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

by William Dalrymple

  The ever astute and watchful Jagat Seths were among the first to realise they had for once backed a loser, and began to refuse loans for military expeditions to put down the different revolts which had begun to spread across the state like wildfires. To avoid further embarrassments, the bankers announced they were heading off with their families on an extended pilgrimage to the temple of their deity, Parasnath, in the mountains of Jharkhand. When the Nawab ordered his troops to block their way, the Seths called his bluff and forced their way through.

  As Mir Jafar stumbled and as his treasury emptied, as intrigue festered in the Murshidabad court and as its military machine seemed locked in paralysis, Mir Jafar’s vigorous but violent son Miran turned increasingly vicious. ‘His inclination was to oppress and torment people,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, who knew him well. ‘He was expeditious and quick-minded in slaughtering people, and in committing murders, having a peculiar knack at such matters, and looking upon every infamous or atrocious deed as an act of prudence and foresight. For him, pity and compassion answered no purpose.’12

  Miran’s first concern was systematically to wipe out what remained of the house of Aliverdi Khan to prevent any counter-coup. He had already sent his henchmen to drown the entire harem of Aliverdi Khan and Siraj ud-Daula. Next came the turn of five of Siraj ud-Daula’s closest relatives. His teenage younger brother, Mirza Mehdi, was despatched with especially savage cruelty: ‘that unfortunate innocent youth was forced between two of those wooden frames called takhtahs [planks], where they conserve shawls and other precious goods; and the ropes having been strained hard at one and the same time, he had been squeezed to death, and it was from that kind of rack that that guiltless soul took its flight to regions of unalterable innocence and eternal repose’.13 Miran later justified the act by quoting an aphorism of Sa’di: ‘killing the snake and keeping its young is not the act of a wise man.’

  Other potential rivals, including several favourites of the old regime and two senior ministers of his own court, he either stabbed in durbar, or at the gates of the palace, or despatched ‘with a strong dose of poison’. Miran’s paranoia grew in proportion to the chaos: the list of potential victims he kept scribbled in a special pocket book soon extended past 300.14 As Warren Hastings reported to Calcutta when he heard about the mass murder of Siraj’s family, ‘no argument can excuse or palliate so atrocious a villain, nor (forgive me, Sir, if I add) our supporting such a tyrant’.15

  But the Company, far from helping Mir Jafar, was actively engaged in undermining the economy which sustained him, so helping wring the neck of the Bengali goose which had been laying such astonishing golden eggs. After Plassey, unregulated private English traders began fanning out across Bengal, taking over markets and asserting their authority in a way that had been impossible for them before the Revolution. By 1762, at least thirty-three of these private businesses had set themselves up in more than 400 new British trading posts around the province. Here they defied the power of local officials, refusing to pay the few taxes, tolls or customs duties they were still required to pay, as well as encroaching upon land to which they were not entitled. In this manner they ate away at the economy of Bengal like an invasion of termites steadily gnawing at the inside of an apparently sturdy wooden structure.16

  ‘They began to trade in articles which were before prohibited, and to interfere in the affairs of the country,’ wrote the brilliant but weak young Henry Vansittart, a friend of Hastings who had just taken over from Clive as Governor, and who was attempting, largely in vain, to try and rein in such abuses. ‘The Nabob complained very frequently.’17 Some of these traders operated on a large scale: by 1762–3, Archibald Keir was employing 13,000 men to manufacture 12,000 tons of salt, although the trade was officially out of bounds to any but the Nawab.18

  Nor was it just Company officials who took advantage of the situation to use force to make a fortune: passes, permissions and sepoys were available to anyone who paid enough to the Company. Mir Jafar made particularly strong complaints about a French merchant who had managed to avail himself of Company dastaks (passes) and a battalion of sepoys to impose trade on the people of Assam in ‘a very violent and arbitrary manner’.19 According to his compatriot, the Comte de Modave, M. Chevalier ‘took a great stock of salt and other articles to offload in the rich province of Assam, shielded by English passes and an escort of sepoys to safeguard his merchandise. He used this armed escort to facilitate the disposal of his goods, and as soon as he was established in the valley, sent his soldiers to the richest inhabitants, violently forcing them to purchase quantities of salt at prices determined by himself. With the same violence, he disposed of all his other trade goods.’20

