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

by William Dalrymple

  He had worked equally hard to keep the different parts of the Confederacy together. Tragically for the Marathas, he was the last of the talented generation that came to prominence after the catastrophic Maratha defeat at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, and his death came at the end of a five-year period, 1795–1800, which had also seen the loss of the Peshwa and the senior members of the houses of Scindia and Holkar. ‘With the death of the great Minister Nana Phadnavis,’ wrote the British Resident at Pune, General Palmer, ‘all the wisdom and moderation of the Maratha government departed.’68 Wellesley needed to do very little: he could just sit back in Calcutta and watch as the great Confederacy fell apart.

  In Nana’s absence, the three ambitious but quarrelsome and inexperienced teenagers who had between them inherited the leadership of Confederacy – the new Peshwa, Baji Rao II; the new head of the house of Scindia, Daulat Rao; and the new chief of the house of Holkar, Jaswant Rao – were now free to conspire and intrigue against each other unchecked. Just as Wellesley was beginning to move the troops of the increasingly well-armed, well-financed and aggressively militaristic Company with great subtlety around the subcontinental chessboard, the Marathas found themselves hopelessly stuck deep in a swamp of internal conflict. They could only hope to win against the Company if they stood united. With every passing day, however, that unity was becoming more and more elusive.69

  The politics of north India had long been dominated by the old, hereditary feud between the Scindia and Holkar dynasties; now it passed down a generation, growing in bitterness and violence as it did so. When Mahadji Scindia had died in 1794, his successor, Daulat Rao, was only fifteen. The boy inherited the magnificent army that Benoît de Boigne had trained up for his predecessor, but he showed little vision or talent in its deployment. General Palmer, who was the Company’s most experienced observer of Maratha politics, had greatly admired Mahadji Scindia; but he was not impressed by his successor. He described him as a ‘profligate young man … weak [and] totally destitute of decency or principle’.

  His revenues have declined rapidly, while his army has been unnecessarily augmented & he is now more than a crore [10 million rupees, £130 million today] in arrears to his troops, though he has received five crores by the most shameless oppression and robbery since he came to the musnud [throne]. The fidelity of his European officers & their corps have so far prevented his deposal, but they cannot save him much longer … He is totally ignorant of his own affairs & incapable of understanding his own true interests, has not the smallest regard to honour or character, nor the least benevolence of mind. His servants take every advantage of these defects, and his government is a scene of confusion, fraud & rapine.70

  It did not help that the new Peshwa, Baji Rao II, was equally young and inexperienced: his character, thought Palmer, ‘is not better than Scindia’s, but he wants the power to do as much mischief. In his private demeanour, however, he is decent while Scindia is quite abandoned. I have had a very troublesome and mortifying part to act here [in Pune] with two young men who neither understand their own good, nor the rights of others.’71

  Baji Rao, a slight, timid, unconfident-looking boy of twenty-one with a weak chin and a downy upper lip, quickly showed himself comprehensively unequal to the challenge of holding together the different factions that made up his power base. Moreover, both he and Scindia were on irreconcilably hostile terms with the third principal Maratha power broker, Jaswant Rao Holkar, the one-eyed ‘Bastard of Indore’.

  The Peshwa’s traditional role was to act as mediator between the different Maratha warlords and to bring them together. But in April 1802, Baji Rao managed instead, quite unnecessarily, to initiate a new blood feud with the Holkars. When Jaswant Rao’s elder brother Vitoji was unexpectedly captured by the Peshwa’s troops, the gleeful Baji Rao hung him in chains and sentenced him to suffer a flogging of 200 strokes, followed by a lingering death, tied to the foot of an elephant. In this manner, Vitoji was dragged screaming around the palace, while Baji Rao looked on, giggling, from a palace terrace.72 Shortly afterwards Baji Rao invited Nana Phadnavis’s former allies and supporters to the palace and there charged them with conspiracy and had them all arrested.73

  As the epithet suggests, Jaswant Rao was the illegitimate son of Tukoji Holkar by a concubine. On the accession of his legitimate half-brother, Jaswant Rao had become a fugitive and set off into the jungle with a band of similarly desperate armed outlaws, living hard and moving fast in the badlands surrounding Indore. Following Vitoji’s murder, having invoked the assistance of the family deity at Jejuri, and buoyed by his reputation as a courageous and resourceful leader, with the help of a tribe of 200 loyal Bhil warriors, Jaswant marched on his brother’s fortress of Maheshwar, and had himself crowned as his successor.

  There, on 31 May, Jaswant Rao Holkar vowed vengeance on those he held responsible for his brother’s murderers. He first turned his attention to Scindia, setting off almost immediately to raid his enemy’s territory and plunder and burn down his palaces. The two rivals spent much of 1801 fighting each other to a standstill across the hills and battlefields of central India as their armies marched and counter-marched between Ujjain and Burhanpur, haemorrhaging men with every inconclusive engagement. According to the chronicler Munna Lal, ‘The other commanders of the Deccan, who could see things as they really were, strove to make peace with Jaswant Rao, saying that mutual hatred between us Marathas is a disgrace: prosperity arises from unity, while discord will bring about our ruin. But as the times were not favourable, their good advice made no impact. Day by day, the flames of discord burned ever more violently.’74

  Finally, Jaswant Rao crossed the Godavari, marched south and headed for Pune with his army. The Peshwa, desperate for allies, turned to the only force still in play after the death of Tipu. He summoned the British Resident and asked for an alliance.

  This was Wellesley’s chance further to divide the Maratha Confederacy and to paralyse its war machine. He offered Baji Rao the same terms he had just offered the Nizam: a defensive alliance and a permanent garrison of Company sepoys to be stationed for his protection in Pune, in return for a large annual cash payment. The Peshwa accepted the terms; but before any Company troops could arrive to protect him, he and Scindia had to face Holkar’s army, which was now rapidly advancing on Pune.

  On Sunday 25 October 1802, the feast of Diwali, the two armies faced each other across a wide wooded valley at Hadaspur, a few miles from the Maratha capital. The battle began at half past nine in the morning with a prolonged artillery duel. It continued indecisively until, soon after one o’clock, Jaswant Rao personally led a massed cavalry charge on Scindia’s guns, ‘like a tiger on a herd of deer’. He was seriously wounded in the charge, but won a decisive victory.75 Long before the battle was finally lost, and 5,000 of his men were killed, the frightened and bewildered Baji Rao had fled.

  For a month, the young Peshwa moved with his bodyguard from one hillfort to another, avoiding Jaswant Rao’s patrols. For a while he hid in the fortress of Sinhagarh, south of Pune, before making his way to the spectacular and craggily inaccessible hilltop fort of Raigad, where the first great Maratha, Shivaji, had been crowned and from where he had defied the Mughal armies of Aurangzeb. All the while, Baji Rao kept in close touch with his new Company allies, who soon put into action a rescue operation.

  From Raigad, the Peshwa was instructed to make his way towards the sea coast, where he took shelter in the old pirate stronghold of Suvarnadurg. Shortly afterwards, he was picked up by the HMS Herculean, commanded by Wellesley’s emissary, Captain Kennedy. Baji Rao and his men were fed and entertained, and two lakh rupeese in gold provided for their personal use. A fortnight later, on 16 December, the sloop docked, to artillery salutes, at Bassein – modern Vassai – the former Portuguese trading post a little to the north of Bombay: an extraordinary crumbling city full of decaying Jesuit churches and overgrown Dominican convents, all slowly beginning to return to the jungle, with mighty banyan trees corks
crewing through the broken baroque pediments and collapsing cloisters.

  Here Baji Rao signed a treaty of alliance with the Company, which he now acknowledged to be the Marathas’ overlord. A large British garrison would be installed in a new barracks to overlook the Peshwa’s palace in Pune, where British arms would now reinstall him.

  The document, known as the Treaty of Bassein, was ratified on the last day of the year, 31 December 1802. When Holkar learned the details of the terms, he declared, simply: ‘Baji Rao has destroyed the Maratha state. Now the British will deal the same blow to it that they did to Tipu Sultan.’76

  With the Treaty of Bassein, Wellesley believed he had succeeded, bloodlessly, in turning the Marathas into dependants of the Company, just as he had the Nizam. Other more experienced observers were less sure. As soon as he heard the details of the treaty, the Resident in Hyderabad, James Kirkpatrick, wrote an official despatch from Hyderabad warning that not one of the Maratha warlords – the real powers in the Peshwa’s dominions – would sit back and allow the English to control Baji Rao as their puppet. He predicted that Wellesley’s actions, instead of bringing peace, would succeed in uniting the Marathas where Baji Rao himself had failed, and that together the Maratha armies would now mass in a ‘hostile confederacy’ to fight the Company.

  Wellesley was predictably furious at what he regarded as Kirkpatrick’s impertinence. He wrote an intemperate reply to Hyderabad, saying that any sort of united Maratha resistance was now ‘categorically impossible’ and that the Resident was guilty of ‘ignorance, folly, and treachery’ in suggesting otherwise. But Kirkpatrick held his ground, replying that his sources of intelligence indicated that ‘such a confederacy was highly probable’, that Holkar was even now on his way to occupy Pune, and that another of the leading Maratha chieftains, Raghuji Bhosle, the Raja of Berar, was planning to join him there.

  Kirkpatrick was correct. Within months, the Company would once again be at war, and this time against the largest, best armed and most tightly trained forces they had ever faced.

  The last survivor of the older generation of rulers was the Emperor Shah Alam. Now seventy-five, the old, blind king still sat on the gilt replica of the Peacock Throne amid his ruined palace, the sightless ruler of a largely illusory empire.

  The Emperor had outlived all his enemies – Nader Shah, Imad ul-Mulk, Clive, Carnac, Shuja ud-Daula, Ghulam Qadir – but this was really his only victory. In old age, he was at least realistic about his failures, telling his heir apparent, Akbar Shah, that from the day that he arrived back in Delhi he was a ruler in name only. He was merely a high-class prisoner, he said, and his sons should not consider themselves more than that.77

  Mahadji Scindia, who had at least showed an intermittent interest in the welfare of the Emperor, had died in 1794 and his successor, Daulat Rao, was completely indifferent to his nominal position as Mughal Vakil-i-Mutlaq, or Vizier. He had still less interest in maintaining the Mughal court which lay in the far north of his dominions, and which he never visited after ascending the musnud. So while the Emperor remained under nominal Maratha protection, with a Maratha garrison resident within the Red Fort, the imperial family lived in poverty, neglected by their keepers.

  These were a group of French officers led by Louis Guillaume François Drugeon, a Savoyard aristocrat who was given charge of the Emperor’s person and command of the Emperor’s bodyguard, and Louis Bourquien, a French mercenary of humble origins, who one historian of the Marathas has described as a ‘pastry cook, pyrotechnic and poltroon’. Overall command lay with Scindia’s Commander-in-Chief, General Pierre Perron, the son of a Provençal weaver, who lived with his troops a hundred miles to the south-east in the great fortress of Aligarh.78

  Several volumes of the palace diary from the period, the Roznamcha-i-Shah Alam, survive in the British Library and they reveal as no other source the degree to which Mughal court life had been diminished by sheer lack of resources. We hear how one prince was caught stripping out pieces of marble and inlaid semi-precious stones from the floor of the Asad Burj tower ‘for the purpose of sale. He was summoned by His Majesty and warned against committing such malicious activities.’ A princess got into a dispute with the king over the interest on some jewels she had been forced to mortgage. A concubine was accused of stealing the ornaments of Nawab Mubarak Mahal. The royal children complained their salaries had not been paid; the more distant royal cousins made a bid to escape from the Salatin Cage, claiming they were not receiving adequate food and were near starvation. The king replied that ‘due to the infirm state of the Empire, it was necessary for the Princes to be contented with whatever the Masters of Pune [the Marathas] provide for expenditure’.

  On one especially telling occasion, the blind king had to reprimand the royal servants when a visiting Maratha chief threw a handful of coins on the floor of the audience hall, and all the attendants, abandoning court decorum, scrambled to grab them, some even breaking into fist fights within the Diwan-i-Am. Meanwhile, petitioners from the city complained about raids by Gujjars within the walls, and by the Sikhs on the outer suburbs.79

  Shah Alam was also alarmed by the reports he heard of the violence and instability generated by the Maratha civil war, and blamed Daulat Rao: ‘His Majesty expressed deep regret at these developments,’ reported his biographer, Munna Lal, ‘saying “this ill-omened one now strives to sow disunity among his companions. With such ugly and inappropriate behaviour, he saws off the branch he’s sitting on. It will all end in scandal and disaster.”’80

