The first encounter between the British and French in India had ended with a victory for the French on points: Madras was still under their control while the British with a superior force had failed to dislodge them from Pondicherry. The defence of Fort St George had been a fiasco, the attempt to seize Pondicherry a failure. The British had nothing to be proud about.
In December the news of peace between Britain and France at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle reached India; under this agreement, Madras was to be returned to the British. Lawrence was released, having been treated well by Dupleix, and rejoined the garrison at Fort St David.
* * *
The 23-year-old Clive had now begun to make his mark. It was not only Lawrence who held a high opinion of the young man. He had become a forceful personality that others envied and tangled with at their peril. At a game of cards in Fort St David, a notorious bully among the officers there won game after game, transparently cheating. Clive accused him openly, while the others present stayed silent. The officer called him out, there and then.
Clive had the first shot; he missed. The officer, a notoriously good marksman, told him to withdraw the accusation of cheating, and he would be spared. Clive is said to have declared, ‘Fire and be damned. I said you cheated, I say so still and I will never pay you.’ The officer raised his gun, then lowered it, and his adversary was spared. Clive, much relieved, made no formal complaint against the other.
After the engagement outside Pondicherry another officer, Allen, who had seen him run away from his post to get ammunition, called him a coward behind his back. One day in Fort St David, Clive shouted to him and Allen, as he passed, hit Clive on the arm from behind. Clive turned and hit him on the head with his cane, saying, ‘You are too contemptible a coward even for a beating.’ Allen then had to apologise in front of the troops – 2,000 men – and resign his commission.
In 1749, Clive took on no less a figure than the chaplain of Fort St David, an embittered reprobate, the Reverend Francis Fordyce, who had the power to create serious trouble for the young officer. In his previous parish, St Helena, he had seduced a planter’s daughter and had been compelled to flee her father’s anger. In Fort St David, he bitterly criticised the governor and his council, threatening violence upon them. The impressive Governor Hinde had been succeeded by the easygoing, amiable, card-addicted Floyer, who took no action against Fordyce.
After the Pondicherry fiasco, Fordyce heaped contempt on the performance of the forces. Clive was furious. The clergyman, who had already threatened to thrash one member of the council and slit the nose of another, told those emerging from a church service that he would ‘break every bone in his [Clive’s] body and half a dozen more of them!’ Shortly afterwards Clive encountered him in the street and hit him a couple of times with his cane. The enraged – but courageous – Fordyce attacked Clive, and it took three men to separate them.
The churchman decided to complain to the council about Clive’s ‘violence and riot’, and sought to have the matter brought before the Company in England. Before he could, however, he publicly insulted the governor and was dismissed. Clive was exonerated by the council as being ‘generally esteemed a very quiet person and no ways guilty of disturbances’.
It was clear from this curious affair that the shy, unhappy, sat-upon youth of Fort St George was no more. Having distinguished himself in fighting he was at the age of only 23 capable of standing up to one of the most senior officials in the status- and hierarchy-obsessed colony. He must have commanded considerable respect in a quiet way.
Life in the settlement was now much more enjoyable than when he had first arrived. He had several friends. He was respected. He enjoyed the esteem of the military commander, Lawrence. He was lodged in a small house at Bandlipollam on hilly ground to the west, which he vastly preferred to the writers’ lodgings at Fort St George. This he shared with an extrovert, often drunk, good-looking lieutenant of the marines, John Dalton.
The two of them spent much of their spare time in the brothels of Cuddalore, where they caught gonorrhoea at least twice. More genteely, they attended the endless and pleasant social life of the settlement, dining frequently with the governor and at the homes of other senior officials, of which Mrs Prince, who possessed a huge house and a large retinue of servants, was the most celebrated. There were a number of English girls in town, on the lookout for eligible bachelors like Clive, among them Eliza Walsh, John’s sister, who enjoyed being carried about on a palanquin by four servants, with an armed soldier in front and a boy on hand to smooth her petticoats. Life was pleasantly relaxed and agreeable now that the French threat had passed.
