Clive

by Robert Harvey

* * *

  At the time of Clive’s departure, Shah Alum, the Shahzada, the tough-minded heir to the Mogul throne, once again decided to make a direct attack on the western front of the British dominions in India. Major Caillaud had been despatched with troops to reinforce Ramnarayan, once again, at Patna. Miran insisted on accompanying the British force with a large army. Ramnarayan, thus encouraged, attacked the Shahzada’s forces and was badly mauled, himself being wounded. But Caillaud’s rapid advance compelled the Shahzada to withdraw before he could capture Patna. On 22 February the two armies met, Caillaud’s army attacking the Shahzada on one flank, the latter concentrating the bulk of his forces against Miran’s large but incompetently led force on the other side. Miran’s army was forced back, but Caillaud’s men went to its help and drove off the Shahzada’s force in disorder.

  Miran, however, who had been slightly wounded, refused to pursue them – to British disgust – and the Shahzada rallied his forces. Meanwhile his father, the Mogul Emperor, had been murdered in Delhi. On hearing this, the Shahzada proclaimed himself Emperor – Shah Alum – King of the World – and, with support from the small French force still headed by Jean Law, once again attacked Patna. This time Caillaud’s and Ramnarayan’s forces charged out of the city and decisively defeated him.

  Caillaud, like Clive before him, decided to pacify the border province by razing the villages that had supported the new emperor. Miran refused to take part, only to be killed in extraordinary circumstances. Some alleged that Caillaud had him murdered, although there is no evidence for this. The official story is that he was struck by lightning in his tent; one witness said that his body was found full of holes, with his sword melted by his side.

  So perished yet another opponent of British rule in India, albeit a deeply unsavoury one; whatever the truth, it was poetic justice for the man who had ordered the murder of Siraj-ud-Daula. What was immediately apparent was that the death of Miran knocked the stuffing out of his father.

  * * *

  With the departure of some ten members of the council in Calcutta to enjoy their new-found wealth in England, the self-important Holwell had been left in charge. He quickly decided that it would now be easier to depose Mir Jafar and for the British to rule Bengal directly. Clive had previously rejected such an option, because he believed the British lacked sufficient forces to control the whole province.

  Caillaud, the British commander, rejected Holwell’s view, and succeeded in blocking his plans until Vansittart arrived to take up his post as governor. Just 28 years old, an aristocrat by the standards of the British in India, foppish, vain and good-looking, offending local tradition by insisting that his wife and her friends accompany him on meetings with senior Moslems, who kept their women well away from men’s business, Vansittart espoused Holwell’s rash idea – with a difference.

  The new governor’s plan was to replace the incompetent, obstinate and ailing Mir Jafar with a more pliable ruler who, in addition, would agree to substantial further concessions to the British, to appease the Company directors in Leadenhall Street as well as further to enrich the colonists. The Nawab’s brother-in-law, Mir Kasim, had long been pressing his claims. He insisted that Mir Jafar was implacably hostile to the British and that he, Mir Kasim, would do their bidding. He also bribed Holwell lavishly.

  Deeply suspicious, Caillaud argued that Mir Kasim should instead replace Ramnarayan as governor of Bihar province, where he would be remote from the centre of power. However, Caillaud’s own candidate for the succession to Mir Jafar, Rai Durlabh, had been closely identified with the infamous Miran. Vansittart sent for Mir Kasim in the summer of 1760. On arrival in Calcutta, the latter asked the British to install him as Nawab. This they refused to do, but agreed to make him the Nawab’s chief minister and thus the obvious successor to Mir Jafar should he die – in exchange, of course, for lavish promises of money and territory to the British when he took power.

  The conceited Vansittart and the self-important Holwell had entirely misjudged their man. Mir Kasim, by contrast with most of the senior Bengali rulers at the time, was energetic, extremely clever and ambitious – as well as being possessed of the psychopathic ruthlessness of a Siraj-ud-Daula or a Miran. Vansittart and Holwell believed that having an energetic and more intelligent Nawab would render the task of ruling Bengal easier than under the doddery Mir Jafar.

