Clive

by Robert Harvey

  The structure of the empire was delicate and complex. At its apex was the Great Mogul in Delhi; beneath him were the Moslem (Turkish) nobility, who administered vast estates and princedoms; and beneath them were the occupied Hindu aristocracy who ran the bureaucracy and trade and also, in many cases, retained aristocratic privileges.

  The arrangement was not a typically colonial one, because the Moslems had to make use of the upper caste of Hindus, and gave them prominent positions and privileges, permitting them to enjoy great wealth. Yet there was a tension between the thin layer of Moslem nobility and the large Hindu majority they presided over. The man who more than any laid the foundations of the East India Company, Sir Thomas Roe, observed once that the greatness of the emperor was ‘not in itself, but in the weakness of his neighbours, who like an overgrown pike he feeds on in frenzy’.

  James argues:

  Appearances were misleading. Whatever its architecture announced to the contrary, the Mughal empire was never monolithic, nor did the emperor’s will run freely throughout India. He was shah-an-shah, a king of kings, a monarch whose dominions were a political mosaic, whose tessera included provinces administered by imperial governors and semi-independent petty states. In the Deccan alone there were over a thousand fortified towns and villages, each under the thumb of its own samindar [landowner], who was both a subject of the emperor and his partner in government. The machinery of Mughal government needed the goodwill and cooperation of such men as well as the services of its salaried administrators who enforced the law and gathered imperial revenues.

  The last of the great Mogul Emperors was Aurungzeb, who ruled India for nearly half a century, from 1659 to 1707. He first experienced the sudden, furious typhoon that was to shatter the peace of India in 1664. A huge tribe of low-caste Hindu dirt farmers, the Marathas, cultivating land on the west side of India around Bombay, combined to form one of the toughest and most vicious guerrilla armies in history, bent on undermining Mogul rule.

  The Marathas were the second major ingredient of eighteenth-century India. Enormously powerful and destructive, they on the whole failed to provide an alternative administration over the parts they conquered and ruled; indeed, much of the time they were content to pillage and plunder, and then withdraw from their conquests. But they battered steadily away at the power of the throne at Delhi.

  In 1664, the Marathas launched their first big attack, sacking the Mogul port of Surat. The emperor responded in traditional fashion by trying to buy them off and offering to employ them as a mercenary army – a role they were to fulfil regularly in Clive’s day, selling themselves to the highest bidder. The Marathas refused, and in 1681 launched a frenzied assault on Mogul rule. They were badly beaten and their lands laid waste, but they retaliated with a vicious guerrilla campaign.

  In 1707 Aurungzeb died, and only five years later his son followed him to the grave. A series of succession crises followed, as rival princes sought to install their nominees on the throne. Stability was restored under Muhammad Shah, who asserted himself over his overmighty subjects and ruled until 1748.

  But the empire was already beginning to crumble. Asaf Jah, one of the mightiest Moslem noblemen, was appointed governor of the Deccan in 1713. When he was appointed chief minister to the emperor, the effective ruler of India, he was beset by conspiracies and returned to the Deccan in 1753, which he virtually ruled as an independent state.

  This was not to spare him the attention of the Marathas, though. ‘Let us strike at the trunk of the withering tree and the branches will fall by themselves,’ asserted one of their leaders. A frontal assault was made upon Asaf Jah; as the fighting raged, the French and British settlements watched in anxiety from the Coromandel Coast, which was under the nominal control of the Deccan. The Maratha brushfire eventually subsided, leaving small pockets of the fighters available to local princes in their quarrels.

  The great bulk of the Maratha army, however, swung north and staged an attack upon Delhi itself, in 1738 reaching and plundering its suburbs. Peace was bought by the emperor ceding the province of Malwa, a great slice across India, which cut off Delhi from the Deccan. The empire was now effectively cut into three: the north ruled by the emperor; the centre, ruled by the Marathas; and the south, ruled by Asaf Jah.

  The weakness of the regime in Delhi was noticed by outsiders. The King of Persia, Nadir Shah, launched a sudden invasion of Northern India, razing Delhi, and had to be bought off at a huge cost, leaving a slaughterhouse behind him. ‘The streets were strewn with corpses like a garden with weeds. The city was reduced to ashes and looked like a burnt plain,’ according to an eyewitness. The Peacock Throne was carried off to Persia.

  The Afghans soon invaded too, but were beaten back. In 1748 the Emperor Muhammad Shah died, and civil war broke out among the noble factions. Two emperors were slain, the Afghans attacked again, and the temporary dictator at Delhi called on the Marathas to fight them. To everyone’s astonishment, in this war the fiercest of Indian fighters had met their match, and the Afghans plundered Delhi in 1756–58. The Afghan king, Ahmad Shah Abdali, had no wish to rule, though, and taking his spoils returned to his rugged kingdom, leaving Delhi and the old empire in a state of virtual anarchy.

  These, then, were the five forces that now fought over the bloody corpse of the once mighty Mogul empire: what was left of imperial authority in Delhi; the Marathas; the fierce tribesmen of the North-West Frontier – Persians and Afghans; the semi-independent Moslem noble princes, ruling most parts of India including Bengal and the Deccan; and, last and least, the British, French and Dutch colonial settlers along the coast (the Portuguese had long been eclipsed), who exerted no real political power outside their enclaves up to that time.

