[Two days later] this unfortunate Prince, already overtaken by the claws of destiny, was arrived at the shore opposite Rajmahal, where he landed for about one hour, with intention only to dress up some khichri [kedgeree – rice and lentils] for himself and his daughter and women, not one of whom had tasted food for three days and nights. It happened that a fakir resided in that neighbourhood. This man, whom he had disobliged and oppressed during his days in power, rejoiced at this fair opportunity of glutting his resentment, and of enjoying revenge. He expressed a pleasure at his arrival; and taking a busy part in preparing some victuals for him, he meanwhile sent an express over the water, to give information to the prince’s enemies, who were rummaging heaven and earth to find him out.
Immediately on the advice of Shah Dana – for this was the fakir’s name, Mir Qasim [the son-in-law of Mir Jafar] crossed the water, and having got Siraj ud-Daula surrounded with his armed men, they had the pleasure of becoming master of his person, as well as his family and jewels … The Prince now became a prisoner and was brought back to Murshidabad … in a wretched condition.
One Mahmedy Beg accepted the commission [to kill Siraj] and two or three hours after the fugitive’s arrival, he set out to despatch him. Siraj ud-Daula had no sooner cast his eyes on that miscreant, than he asked whether he was not come to kill him? And the other having answered in the affirmative, the unfortunate prince, on this confession, despaired of his life.
He humbled himself before the Author of all Mercies, asked pardon for his past conduct, and turning to his murderer asked, ‘They are not then satisfied with my being willing to retire into some corner, there to end my days with a pension? He had time to say no more; for at this words the butcher smote him repeatedly with his sabre; and some strokes falling on that beauteous face of his, so renowned over Bengal for its regularity and sweetness, the prince sunk to the ground, fell on his face and returned his soul to its maker; and emerged out of this valley of miseries, by wading through his own blood. His body was hacked to pieces, and by strokes without number, and the mangled carcase being thrown across the back of an elephant, was carried throughout the city.86
Siraj ud-Daula was only twenty-five years old. Shortly afterwards, Miran wiped out all the women of the house of Aliverdi Khan: ‘Around seventy innocent Begums were rowed out to a lonely place into the centre of the Hooghly and their boat sunk.’ The rest were poisoned. These bodies were brought together with those which were washed ashore and were buried together in a long line of sepulchres beside the old patriarch in the shady garden of Khushbagh, just across the Hughli from the small market town that today is all that is left of Murshidabad.
One woman, however, was spared. Both Miran and his father asked for the hand of the famously beautiful Lutf un-Nissa. ‘But she declined and sent this reply: “having ridden an elephant before, I cannot now agree to ride an ass.”’87
The same day that the remains of Siraj ud-Daula were paraded through the streets, 7 July, exactly 200 days since the task force had set off up the Hughli to Fulta, Clive finally got his hands on his money. It was one of the largest corporate windfalls in history – in modern terms around £232 million, of which £22 million was reserved for Clive. He immediately despatched his winnings downstream to Calcutta.
‘The first fruit of our success was the receipt of Rs75 lakh, nearly a million sterling,* which the Souba paid and was laid on board 200 boats, part of the fleet which attended us in our march up, escorted by a detachment from the army,’ wrote Luke Scrafton, one of Clive’s assistants.
As soon as they entered the great river, they were joined by the boats of the squadron, and all together formed a fleet of three hundred boats, with music playing, drums beating, the colours flying, and exhibited to the French and Dutch, whose settlements they passed, a scene far different from what they beheld a year before, when the Nabob’s fleet and army passed them, with the captive English, and all the wealth and plunder of Calcutta. Which scene gave them more pleasure, I will not presume to decide.
Clive’s winnings in 1757 was a story of personal enrichment very much in the spirit of the Caribbean privateers who had first founded the Company 157 years earlier: it was all about private fortunes for the officers and dividends for the Company, about treasure rather than glory, plunder rather than power. Yet this was only the beginning: in total around £1,238,575 was given by Mir Jafar to the Company and its servants, which included at least £170,000 personally for Clive. In all, perhaps £2.5 million was given to the Company by the Murshidabad Nawabs in the eight years between 1757 and 1765 as ‘political gifts’. Clive himself estimated the total payments as closer to ‘three million sterling’.*88
Clive wrote to his father as he escorted his loot down the Bhagirathi, telling him that he had brought about ‘a Revolution scarcely to be parallel’d in History’.89 It was a characteristically immodest claim; but he was not far wrong. The changes he had effected were permanent and profound. This was the moment a commercial corporation first acquired real and tangible political power.90 It was at Plassey that the Company had triumphantly asserted itself as a strong military force within the Mughal Empire. The Marathas who had terrorised and looted Bengal in the 1740s were remembered as cruel and violent. The Company’s plunder of the same region a decade later was more orderly and methodical, but its greed was arguably deadlier because it was more skilful and relentless and, above all, more permanent.91
It initiated a period of unbounded looting and asset-stripping by the Company which the British themselves described as ‘the shaking of the pagoda tree’.92 From this point, the nature of British trade changed: £6 million** had been sent out in the first half of the century, but very little silver bullion was sent out after 1757. Bengal, the sink into which foreign bullion disappeared before 1757, became, after Plassey, the treasure trove from which vast amounts of wealth were drained without any prospect of return.
Bengal had always produced the biggest and most easily collected revenue surplus in the Mughal Empire. Plassey allowed the EIC to begin seizing much of that surplus – a piece of financial happenchance that would provide for the Company the resources it would need to defeat a succession of rivals until they finally seized the Mughal capital of Delhi itself in 1803. The Company was now no longer simply one of a number of European trading companies competing for Indian markets and products. Rather, it found that it had become a kingmaker and an autonomous power in its own right. It was not just that the East India Company had assisted in a palace coup for which it had been very well paid. With this victory, the whole balance of power in India had now shifted.
The British had become the dominant military and political force in Bengal. They now suspected that if they grew their army sufficiently they could probably seize any part of the country they took a fancy to, and rule it either directly or through a pliant puppet. Moreover, many Indians were beginning to understand this, too, meaning that the Company would become the focus for the attentions of all the dethroned, dispossessed and dissatisfied rulers, leading to a kaleidoscope of perpetually reforming and dissolving alliances that occurred from this point and which offered the region little prospect of peace or stability.
Indeed, the most immediate effect of Clive’s palace coup was to destabilise Bengal. Three months later, in September, Clive had to return to Murshidabad to try and sort out a growing chaos there. Exactions by the Company, gathering arrears of pay of Mir Jafar’s troops, military paralysis in the face of rebellions and punitive expeditions using Company sepoys created a growing vortex of violence and unrest. It was becoming abundantly clear that Mir Jafar was not up to the job, and that however many members of Siraj ud-Daula’s regime he and Miran purged, there could be little legitimacy for this general who had had his own Nawab murdered and who now sat in what one Company observer called ‘a throne warm with the blood of his Lord’.93
From now on there would be a slow drift to the Company of troopers, merchants, bankers and civil servants, leaving the Nawabs with no
thing more than the shadow of their former grandeur. Clive and his colleagues had intended to do little more than re-establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a more friendly Nawab. But what they had in fact done was fatally and permanently to undermine the authority of the Nawabs, bringing chaos to what had been up to that point the most peaceful and profitable part of the old Mughal Empire.94
* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £3 million = £315 million; Rs110,000 = £1,430,000; £1 million = £105 million.
* The modern equivalences of these sums are: Rs1.5 crore = about £200 million; £234,000 = almost £25 million; £27,000 = almost £3 million.
* £100 million today.
* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £1,238,575 = around £130 million; £170,000 = almost £18 million; £2.5 million = £260 million; £3 million = over £300 million.
** £630 million today.
4
A Prince of Little Capacity
Twelve months later, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Plassey Revolution, Mir Jafar paid a state visit to Calcutta.
It was the new Nawab’s first visit since he had led the assault on the town as a general of Siraj ud-Daula two years earlier, and his last before Clive would return to London to pursue his parliamentary ambitions. It was therefore as magnificent an affair as the still somewhat battered trading settlement could muster: there was a visit to the theatre, several concerts and a grand ball at the slightly surprising venue of the Calcutta courthouse, where the few women present danced ‘until their feet were sore’.
Even more of a surprise was the choice of decoration selected to beautify the halls of justice for the entertainment of the pious Shia Muslim Nawab: ‘twelve standing waxwork Venuses’, unveiled to the sound of trumpets, horns and kettledrums. ‘We have been so much taken up with balls, musick and visits to do honour to the Nabob,’ wrote Luke Scrafton, ‘that all publick affairs have been totally neglected.’1
But behind the external show of friendship between allies, perhaps inevitably, distrust and mutual dislike were now growing between the two rival governments of Bengal. ‘Thank God His Excellency is at last gone,’ wrote Scrafton a week later. ‘He has led me a hell of a life here by the constant attendance I have been obliged to pay to him and his wenches, for he never went twenty yards from his house but they were with him.’2 Clive, characteristically, was more cutting: the ‘humane, generous and honest prince’, whose impeccable character he had vouched for to the directors before Plassey, and who he had claimed to honour ‘with the same regard as a son has for a father’, he now regularly referred to as ‘the old fool’, while his son Miran was dismissed as ‘a worthless young dog’.3 Indolence, incompetence and opium had changed Mir Jafar, Clive wrote to London. The man he had raised to the throne had now become ‘haughty, avaricious, abusive … and this behaviour has alienated the hearts of his subjects’.4
If anyone had changed it was in reality the smugly victorious and now supremely wealthy Clive. Indeed, such was Clive’s swaggering self-confidence at this period that he began to show signs of regretting sharing power with the Mughals at all. In despatches to London he flirted with the idea of seizing full and immediate control of Bengal with the now greatly enhanced power of his ever-growing cohort of tightly disciplined sepoy regiments. By the end of 1758 he was dismissively writing to the chairman of the EIC directors, ‘I can assert with some degree of confidence that this rich and flourishing kingdom may be totally subdued by so small a force as 2,000 Europeans’:
The Moors are indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly beyond all conception … The soldiers, if they deserve that name, have not the least attachment to their Prince, he can only expect service from them who pays them best; but it is a matter of great indifference to them whom they serve; and I am fully persuaded that after the battle of Plassey I could have appropriated the whole country to the Company and preserved it afterwards with as much ease as Mir Jafar, the present Subah [governor] now does, through the terror of English arms and their influence …
The power of [the Mughal] Empire is greatly broken by intestine commotions, and perhaps its total ruin has been prevented only by the sums of money sent to Delly [from Bengal] … You are well acquainted with the nature & dispositions of these Musselmen: gratitude they have none; [they are] bare Men of very narrow conceptions, and have adopted a system of Politicks more peculiar to this Country than any other, viz: to attempt everything through treachery rather than force. Under these circumstances may not so weak a Prince as Mir Jafar be easily destroyed, or be influenced by others to destroy us? What then can enable us to secure our present acquisitions, or improve upon them, but such a force as leaves nothing to the power of Treachery or Ingratitude?5
Even more than the distrust and contempt, what emerges from the letters of the period is the sense of mutual incomprehension between these two very different worlds which had now been brought into such close proximity. Mir Jafar, for example, clearly imagined the Company to be an individual. When he learned that Clive was returning to Britain, the packet of presents he sent to his esteemed ally the Company was accompanied by a courteous Persianate letter addressed to what Mir Jafar clearly thought was a single sovereign ruler rather than an impersonal corporate board made up of rich London merchants. In Warren Hastings’ translation from the Persian it expressed Mir Jafar’s ‘earnest desire to see you … which exceeds anything that could be written or spoke … I proceed to address myself to your heart, the repository of friendship … The light of my eyes, dearer than my life, the Nabob Sabut Jung Bahadur [Clive], is departing for his own country. A separation from him is most afflicting to me. Despatch him speedily back to these parts and grant me the happiness of seeing him again soon.’6
The incomprehension was mutual. In London, the directors were still dimly digesting the news of the overthrow and murder of Siraj ud-Daula, leading one anxious but inattentive Company director to ask another, was it true that the recently assassinated Sir Roger Daulat was a baronet?7
What the people of England did understand very clearly was the unprecedented amount of money – or to use the newly Anglicised word, loot – that Clive was bringing back with him. Not since Cortés had Europe seen an adventurer return with so much treasure from distant conquests.
