Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  By virtue of an imperial grant dating back thirty years, the Company’s establishments in Bengal claimed exemption from customs duties in return for a lump sum paid direct to the Nawab, who was the Moghul’s regent, kinsman, and governor for what was the richest province in the whole empire. Negotiations as to the amount and frequency of such payments had to be reopened with each new Nawab; but the beauty of this system was that in principle it eliminated the far worse wrangles and delays that would result from dealing with the numerous and none too scrupulous officials to whom customs and excise collection was farmed. In practice, of course, the Company was never free of local exactions; and as trade increased so did the need to lubricate all moving parts in what was necessarily a most cumbersome commercial machine. But in about 1680 the situation had been rendered intolerable by the imposition of a five per cent duty on imported bullion and a three and a half per cent duty on exports – in addition to the lump sum payment. The Nawab responsible was the recently reappointed and very able Shaista Khan and it was to demand redress that Hedges soon presented himself at Dhaka, the Nawab’s capital (and now that of Bangladesh).

  Whatever the Company might think, though, and whatever Hedges might demand, the fact was that the Moghul emperor, through his provincial governors, was entitled to tax foreign traders as he saw fit. They had come as uninvited guests and they continued at his pleasure. Except in Bombay and Madras the Company had no territorial rights and even its commercial privileges had no validity beyond the reign of whoever had granted them.

  But this is not to say that the English were merely tolerated. When Hedges duly played his last card and threatened to withdraw all the Company’s factors from Bengal, Shaista Khan was deeply and genuinely concerned. The days of Elizabeth and Akbar when European trade to India had been valued principally for its limited stock of novelties, trinkets and sporting dogs had long since passed. In the period 1681-5 the Company would export, mainly to Moghul India, a grand total of 240,000 kg of silver and nearly 7000 kg of gold. With Aurangzeb’s armies permanently locked in combat with either Afghans or Marathas, the demand for coin throughout the empire was unprecedented and to an important extent it was being met by the European trading companies. Additionally the manufacturing industries of Gujarat, the Tamil country and Bengal had come to depend on Europe’s insatiable demand for cottons and silks. And although on land the trading companies were militarily insignificant, at sea they retained that potential for nuisance which Henry Middleton had discovered and which John Child was to essay with a blast of ‘air from my bum’.

  All in all then an uneasy and unwritten reciprocity underlay relations between the Company and the Moghul authorities. Instead of fleas on the back of Aurangzeb’s imperial elephant, the European companies were more like egrets busily delousing the Moghul water-buffalo. They pecked and flapped about the imperial person knowing full well that their humble services, although mildly irritating, were both appreciated and necessary. And of this symbiotic relationship neither party quite lost sight, either in the protracted negotiations undertaken by Hedges or in the hostilities which rapidly succeeded them.

  In the event Hedges came away from the Nawab’s court at Dhaka well satisfied. In return for various sureties, Shaista Khan had agreed to petition the emperor for a renewal of the Company’s customs exemption and in the meantime to give the Company a period of grace. ‘I bless God,’ wrote Hedges in his diary, ‘for the great success I have had, beyond all men’s expectations.’ He reckoned to have saved his honourable masters £20,000 per annum and, once the imperial farman should arrive, he confidently predicted that its preferential terms would give the Company such a commercial edge over its competitors that it ‘shall never more be much troubled with interlopers’.

  Supplementing Hedges’s diary with the visual cameos afforded by Moghul paintings of the period, there emerges a vivid impression of what was probably – with the Emperor himself forever in the field – the most refined court in India at the time. Hard bargaining was left to intercessors and intermediaries operating behind the latticed scenes. Meanwhile Hedges and the old Nawab observed the niceties of civilized intercourse, exchanging mutual flatteries and waiving minor points of etiquette (which the Englishman construed as a ‘greater kindness than he has ever shewn before to any Christian’). Hedges, as a one-time director of the Levant Company, had spent some years in Constantinople. He spoke Turkish and Arabic and he relished the courtly values of the Islamic world; brocade diplomacy was his speciality.

  How very different was the coarse, vituperative and money-grubbing atmosphere which awaited him at the Company’s Kasimbazar establishment in west Bengal. Here merchants bickered over who should have the raw silk sweepings from the factory floor; with a commission on this and a backhander for that, scarce a man was not busily lining his own pocket. But the level of corruption was a direct reflection of the level of trade; the more silk passing through the warehouses, the more sweepings for feathering factors’ nests. Thus the man who presided over this turbulent mob, the indestructible Job Charnock, was both the most abrasive and yet the most effective of all the Company’s Indian factors.

  Whereas Hedges’s considerable vanity was flattered by the company of Moghul courtiers, Charnock was at home with their Hindu agents and subjects. Smitten rather than outraged, he had once snatched a young Hindu girl from her husband’s funeral pyre and now lived contentedly with the sari-ed maiden and her extended Indian family. His Christianity was suspect and he was certainly every bit as venal and cantankerous as the worst of his subordinates. But he had been in Bengal long enough to know its trade backwards. From the money-lending Seths or the tax-gathering Chands, as from the weavers and growers, he stood no nonsense. In his warehouses substantial cargoes were always ready for the next ship to call at ‘The Bay’ and over the years he had won the confidence of the directors back in London. In their book ‘good honest Job’ could do no wrong. True he perhaps lacked those finer points of breeding desirable in a President – and he had in fact been passed over in the promotion race, most recently by the appointment of Hedges – but that in no way prejudiced his standing with the directors and in particular with Sir Josiah Child whose long and influential career as a director of the Company had begun in 1677.

  That Hedges would clash with Charnock and his companions was thus understandable. In fact by appointing outsiders to investigate and adjudicate in the affairs of its regular factors – while at the same time encouraging those same regular factors to report direct and in secret to London – the Company seemed positively to encourage an atmosphere of distrust and rancour. Within weeks of Hedges’s return from Dhaka, accusations and counter-accusations were passing up and down the river between Hedges at Hughli town and Charnock at Kasimbazar with the regularity of the dreaded tidal bore. Each in turn accused the other of peculation, nepotism, atheism, entertaining interlopers, fornicating with heathens and any other crime considered heinous enough to win censure from the Court of Committees in London. Tough-skinned and frankly contemptuous, Charnock had seen off Hedges’s predecessor and did not doubt that the new Agent would soon follow. But to the refined and unhappy Hedges these base insinuations were ‘insufferable’. ‘I can no more bear them than an honest virtuous woman can be questioned for her chastity’, he moaned. ‘It’s absolutely necessary that one of us two be replaced.’

  Hedges could not have known that even as he penned this cri de coeur the directors in London were reaching precisely the same conclusion. Six months later, in July 1684, word duly reached Bengal that Agent Hedges had been dismissed the service and that their establishments in Bengal were again to come under the governorship of Madras. The reason given for terminating so abruptly the services of one in whom they had supposedly placed their confidence was that Hedges, or one of his over-zealous supporters, had intercepted private letters from one of Charnock’s henchmen to Sir Josiah Child. Significantly, more heinous in Child’s eyes than adultery or malpractice was the crime of having interf
ered with his system of informers.

  This pernicious system would last as long as the Company, and although the charge of subverting it would ever be of the most serious, it was not Child’s invention. He merely exploited it for his own often devious purposes. Never, in more than 150 years from the time of William Hawkins till that of Warren Hastings, did the Company in London master its profound distrust of its overseas employees or encourage among them the development of a responsible command structure. In Bantam, Surat, Bombay and Madras the same spectacle of bickering and bitterly divided factors would be witnessed year in and year out. Occasionally, and thanks mainly to the high mortality in the East, outstanding talents rose to the fore and commanded widespread respect. But this was in spite of the Company’s direction, rarely because of it; and invariably such luminaries were eventually disowned or discredited. The pleas repeatedly voiced by Hedges that he be accorded the confidence and authority to carry out the task for which he had been appointed would be repeated almost word for word by Warren Hastings a century later. By then Calcutta was ‘the city of palaces’ and Hastings Governor-General of a sizeable chunk of the Indian subcontinent; but in this one crucial respect nothing had changed.