  * * *

  All this was now to change; and Dupleix was the first to understand that in a continent where central authority had disintegrated, a small and determined group of well-disciplined troops could take advantage of the hatreds felt by Moslem prince against Moslem prince, Hindu aristocracy against Moslem overlord, Hindu merchant against Hindu prince and Moslem overlord, and Maratha soldier of fortune against anyone with authority, selling himself to those who would pay him most. In a continent already dominated by a foreign power and religion, albeit crumbling, where internal warfare was becoming endemic, the Europeans were no more than another mercantile player in the game, not colonial plunderers.

  Indeed, at first the Hindu majority of India were to welcome the Europeans as less brutal than their Moslem masters. Ordinary people desperately desired order and peace of the kind the Mogul empire had imposed to warfare and insecurity. The Europeans, and in particular Dupleix, could see that what was required was not outright military victory, but an instinctive mind which could pick the winners and, through the judicious deployment of European troops, tilt the balance.

  The Europeans might thus attach themselves to the huge armies of the challengers for power. Once established, their side would be beholden to them; and if the new incumbents tried to turn on the Europeans, the latter would switch their support to their opponents, bringing about their downfall. In this way a small number of Europeans could dominate a large empire. It was the trick that had been practised by the Moguls themselves, until they were blasted away by the Marathas. Even Cortés and Pizarro, founders of the Spanish empire in America, had done the same.

  * * *

  To many modern historians, the French and later British attitudes were simply ‘colonialist’: they were embarked upon the creation of a European empire over large and subject peoples which, in the event, was to last 200 years. Worse, the European powers were subjugating developed cultures beneath a rule that depended on superiority in weaponry alone; it was said that the degree of civilisation of the colonised people was equal, if not superior, to that of the invading power. Even in contemporary Britain, low-born colonial plunderers were to be sneered at as men who had despoiled ancient princes and nobles of their wealth through armed robbery.

  At the time Cliv
e was apprenticed at Fort St George, the motives of the French and the British would seem amply to lend themselves to such an analysis. The European settlements were there, first and foremost, out of commercial greed. Dupleix and Clive were soon to evoke ideals of honour and national interest, but the primary purpose of most of their followers in establishing the Indian empires was plunder. The colonists were usually men of moderate means in their own homelands and intent on enriching themselves as quickly as possible and, in many cases, getting out of the disease-ridden tropics as fast as they could.

  It will be seen later how Clive first began to wrestle with the problem of institutionalising empire through good government and even a sense of moral purpose – something in which he was to be bitterly frustrated, and which was not to occur until several decades later. But there can be no romanticism about the motivation of the first European settlers in India.

  Equally, however, there should be no illusion about the condition of India when the Europeans arrived. India was home to great civilisations, but it was not ‘civilised’ in the secondary meaning of the term. Its governance was based upon force, oppression, exploitation and superstition. While the formal rule of law existed, the concepts of impartial administration, of a contract between ruler and the ruled, of justice, of respect for the law, of non-violence – so vigorously debated in England for centuries, in particular during the previous one, and later to be the core of Gandhi’s teachings – were entirely absent. The ruler was entitled to plunder as much as he could from the ruled who, in turn, were entitled to safeguard as much of their miserable lot as they could from the ruler.

  Moreover, the rulers were themselves foreign colonial oppressors, Moslem overlords from central Asia throttling a Hindu middle class and, beneath that, a peasantry that counted for absolutely nothing at all. As the grip of the Mogul empire collapsed, the rulers were no longer capable of preserving even that minimalist justification for despotism – the protection of life, law and order. The life of ordinary Indians was not just nasty and brutish, but short, liable to be cut off by any of a host of invaders and warring factions. The Hindu middle class, and much of the Moslem aristocracy, yearned for some sort of order, even that imposed by an outside power – a factor Dupleix and Clive were to turn to their advantage by exploiting the very divisions of Moslem rulers.

  It is hard to see the Hindus shrugging off the invasions from the north-east on their own – although the savage and anarchic Marathas were perhaps the nearest equivalent to native freedom-fighters in eighteenth-century India. It seems difficult to deny, though, that the main elements for stability in post-colonial India – democracy, respect for the constitutional order, an impartial judiciary, the settlement of disputes through adjudication, not force or corruption, an army and a civil service at the service of the people rather than its oppressors – were endowed by the Raj in its more mature phase.

  A man may bitterly resent his schooling and, indeed, in many cases, it may have warped him. The Raj was in some ways enlightened, in others cruel and insensitive. But few would say that India would have been better off with no schooling at all. India in the eighteenth century was, in terms of governance, at an infant stage, where the law of the jungle prevailed. Its glittering scientific and architectural achievements, as well as its wealth, were underpinned by the cruelties of the Pharaoh, imperial China and ancient Rome. The atrocities of the Moguls and their warring princes, the depredations of the Marathas, Persians and Afghans, and the avarice of the Hindu upper castes cannot be invoked as forebears by the modern followers of Gandhi.

