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

by William Dalrymple

  Quite unknown to Clive at the time, his night attack was in fact a decisive turning point. Terrified by the unexpected nature of the assault, Siraj struck camp and retreated ten miles that morning. The following day he sent an ambassador with proposals for peace. Even before the night attack, he had been aware of the damage done to the Bengal economy by the destruction of Calcutta, and he was prepared to be a little generous. But on 9 February he signed the Treaty of Alinagar, which granted almost all the Company’s main demands, restoring all the existing English privileges and freeing all English goods of taxes, as well as allowing the Company to keep their fortifications and establish a mint. His only insistence was that Drake be removed – ‘Tell Roger Drake’ not to ‘disturb our affairs’ – something the Company was more than happy to grant.45

  The following day, Siraj ud-Daula began his march back to Murshidabad, leaving Clive and Watson astonished at their own success. Clive was ready to return to Madras, having fulfilled all his war aims with minimum cost and casualties: as he wrote to his father on 23 February: ‘I expect to return very shortly to the coast, as all is over here.’46

  For his part, however, Watson reported to the Crown, not the Company, and for him things had just become a great deal more complicated.47 A few days earlier, he had been officially notified of the outbreak of what future generations would call the Seven Years War. Around the world, from Quebec to the Senegal River, from Ohio to Hanover, Minorca to Cuba, hostilities were now finally breaking out between Britain and France in every imperial theatre. Watson’s instructions arrived in a packet from London, with an official copy of the declaration of war and a letter from the Admiralty directing ‘all officers under the King to distress the enemy as far as it is in their power’.48

  Watson was unequivocal about what he now needed to do: attack the French, wherever they were to be found. And in the case of Bengal, that meant starting by attacking the French colony of Chandernagar, twenty miles upstream.

  Relations between the authorities in Chandernagar and Calcutta had always been surprisingly cordial: after the fall of Calcutta, the French in Chandernagar had been generously hospitable to the Company refugees as they fled Siraj ud-Daula, reserving their anger only for Drake and his Council: ‘Their shameful flight covers all Europeans with a disgrace which they will never wipe out in this count,’ wrote the French Governor, M. Renault. ‘Everyone curses, detests, abhors them … In short, whatever one may say, these gentlemen, especially Mr Drake, will never free themselves from such infamy, and Mr Drake will never deprive his nation of the right to hang him and all his Council.’49

  Given this, the French were quick to reach out to their British counterparts after the recapture of the city, seeking a local neutrality in case of the outbreak of war. Calcutta responded warmly, and negotiations began. It was Watson who broke them off on 6 March, just hours before the treaty of neutrality was to be signed. According to Jean Law, the Admiral took the stand ‘that the Chandernagar authorities were not empowered to make treaties, and therefore he had declined to sign the draft. The truth, however, was that on the very day fixed for the signing, the Admiral was informed that his two lost and long-awaited ships had arrived at the mouth of the Ganges, and it was this news that made him change his mind. The English army now set off to march towards Chandernagar, while the missing ships prepared to sail up the Ganges.’50

  On 8 March, Clive began his march at the head of a small army which had now swelled to 2,700. He took his time, taking three days to cover the twenty miles separating the two rival trading stations. Two days later, the Nawab wrote Clive a letter which the latter took as giving Siraj’s assent for an attack on the French. This was in return for an EIC promise of military assistance should Bengal be attacked by the Afghan monarch Ahmed Shah Durrani, who had just seized Delhi on the first of what were to be seventeen annual raids on north India, and who was said to be planning a looting expedition eastwards. By the 12th, Clive had encamped two miles from Chandernagar and called upon the French to surrender. The French declined to do so.

  Chandernagar had, like Calcutta, recently outgrown all its rival settlements to become the prime French trading post in the East. Also like Calcutta, it was vulnerable to attack, less from the land, for its Fort d’Orléans, built on the principles of Sébastien de Vauban, was a much more impressive fortification than Fort William; but its defences against assaults from the river were far less formidable. Renault was aware of this, and as soon as war broke out he sank four ships and ran a boom and several chains around them to block the British warships from coming close to the vulnerable eastern face of his fort.