  In fact, a weak ruler was in the British interest; a strong one extremely dangerous. It has been suggested that Vansittart was in fact an enlightened figure who sincerely believed, 200 years ahead of his time, in returning Bengal to local rulers; there is little to support this. All the evidence suggests he was deceived and bribed by Mir Kasim into believing he would be more pliable.

  Vansittart and Caillaud set out in October with a large force of European soldiers for Murshidabad. There they found Mir Jafar implacably opposed to the idea of having his brother-in-law as chief minister. Almost certainly, the old man believed he would be murdered as soon as British backs were turned. There were rumours that Miran had, in fact, been assassinated on Mir Kasim’s orders. The Nawab had been a shadow of his former self since his son’s death.

  Caillaud resorted to strong-arm tactics, surrounding the Nawab’s Motijhil palace and insisting that Mir Kasim be installed as chief minister. At length Mir Jafar capitulated – and astonished the British by abdicating provided they agreed to give him protection from his successor. Mir Kasim was promoted to Nawab, while the befuddled old man was taken to Calcutta under British escort. Thus ended the career of the man whom Clive had elevated to Nawab – or so it seemed.

  Carnac was horrified: ‘I should have been extremely sorry to have had a hand in bringing it about, and I think it will vex Colonel Clive sorely. We can never expect to be trusted again, after having sacrificed the man we had so solemnly taken by the hand. I would not be prevailed upon to see, and the shock would have been too great for me to behold his downfall, the person whom Mr Clive had been the sole instrument raising.’

  The next step for the British was to secure the indispensable seal of approval for the new Nawab from the emperor. At this stage, Vansittart conceived an extraordinary fantasy, instructing Caillaud to open negotiations with Shah Alum with the intention of giving British support to his campaign to take over the throne of Delhi. The idea was to emulate Clive and rule all of northern India through a puppet emperor.

  There were two obstacles, however: Shah Alum remained hostile to the British, and the new British commander, Carnac, Clive’s old confidant and a realist, realised there was no prospect of negotiation. Accordingly he launched a largely successful attack on Shah Alum’s forces, capturing Jean Law and most of the French party at last, and seeking the emperor’s firman when Shah Alum was forced to sue for peace.

  Vansittart stubbornly revived his grandiose policy of an alliance with Shah Alum, under which British troops would install him on the throne in Delhi. The enterprising young man now readily agreed. The whole idea was pure folly: the success of such an expedition so far from supply lines from Calcutta was anything but certain; and to strip Bengal of its defences in pursuit of this alternative would have been to invite a seizure of power by Mir Kasim.

  Fortunately, Mir Kasim was himself so enraged by the proposal that he failed to reach this conclusion himself. He saw the British aim as being to install one of their own placemen in Delhi who would then strip him of his authority in Bengal. He would not support the proposed British expedition, refused to swear allegiance to the emperor, and recalled his army from Carnac’s command.

  The British commander was enraged, but Vansittart pursued his policy of appeasement towards Mir Kasim. However, the directors in London had appointed Clive’s old sparring partner, Sir Eyre Coote, as the new commander of British forces in Bengal, and he now arrived in Patna to take up this post. Coote, cussed and obstinate as ever, insisted that Mir Kasim come to Patna to swear his allegiance to Shah Alum. The Nawab, encamped outside the city, refused to do so. Lacking his backing, Shah
Alum eventually left for Delhi without British support, scuppering Vansittart’s ambitious plan to bring all of northern India under indirect British rule.

  Furiously, Coote demanded an audience with Mir Kasim and, when this was denied, rampaged through the camp ‘in a great passion, with his horsemen, peons, sepoys, and others, with a cocked pistol in each hand … uttering God-dammees into my tent’, as the Nawab later complained. At long last Mir Kasim was persuaded to swear allegiance to the emperor.

  Based in Calcutta, Vansittart seethed at this disrespect shown by Coote to the new Nawab and at the failure of his plan to march on Delhi, which he blamed on Coote’s insubordination. In fact Coote, like the other British commanders, had seen through Mir Kasim.