  Clive’s Indian biographer, Chaudhury, points out that romantic European attitudes towards the Indians underwent a dramatic reappraisal once they had actually made contact with the subcontinent:

  As late as the eighteenth century, if there were any preconceptions regarding India they were all favourable. India was the country of spiritual wisdom, of material splendour, of gentleness of manners and benevolent dispositions. For so thoroughgoing a revolution of opinion to have taken place as soon as direct contact was established there must have been a great shock from the first direct contact.

  Furthermore it should be kept in mind that the new attitude was shaped by empirical experience and the aims of the appraisal were severely practical. The men who formulated the opinions were neither moralists, not theorists, not idealists. They had come from eighteenth-century Europe, which had enough cynical immorality of its own, and they were cynical men. They had to deal with Indians in connection with political and commercial affairs. Dupleix and Bussy, more particularly, acquired a great reputation for their deep insight into the Indian character and their skill in dealing with those who mattered. The respect in which they were held was also due to this very clear-sightedness, for Indians do not admire those that they dupe.

  Dupleix’s view of a noble in Hyderabad is typical of the European attitude, and cannot have been without foundation: ‘Sayyid Lashkar Khan is a very honest man, but an honest man among the Moors is only a rogue elsewhere. They are all possessed by avarice, and they have around them a band of rascals who always prompt a thousand chimeras and a thousand wicked calculations into them, so that one can never count on their constancy in being friendly.’

  Clive’s friend and biographer, Robert Orme, reflected a no more favourable British attitude when he wrote, ‘The governments of Indostan have no idea of national honour in the conduct of their politics; and as soon as they think the party with whom they are engaged is reduced to great distress, they shift, without hesitation, their alliance to the opposite side, making immediate advantage the only rule of their action.’

  Of the Moslem princes he wrote: ‘A domineering insolence towards all who are in subjection to them, ungovernable wilfulness, inhumanity, cruelty, murders, and assassinations, deliberated with the same calmness and subtlety as the rest of their politics, an insensibility to remorse for these crimes, which are scarcely considered otherwise than as necessary accidents in the course of life, sensual excesses which revolt against nature, unbounded thirst for power, and an expaciousness of wealth equal to the extravagance of his propensities and vices – this is the character of the Indian Moor, who is of consequence sufficient to have any character at all.’

  Orme acknowledged that the Moslem ruling class was scrupulously polite, yet:

  the politeness of other nations may have risen from a natural ease and happiness of temper, a point of honour, the idea a man conveys of himself by the respect he shows to others; but the decorum with which the common ceremonies and occurrences of life are conducted in Indostan, is derived from the constant idea of subordination, joined to a constant habit of the deepest disguise and dissimulation of the heart. In Indostan every man may literally be said to be the maker of his own fortune. Great talents, unawed by scruples of conscience, seldom fail of success: from hence all persons of distinction are seen running in the same course. The perseverance necessary to attain his end teaches every man to bear and forbear contrary to the common instincts of human nature: hence arises their politeness … The general competition has put an end to mutual confidence; a sensibility capable of discerning everything, is soon taught a disguise capable of concealing everything. Where morality has no check upon ambition, it must form the blackest resolutions; and the dissimulation necessary to carry these into execution will, amongst a people circumstanced as I have described them, be carried into excess, which different manners and better mortals will scarcely imagine human nature to be capable of.

  At least the Moslems were usually passive oppressors, as another English observer noted: ‘As they sit for the most part (when they are not with their women) upon their sofas, smoking, and amusing themselves with their jewels, taking coffee or sweetmeats, seeing their quails fight, or such pastimes, nothing surprises them so much as to see a European walk about a room; and none but their very young people ever ride for amusement or exercise only.’

  The Hindus instead were astute and energetic and could expiate guil
t by paying the priests. Orme cited the example of the Rajah of Travancore, who was told by the brahmins that he must repent by being born out of the womb of a cow. A golden cow was made in which the rajah sat for several days before being ‘born’; the cow was divided up among the priests.

  Chaudhury emphasises that these faults were those of the ruling class, not the great majority of Indians, who were poor and oppressed, brutalised by crippling taxation and from time to time slaughtered in war or mutilated and raped by the Marathas. The defects were not racial but those of an indolent but tough-minded élite.

  * * *

  In 1748, Asaf Jah, the mighty and quasi-independent ruler of the Deccan (southern India) died, and a succession struggle began. Dupleix saw his chance to bring French support to install his candidate on the throne. This was Muzaffar Jang, who was backed by the powerful Chanda Sahib, the aspirant to the lesser throne of the Carnatic itself – the man who had infuriated Dupleix at one time by attacking his forces at Madras. Install these two, he believed, and he would become master of a third of India, the south, containing some 30 million people.

  In August 1749, these two Indian princes and their French allies attacked and decisively defeated the Nawab of the Carnatic’s forces, killing their ruler. His younger son, Muhammad Ali, who had led the force that supported the British at Fort St David, escaped, and with a small force galloped some 250 miles to the fort town of Trichinopoly. Chanda Sahib now controlled most of the Carnatic, and rewarded the French with generous grants of land around Pondicherry.