  Early on the morning of 23 March, Clive stormed and took the principal French battery commanding the river. From that point on, Admiral Watson took over and it was to sea power, not Clive’s land forces, that most casualties fell. The French, who had only 700 men to defend their fort, fought bravely in their burning, disintegrating buildings, with no possibility of relief.

  It was again Clive’s nephew who left the best record of the taking of Chandernagar in his journal: ‘The Kent & Tyger were all this time getting up the river,’ wrote Edward Maskelyne, ‘in the passage of which they were greatly retarded by the French having sunk four ships in the channel.’

  This difficulty was at last removed [once the chains and booms had been cut away] & the two ships drew near the fort, but before they got within musquet shot, the French from 16 guns made great havoc. When the broadsides began to fire the enemy soon quitted their guns for they lost 150 officers in two hours, & the faces of two bastions were in the meantime brought to the ground, so that the Monsieurs hung out a flag & surrendered at discretion.

  [Before they did so] the quarter-deck of the Kent was cleared of every man but the Admiral [Watson] & pilot, Captain Speke, and all the officers being killed or wounded, as were about 150 men in both ships. The Tyger suffered vastly in seamen & the Kent both in officers & sailors. Captain Speke has his leg sadly mauled & his son Billy has lost one of his with part of his thigh by the same shot. That charming young fellow Perreau was shot through the head, and Second Lieutenant Hayes lost his thigh and is since dead.

  As we [land forces] were under cover of houses we suffered little, though we greatly incommoded the enemy in reverse by our shot and shells. It must be owned considering all things that the Messieurs made a good defence, though the Fort held out only 2 hours after the ships came before it.

  ‘Perhaps you will hear of few instances where two ships have met with greater damage than the Kent and Tyger in this engagement,’ wrote one of the surviving sailors. ‘We have never yet obtained a victory at so dear a rate.’51

  The destruction within the Fort was every bit as severe as that on deck. By sunset, all five of the French 24-pounder guns had been blasted off their mounts, ‘the walls of d’Orléans were in ruins, the gunners almost all killed, and the men were being shot down by musketeers from the roofs of neighbouring houses and the tops of the masts and rigging of the ships. In a single day’s fighting, the French lost two Captains and two hundred men killed and wounded.’52

  The capture of Chandernagar was a body blow to the entire French presence in India. As Jean Law noted, ‘with the fall of Chandernagar, the gate to the entire country was thrown open to the English, a gate that opened onto the road of glory and riches. By the same event, the principal place of commerce of the French Company, the sole port where our ships could shelter, was now closed for a long time. A flourishing colony was destroyed and many honest people in French India were ruined. Indeed, I saw myself ruined.’53

  While the battle was taking place, Siraj ud-Daula remained in an agony of indecision: wishing to help the French against the British, but not daring to give the Company any excuse to break their treaty with him. At one point he sent a relief force towards Chandernagar, hesitated, and then withdrew it. A day later, making the best of a fait accompli, he sent a message to Clive telling of his ‘inexpressible pleasure’ at his victory. With the message he
sent a present.

  ‘Now taking the cotton wool of recklessness from the ear,’ recorded the Riyazu-s-salatin, the young Nawab tried to win the friendship of Clive with a gift of two leopards ‘extremely good at catching deer’. But it was now much too late. ‘For the arrow of fate cannot be parried by the shield of effort once God’s decree has already passed another way.’54

  As April drew to a close, Clive and Watson began to pack up and prepare their troops to leave Bengal for the Coromandel, nervous at how long they had left Madras undefended and open to a French attack. There the whole Bengal campaign would have ended, but for the hatred and disgust now felt for Siraj ud-Daula by his own court, and especially Bengal’s all-powerful dynasty of bankers, the Jagat Seths.

