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

by William Dalrymple

  It was a massacre. Among the many casualties was Pester, who was hit by some of the first volleys: ‘A grapeshot passed through the housing of my pistols, and shattered the stock of one of them, and I felt my horse stagger under me; another grape had grazed his side and lodged under the skin; a third went through him. It entered at his near quarter and passed out at the other. He staggered and fell onto me.’140

  Chaos broke out, but the Marathas remained at their defensive position on the raised ground, failing to advance and scatter the terrified Company sepoys. This gave Lake time to rally his men. Deciding to lure Bourquien off his strong position, Lake gave the order for the infantry to fall back in a feint, and they did so, between two wings of cavalry who lay hidden behind the tall grass. The Marathas took the bait and rushed forward, only to find themselves caught in a pincer movement. The Company infantry then turned and advanced methodically forward with bayonets, supported by the galloper guns. ‘We drove them into the Yamuna,’ wrote the badly bruised Pester, ‘and hundreds of them were destroyed in endeavouring to cross it.’

  The Flying Artillery was up, and the river appeared boiling by the fire of grape kept up on those of the enemy who had taken to the river. It was literally, for a time, a stream of blood, and presented such a scene as at another period would freeze a man’s very soul. When this was past, we faced about, and returned to the field of battle to collect our wounded men and officers …

  There the scene was truly shocking … About thirty surgeons were absolutely covered in blood, performing operations on the unfortunate soldiers who had had their legs and arms shattered in the action, and death in every shape seemed to preside in this assembly of human misery. Their exclamations were enough to pierce the hardest heart. Numbers were fainting, and even dying under the operation; others bore the pain with as much fortitude as they could … In one corner of the tent stood a pile of legs and arms, from which the boots and clothes of many were not yet stripped off.141

  That night, five French commanders gave themselves up, and Lord Lake wrote to tell Wellesley what had passed.142 He added: ‘Your Lordship will perceive that our loss has been very great … under as heavy a fire as I have ever been witness to …’143 Later he expanded on the bravery and skill shown by his Maratha opponents. ‘Their battalions are uncommonly well appointed,’ he wrote, ‘have a most numerous artillery, as well served as they possibly can be.’

  All the sepoys of the enemy behaved exceedingly well, the gunners standing to their guns until killed by the bayonet … I was never in so severe a business in my life, and I pray to God I may never be in such a situation again. Their army is better appointed than ours; no expense is spared, and they have three times the number of men to a gun we have. These fellows fought like devils, or rather heroes, and had we not made a disposition for attack in a style that we should have done against the most formidable army we could have been opposed to, I verily believe, from the position they had taken, we might have failed.144

  Terrible as it was, the Battle of Delhi was the last time British troops faced French officers in South Asia, ending more than a century of rivalry which had caused so much bloodshed, mostly of non-Europeans, across the subcontinent. It also brought to a close Hindustan’s unhappy century of being fought over, and plundered, by rival armies. As Khair ud-Din put it shortly afterwards, ‘the country is now flourishing and at peace. The deer lies down with the leopard, the fish with the shark, the pigeon with the hawk, and the sparrow with the eagle.’145 Khair ud-Din was, of course, writing to flatter his British patrons, but there was a measure of truth in what he wrote: in comparison with the horrors of the last century – ‘the Great Anarchy’ – the next fifty years would be remembered as ‘the Golden Calm’.

  Most importantly, the Battle of Delhi decided the future fate of India. The Marathas were the last indigenous Indian power that was militarily capable of defeating the Company and driving it out of South Asia. There were other battles still to be fought against both Scindia and Holkar before they surrendered, but after Assaye and Delhi the outcome of the war was quite clear. The last power who could have ousted the Company had been humbled and was about to be conquered.

  Company Bengal, Madras and Bombay were now linked up as a continuous unit, joined with the Deccan and much of Hindustan, so consolidating a land empire that controlled over half a million square miles of territory and which, fifty years later, would become the British Raj.146 Before long, the Company would conclude treaties with all the Rajput states that had been fiefs of Scindia: Jodhpur, Jaipur, Macheri, Bundi and the Jat Raja of Bharatpur. All the major regimes of peninsular India had now either been annexed or become allies of the Company through a process of conquest, collaboration and co-option. As Arthur Wellesley told his delighted brother: ‘Your policy and our power have reduced all the powers in India to the state of mere cyphers.’147

  Around 600 well-trained Company civil servants, guarded by 155,000 Indian sepoys, were to administer most of peninsular India.148 Here the Company’s army was now unequivocally the dominant military force, and the Governor General who controlled it the real Emperor. Not only had Lord Wellesley gained many more subjects than Britain had lost a decade earlier in North America – around 50 million – he had also created a cadre of young men committed to his imperial project, and who would carry it forward after he had gone.149 Wellesley’s ambitious protégés were working for the establishment and spread of an Anglicised colonial state that would provide an efficiently regimented but increasingly remote and alien administrative infrastructure for this new empire. As one of them, the young Company diplomat Charles Metcalfe, wrote, ‘Sovereigns you are, and as such must act.’150