  Observing the unseemly Hedges-Charnock affair from the scented halls of his seraglio in Dhaka, Shaista Khan drew the obvious conclusion. ‘The English are a company of base, quarrelling people, and foul dealers’, he muttered as he ordered one of Charnock’s henchmen to be removed from court. Any intention he had had of interceding for such men in the matter of their customs exemption was now far from his mind. On the contrary, he pressed them for the duties which had accrued in the intervening months and showed more favour to the Dutch and to the detested interlopers than to the Honourable Company. Compared to the well-regulated Dutch company, which also had a chain of factories stretching up the Hughli river, the English seemed as keen to sell their brethren as their bullion. In short, they were fair game and their divisions played into the Nawab’s hands.

  Hedges had advised that if the English were ever to be masters of their destiny in Bengal they must seek a fortified settlement there equivalent to Bombay or Madras. He understood the Dutch were contemplating something similar and he strongly recommended the island of Sagar at the mouth of the Hughli. As the Nawab leant ever harder on the Company’s upriver factories, Charnock at Kasimbazar and Child in London also came to accept the need for drastic action. But instead of quietly occupying Sagar, a move which would probably have entailed an immediate interruption of trade plus the long-term expense of fortifications, they resolved on a show of strength with the Nawab to make him ‘sensible of our power as we have of our truth and justice’. The idea seems to have been that they would continue to trade – but at the point of a gun – while at the same time prospecting for a permanent base and ideally one that was already fortified.

  Such was the muddled thinking that lay behind the Moghul War, or sometimes ‘Child’s War’, the results of which in so far as they affected Bombay and Surat have already been noticed. Interrupting the movement of Indian shipping in the Arabian Sea was all part of the plan but the main thrust of the attack was to be made where the main provocation was perceived – in Bengal. And to this end two ships carrying three companies of infantry arrived at the mouth of the Hughli river in the autumn of 1686.

  ‘308 soldiers to make war on an empire which had at that moment an army of at least 100,000 men in the field’, writes Sir William Hunter in his History of British India. With a fine sense of the absurdity of it all Hunter reckons that the Nawab alone had 40,000 troops at his command. ‘Conceived in ludicrous ignorance of the geographical distances and with astounding disregard of the opposing forces’ here was a contest with all the ingredients for sublime tragedy plus limitless scope for personal heroics; a foretaste perhaps of Clive at Arcot, or more likely a repeat of the Run blockade and the Amboina Massacre.

  Yet not so. With extraordinary perversity the war insisted on taking a course of its own which bore no more relationship to the show of force that was intended than it did to the sound drubbing that was invited. For a start, it was never actually declared. Somehow the Company’s ultimatum which was to have signalled the outbreak of hostilities never reached the Nawab. He must, however, have had some inkling of trouble for long before the invasion force reached Bengali soil he took the precaution of surrounding the Company’s headquarters in Hughli with a few thousand troops. They were well behaved and, having no clear idea why 308 infantrymen from the other side of the world should choose to land in their midst, they duly permitted the newcomers to join their fellow-countrymen in the English factory.

  Oddly, as it must have seemed to the Nawab’s troops, these alien soldiers included no officers above the rank of lieutenant. In their wisdom the Company’s directors had decreed that the conduct of their ‘warr with the Moghul’ would best be left to their much mistrusted factors and their passing ships’ captains, overall command being reserved for the head of the Hughli factory. There was no way that the directors could have known that this worthy had in fact succumbed during the previous monsoon, leaving the indestructible Job Charnock of Kasimbazar as the senior factor. Thus to ‘good, honest Job’, still wheeling and dealing to his heart’s content and a man with no military experience whatsoever, it fell to command the assault on the most powerful empire in Asia.