  Siraj ud-Daula’s flight from Calcutta after Clive’s night attack, followed by the humiliation of the Treaty of Alinagar, had broken the spell of fear with which Siraj had kept his court cowed. He had alienated many of his grandfather’s old military commanders, particularly the veteran general Mir Jafar Ali Khan, an Arab soldier of fortune originally from the Shia shrine town of Najaf in modern Iraq. Mir Jafar had played his part in many of Aliverdi’s most crucial victories against the Marathas, and had most recently led the successful attack on Calcutta. But having taken the town and defeated the Company in battle, he had then been sidelined, and the governorship given instead to a Hindu rival, Raja Manikchand. He and his brothers-in-arms from the Maratha Wars, ‘commanders of merit, as well as of old standing, all deserving the utmost regard, were tired of living under such an administration,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘and wished no better than to be rid of such a government by Siraj ud-Daula’s death’.

  So that whenever they chanced to perceive any appearance of discontent anywhere, or any hatred against the government, they would send secret messages to the party, with exhortations to contrive some mode of deliverance, under promise of their being most heartily supported. Mir Jafar Khan, as the most considerable and the most injured of the malcontents, was the foremost amongst them. Jagat Seth had secretly promised to support him vigorously; and they formed together a confederacy … Other disaffected grandees joined together in the scheme of overthrowing Siraj ud-Daula, whose character of ferocity and thoughtlessness kept them in continual alarms, and whose fecklessness of temper made them tremble.55

  The plotters’ first plan had been to support Aliverdi Khan’s daughter, Ghasiti Begum, but Siraj had moved so quickly against her at his succession that that plan had never got off the ground. A second scheme had revolved around supporting Siraj’s cousin, Shaukat Jung of Purnea, ‘a subahdar to the taste of Jagat Seth and the chief Moors and Rajas’, but the latter had proved even less dependable than Siraj.56 He went into battle against his psychotic cousin in such a cloud of opium that he was ‘incapable of holding up his head’ or to do more ‘than listen to the songs of his women … so alighted from his elephant … and was totally out of his senses when a musquet-ball, lodging into his forehead, made him return his soul to its maker’.57

  Only now that Clive had demonstrated his military capacity in taking back Calcutta, then seizing Chandernagar, did the plotters decide to reach out to the Company as a third option, hoping to harness the EIC’s military forces for their own ends. William Watts, who had just returned to the looted English factory of Kasimbazar under the terms of the Treaty of Alinagar, was the first to hear these murmurs of discontent. From the EIC’s factory on the southern edge of Murshidabad he became aware of the mutterings of the disaffected nobles at court and hints of a possible coup, so he sent his Armenian agent, Khwaja Petrus Aratoon, to investigate. The answer came back that Mir Jafar, in his position as paymaster of the Bengal army, was prepared to offer the Company the vast sum of 2.5 crore* rupees if they would help him remove the Nawab. Further investigation revealed that the scheme had wide backing among the nobility but that Mir Jafar, an uneducated general with no talent in politics, was simply a front for the real force behind the coup – the Jagat Seth bankers. ‘They are, I can confirm, the originators of the revolution,’ wrote Jean Law many months later. ‘Without them the English would never have carried out what they have. The cause of the English had become that of the Seths.’58

  Watts passed on the offer to Clive, who was still encamped outside Chandernagar and who had also, quite independently, begun to hear rumblings about a possible palace revolution. On 30 April 1757, Clive first mentioned in writing the scheme with which his name would henceforth be for ever associated. Writing to the Governor of Madras, he observed that Siraj ud-Daula was behaving in an even more violent way than usual – ‘twice a week he threatens to impale Mr. Watts … in short he is a compound of everything that is bad, keeps company with none but his menial servants, and is universally hated and despised.’