  Modave noted that the further away you went from Calcutta, the worse the situation became: ‘A European visiting the upper parts of the Ganges finds mere robbers in charge of Company affairs, who think nothing of committing the most atrocious acts of tyranny, or subaltern thieves whose despicable villainy dishonours the British nation, whose principles of honour and humanity they seem totally to have rejected.’

  The morals of this nation, otherwise so worthy of respect, have here become prodigiously depraved, which cannot but cause distress to any decent and thoughtful observer. British soldiers and traders permit themselves all sorts of liberties in the pursuit of private profit or in the hope of impunity. I have seen some so far forget their duty, that they beat to death unfortunate Indians to extract money not owed to them.

  The country lies groaning under the Anarchy, laws have no power of sanction, morals are corrupt to the ultimate degree, the people groan under a multitude of vexations, all caused by the decay and confusion into which this once-great empire has fallen, with legitimate rulers having neither credibility nor authority. This rich and fertile land is turning into a desert. It is lost, unless some sudden general revolution restore its ancient splendour.21

  Again, it fell to the young Warren Hastings, upriver in Murshidabad, to blow the whistle on many of these illicit activities, exposing the unbridled extortion now going on everywhere in the province: ‘I beg leave to lay before you a grievance which calls loudly for redress,’ he wrote to his friend and ally Vansittart, ‘and which will, unless attended to, render ineffectual any endeavours to create a firm and lasting harmony between the Nabob and the Company; I mean the oppressions committed under the sanction of the English name.’

  This evil, I am well assured, is not confined to our subjects alone, but is practised all over the country by people falsely assuming the habits of our sepoys, or calling themselves our gomastas [agents/managers]. As, on such occasions, the great power of the English intimidates people from making any resistance, so on the other hand the difficulty of gaining access to those who might do them justice, prevents our having knowledge of the oppressions, and encourages their continuance, to the great scandal of our government.

  I have been surprised to meet [along the Hughli] with several English flags flying in places which I have passed; and in the river I do not believe there was a boat without one. But whatever title they may have been assumed, I was sure their frequency can bode no good to the Nawab’s revenues, or the honour of our nation; but evidently tend to lessen each.22

  ‘Nothing will reach the root of these evils,’ he added, ‘’till some certain boundary is fix’d between the Nabob’s authority and our privilege.’23

  Hastings was now the rising star of the East India Company’s Bengal administration. He had never known either of his parents: his mother had died in childbirth, and his father disappeared to Barbados soon after, where he first remarried, then promptly died. Warren was brought up by his grandfather and educated in a charity school with the poorest children in the Gloucestershire village of Daylesford. At some point he was rescued by an uncle who sent him to London to be educated at Westminster, where he is said to have played cricket with Edward Gibbon, the future historian of Roman decline and fall.* There Hastings quickly excelled as the school’s top scholar bu
t was forced to leave, aged only sixteen, when his uncle died. His guardian found him a place as a writer in the Company, and shipped him straight out to Bengal, just in time to become a prisoner of Siraj ud-Daula at the fall of the Kasimbazar factory in 1756.24

  By then, working as a buyer of silk in the villages around Murshidabad, fluent in Urdu and Bengali, and working hard on his Persian, Hastings had already fallen for his adopted country, which he always maintained he ‘loved a little more’ than his native one. A portrait from the period shows a thin, plainly dressed and balding young man in simple brown fustian with an open face and a highly intelligent, somewhat wistful expression, but with a hint of sense of humour in the set of his lips. His letters chime with this impression, revealing a diffident, austere, sensitive and unusually self-contained young man who rose at dawn, had a cold bath then rode for an hour, occasionally with a hawk on his arm. He seems to have kept his own company, drinking ‘but little wine’ and spending his evenings reading, strumming a guitar and working on his Persian. His letters home are full of requests for books.25 From the beginning he was fierce in his defence of the rights of the Bengalis who had found themselves defenceless in the face of the plunder and exploitation of Company gomastas after Plassey: the oppressions of these agents were often so ‘scandalous,’ he wrote, ‘that I can no longer put up with them without injury to my own character … I am tired of complaining to people who are strangers to justice, remorse or shame.’26 Brilliant, hardworking and an unusually skilled linguist, he was quickly promoted to become the Company’s Resident at Mir Jafar’s court where his job was to try and keep the hapless Nawab’s regime from collapse.

  This was every day becoming more likely. The absence of taxes and customs duty all added to the financial pressure on the Nawab and led to growing violence in the streets of Murshidabad where the Nawab’s hungry sepoys were now taking matters into their own hands. But it also did much to alienate powerful individuals who might otherwise have been tempted to throw in their lot with the Company-backed regime. One of the first victims of the new power equation in Bengal was an influential Kashmiri trader named Mir Ashraf. Mir Ashraf was part of a dynasty of cultured Patna-based merchant princes who had grown rich on the manufacture and trade of saltpetre, derived from the mineral nitrates which appeared naturally in the soils of Bihar. As well as being an important ingredient of gunpowder, it was also used by the Mughals to cool their drinks.

  Mir Ashraf’s dynasty had good political connections at the Murshidabad court, and until the Battle of Plassey they had found it easy to dominate the saltpetre trade with the support of the Nawab. This irritated their British counterparts, who were unable to compete with the Mir’s efficient procurement organisation, and who had for some years been complaining unsuccessfully that he was monopolising all saltpetre stocks and so shutting them out of the market.

  Before Plassey, these complaints about Mir Ashraf were simply ignored by Nawab Aliverdi Khan, who dismissed the petitions against his friend by English interlopers as absurdly presumptuous. But within two months of the overthrow of Siraj ud-Daula, the Company’s merchants in Patna were not only successfully encroaching upon Mir Ashraf’s trade, they actually seized his entire saltpetre stocks by force of arms: in August 1757, a particularly aggressive Company factor named Paul Pearkes, whose name appears in several letters of complaint from Mir Jafar, actually broke into Ashraf’s warehouses in an armed attack, using the 170 sepoys stationed to guard the Company’s fortified upcountry base, the great Patna factory. His excuse was the patently invented charge that his business rival was sheltering French goods. Pearkes seized all the saltpetre in the warehouse and adamantly refused to return it, despite the intervention of several British officials in Patna. Only when Mir Ashraf personally appealed to Clive himself was his property restored.27

  As a result of these abuses, by 1760 both Mir Ashraf and the influential Jagat Seths had turned against the new regime and were actively writing letters to the one force they thought might still be able to liberate Bengal from the encroachments of the Company. This was the new Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam, who since his escape from Delhi had been wandering the Ganges plains, actively looking for a kingdom to rule, and surrounding himself with followers hoping for a return of the old Mughal order.28

  On 9 February 1760, just four days after Clive had left India, Shah Alam crossed the Karmanasa, the boundary of Mir Jafar’s dominions, and announced to his followers that the time had come to retake ‘the prosperous and rich province’ of Bengal for the Empire. His ultimate aim, he said, was to ‘earn the money and revenue required to put down [the psychotic teenage vizier in Delhi] Imad ul-Mulk, and all who were acting against his government’.29

  But his first goal, encouraged by Mir Ashraf, who used Hindu ascetics to carry his secret messages back and forth, was to take advantage of the growing anarchy in Mir Jafar’s dominions to attack his western headquarters, Patna. Within a few days, large numbers of the old Mughal nobility of Bengal had thrown off their allegiance to Mir Jafar and offered their support to the young Emperor in his quixotic quest to rebuild the hollowed-out Mughal imperium.30

  While Murshidabad had been falling apart, the Mughal capital of Delhi was faring even worse: like some rotting carcass preyed upon by rival packs of jackals, what was left of its riches provided intermittent sustenance to a succession of passing armies, as the city was alternately occupied and looted by Maratha raiders from the south and Afghan invaders from the north.

