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

by William Dalrymple

  Hastings, always sensitive to criticism, wrote that he could hardly breathe in this air of extreme malice. ‘Dark allusions, mysterious insinuations, bitter invective and ironical reflections are weapons to which I have become accustomed,’ he wrote soon after.71 According to a gleeful Francis, ‘the sweat ran down Hastings’ face, tears gushed from his eyes, he beat his head, and ran about the room in a fit of distraction’.72 Soon afterwards, Francis was writing to the Prime Minister, Lord North, of his contemptuous estimate of Hastings: ‘without denying him some little Talent of the third or fourth order,’ he wrote, ‘we were all as much deceived with regard to his Abilities and Judgement, as to his other Qualifications. I look back to my own Prepossession in his favour as to a State of Delirium, from which he himself has recovered me …’73

  Under the malevolent influence of Clive, who had always distrusted Hastings’ Indophilia, Francis had arrived in India already convinced that Hastings was the source of all the evils and corruption of Bengal. As he wrote to his patron, who was then returning from the last leg of his Grand Tour, ‘Mr Hastings is the most corrupt of villains.’ As for Hastings’ only ally on the Council, Richard Barwell, ‘he is an ignorant, false, presumptuous blockhead’.74

  These were views Philip Francis held steadfastly until his death, and from the day of his arrival in Calcutta he worked hard to bring Hastings down, to block all his initiatives and to reverse all the work he had already done. ‘Bengal is ruined and Mr H has done it alone,’ he wrote within a few weeks of arriving. ‘By the next ship I believe we shall send you such an Account of the Internal State, as will make every man in England tremble.’75 His two fellow councillors, both peppery soldiers, neither very bright, went along with all that Francis suggested, having been won around to his views in the course of the year-long sea voyage to Bengal.

  Hastings had every reason to feel aggrieved. Far from being regarded as the incarnation of Company corruption, up to the arrival of Francis, Hastings had been regarded as a man with a spotless reputation. Tall, thin, clean-living, quietly spoken and dryly scholarly, Hastings was one of the few Company servants who had always stood up against the wilder excesses of Company rule. He was also widely admired for his remarkable administrative ability and sheer industry. The artist William Hodges, who travelled up the Ganges with Warren Hastings, remarked on his plain attire, amid the pomp of his colleagues, and noted how firmly he stopped his attendants treating ordinary Indians roughly. He was constantly lending money to friends in distress and he looked after his household with generosity and consideration: his pension list remembered the widow of his very first servant in Kasimbazar and even a blind man who used to sing for him in the streets of Calcutta.76 Ghulam Hussain Khan, who has little good to say about any British official, wrote a long and singular passage in his history praising Hastings’ struggles for justice for ordinary people under Company rule, as well as his personal generosity: ‘May the Almighty Bestower of Graces and Favor reward the Governor for having hastened to the assistance of so many afflicted families … and of listening to the groans and sobs of so many thousands of oppressed ones, who know how to suffer but cannot speak.’77

  Far more than any of his contemporaries, Hastings was conscious of the many flaws in the Company’s regime, and wrote about them tellingly: ‘To hold vast possessions, and yet to act on the level of mere merchants, making immediate gain our first principle; to receive an immense revenue without possessing protective power over the people who pay it … [these] are paradoxes not to be reconciled, highly injurious to our national character … and bordering on inhumanity.’78 He was determined to bring about the changes that were needed to make Company rule more just, more effective and more responsible: Company servants, he wrote, were often ignorant of local languages and customs, but Indian petitioners were still powerless to resist their abuses and oppressions. This he believed to be ‘the root of all evil which is diffused through every channel of our government’.79 ‘God forbid,’ he wrote as he left to take up the Governor Generalship, ‘that the government of this fine country should continue to be a mere chair for a triennial succession of indigent adventurers to sit and hatch private fortunes in.’80

  Between his appointment, in February 1772, and the coming of Francis and the other councillors two and a half years later, Hastings had already done much to overhaul and reform the worst aspects of Company rule in Bengal. On arrival in Calcutta, he had been appalled by the mess he had inherited: ‘The new government of the Company consists of a huge heap of undigested materials, as wild as chaos itself,’ he wrote. ‘The powers of the government are undefined; the collection of revenue, the provision of the investment, the administration of justice (if it exists at all), the care of the police, are all huddled together, being exercised by the same hands, though most frequently the two latter offices are totally neglected for the want of knowing where to have recourse to them.’81

  He got quickly to work, beginning the process of turning the EIC into an administrative service. Hastings’ first major change was to move all the functions of government from Murshidabad to Calcutta. The fiction that Bengal was still being ruled by the Nawab was dispensed with and the Company now emerged as the undisguised ruler: ‘Calcutta is now the capital of Bengal,’ he wrote, ‘and every Office and trust of the province issues from it … It was time to establish the Line of the Company’s Power, & habituate the People, and the Nabob to their Sovereignty.’82 Yet Hastings wished to retain and revive the existing Mughal system and operate it through Indian officials, only with the office of the Governor General and his Council replacing that of the Nawab. He even went as far as proposing that no Europeans should be permitted to live outside Calcutta, except at a few select factories connected with the Company’s trade.

  Throughout 1773, Hastings worked with extraordinary energy. He unified currency systems, ordered the codification of Hindu laws and digests of Muslim law books, reformed the tax and customs system, fixed land revenue and stopped the worst oppression being carried out on behalf of private traders by the local agents. He created an efficient postal service, backed a proper cartographical survey of India by James Rennell and built a series of public granaries, including the great Gola at Patna, to make sure the famine of 1770–71 was never repeated.83

  The Tibetan adventurer and diplomat George Bogle met Hastings around this time and described him as ‘a man who is in every way fitted for the station he holds. He possesses a steadiness, and at the same time a moderation of character; he is quick and assiduous in business, and has a fine style of language, a knowledge of the customs and dispositions of the natives, whose tongue he understands, and, although not affable, yet of the most ready of access to all the world. During his administration many abuses have already been reformed and many useful regulations have been established in every department of government.’84

  Underlying all Hastings’ work was a deep respect for the land he had lived in since his teens. For, unlike Clive, Hastings genuinely liked India, and by the time he became Governor spoke not only good Bengali and Urdu but also fluent court and literary Persian. He even sang ‘Hindoostanee airs’. His letters, including some written to his friend Samuel Johnson, reveal a deep affection for India and Indians quite absent from the openly racist letters of Clive: ‘Our Indian subjects,’ wrote Hastings, ‘are as exempt from the worst propensities of human nature as any people upon the face of the earth, ourselves not exempted. They are gentle, benevolent, more susceptible to gratitude for kindness shewn them than prompt to vengeance for wrongs sustained, abhorrent of bloodshed, faithful and affectionate in service and submissive in legal authority.’85 Hastings particularly disliked the haughty way Company servants dealt with Indians and the tone they often took: ‘There is a fierceness in the European manners, especially among the lower sort, which is incompatible with the gentle temper of the Bengalee, and gives the former an ascendant that is scarce supportable even without the additional weight of authority.’86

  Over th
e years, the more Hastings studied Indian culture, the more respectful he became. Under his patronage, and under the guidance of the Persian scholar and pioneering Orientalist Sir William Jones, who was brought out to superintend the new legal system, an ‘Asiatick Society’ was founded in 1784 which, among other projects, sponsored the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita, for which Hastings composed a rightly celebrated introduction: ‘It is not very long since the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life,’ he wrote, ‘nor, I fear, is that prejudice yet wholly eradicated, though surely abated. Every instance which brings their real character home will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained from their writings: and will survive when the British dominion in India shall long cease to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance … In truth I love India a little more than my own country.’87

  Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Society became the catalyst for an outpouring of scholarship on the civilisation of what Jones called ‘this wonderful country’. It formed enduring relations with the Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilisation. In India Jones wrote that he had found Arcadia. It was a moment, rare in the history of Empire, of genuine cross-cultural appreciation.88