  This induces me to acquaint you that there is a conspiracy carrying on against him by several of the great men, at the head of whom is Jagat Seth himself. I have been applied to for assistance, and every advantage promised that the Company can wish. The Committee are of the opinion that it should be given as soon as the Nabob is secured. For my part, I am persuaded that there can be neither peace nor security while such a monster reigns.

  Mr Watts is at Murshidabad and has many meetings with the great men. He desires that our proposals may be sent, and that they only wait for them to put everything into execution; so that you may very shortly expect to hear of a Revolution which will put an end to all French expectations of ever settling in this country again …59

  The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.60 This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts. But seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for the Company, they dressed up the conspiracy in colours that they knew would appeal to their masters and presented the coup as if it were primarily aimed at excluding the French from Bengal for ever.*

  By 1 May, a Secret Committee made up of senior Company officials in Bengal formally resolved to join the conspiracy: ‘The Committee were unanimously of the opinion that there could be no dependence on this Nabob’s word, honour and friendship, and that a revolution in the Government would be extremely for the advantage of the Company’s affairs.’61

  The Secret Committee then began to haggle over their terms of service, again using Khwaja Petrus as the intermediary for their coded correspondence. Before long, Mir Jafar and the Jagat Seths had significantly raised their offer, and were now promising the participants Rs28 million, or £3 million sterling – the entire annual revenue of Bengal – for their help overthrowing Siraj, and a further Rs110,000 a month to pay for Company troops. In addition, the EIC was to get zamindari – landholding – rights near Calcutta, a mint in the town and confirmation of duty-free trade. By 19 May, in addition to this offer, Mir Jafar conceded to pay the EIC a further enormous sum – £1 million* – as compensation for the loss of Calcutta and another half a million as compensation to its European inhabitants.62

  On 4 June a final deal was agreed. That evening, Khwaja Petrus obtained for Watts a covered harem palanquin ‘such as the Moor women are carryed in, which is inviolable, for without previous knowledge of the deceit no one dare look into it’.63 Within this, the Englishman was carried into Mir Jafar’s house to get the signatures of the old general and his son Miran, and to take their formal oath on the Quran to fulfil their part of the treaty obligations.64 On 11 June, the signed document was back in Calcutta with th
e Select Committee, who then countersigned it. The next evening, pretending to set off on a hunting expedition, Watts and his men decamped from Kasimbazar and made their escape through the night, down the road to Chandernagar.

  On 13 June 1757, a year to the day since Siraj had begun his attack on Calcutta, Clive sent an ultimatum to Siraj ud-Daula accusing him of breaking the terms of the Treaty of Alinagar. That same day, with a small army of 800 Europeans, 2,200 south Indian sepoys and only eight cannon, he began the historic march towards Plassey.

  The road from Calcutta to Murshidabad passes through a great planisphere of flat, green floodplains and rice paddy whose abundant soils and huge skies stretch out towards the marshy Sunderbans, the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal to the south – a great green Eden of water and vegetation. Amid these wetlands, bullocks plough the rich mud of the rice fields and villagers herd their goats and ducks along high raised embankments. Reed-thatched Bengali cottages are surrounded by clumps of young green bamboo and groves of giant banyans, through which evening clouds of parakeets whirr and screech.

  In the pre-monsoon heat Clive marched his sepoys along a shaded embankment which led through this vast patchwork of wetlands: muddy paddy of half-harvested rice on one side gave way to others where the young green seedlings had just been transplanted into shimmering squares in the flooded fields. Through all this ran the main waterway of the Bhagirathi on which a small flotilla of wood and bamboo boats – it was now too shallow for Watson’s battleships – sailed level with the land forces, providing transport for some of the officers of the European troops, and supplies of food and ammunition for all.

  After all the frantic activity and communication of the previous week, as Clive marched north he began to be increasingly nervous about the ominous silence from the plotters. On 15 June, Clive wrote to reassure the Jagat Seths that he remained committed to the terms they had agreed: