The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

  This was the business whose directors, on 25 March 1755, signed up the thirty-year-old Robert Clive, for the second time. This was something of a surprise to all parties: only eighteen months earlier, Clive had retired from the Company’s service having already made in India a substantial fortune by the age of twenty-eight. He had returned to London with the intention of entering politics and quickly used his wealth to buy a rotten borough. Nothing, however, had worked out for him at Westminster: the previous day, Clive ‘by a most unusual proceeding’, had been ejected from the House of Commons after objections had been raised as to the integrity of the election process in his constituency. Following several weeks of wrangling and horse-trading, a series of political shenanigans by the Tories, who were attempting to collapse the Whig government, had managed to unseat Clive by 207 votes to 183.10 Having spent much of his new fortune trying to bribe his way into getting elected, this left Clive humiliated, unemployed and out of pocket. A second career in India was Clive’s best option to restore his fortune, and so set himself up for a second run at Parliament sometime in the future.

  The directors had reason to move so quickly. For Clive, who first went out to India as a humble accountant, had proved to have unexpected talents in a quite different sphere. With no military training and no formal commission, and still only in his mid-twenties, the curt, withdrawn and socially awkward young accountant had been the surprise star of the Carnatic Wars, and the man who as much as anyone had prevented Dupleix from realising his dreams of expelling the EIC from India and establishing the French Compagnie in its place. Now that the French war drums were beginning to beat again in North America, and as both Britain and France began frantically rearming and preparing for another round of conflict, the directors were keen to send Clive back to India at the head of the private army of sepoys that Clive himself had helped recruit, drill and lead into battle.

  Robert Clive was born on 29 September 1725 at Styche Hall in the Shropshire village of Moreton Say, into a family of minor provincial country gentry. He had quickly gained a reputation as an unusually unruly and violent child: by the age of seven he had become ‘out of all measure addicted to fightin’’, according to his worried uncle, ‘which gives his temper a fierceness and imperiousness, so that he flies out upon every trifling occasion … I do what I can,’ he added, ‘to suppress the hero, that I may help forward the more valuable qualities of meekness, benevolence and patience.’11 The uncle’s efforts were entirely in vain: meekness, benevolence and patience remained qualities which eluded Clive throughout his life. Instead, soon after hitting puberty, he had turned village delinquent, running protection rackets around Market Drayton, ‘now levying blackmail on anxious shopkeepers trembling for the security of their windows; now turning his body into a temporary dam across the street gutter to flood the shop of an offending tradesman’.12

  By the time Clive turned seventeen, his father Richard recognised that his son was too morose and difficult for the Church, and far too hot-headed and impatient for the law. Luckily, Richard Clive happened to know a director of the EIC. Robert presented himself at East India House for the first time on 15 December 1742, where he was formally admitted to the most junior rank of ‘Writer’. Three months later, on 10 March 1743, he took ship for India.

  It was not a very brilliant start. En route, Clive lost much of his baggage off Brazil, then managed to fall overboard and narrowly avoided drowning; he was only spotted by a sailor entirely by chance, fished out and saved. On arrival in Madras he made little impression: unknown, unremarkable and without the necessary introductions, he led a solitary life, occasionally quarrelling with his fellow writers and getting into fights. ‘Dour, aloof and withdrawn’, on one occasion he behaved so badly to the Secretary at Fort St George that the Governor made him formally apologise. He was lonely, homesick and miserable. Before long he had developed a profound hatred for India that never left him. ‘I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country,’ he wrote home at the end of his first year, as he gradually sank into a deep depression. Within a year, in the absence of any better outlet, he turned his innate violence on himself and attempted suicide.

  None of his letters from Madras contain a word about the wonders of India, and he gives no hint of the sights he saw; nor does he seem to have made any attempt to learn the languages. He had no interest in the country, no eye for its beauty, no inquisitiveness about its history, religions and ancient civilisations, and not the slightest curiosity about its people whom he dismissed as universally ‘indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly’.13 ‘I think only of my dear Native England,’ he wrote home in 1745. What he did have, from the beginning, was a streetfighter’s eye for sizing up an opponent, a talent at seizing the opportunities presented by happenchance, a willingness to take great risks and a breathtaking audacity. He was also blessed with a reckless bravery; and, when he chose to exercise it, a dark personal magnetism that gave him power over men.

  It was only during the French attack and conquest of Madras in 1746 that Clive’s talents became apparent. He was in Madras when Dupleix’s forces took the town. Refusing to give his word that he would not bear arms against the French, he slipped out of the town at night, in disguise, managed to dodge French patrols and made it on foot to the other, smaller British stronghold on the Coromandel coast, Fort St David. Here he was trained to fight by Stringer Lawrence, a bluff, portly John Bull, known as ‘the Old Cock’, who had seen action against the French at Fontenoy and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobites on Culloden Moor. The two terse and plain-spoken men worked well together, and Lawrence was the first to spot Clive’s potential. By the time Dupleix began leasing out his sepoy regiments to his client Nawabs in the late 1740s, Clive was showing promise in what he called ‘the military sphere’, steadily rising in the ranks to become the lieutenant of a Company of Foot, and demonstrating the aggressive chutzpah and a willingness to take risks that would distinguish him throughout his life.

  It was at this point, under the tutelage of Stringer Lawrence, that the Madras authorities began to imitate the French initiative and for the first time started training up their own sepoys – at first mainly Telugu-speakers – and drilling them to fight in infantry formations, supported by mobile European field artillery. For many years, the sepoys numbered only a few hundred and did not even have proper uniforms; what fighting they did was initially tentative and amateurish: ‘How very ignorant we were of the art of war in those days,’ wrote Clive in the mid-1750s, looking back at his performance in the early years of the Carnatic Wars.

  On 26 August 1751, Clive first made his name when he volunteered to march through torrential monsoon rains to relieve the siege of Arcot, the capital of the Nawabs of the Carnatic, with only a small force of 200 Europeans and 300 sepoys. Clive surprised the French and their allies by attacking in the middle of a thunderstorm, and soon raised the Nawab’s Mughal colours from the gates. His victory gave the first indication that the Company could manage a successful military campaign in India, either against Indian troops, who had until then often defeated them, or against the French, who only a few years before had been the first to demonstrate the possibilities of modern infantry and field artillery techniques over Indian cavalry armies. It was a crucial moment in the rising confidence of the Company in India.14

  Professional military pundits sniffed at the amateur soldier and carped that they ‘envied him for his good luck but could not admire him for his knowledge of the military art’.15 But Clive’s record of success spoke for itself. The use of speed and surprise was to remain his favourite strategy as a soldier. War in eighteenth-century India was often a slow, gentlemanly and formal affair, as much a sophisticated chess game as an act of aggression: bribes and negotiation usually played a more important role than formal assaults; armies could be bought off, or generals turned and made to break with their paymasters. Clive was happy to play these games when it suited him, but as often as not broke with these conventions, attacking when l
east expected and with as much ruthlessness and offensive force as possible, making forced marches in monsoon rains, laying down unexpected ambushes and attacking at night or in thick fog.

  Clive’s greatest success came in 1752 when he beat off a threatened attack on Madras. He and Stringer Lawrence then went on the offensive and managed to win a series of small engagements around the Carnatic, securing Arcot and Trichinopoly for the British and their tame Nawab, Muhammad Ali. The French began to run out of money and failed to pay their Indian troops.16 On 13 June 1752, the French commander, Jacques Law, a nephew of the founder of the French Compagnie, surrendered to Clive and Lawrence outside the magnificent island temple of Srirangam, the ancient centre of Tamil Vaishnavism. Seven hundred and eighty-five French and 2,000 Compagnie sepoys were made prisoners of war.

  It was a crushing blow to Dupleix’s ambitions: according to his secretary, Ananda Ranga Pillai, when he heard the news Dupleix ‘could neither attend mass nor eat his dinner’. Soon afterwards, Dupleix was sacked, arrested and sent back to France in disgrace.17 Clive, in contrast, returned to Madras a hero. In a letter of congratulation, Clive’s father urged him quickly to gather what wealth he could in India: ‘As your conduct and bravery is become the publick talk of the nation,’ he wrote, ‘this is the time to increase your fortune, [and to] make use of the present opportunity before you quit the Country.’18 Clive needed no encouragement. As a reward for his success he was given the lucrative position of Quartermaster in the Commissary, a post which earned him the huge sum of £40,000* in commissions in a very short period.

  On 18 February 1753 Clive impulsively married the formidable Margaret Maskelyne, sister of Nevil, the Astronomer Royal, in St Mary’s, Fort St George.* The following month, on 23 March, the couple set sail for England on the Bombay Castle. They had no wish ever to return to India. On his arrival in London, Clive quickly paid off his family debts – his father Richard allegedly commented, ‘So Bob’s not a boobie after all’ – and spent large sums trying to enter Parliament. But despite successfully buying a Cornish rotten borough, his political career was quickly wrecked on the shoals of inter-party intrigue, and after only eighteen months he found that he needed to return and make a second fortune in India.

  With a major French offensive thought to be imminent, his services were badly needed. Reflecting his odd position, strung between the Company’s Civil and Military services, Clive rejoined in the senior position of Deputy Governor of Madras, and was also given a military rank in the army: a local commission as a royal lieutenant colonel, effective only in India.19 Egged on by the Company, ministers had now become alarmed at the level of force the French were building up in India and the fact that the British could not begin to match it. This was a matter of personal concern for many MPs, as a large number had invested their savings in East India stock.† Lord Holderness, the government minister who took the closest interest in India, told his colleague Lord Albemarle that the British government must never accept ‘a decisive superiority of force in the hands of the French in that part of the world’. The decision was soon made to send out a squadron of Royal Navy warships under Admiral Watson to support the EIC’s own private army, along with some regular British army troops in order to match the regiment believed to have been sent by the French.20 Clive followed it a month later in a separate flotilla. In his pocket was a Royal Commission to take charge of the troops on arrival in India.

  It was an entirely random set of political circumstances that wrecked Clive’s ultimate ambition to become a politician, destroying his fortune and forcing him back into the arms of the Company. But it was a piece of happenchance that had immense and wide-ranging repercussions. It was Clive’s particular qualities of extreme aggression and devil-may-care audacity that drove the events of the next few months, and which directly led to one of the oddest events in world history: a trading company based in one small building in the City of London defeating, usurping and seizing power from the once-mighty Mughal Empire.

  ‘Calcutta,’ wrote Clive a few years later, ‘is one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond conception.’21

  In September 1755, as Clive’s ship, the Stretham, neared India, the British bridgehead in Bengal was unrecognisable from the muddy trading station founded by Job Charnock only sixty years earlier. Charnock’s daughter-in-law was still living in Calcutta, but there was very little else that the town’s founder would now recognise.22

  Since Charnock’s death, Calcutta had quickly grown to become the jewel among the Company’s overseas trading stations: it was by far the EIC’s most important trading post in India and the major source of British textile imports. Indeed, 60 per cent of all EIC exports from Asia were now passing through Calcutta.23 To pay for these exports, the EIC sent out annually to Bengal £180,000,* 74 per cent of it in the form of gold and silver bullion.24

  As a result of these huge flows of cash, the city had been transformed: its fortifications, wharves and honeycomb of warehouses now straggled three miles down the silt banks of the river, towards the jungles of the Sunderbans, its flat skyline dominated by the low ramparts of Fort William, and a number of grand new ‘Grecian’ buildings: Roger Drake’s Governor’s House, a school, the playhouse, St Anne’s Protestant church, St Nazareth for the Armenians, a hospital, the jail, the grand tank for the drinking water and an increasingly well-stocked burial ground for the dead.

  Calcutta probably now contained around 200,000 people – though some wilder estimates put the figure at almost double that – of whom around a thousand were Europeans. The city’s docks were as busy and bustling as its bazaars, and twice as many ships now visited it every year as docked at its Mughal rival, Hughli, a little upstream. The Calcutta punch houses were always full of captains and their crews of boatswains, mates and pilots, drinking away their sorrows before heading to Calcutta’s notorious brothels.

  Set back from the riverfront, the European houses in Calcutta were usually large, comfortable and airy buildings, painted bright white, with wide verandas, stable blocks and large gardens. Even at the best of times, town planning was never one of Calcutta’s more obvious virtues: Mrs Jemima Kindersley thought the city looked ‘as awkward a place as can be conceived, and so irregular that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air, and fallen down again by accident as they now stand: people keep constantly building; and everyone who can procure a piece of ground to build a house upon consults his own taste and convenience, without any regard to the beauty or regularity of the town’.25 Chaotic it may have been, but it was also extremely prosperous.

  The profits from Calcutta’s trade were huge and still growing, but what really attracted Indians to this foreign-owned Company town was the sense that it was safe and secure. Throughout the 1740s, while the Carnatic Wars were raging in the south, the Marathas had attacked Bengal with horrifying violence, killing what the Dutch VOC chief in Bengal estimated to be as many as 400,000 civilians.26 In 1750, Bhaskar Pandit, a general of the Maratha leader Bhonsle, invaded Bengal again, this time with 20,000 cavalry. They carried out night raids, pillaging the Nawab’s camp, and destroyed the convoys which brought provisions for his army. The Marathas followed a scorched-earth policy, burning the neighbouring villages to prevent grain from reaching the enemy. The Nawab’s soldiers were thus denied food, conveyance and their own baggage, and so rendered ineffective, something the Company factors graphically described in their letters home.27 Vaneshwar Vidyalankar, the Pandit of the Maharaja of Bardwan, wrote that the Marathas ‘are niggard of pity, slayers of pregnant women and infants, of Brahmans and the poor, fierce of spirit, expert in robbing the property of everyone and committing every sinful act. They created a local cataclysm and caused the extirpation of the people of Bengal villages like an [ominous] comet.’28

  The Bengali poet Ganga Ram in his Maharashta Purana gave a fuller picture of the terror they inspired. ‘The people on earth were filled with sin,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no wors
hip of Rama and Krishna. Day and night people took their pleasure with the wives of others.’ Finally, he wrote, Shiva ordered Nandi to enter the body of the Maratha king Shahu. ‘Let him send his agents, that sinners and evil doers be punished.’29 Soon after:

  The Bargis [Marathas] began to plunder the villages and all the people fled in terror. Brahmin pandits fled, taking with them loads of manuscripts; goldsmiths fled with the scales and weights; and fishermen with their nets and lines – all fled. The people fled in all directions; who could count their numbers?

  All who lived in villages fled when they heard the name of the Bargis. Ladies of good family, who had never before set a foot on a road fled from the Bargis with baskets on their heads. And land owning Rajputs, who had gained their wealth with the sword, threw down their swords and fled. And sadhus and monks fled, riding on litters, their bearers carrying their baggage on their shoulders; and many farmers fled, their seed for next year’s crops on the backs of their bullocks, and ploughs on their shoulders. And pregnant women, all but unable to walk, began their labour on the road and were delivered there.