  Moreover, Hastings’ interest in the Gita was not just antiquarian: aspects of its philosophy came to guide him in his personal life and he took as his own maxim the sloka [verse], ‘Your entitlement is to the deed alone, never to its results. Do not make the results of an action your motive. Do not be attached to inaction. Having renounced rewards resulting from actions, wise men endowed with discrimination are freed from the bondage of birth and go to the Regions of Eternal Happiness.’89

  Philip Francis, by contrast, took the Clive approach to India and wrote contemptuously of the ‘ignorant and unimproved natives of Bengal’, as well anticipating Macaulay by trying to insist on English becoming the language of government in India.90 ‘The baseness of the Bengali is proverbial,’ he grumbled; you could not conceive a ‘more refined depravity’. Such differing views left little neutral middle ground. Hastings came to loathe Francis – ‘this man of levity, the vilest fetcher and carrier of tales … without one generous or manly principle’ – with the same intensity as he himself was hated by his nemesis. But though he might fume and fret, Hastings could not overrule the hostile majority on his council in Calcutta – ‘We three are king,’ crowed Francis – and, increasingly, Madras and Bombay began simply ignoring Hastings’ orders, too.91

  So began a period of intense political conflict and governmental paralysis in Bengal, generating what Ghulam Hussain Khan, who was baffled by the Company’s methods of decision-making, called ‘an infinity of disturbances and confusions which perpetually impeded the wheels of government’. There was no ‘head over them all, with full power and authority’. Instead, authority was invested with the Council – ‘what the English call a committee, four or five men … that are perpetually at variance with each other, and perpetually in suspense about their own staying, and their being succeeded by another’. The result was a ‘constant failure’ that now plagued ‘every endeavour’ of the Company … ‘This country seems to have no master,’ concluded the historian.92 Hastings would not have disagreed. As he himself wrote, ‘All business stood still, for the Board is continually occupied in collecting proofs of my demerit, and of the virtues of my adversaries.’93

  The political paralysis in Bengal soon became clear to all the Company’s many enemies in India, and it was not long before two powers in particular decided to test the strength of their now divided and weakened adversary. Both courts had their capitals in the south: Company control of the north and east of the peninsula may now have been assured, but the same was far from true of the south and west.

  The first power were the Marathas, who had been for nearly seventy years, since the death of Aurangzeb, by far the strongest military power in India, and largely responsible for the slow dismembering of the Mughal Empire. In 1761 the Marathas had received a major setback at the Battle of Panipat when, outmanoeuvred, poorly supplied, surrounded on all sides and hungry to the point of malnourishment, disease and weakness, they were catastrophically besieged on the plains outside Panipat by Ahmad Shah Durrani’s invading Afghans. In the weeks leading up to their final annihilation, their commanders had slowly been killed one by one under an intensive Afghan artillery bombardment: first Balavant Rao Mehendale, then Govindpant Bundele: ‘the earth trembled, people began to speak ill words, and they say thunderbolts fell to earth’.94 Then, on the fateful day of 7 January 1761, the desperate and now starving Marathas tried to break out of their blockaded camp. Under their high yellow banner they were slaughtered by the camel-borne swivel guns and the massed cavalry charges of the well-provisioned Afghans. That day ended with 28,000 Maratha dead on the battlefield, including much of the younger Maratha leadership and the Peshwa’s only heir, shot by a ball through the chest. The following day, a further 40,000 disarmed Maratha captives, who had surrendered and thrown themselves at the mercy of the Afghans, were to a man executed on Durrani’s orders. The Peshwa Ballaji Rao died broken-hearted soon after: ‘his mind had become confused and he began to revile and curse his people’.95 But a decade later, Durrani was dead and the Marathas had begun to recover their strength. They were now back in control of much of central and western India, and ambitious to extend their influence from the Kaveri to the Indus.

  The second power was a new force, which in the 1770s was just emerging and beginning to flex its military muscles: the Mysore Sultanate of Haidar Ali and his formidable warrior son, Tipu Sultan. Haidar, who was of Punjabi origin, had risen in the ranks of the Mysore army, where he introduced many of the innovations he had learned from observing French troops at work in the Carnatic Wars. In the early 1760s he deposed the reigning Wodiyar Raja of Mysore and seized control of his state in what today might be called a military coup, rapidly increasing the size of Mysore’s army and using it to occupy the lands of a succession of small neighbouring rulers.

