, was that, once mobilized, military action and political involvement would come to be the master, not the servant, of business opportunity and would end up generating unanticipated problems that in turn would call for further and deeper military engagements until the point when a quick killing would no longer mean a trade opportunity. This is exactly what happened in Bengal, and what happened in Bengal landed Britain the wrong empire.
No one saw it coming, not even Robert Clive, back in England after the victory in the Carnatic, relishing his fame and fortune as the hard man of the East India Company, his pockets jingling with spare silver. Neither he, nor the court of directors, were under any illusion that the French would be content to cut their losses in the south of India without trying to compensate in the potentially much richer trading zone of the northeast. Their own factory at Chandernagor had the makings of a Gallic Calcutta, and their growing fleets could compete for control of the Bay of Bengal, sail by sail, with those of the East India Company. But the kind of spiralling competition that had caused so much damage in the south seemed to be contained by the much tougher and apparently more stable regime of Alivardi Khan, the nawab of Bengal. Taking advantage of the impotence of the Mughal court at Delhi to defend the empire, the nawab governed effectively from Murshidabad, 300 miles (400 km) up the Ganges from Calcutta, as a mini-Mughal, carving out a virtually autonomous kingdom that included not just Bengal itself, but also Orissa to the south and Bihar to the west. It was, in its own right, a huge, economically dynamic territory, and it was getting bigger by the year as estuary lands were reclaimed and put under rice, indigo or sugar. The European trading communities, which included the Dutch at Chinsura, were confined within their ‘factories’ and given limited licences to trade up-country (which meant, in effect, buying printed cottons and silks and handing over silver), and the idea that there might be some sort of break-out into an aggressive, free-wheeling armed state within a state seemed, even in the mid-1750s, inconceivable and, for everyone concerned, undesirable.
But the status quo was actually much shakier than would have been apparent to any visitor to Alivardi Khan’s elegant court. He too was over-extended and had difficulty in preventing the Marathas from invading western Bihar and western Bengal. To generate the funds needed to shore up his army meant either becoming further indebted to bankers like the house of Jagat Seth, or putting heavy pressure on the zemindars with the predictable result of making enemies. The new defensiveness applied to the Europeans, too. With another round of Anglo-French hostilities coming, the two companies were determined to deprive each other of another Bengali speciality that had become strategic treasure: saltpetre. As they were manoeuvring for position in 1756, Alivardi Khan died and was succeeded by his twenty-year-old grandson, Siraj-ud-Daulah.
‘Sir Roger Dowler’ (as schoolboys of my generation still knew him) was the first official villain of imperialist history, the sadistic fiend who immured innocent Britons within the living tomb of the B
lack Hole of Calcutta. Pictures of the monster gloating over his victims, which illustrated Victorian and even twentieth-century ‘empire stories’, featured stereotypes of the oriental despot: curled mustachios as black as his heart. ‘Early debauchery had unnerved his body and mind,’ wrote Macaulay (which certainly could not be said of his own childhood) ‘. . . it had early been his amusement to torture beasts and birds and when he grew up he enjoyed with still keener relish the misery of his fellow creatures.’ But Siraj-ud-Daulah was, of course, just your standard eighteenth-century Indian princely post-adolescent: impulsive, spoiled rotten, ill-informed and politically out of his depth. Given what had happened in the Carnatic, it was not, in fact, unreasonable for him to try to ensure that the ostensibly commercial companies stayed just that, by demanding that the European trading posts dismantle their fortifications at Chinsura, Chandernagor and Calcutta. The Dutch and the French obliged. The British did not, perhaps because Calcutta was now much more than a service extension of the trade depot. In the sixty years since Job Charnock had planted himself beneath his banyan tree by the Hooghly, in what was acknowledged then and ever since to be the unhealthiest climate in all India, it had grown into a sizeable city, in its own right with a population of at least 100,000. It was no longer just a strung-together agglomeration of weaving and fishing villages along the Hooghly but a tight little economic powerhouse.
Rightly or wrongly, the British felt that Calcutta was their creation and that it lived or died with the capacity to buy, up-country, the products that the Company needed to ship home (which its servants liked to trade, not always legally, to line their own pockets). The mere existence of the crudely built Fort William was the bargaining chip they needed to press claims for the protection and expansion of that trade, and they were not about to hand it over on a platter to the young nawab. The defiance was poorly timed since the ditch being dug to complete its defences had not been finished before Siraj-ud-Daulah marched on the city to enforce his will. He took it without much trouble, the president and most of the councilmen and inhabitants (about 450 of them) managing to flee before its capture. One of those who did not was Zephaniah Holwell, who along with a group of civilian and military prisoners was imprisoned on 20 June 1756 in a cell about 18 by 14 feet (6 by 3 metres), used for offenders in the Fort and long known by the British as ‘the Black Hole’. It was Holwell’s graphic account, A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen and Others who were Suffocated in the Black Hole, written on the journey home a year later that gave Britain its first imperial atrocity melodrama, perfectly tuned to the contemporary taste for the macabre and the sentimental, and complete with sons expiring as they held the hands of their fathers. Holwell claimed that 146 had been incarcerated and 43 survived. The best-researched modern evidence now suggests that he doubled the number of both prisoners and survivors. But this is still by any standards a grim reckoning, and the revisionist argument that some of the bodies were already dead, casualties of the fighting, does not make it any prettier. Some of Holwell’s account must have been true: the stifling heat; and unhinged victims, their clothes torn off to give them a fraction more room, dying and making air available for others. But – as any survivors from among the Jacobites imprisoned in Carlisle Castle in 1746 would have confirmed – this kind of treatment was, unhappily, nothing unusual for the eighteenth century.