* * *
With the conclusion of peace between Britain and France the considerable garrison at Fort St David was now unemployed; but Lawrence was not long in finding a suitable case for military intervention. There was no evidence whatsoever that this was part of a grand strategy of English intervention in Indian affairs. Lawrence lacked the vision or ambition for such a role; and the East India Company servants were determined to go ahead with trade and avoid, wherever possible, military engagements, which they feared and abhorred. The merchant class dominated the settlements, and regarded soldiers as second-class citizens, and warfare as an unwelcome interruption to trade.
However, the lure of a petty local conflict proved irresistible to the idle forces in Fort St David. Lawrence was well aware that his garrison would be much reduced, as the merchants were pressing, unless he could find something for it to do. In 1739 the Rajah of Tanjore had been deposed, and he had now come to the British to seek help. The region was only some 30 miles inland from Fort St David and was prosperous, pretty and strewn with pagodas. Quite why the British decided to help him remains a mystery. In exchange for restoring him to his throne, they demanded the expenses of the expedition and control of the fort of Devikottai on the Coleroon river, a place devoid of strategic significance.
In March 1749, Clive, now promoted to the rank of lieutenant, accompanied Captain John Cope on the expedition to restore this obscure prince to his throne. It marked his first journey into the interior, about which he had so long dreamed. The aim was to attack by land and sea. An appalling storm ravaged the footsoldiers; the company failed to make contact with the naval forces off the coast.
When the British finally encountered the enemy, they were not supported by the local people, as the rajah had said they would be. Instead, in Clive’s words, they were ‘a little staggered’ by the sheer size of the Tanjore army. Wisely, Cope retreated, but not in an orderly manner. Pursued in desultory fashion by the colossal but clumsy local army, the British force lost around 400 Indian soldiers and most of its baggage as it crossed a small river.
The expedition had been a fiasco. The military reputation of the British in India had sunk to a new low. Lawrence was well aware of the grumbles from Company officials about the cost of the British military presence. He determined to try again. He took the risk of himself leading the entire garrison up the Coleroon river and landed on a mudflat opposite the fort of Devikottai.
Clive, the most promising of the younger commanders, was given the job of leading the assault on the fort by a force of 30 British soldiers and 700 Indians. With extraordinary bravado, he set the British a furious pace across the river and up towards the fort, where they became separated from the Indian soldiers still struggling to cross the river.
His small force was suddenly surrounded by a group of cavalry, slashing wildly at Clive and his men; to the young commander’s horror, he realised that he and his men were unsupported from the rear. As the others were cut down beside him, a horseman rode up to Clive, raising his sword; Clive narrowly escaped being cut down, and with three or four survivors ran back to the river where his Indian troops were drawn up in a precarious position with their backs to the water. They looked like being overwhelmed. But Lawrence, across the river, understood Clive’s difficulties and ordered his forces forward. They crossed successfully and reinforced the foothol
d on the bank; fearing they had been lured into a trap, the attacking forces pulled back.
When the British reached the fort it was deserted. They climbed its ramparts and saw a huge army of some 15,000 men retreating across the plain. It had been a salutary demonstration: first, of how reckless and inexperienced the young Clive was; and, second, of how a seemingly irresistible force of Indians could be put to flight merely by a display of aggression, discipline and boldness by a much smaller force.
The usurping ruler of Tanjore promptly offered peace: the British could have the fort and their expenses, and the old rajah be given compensation. The British accepted these terms. Clive, who might have expected a reprimand for his foolhardy conduct, was complimented by Lawrence for ‘his early genius … he behaved in courage and in judgment much beyond what could be expected from his years’.
* * *
Lawrence appointed Clive his quartermaster when the French formally handed back Madras. The small British contingent was despatched to Pondicherry, where they were received civilly by their arch-enemy, Dupleix, and his wife. The young soldier was fascinated to meet the man who had already tried to drive the British out of southern India, and who would soon become his most formidable opponent.