On 5 February 1760, Clive and his wife Margaret set sail for home on the Royal George, and even before they landed the gossip of the capital was focusing on the unprecedented wealth that Clive was said to be shipping home: Edmund Burke speculated in the Annual Register that ‘it is supposed that the General can realise £1,200,000 in cash, bills and jewels; that his lady has a casket of jewels which are estimated at least at £200,000.* So that he may with propriety be said to be the richest subject in the three kingdoms.’
The true sums were somewhat less than this. Nevertheless, on arrival, the 35-year-old former Governor of Bengal bought the Shropshire estate of Walcott and leased a townhouse in Berkeley Square, the most fashionable part of London’s Mayfair. A year later the Clives bought, in addition, the Claremont estate from the Duchess of Newcastle for £25,000, as well as a weekend retreat at Esher and several tracts of surrounding land, which they improved and combined into a single estate for an additional £43,000. They also purchased extensive lands in Co. Clare whose name Clive promptly changed from Ballykilty to Plassey. ‘The cost of living rose immediately with the coming of this Croesus,’ wrote Horace Walpole, the waspish Whig, in his diary. ‘He was all over estates and diamonds … and if a beggar asks charity, he says, “Friend I have no small brilliants with me.”’ By this time the rumour mill was in overdrive and the Salisbury Journal was reporting that even Lady Clive’s pet ferret had a diamond necklace worth over £2,500.**8
Meanwhile, the Bengal that Clive had just conquered sank quickly into chaos.
The young Warren Hastings, now the Company’s Resident (effectively ambassador) at Murshidabad, had been the first to sound the alarm, urging his boss to stay on
and settle the anarchy he had helped unleash. In particular, he cited the growing instability at the Murshidabad court. Just before Clive left, Mir Jafar had been able to pay only three of his army’s thirteen months’ arrears of pay. As a result the unpaid troops were openly mutinous and some were starving: ‘their horses are mere skeletons,’ he wrote, ‘and their riders little better. Even the Jamadars [officers] are many of them clothed with rags.’9 It had taken only three years since Plassey to impoverish what had recently been probably the wealthiest town in India.
Mir Jafar himself certainly bore some of the responsibility for this mess. As with his mentor Clive, Plassey had brought him great personal enrichment, which he did not hesitate to show off, even as his soldiers went hungry: according to Ghulam Hussain Khan, he had always had a taste for fine jewels, but now ‘was actually loaded with those glittering things; and he actually wore six or seven bracelets at his wrists, every one of a different species of gem; and he also had hanging from his neck, over his breast, three or four chaplets of pearls, every one of inestimable value … He at the same time amused himself with listening to the songs and looking at the dances of a number of singers, who he carried with him wherever he went upon elephants.’10
It was now clear to everyone that Mir Jafar was simply not capable of ruling Bengal: an almost uneducated Arab soldier, he had no political skills and little conception how to run a state or administer its finances. As Clive himself calmly noted before boarding ship with his fortune, Mir Jafar had proved ‘a prince of little capacity, and not at all blessed with the talent of gaining the love and confidence of his principal officers. His mismanagement has thrown the country into the greatest confusion.’11 By 1760, three simultaneous rebellions had broken out across his dominions in Midnapur, Purnea and Patna. The Mughal nobility and officers of the army came to be increasingly resentful of the massive tribute that Mir Jafar had so thoughtlessly agreed to pay for Company support in overthrowing Siraj ud-Daula, and which was now daily depriving them of the payments and salaries that sustained the engine of state.
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Page 19