Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  In 1782, with Hughes obliged to retire to Bombay for refitting, Suffren briefly enjoyed complete supremacy on The Coast, raiding the Company’s settlements in the Circars and capturing supply vessels as far north as the mouth of the Hughli. Madras itself looked doomed until December brought better news; Hyder Ali had died – according to Colonel Love, ‘of a carbuncle in the district now called North Arcot’ or, as the Madras Council reported, ‘of the violent discharge of a boil upon his back’.

  Hastings was convinced that the tide was finally turning. In spite of destructive and unauthorized meddling by both Bombay and Madras, his diplomatic overtures to the Marathas were having effect. Any threat to Bengal had been removed by neutralizing subsidies to the Bhonslas while in the north Scindia had been converted from enemy number one to peacemaker and go-between in negotiations with Poona. The great confederacy was thus split and the resultant treaty of Salbai, worked out in 1782 though not ratified till later, came to be regarded by Hastings as one of his crowning achievements.

  ‘We want nothing from the Marathas except an alliance against Hyder’, he had written; and that, plus the retention of Salsette and a pledge from Poona not to admit the French, was all he got. Gwalior and Ahmadabad were surrendered; so were lesser acquisitions round Bombay like Bassein and Broach; no indemnity was involved. For four years of crippling expense and less than glorious campaigning, the compensation was minimal. In the crude terms used to evaluate advantage by Clive’s generation, Salbai looked like a climbdown and, by the next generation, like a stopgap. More recently its terms have been described as ‘humiliating’ (P. Nightingale).

  But to Hastings it appeared otherwise; (and likewise to Luard in the Cambridge History of India; ‘its importance cannot be over-estimated…[as] the turning point in the history of the English in India’). Allies like the Gaikwar had been rewarded, pledges in respect of Gwalior had been honoured, Scindia’s attachment to the British secured. Calcutta had substantiated its right to conduct the external affairs of the other settlements and to deal honourably and on terms of equality with India’s major power-broker. In the past local commanders and governors had too often sacrificed the Company’s broader interests for immediate financial or territorial gain. Such had been the cause of both the Maratha and Mysore wars, and it had to stop. Hastings rejected as impracticable the idea that the Company should forgo its political responsibilities and revert to a trading body, and as undesirable the idea that it must inevitably aspire to an all-Indian supremacy. Instead it should aim to exert, from behind its ring fence of subordinate states, a stabilizing and responsible influence as one among several of the subcontinent’s powers.

  The keystones of Salbai were therefore a provision whereby both signatories undertook to oblige their allies to observe the peace indefinitely and, following from that, a provision whereby the Marathas were to force Hyder Ali, their erstwhile ally, to withdraw from the Carnatic and likewise observe the peace thereafter. Here was the basis for a comprehensive and lasting settlement. It did indeed justify Hastings’s boast of ‘preserving India to Great Britain’ and should have been the Company’s noblest bequest to its successors in Whitehall. But Hastings was reckoning without his still obdurate colleagues on The Coast. If the treaty of Salbai foreshadowed a future in which the British were to play their part as an integrated and responsible polity, the treaty of Mangalore, which would end the Mysore War, resurrected the bad old days when it was each Presidency for itself and devil take the consequences.

  To the glad tidings of Hyder’s timely death in December 1782 had been added news of a highly successful incursion into Mysore territory by part of the Bombay army, now freed from its Maratha commitments and operating against the common enemy from the Malabar Coast. As with the Marathas at Gwalior, Mysore had thus been taken in the rear and Tipu was immediately obliged to withdraw troops from the Carnatic and hasten home to meet the new threat. This should have provided Madras with an opportunity to strike back. But so obsessed was the Madras Council with the French presence and so dismal were the relations between its civil and military authorities that no advantage was taken of the situation.