Dupleix, for his part, was more interested in shaking hands with his adversary Lawrence. The disdainful French intellectual made a striking contrast to the tubby, earthy, swashbuckling little Englishman. Clive was impressed by the beauty of the little French town, with its classical and stately baroque architecture. Its magnificent embellishments and columns were a little showy for British tastes, but were certainly impressive.
A few weeks later, a larger contingent of British soldiers and civilians retraced their way along the road to Madras, which they found ruined and deserted. Clive was deeply depressed. Having achieved so much militarily, reality was now returning. If the war was truly over, he had no alternative but to return to his old profession as a writer.
He had sought the rank of captain, but the Company seniors, with the short-sightedness and parsimony that was to mark their actions time and again, were determined to reduce military spending, having learnt nothing from the sack of Madras. With Lawrence’s backing, he sought promotion; and was granted the job of Steward of St George, in charge of food supplies for the garrison town, as well as furnishings and fittings. It was potentially a highly lucrative job, with a commission on every supply to the garrison. Clive was now rising fast within the Company.
Within a few weeks he was struck down for the first time by severe illness – this time the fever endemic to the Carnatic. In January 1750, he went to Bengal to recuperate. Although Calcutta was suffocatingly humid in summer, unlike the Carnatic, it was quite fresh and cool in winter. As the ship docked after a few days’ voyage, Clive was in good spirits in spite of his sickness. Calcutta was a city of wealth and elegance by comparison with the attractive, but provincial and nepotistic, enclaves along the Coromandel Coast.
Fort William, the British settlement, was a magnificent Italianate fortress with a low, heavily buttressed wall which extended for a mile and directly overlooked the Hugli river. Beautifully designed public buildings rose over the parapets and peered over the waterfront where ships with elegant masts and puffed sails bobbed quietly at anchor. Magnificent merchant houses extended in both directions beside the fort, testaments to wealth and taste. The steamy climate made their white façades look faded and stained. Of all the English settlements in India, Fort William was the most exotic.
Yet there was also a sense of complacency and decay about it. Its basis was trade, and military activities counted not at all there. As Clive gazed from the ship at the wide mouth of the Hugli, surveying the damp, malarial swamp about him, the huge river snaking away as far as the eye could see from this astonishing piece of Italianate eighteenth-century glory, he felt a profound sense of adventure, as though arriving at an outpost of man on a distant planet. The dark interior of India beckoned upriver.
Bishop Heber’s description of the ‘black town’ of Calcutta half a century later already applied: It was
deep, black and dingy, with narrow-crooked streets, huts of earth baked in the sun, or of twisted bamboos, interspersed with ruinous brick bazaars, pools of dirty water … a crowd of people in the streets, beyond anything to be seen in London, some dressed in tawdry silks and brocades … religious mendicants with no clothing but their long hair and beards in elf locks, their faces painted white or yellow, their beads in one ghastly lean hand, and the other stretched out like a bird’s claw, to receive donations … a constant clamour of voices, a constant creaking of cart wheels, which are never greased in India … add to all this a villainous smell of garlic, rancid coconut oil, sour butter and stagnant ditches.
Clive by now considered himself a trader first and a soldier second. He had glimpsed the possibilities of acquiring immense wealth. His main aim was to make a fortune, not to indulge in ill-paid military adventuring. It was clear that he had no real interest in fighting for fighting’s sake; he was a young man on the make. For the time being, though, he was recuperating; and his position immediately opened the doors of Calcutta society. He spent his enforced idleness being entertained to lavish meals, or listening to the harpsichord in the cool of the evening.
He made a friend in Robert Orme, effeminate, vain, intelligent and difficult, a 20-year-old who was to become Clive’s biographer. Impulsively he expressed the desire to stay in Calcutta permanently; but as his health improved it was obvious that he must return to where he had made the beginnings of a reputation. He left that strange and exotic outpost at the mouth of a tropical river with regret: his fascination for Bengal dated from the visit.