  Throughout these successive occupations, Imad ul-Mulk had some how clung to power in the ruins of Delhi with the backing of the Marathas, sometimes ignoring, sometimes bullying his powerless puppet monarch, Shah Alam’s father, Alamgir II. Eventually, on the eve of yet another Afghan invasion by Ahmed Shah Durrani, who was now married to Alamgir’s daughter, and who he feared would naturally side with his father-in-law, the vizier decided to rid himself of his royal encumbrance entirely before the latter did the same to him.31

  According to the account of Khair ud-Din Illahabadi in his Book of Admonition, the Ibratnama, Imad ul-Mulk finally took action in the early afternoon of 29 November 1759, at the fourteenth-century Firoz Shah’s Kotla, south of the Red Fort, overlooking the Yamuna River. ‘Imad ul-Mulk mistrusted the King, and equally the minister Khan-i Khanan, whom he knew to be party to the King’s secret counsels.’

  So, he first murdered the Khan-i Khanan while he was at his prayers, then he sent to the King the fake news that, ‘A wandering dervish from Kandahar has come and settled in the ruins of Firuz Shah’s kûtla, a wonder-worker definitely worth visiting!’ He knew that the pious King had a penchant for visiting fakirs, and that he would not resist an invitation to see one who had come from Ahmad Shah Durrani’s homeland.

  The King could not contain his eagerness, and immediately set off: when he reached the chamber, he paused at the entrance, and his sword was politely taken from his hand and the curtain lifted: as soon as he was inside, the curtain was dropped again and fastened tight. Mirza Babur, who had accompanied him, saw that the Emperor was in danger and drew his sword to take on the attackers: but he was over-powered by a crowd of Imad al-Mulk’s men, disarmed and bundled into a covered litter, then whisked off back to the Salateen prison in the Red Fort.

  Meanwhile, some ghoulish Mughal soldiers, who had been awaiting the King’s arrival, appeared out of the dark and stabbed the unarmed man repeatedly with their daggers. Then they dragged him out by the feet and threw his corpse down to the sandy river bank below, then stripped it of its coat and under-garments and left it lying naked for six watches before having it taken to be interred in the Mausoleum of the Emperor Humayun.32

  The news of his father’s assassination finally reached Shah Alam three weeks later. The prince was still wandering in the east. His official court chronicle, the Shah Alam Nama, paints a picture of the young prince touring the Ganges plains giving titles and promising estates, and trying to gather support rather as a modern Indian politician canvasses for an elec
tion: visiting shrines, seeking the blessings of holy men and saints, holding receptions and receiving supporters and recruits.33

  Shah Alam had no land and no money, but compensated as best he could for this with his immense charm, good looks, poetic temperament and refined manners. The Lord of the Universe may have been unable to enter his own capital, yet there was still some lingering magic in the title, and this penniless wanderer was now widely regarded as the de jure ruler of almost all of India, able to issue much-coveted imperial titles.34 The young Shah Alam proved adept at drawing on the hallowed mystique associated with the imperial person, and the growing nostalgia for the once-peaceful days of Mughal rule. In this way, he managed to collect around him some 20,000 followers and unemployed soldiers of fortune, most of them as penniless and ill equipped as he was. It was as if the value of the royal charisma was growing in importance, even as the royal purse emptied.

  Apart from money, what Shah Alam really lacked was a modern European-style infantry regiment, and the artillery which would allow him to besiege walled cities. Shortly before he learned of his father’s death, however, fortune brought him a partial solution to both in the person of the dashing fugitive French commander of Scottish extraction, Jean Law de Lauriston. Law had managed to escape from Bengal soon after the twin disasters of the fall of Chandernagar and the Battle of Plassey temporarily ended French ambitions in eastern and northern India. He was still on the run from the Company when he came across the royal camp. He was delighted by what he saw of the ambitious and charming young prince.