  In a dazzling little campaign Tipu’s battle-hardened troops made short work of the Bombay army, leaving only the heavily invested port of Mangalore in British hands. Then Suffren put in a new appearance on the other side of the peninsula. Three thousand more French troops were landed at Cuddalore; worse still, their commanding officer turned out to be none other than the great de Bussy. Hughes and his squadron doggedly returned to the fray; Suffren for once scored a convincing victory. That left the Madras forces minus the redoubtable Coote, who had died earlier in the year, besieging a numerically superior force in Cuddalore with a resurgent Tipu in their rear and the all-powerful Suffren blockading the coast. Seldom can news of a European peace, which reached Madras in June, have been so welcome. It remained only to settle accounts with Tipu.

  Hastings urged that any negotiations with Tipu must be conducted from a position of strength and must fit within the context of Salbai. Madras, invoking London’s orders for an early settlement, ignored him. It dispatched its own emissaries to Mangalore – which place had just surrendered to the Mysore army – and they, under conditions bordering on duress, concluded a peace, in March 1784, which restored all conquered territory. Thus, like Salbai, Mangalore brought no territorial accessions and in this respect Hastings should have welcomed it. But it also took no account of the general settlement envisaged by Salbai and contained neither compensation for British losses nor safeguards for the return of all the British prisoners.

  Tipu was clearly delighted with these terms and would have no compunction in renewing hostilities with both the Marathas and the Company. Conversely, the Company’s officers, who for four years had been chasing his shadow or languishing in his prisons, saw them as an abject betrayal. So did Hastings. It was not for such a peace-at-any-price with rascally Mysore that he had squared the Marathas and impoverished Bengal. Either Mangalore must be repudiated, he argued, or failing that its terms must be altered. In fact the treaty was ratified. As of old, Hastings was again at the mercy of a hostile Council and a dangerous new rival.

  Lord George Macartney, President of Madras since 1781, although lacking the wit and venom of Philip Francis, more than made up for them with an unsullied reputation and dazzling connections. Unduly conscious of these credentials but knowing nothing whatsoever of India or the Company’s business, he was typical of the coming generation of proconsuls and, of course, the very antithesis of Hastings. The quarrel had begun with his meddling in the Maratha negotiations and then with the conduct of the Mysore war and, in particular, over the authority vested in Eyre Coote. Macartney had complained that Coote rode roughshod over the Madras establishment and treated him personally as no more than his ‘bullock-agent’. Coote had responded by accusing him of sabotaging the war effort and had urged Hastings to suspend him.

  Nor did Coote’s death defuse the situation. General Stuart, his successor, proved even more contemptuous of civilians and was duly removed by Macartney for ‘premeditated, wilful, repeated, and systematic disobedience’. The ‘removal’ was precisely that. Stuart, who had equipped himself with a cork leg to replace one shot away by Hyder Ali, had to be carried bodily from his quarters and in the same manner bundled on board a ship for London ‘with 59 packages’. The incident had serious repercussions. Stuart held his commission from the King, not the Company. Macartney had clearly overstepped his authority in dismissing him, and all the other King’s officers promptly declined orders in protest. Although a full-scale mutiny was narrowly avoided, Stuart continued to demand satisfaction of Macartney and eventually exacted it with a flesh wound inflicted on the duelling ground.

  Macartney’s drastic action may have been prompted by panic. Stuart had been one of the leading lights in the earlier conspiracy against Lord Pigot and could conceivably try it again. Macartney certainly detected the same conjunction of a disgruntled military and a
n incensed Nawab (Mohammed Ali) who was as usual eagerly encouraged by his sinister coterie of creditors. Indeed it was Macartney’s highly provocative treatment of the Nawab which constituted his bone of bitterest contention with Hastings. For the duration of the war Hastings himself had proposed that the Nawab must sign a large part of his revenues over to the Company. This did not go down well with the Nawab’s creditors and it is just possible that they won Hastings round to their way of thinking. (They commanded an influential following in both Westminster and Leadenhall Street; Hastings sorely needed any support he could get; even Pitt and Dundas would eventually find it expedient to capitulate to the ‘Arcot Interest’.) Whatever the reason, Hastings soon found Macartney’s treatment of such an old ally as Mohammed Ali unnecessarily harsh and tantamount to a usurpation of his rights. When Macartney refused to back off, Hastings again recommended his suspension and was again frustrated by his Council. Clearly Macartney’s influential connections were no secret in Bengal; neither was the fact that Hastings’s recall was being demanded by Parliament; and neither were Macartney’s expectations of himself being appointed the new Governor-General.