  He imported French officers to train his troops and French engineers to rebuild the defences of the island fortress of Srirangapatnam. Haidar and Tipu even tried to create a navy, which by 1766 comprised two warships, seven smaller vessels and forty gallivats, all commanded by a European seaman named Stannett.96

  Both the Marathas and Tipu’s Mysore Sultanate would in time develop to be the two fiercest and most challenging military adversaries the Company would ever face, and the final obstacles to its seizure of peninsular India.

  For some time the directors had been growing alarmed at how Indian military techniques were rapidly improving across the region: the easy victories of the Plassey era, a decade earlier, were now increasingly eluding the Company. It had taken Indian states some thirty years to catch up with the European innovations in military technology, tactics and discipline that had led to the Company’s early successes; but by the mid-1760s there was growing evidence that that gap was fast being bridged: ‘The progress that the natives make in the knowledge of the art of war, both in Bengal and on the Coast of Coromandel, is becoming a very alarming circumstance,’ noted the directors, urging the Bengal Council to prevent ‘letting any European officers or soldiers enter into the service of the country government’, and ‘discourage, as far as in your power, all military improvements among them’.97

  The anxieties of the directors were shown to be fully justified when, in August 1767, Haidar Ali declared war on the Company and descended the ghats east of Bangalore with a huge force of around 50,000 men. Of these troops, 23,000 were cavalry, but 28,000 – some twenty battalions – were trained units of highly disciplined sepoy infantry. The Company was unaware that Haidar had modern infantry forces of such size and discipline, but this was not
the only shock. The Mysore sepoys’ rifles and cannon were found to be based on the latest French designs, and the Mysore artillery had a heavier bore and longer range than anything possessed by the Company’s armies.

  In many other respects, too, the Mysore troops were more innovative and tactically ahead of the Company armies. They had mastered the art of firing rockets from their camel cavalry to disperse hostile cavalry formations, for example, long before William Congreve’s rocket system was adopted by the British army.98 Haidar and Tipu had also developed a large bullock ‘park’ of white Deccani cattle to allow them rapidly to deploy infantry and their supplies through their kingdom, a logistical innovation later borrowed by the Company.

  In September 1767, while Haidar was engaging the main Madras army near Trinomalee, the seventeen-year-old Tipu led a daring raid behind Company lines into the garden suburbs of Madras. He rode at speed across the plains of the Carnatic with his crack cavalry and, finding no opposition, began burning and looting the grand weekend Georgian villas of the Madras Council that covered the slopes of St Thomas Mount. He also came close to capturing the Governor of Madras, and might actually have done so had his cavalry not become distracted by their looting. ‘I never saw black troops behave so bravely as Haidar’s,’ wrote a Company captain who saw them in action.99

  In the end, the Company sued for peace. Haidar was successfully bought off: a treaty was signed and the Mysore forces returned home. But the fact that the Company could now be so easily surprised and defeated was a lesson noted with satisfaction in many courts in India, particularly that of Haidar in Mysore and the Marathas in Pune.

  It was near Pune, twelve years later, in 1779, that the Company received its first major defeat since the victory at Plassey. In February, without consulting Hastings in Calcutta, the Bombay Council got itself entangled with internal Maratha politics and signed an agreement with one of the Marathas’ ousted leaders, Raghunath Rao, offering to reinstate him on the throne of Pune as regent to the young Maratha Peshwa. On 24 November, this rogue expedition, unauthorised by Calcutta, left Bombay harbour and set off towards Pune with just 2,000 sepoys, a few hundred European cavalry and artillery, and a force of 7,000 of Raghunath Rao’s Maratha cavalry. Commanding the expedition was the elderly Colonel Egerton. The second-in-command was Shah Alam’s old adversary John Carnac, who had recently taken over a senior position in the Bombay Presidency.