  Frustrated by the ways of this world, the Emperor looked more and more to the world of the spirit. When a celebrated dervish arrived from Lahore, the imperial princes were sent out to the gates of the city to welcome him. On one occasion, it was reported that a concubine ‘saw in a dream that if His Majesty paid a visit to Qadam Sharif and ordered a red cow to be released to wander free, the situation in the Empire would improve’. The Emperor gave orders that both should be done.81

  Shah Alam’s one remaining pleasure was his literary work. He spent much of his free time in his seventies editing his lifetime’s poetic composition, from which he produced a single volume of his favourite verses, and the Nadirat-i-Shahi, Diwan-i-Aftab. He also dictated what scholars hold to be the first full-length novel in Delhi Urdu, a massive and ambitious 4,000-page work called the Ajaib ul-Qasas. This dastan (story) is a meditation on kingship and tells the story of a prince and princess tossed back and forth by powers beyond their control, from India to Constantinople via various magical islands and fairy and demonic realms. While the prince’s sense of helplessness in the hands of fate reflects Shah Alam’s experience, the lavish courtly settings of the dastan contrast with the impoverished reality of Shah Alam’s daily life under the neglectful regime of the younger Scindia.

  Daulat Rao may not have realised the value of controlling the elderly Mughal Emperor, but Lord Wellesley certainly did. He understood the vital distinction that, while Shah Alam may not have commanded any significant military power, he still held substantial symbolic authority, and that his decisions instantly conferred legality. ‘Notwithstanding His Majesty’s total deprivation of real power, dominion, and authority,’ he wrote, ‘almost every state and every class of people in India continue to acknowledge his nominal sovereignty. The current coin of every established power is struck in the name of Shah Alam …’82

  As it became clear by the end of June 1803 that Scindia was not going to accept the Treaty of Bassein, and that war was now unavoidable, Wellesley began drawing up detailed plans to invade Hindustan and seize both its ancient Mughal capital and its emperor. Having brought about ‘the destruction of M. Perron’s force’, he would, he wrote, ‘invade Scindia’s possessions and make alliances with the Rajputs’.83 ‘I will seize Agra and Delhi,’ he told his brother Arthur, and thus ‘take the person of the Mogul into British protection … at the earliest practical moment.’84 This would be the moment when the Company finally, both symbolically and in substance, came
to replace the Mughals and the Marathas as the paramount rulers of India.

  The British had long used Shah Alam’s confidant, Sayyid Reza Khan, as a discreet channel of communication with the Emperor, and now Wellesley decided to send a secret letter to Shah Alam, offering him asylum and opening negotiations to take the Mughals back under Company care for the first time since the Emperor had left Allahabad thirty years earlier, in 1772: ‘Your Majesty is fully apprised of the sentiments of respect and attachment which the British Government has invariably entertained towards your Royal Person and Family,’ he began in his usual style, mixing flattery, sarcasm and half-truths. ‘The injuries and indignities to which your Majesty and your illustrious family have been exposed since the time when your Majesty unhappily transferred the Protection of your person to the Power of the Maratha State, have been a subject of unceasing concern to the Honourable Company.’

  I have deeply regretted that the Circumstances of the times have hitherto not been conducive to the interposition of British Power for the purpose of affording your Majesty effectual relief from injustice, rapacity and inhumanity. In the present Crisis of Affairs, it is probable that your Majesty may have the opportunity of again placing yourself under the Protection of the British Government, and I shall avail myself of any event which may enable me to obey the Dictates of my Sincere respect and Attachment to your Royal House.85

  Wellesley’s Commander-in-Chief, Lord Lake, was instructed to ‘show His Majesty every demonstration of reverence, respect and attention and every degree of regard for the comfort of His Majesty and the Royal Family’, and to assure him ‘that adequate Provision will be made for the support of your Majesty and of your family and Household’. It sounded generous, although the following paragraph hinted at Wellesley’s actual intentions, when he suggested that the Emperor might prefer to leave the Red Fort and reside closer to Calcutta, at the modestly provincial fort of Monghyr near Patna.86 But the chivalrous Lord Lake, misunderstanding Wellesley’s meaning, went beyond his superior’s intentions and assumed the tone of a subject rather than that of a friendly protector: ‘I am cordially disposed to render your Majesty every demonstration of my loyalty and attachment,’ he wrote, ‘and I consider it to be a distinguished honour, as it is a peculiar privilege, to execute your Majesty’s commands.’