  The Mangalore treaty, which also completely ignored Mohammed Ali’s rights, was the final straw. ‘You act criminally towards your country’, Hastings had told Macartney in a résumé of the latter’s transgressions. Yet again he moved for suspension and yet again the Council refused to oblige. Worse still, even Leadenhall Street seemed to be taking Macartney’s side. With Parliament, the Court of Directors, his own Council, and the subordinate Presidencies all ranged against the Governor-General, with age catching up on him and with ill-health, or arrogance, upsetting his judgement, it was time to go. A sizeable fortune, estimated at £175,000 and culled from a variety of sources both legitimate and suspect, awaited him at home – or at least it should have done had it not been for his habitual ‘generosity, carelessness, and extravagance’. Mrs Hastings, his beloved Marian, was already in England; and he had promised to follow her within the year. He waited only for news of his successor – or at any rate confirmation that it would not be Macartney.

  And yet there was still just a chance that he might stay. Fox’s India Bill, which would have dissolved the Company and which Hastings had characterized as ‘impudence and profligacy unequalled’, had been defeated. Now young Pitt’s star was in the ascendant and it was just possible that the great-grandson of Governor Pitt would reassert the Company’s rights and at long last give to its Governor-General the full and undisputed authority necessary to conduct its Indian affairs. In the event, of course, Pitt’s India Bill did no such thing. On learning its terms, Hastings threw in the towel. To John Scot, his agent in London and an ex-officer of the Company, he wrote that ‘an Act more injurious to his [Scot’s] fellow-servants, to my character and authority, to the Company…and to the national honour could not have been devised…’ It was an ‘unequivocal demonstration that my resignation of the service is expected’. He immediately obliged, sailing from Calcutta in February 1785.

  There remains just his impeachment in the House of Lords – more theatre than politics, it was both a personal tragedy and a public farce which ran for nine years longer than it should have –plus the rather more intriguing question of why Hastings took so long to relinquish office. If there was ever a moment when the Company in India might have withheld its allegiance to the Directorate it must surely have been in 1784-5. Political extinction in the shape of Dundas’s, Fox’s, and finally Pitt’s bills stared it in the face. The defiant example of the American colonies was fresh to the mind and indeed largely responsible for focusing so much parliamentary attention on India. Moreover, in Hastings India had a Governor-General who, provoked beyond reason, just might have fancied his chances. Cornwallis, who would succeed him two years later, conceded that he was ‘beloved by the people’ and even Macaulay, his fiercest critic, would credit him with ‘a popularity such as…no other governor has been able to attain’. His ability was also unquestioned. The loyalty of the Nawabs of Oudh and the Carnatic was founded on his personal friendship. The Nizam and Scindia were firmly attached to the British interest. Only Tipu remained to give trouble and Tipu could have been tamed with a renegotiated Mangalore.

  But whether a unilateral declaration of independence was ever seriously entertained we shall never know. History is constructed from what men did and what they wrote. What they thought and said in private – especially if of a treasonable nature – is seldom apparent. One can only conjecture.