  * * *

  The new Nawab had won half a battle: the proposed collaboration between the British and the emperor had failed. He now sought to oust the old enemy of central power in Bengal, Ramnarayan, Governor of Bihar, who had been so loyal to the British. The ridiculous Vansittart was persuaded, and possibly bribed, to suspend Ramnarayan from his post. Coote was appalled, writing from Patna that he was ‘heartily tired of being employed for a service where there is so much corruption and villainy’.

  Ramnarayan, one of the staunchest allies of the British, had his wealth stripped from him and was then murdered. The message was clear. The British were prepared to deliver up their Hindu allies to the new Nawab. Clive’s subtle power structure of checks and balances – the regional noblemen checking the central authority, the Hindu merchant class balancing the Moslem aristocracy – lay in ruins.

  Mir Kasim now embarked on a reign of terror in Murshidabad. All potential enemies were placed under surveillance. The Hindu merchants were watched closely. The Seths were placed under house arrest. The seething cauldron of conspiracy that was Murshidabad under both Mir Kasim’s predecessors was taken off the boil by his ruthlessness. Mir Kasim switched his capital to Monghyr, away from possible plots.

  The new Nawab dispensed with the sprawling Bengali army and began to recruit a much more effective one consisting of European mercenaries and deserters; his right-hand man in this task was a former French sergeant, by trade a butcher, Walter Reinhardt, under the Indian alias of Sumru.

  Thus equipped, Mir Kasim began to challenge the power of the British at their weakest point: the grotesque economic exploitation under their rule. In May 1762 his soldiers began to stop ships bearing the Company flag and to search British trading agents. The notorious agents retaliated, beating up the Nawab’s officials on a number of occasions. Mir Kasim complained angrily to the British, and Vansittart sought to meet him halfway: in this matter, at least, the Nawab held the moral high ground.

  The governor met him at his new capital of Monghyr in December 1762, and agreed on a new regime of tariffs, as well as the right of the Nawab’s officials to decide disputes. Vansittart and his cronies also accepted a substantial bribe, estimated at around £200,000. On his return to the capital, he found the whole British community up in arms at this act of appeasement and apparent sellout. The council refused to ratify the agreement.

  Angrily, Mir Kasim promptly announced that equal duties would now be levied on everyone, including Company agents, and in March announced that duties would be removed altogether. This was immensely popular among the miserably oppressed peasantry and merchants, but it was a final slap in the face and declaration of independence from the British, most of whose profit came from these levies.

  Vansittart immediately sought talks with him, but he announced that he would receive British envoys only if they were unaccompanied by soldiers. Meanwhile those old British allies, the Seths, were arrested in Murshidabad and brought to Monghyr. The two British envoys, Hay and Amyatt, were insulted and at length only the latter was permitted to leave Monghyr. In July Hay and his few retainers were set upon outside Murshidabad and he was killed, his head being presented to the Nawab.

  Mir Kasim hurried his armies up to Patna. There was talk that he had forged a pact with the most powerful prince in north India, the Nawab of Oudh, the de facto ruler in Delhi. The British commander outside Patna, William Ellis, staged a pre-emptive strike, seizing the city. However, while his force was engaged on a punitive expedition outside Patna, the Nawab’s forces seized it back. Ellis’s small army was surrounded and forced to surrender.

  Matters had now almost reverted to what they had been at the time Siraj-ud-Daula seized Calcutta six years before, in advance of Clive’s conquest: a state of undeclared war existed between the British and the ruler of Bengal. The difference this time was that the British had a good and well-commanded army in the field. Of the five powers that ran Bengal after Clive’s departure, four – the directors in London, the governor, the council and the Company agents – were all either venal or incompetent or both. Only the soldiers were to save the day, displaying both tactical ability and political good sense.

  * * *

  In early July, the council at last declared war on Mir Kasim, and Mir Jafar was nominally reinstated as Nawab at Murshidabad. To the colonists’ intense relief, it was quickly apparent that Mir Kasim, for all his energy, brutality and shrewdness, had overreached himself militarily. A considerable British force under Major Thomas Adams marched on Monghyr, winning a series of engagements against Mir Kasim’s forces, which while much more effective than the giant Indian armies of the past, were ill-trained and ill-motivated by comparison with the British troops and their sepoys. In August Adams secured the redoubt of Undwa Nala, defended by 40,000 men, and took 100 cannon.