CHAPTER 5
The Return of the French
Any idea that Clive was a man of destiny, and still less that he was plotting to conquer Bengal, would have seemed ludicrous.
One other man, though, was plotting to do just that and his ambition was to spur Clive to his own destiny. François Dupleix, the Frenchman he had seen twice, first strutting as a conqueror in Fort St George, then as lofty peacemaker in the ornate town of Pondicherry, was preparing a more ambitious scheme than any yet conceived for India.
Dupleix had had the imagination, even genius, to have understood two things about India long before Clive. The first was that relatively small, well-trained, well-equipped European armies could defeat the colossal, ill-trained, ill-equipped moving townships that constituted Indian armies. Although Dupleix did not realise it, this was because of the essentially different nature of Indian warfare.
Indian armies, whenever possible, barely engaged each other. It was enough that one side was overwhelmingly superior, and proved it in a brief cannon duel, an infantry clash or cavalry battle, for the other to give way. The banners, tents, elephants, camels, music, weaponry, colour and sheer size of these forces were intended to intimidate the other side into submission. Sometimes major battles occurred; on other occasions, magnificence was enough. Musket fire was itself as much for display as death: the noise and flashes were terrifying, but even British bullets fell to the ground after a hundred yards.
Dupleix’s second insight was that the ferocious infighting between Indian princes permitted a European force decisively to tilt a battle one way or the other, and so acquire a wholly disproportionate influence. Clive’s success in India and the establishment of the British Raj was due to his own grasping of the two lessons learned by Dupleix.
* * *
India in the mid-eighteenth century was a truly astonishing civilisation. It was at once one of the most powerful, literate, artistically endowed, developed, sophisticated and economically advanced societies on earth, yet at the same time contained the seeds of its own destruction. One visitor, James Forbes, who later became Governor of Bombay, considered that India possessed ‘eloquence, poetry, painting and architecture, in a considerable degree of perfection’.
Four major influences had shaped this continent of 180 million peopl
e, one-third of them Moslem, two-thirds Hindu or other sects. The first and most visible were the Mogul Emperors, direct descendants of Tamerlane through a ferocious fighter and heir of the Mogul, Barbar. In 1526 he had conquered most of the subcontinent. The Moguls were in fact Turks, their civilisation was Persian, and their culture an exquisite blend of Persian and Indian styles. Above all the Moguls were Moslems, fierce and imperious, but never able to do more than make a surface impression on their Hindu subjects – the vast majority of Indians, whose main pursuit was commerce, and whose own civilisation was also far developed.
Lawrence James captures the magnificence of the Moguls:
India’s official architecture was a backdrop for the traditional public rituals of state. The formal processions in which a ruler presented himself to his subjects and undertook his devotions and the durbars [assemblies] where great men met, exchanged gifts and compliments and discussed high policy, required settings appropriate to what was, in effect, the theatre of power. At the heart of the Emperor Shahjahan’s great palace, now called the Red Fort, in Delhi are the great audience halls, one a vast open courtyard, the other enclosed and reserved for foreign ambassadors and other elevated visitors. Both are now stripped of their awnings and wallhangings and the private chamber lacks the Peacock Throne, a stunning construction of gold and jewels surmounted by a golden arch and topped by two gilded peacocks, birds of allegedly incorruptible flesh which may have symbolised not only the splendour of the Mughals but their durability.
When Shahjahan held durbars for his subjects, dispensing justice and settling quarrels, he overlooked them from a high, canopied dais with a delicately painted ceiling. If he glanced upwards, he saw a panel which portrays Orpheus playing his lute before wild beasts who, bewitched by his music, are calmly seated around him. The scene was a reminder to the emperor and his successors that they were Solomonic kings. Like the Thracian musician they were bringers of harmony, spreading peace among subjects who, if left to their own devices, would live according to the laws of the jungle. It was a nice and revealing conceit, a key to the nature of Mughal kingship and, for that matter, its successor, the British Raj.
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