  According to his instructions, this assault was not to be made from Hughli. The object of landing troops there seems to have been simply that of protecting the factory while its considerable stocks of saltpetre (‘soe necessary and valewable at this time’) were transferred to river craft. The English were then to take to their ships, waylay Moghul vessels in the river, and eventually stage an invasion by taking Chittagong, a place which figured largely in Sir Josiah Child’s calculations as the Achilles heel of the Moghul empire. The war thus began with the contradictory spectacle of the invaders endeavouring to withdraw, while the invaded, ever mindful of the value of European trade, sought to persuade them to stay.

  As recorded by Charnock, hostilities actually commenced on 28 October 1686 when three of his soldiers, going peaceably about their shopping in the Hughli bazaar, were (reportedly) ‘beate, cut, and carried prisoner’ to the town’s governor. Without waiting to establish the circumstances, ‘Colonel’ Charnock responded with a series of ferocious reprisals during which the town’s guns were spiked, a Moghul ship was taken, and several houses set on fire. Only one English soldier was killed to the sixty fatalities of the enemy. ‘We had an absolute conquest and might have made the towne our own’, crowed the jubilant ‘Colonel’, oblivious of the fact that the Nawab might well have settled for just such an outcome. But Charnock had his orders and they ‘would not beare us out’; he was not to occupy Hughli but evacuate it.

  To allow time for the loading of the saltpetre, a ceasefire was agreed and desultory negotiations were opened. They were still going on when, the warehouse at last empty, Charnock duly embarked his whole contingent and sailed downriver. No attempt was made either to hasten his departure or to prevent it. ‘Our coming off was very peaceable.’ If anything the evidence suggests that Charnock was as reluctant to leave as his hosts were to see him go. But he was not going far. Having followed to the word the Company’s orders to evacuate Hughli, he now flatly contradicted their spirit by landing his entire force just twenty miles downstream.

  The spot chosen was a long deep-water basin where the river curled to the west leaving a high mud ridge on its eastern flank. Although technically accessible to ocean-going ships at high tide, it was still seventy miles from the sea up a river which English skippers were as yet reluctant to navigate in any vessel over 300 tons. It was not much better than Hughli in this respect and, according to Charnock, it was even more vulnerable to attack by land. But at least it commanded the river and was well removed from the Moghul centres of power. Here negotiations could continue on more neutral ground while he cast about for alternative sites for a fortified base. He calle
d the place ‘Chuttanutteea’ after the neighbouring village of Sutanati; others called it ‘Kalikata’ and eventually Calcutta after another nearby village, Kalighat.

  During the winter months of 1686-7 negotiations with the nawab’s representatives seemed to be going well. In his mud and timber huts beside the river Charnock drew up his terms – a site for a fort, all the usual customs exemptions, and the payment of an outrageous indemnity of 6.6 million rupees (including one item of 2 million rupees for ‘1000 men and 20 ships for the warr’). Amazingly an agreement in principle seemed to be forthcoming. But in reality both sides were playing for time.

  As per the Company’s orders, Charnock was now supposed to have taken the offensive by attacking the Moghul marine and storming the town of Chittagong. But he lacked the men and ships for such an extensive programme, only a third of those originally intended for Bengal having materialized. It may be, therefore, that he was waiting for reinforcements. More plausibly he was also hoping that his instructions would be cancelled. For he realized that if carried out to the letter they would antagonize the Emperor as well as the Nawab and so ‘forfeit all our trade in the Bay’. Similarly the Nawab banked on the English in time coming to their senses. He understood their reluctance to jeopardize such a valuable trade and, seeing no reason for generous concessions, sought to prolong the negotiations. He therefore adopted his usual ploy of repudiating the agreement already reached in principle.