  It seems clear enough, though, that Hastings was not the only one who felt bitter. In letters quoted in Professor Furber’s biography of Dundas, George Smith, a member of the Bengal Council, refers to a ‘furore of petitioning’ against Pitt’s bill in both Calcutta and Madras. Disaffection was rife among the King’s officers who resented Macartney’s conduct towards Stuart, among the Company’s officers who resented the increasing numbers and privileges of the King’s officers, and among the Company’s civilians who took exception to the censures included in Pitt’s bill and to its provisions against profiteering. But Smith’s advice to Dundas was to make no concessions. It was concessions that had encouraged the American colonists to fight. Better just to stand firm until ‘chimerical ideas of Independence…droop and drop, for our [i.e. Indian] condition is very different indeed from that of the Irish and Americans’.

  And what of Hastings? ‘He might have attempted, and successfully, a dismemberment of this country from the British Empire’; but, as Smith added, he was too loyal, too faithful to the Honourable Company. ‘I owe to my ever honourable employers the service of my life’, Hastings wrote. ‘My conscience…prompts me to declare that no man ever served them with a zeal superior to my own, or perhaps equal to it.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Tea Trade Versus Free Trade

  THE FAR EAST AND THE PACIFIC

  Spanning the period of the transfer of power in London, Hastings’s Governor-Generalship may be seen both as a culmination of the Company’s rule and as the inauguration of the Raj. It was like the end pillar of India House’s new classical colonnade which, depending on your viewpoint, could be seen as terminating the building’s somewhat chaotic side elevation or as beginning its grandiose frontal façade. Although drawing heavily on past precedents, both Indian and British, Hastings seems to have been more than conscious of the changing British role in India; and to this change he made another vital contribution.

  It was something to do with his perception of India. Although most eighteenth-century Englishmen in India affected oriental customs to the extent of smoking a hookah and taking lower or half-caste women to bed, they viewed the subcontinent with an understandable detachment, albeit tinged with avarice and anxiety. The social whirl of Calcutta and the civic pride of Madras are reminiscent of the starched table-linen and frantic gaiety of a cruise liner. Outside, in the dusty mofussil and further ‘upcountry’, India’s political disarray surged around them. They followed its progress for the opportunities it offered. But looking ever to the revenue receipts, the trade investment, and above all their own perquisites, they felt no sense of identity with their Indian surroundings, let alone with the subcontinent as a whole.

  It was different with Hastings. Perhaps because he was there so long, perhaps because he had mastered Urdu and Bengali, or perhaps just because he liked the place, Hastings saw beyond the immediate and often sordid political and commercial realities to an Indian totality that was both geographical and historical. Admiration for this vast and noble entity fired his curiosity. Like many who have followed him, he longed to comprehend India’s profusion and diversity, to fathom its antiquity, and to explore its extent.

  Thanks to Hastings’s patronage, in the face of the usual obstruction from his Council, Charles Wilkins, the first Englishman to master Sanskrit, published a translation of the Bhagavad-gita, the devotional core of the Mahabbarata. Hastings wrote his celebrated introduction to it during those last anxious months in India. The Gita, h
e declared, evinced ‘a sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled’ and a theology to which even a dedicated Christian could not take exception. This and other masterpieces from an age predating civilization in Europe would, he predicted, ‘survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance’. In encouraging Hindu scholarship (and in founding a Muslim college in Calcutta) Hastings declared his policy to be that of ‘reconciling the people of England to the natives of Hindustan’. Such notions had no precedent among the Company’s servants. Hastings may be credited with having established the idea of a lasting and responsible British participation in India’s history and of having made India a respectable subject for statecraft and dominion.

  Also under his patronage Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal which quickly became the great clearing-house for oriental scholarship. Jones, a Supreme Court judge and polymathic genius who shunned British society in favour of his Brahmin tutors, defined the Society’s field of enquiry as all-embracing. It was to investigate India’s geography, history, grammar, rhetoric, agriculture, industry, science, music, architecture, poetry, medicine, plus ‘whatever is rare in the stupendous fabric of nature’. ‘If now it be asked what are the intended objects of our enquiries within these spacious limits, we answer Man and Nature, whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other.’