  Mir Kasim retreated to Patna as the British force approached, taking the Seths with him; on the way he had them beheaded – partly to impress the British, partly because they were part of a plot against him. Thus ended the career of the Banker of the World and his brother, possibly the richest men in India, who had played so crucial a role in Clive’s seizure of power and subsequent government of Bengal. Ramnarayan was drowned by Mir Kasim’s men in the Ganges with a bag of sand tied around his neck.

  The following day, Mir Kasim’s chief military commander was also executed, almost certainly because he had been implicated in the plot with the Seths. The ruthlessness of the man Vansittart and Holwell had naively installed as Nawab had not yet reached its apogee. Early in October he reached Patna, just as Adams, after a string of victories, captured Monghyr itself.

  Out of revenge, Mir Kasim ordered the British troops and civilians captured at Patna to be executed. Reinhardt – alias Sumru, his right-hand man – ordered his troops to surround the prison on 6 October. There then followed a massacre much less well known but even more horrific than the Black Hole of Calcutta in numbers, in the premeditation with which it was carried out – Mir Kasim had directly instructed Sumru to do the deed – and in its method.

  The three senior Britons were summoned to Sumru’s presence and promptly cut to bits, their remains being thrown down a well. The remainder were then attacked with swords and other weapons, prompting a furious fight by the doomed men using the few pieces of wood and bottles that came to hand. Every one of around 100 soldiers and 50 officers and civilians was slaughtered.

  This atrocity against a European power was unprecedented. But the political reverberations were to be far smaller than the Black Hole, which had been used as a cover both for the English humiliation in Bengal and for Clive’s subsequent conquest of the country. It was an atrocity that shrieked to the very gates of hell.

  As Adams’s army advanced remorselessly against what Carnac labelled the ‘most obstinate resistance infinitely above whatever was made by a black army before’, Mir Kasim abandoned Patna which, after a ten-day siege, the British successfully stormed. The British commander then turned his attention to pursuing Mir Kasim – but stopped at the border of the British dominions – the Karamnassa river between Bihar and Oudh – which he refused to cross without authorisation from Calcutta. To pursue Mir Kasim was one thing; to declare war on Oudh another. Soon afterwards the formidable Adams was taken ill an
d had to return to Calcutta, where he died.

  The ever-resourceful and vicious Mir Kasim now entered an alliance not just with the Nawab of Oudh, but with the former fierce enemy of them both, Shah Alum, the young Mogul Emperor. The danger of a united front between the three was a serious one for the British, particularly because of the reputation of the Nawab of Oudh, who was effectively the ruler at Delhi and a far more impressive warrior and statesman than either the bold but ill-supported emperor, or the vicious Mir Kasim.

  By January 1764, lacking proper leadership, the European forces, some of them French, who had captured Patna under Adams were mutinous. Some defected to the enemy, the remainder being bought off. This prompted a mutiny by the sepoys, who similarly had to be remunerated. Carnac, in the nick of time, arrived to take control. He advanced over the river a short way to Buxar, reluctant to extend his lines further.

  His caution proved all too sensible. The swollen army of the three Indian allies moved around his flank into Bihar to cut him off. He fell back swiftly to avoid this, attracting fatuous criticism from the armchair generals in Calcutta. On 3 May 1764 a ferocious battle was fought lasting all day, on which the survival of British rule in Bengal hung by a thread, and the Indian army was at last pushed back. But Carnac did not have the strength to go in pursuit, and the loyalty of his troops was also in doubt. In Calcutta, the council was furious at his ‘inaction’, although any hot pursuit could have ended in a military disaster for the British – which so far had been avoided by the narrowest of margins.

  More worrying still, Mir Jafar himself had begun to intrigue against the British as of old, probably out of fear that he might be toppled in a plot, and insisted on the appointment of the unsavoury Nundcomar as his chief minister. It was soon reliably reported that the latter was negotiating with the three Indian allies. The prospect of the triple alliance against the British being joined by an internal insurrection within Bengal was alarming. Carnac was treading on very thin ice indeed. Clive’s empire was tottering.