  In London there was surprisingly little awareness as yet of what had been achieved. The country was still obsessed with the struggle with Napoleon, and despite the swathe of territories Lord Wellesley had conquered, there was little interest in what had taken place in India outside those organisations or people directly concerned with it. Even Wellesley’s ultimate boss, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, declared himself ‘totally unacquainted with every part of this subject’ when Lord Wellesley’s aggressively expansionist Indian policy was briefly discussed in a half-empty House of Lords.151

  But within India everyone knew that a major revolution had just taken place. Many Muslims, led by the puritanical Delhi imam Shah Abdul Aziz, saw this as the moment that India had slipped out of their hands for the first time since the twelfth century: ‘From here to Calcutta, the Christians are in complete control,’ wrote Shah Abdul Aziz in an 1803 fatwa of jihad. ‘India is no longer Dar ul-Islam.’152 Company officials realised it with equal clarity: ‘We are now complete masters of India,’ wrote Thomas Munro, ‘and nothing can shake our power if we take proper measures to confirm it.’153

  The sinews of British supremacy were now established. With the exception of a few months during the Great Uprising of 1857, for better or worse, India would remain in British hands for another 144 years, finally gaining its freedom only in August 1947.

  Shah Alam and the royal family watched the battle anxiously from the roof of the Red Fort. Towards late afternoon they had a grandstand view of the Company lancers chasing fleeing Maratha sepoys immediately opposite their marble pavilions and ‘cutting them up on the banks of the river which runs immediately under the fort of Delhi. The Emperor had sent out instantly to congratulate the Commander-in-Chief on our victory and declared that “he waited to receive the General as his saviour in his arms.”’154

  The following day, 15 September, according to the Shah Alam Nama,

  General Lake proceeded to pitch his tents on the far side of the Yamuna and sent Sayyid Reza Khan, who had for a long time been the Company’s representative at the Imperial Court, to humbly request an audience at the Celestial Threshold. He also asked that boats should be provided for crossing the river. The Universal Monarch gave the order to his Commander of the River to send boats without delay. The General crossed the Yamuna and l
odged in the vicinity of the old fort, Purana Qila. The next day, Sayyid Reza Khan presented the Governor General’s letter to His Majesty expressing good wishes and loyal friendship. His Majesty honoured the messenger with gifts of robes.155

  On 16 September, the Crown Prince, Akbar Shah, was meant to have presented himself at Lord Lake’s camp in Purana Qila at noon, but with the usual Mughal sense of time-keeping, did not appear until 3 p.m., when the sepoys had been on parade for a full three hours. Major William Thorn was among those standing to attention, sweating in his fustian red coat in the claggy monsoon heat. ‘By the time that the usual ceremonies had been gone through,’ he wrote, ‘his Highness had remounted his elephant, and the cavalcade had formed, it was past four o’clock.’

  The distance being four miles, His Excellency [Lake] did not arrive at the palace until sunset. So great, indeed, was the pressure of the crowd through which the procession had to pass, that it was with difficulty that the line could be preserved; for the population of Delhi was in a manner concentrated into a solid mass: and even the courts of the palace were filled with spectators, anxious to witness the revival of the House of Timur, which had so long been under a cloud.156

  Memories of earlier Maratha sieges and lootings were not easily forgotten and Scindia’s troops had always been unpopular in Delhi; no one, it seems, was sad to see them go. As for what might be expected from the Emperor’s new protectors, the people of the Mughal capital kept, for the time being, an open but curious mind:

  At length, after a slow progress, amidst this immense assemblage, all eager to behold the deliverer of their sovereign, the Commander-in-Chief reached the palace, and was ushered into an apartment where the eyes of beholders had formerly been dazzled by the splendour of oriental magnificence …

  But now, such is the vanity of earthly grandeur, and the uncertainty of mortal power, the descendant of the great Akbar, and the victorious Aurangzeb, was found, an object of pity, blinded and aged, stripped of authority, and reduced to poverty, seated under a small tattered canopy, the fragment of regal state, and the mockery of human pride. Such a scene could not fail to make a deep impression on the minds of those who beheld it.157

  According to the Shah Alam Nama, Lake nevertheless ‘bowed his head at the feet of the imperial throne’, then conversed with the blind Emperor through his deputy, Colonel Sir David Ochterlony. Ochterlony’s father was a Highland Scot who had settled in Massachusetts. When the American Revolution broke out, his loyalist family fled to Canada, and David entered the Company’s army in 1777. He never returned to the New World, and, having made India his home, vowed never to leave it. He had collected a variety of Indian wives, to each of whom he gave an elephant, and through whom he learned to speak fluent Urdu and Persian. This was something that impressed and surprised the chronicler Munna Lal, who noted that Da’ud Akhtar-Luni Bahadur (as he called him) ‘was unrivalled for understanding and penetration and very well-versed in Persian letters. At the Emperor’s request, he was left at Court to advise on political and financial negotiations with His Majesty.’158

  Ochterlony read to Shah Alam the carefully worded letters sent for the occasion by Wellesley, in which the Governor General described himself as ‘the happy instrument of your Majesty’s restoration to a state of dignity and tranquillity, under the power of the British Crown’.159 In return, wrote Munna Lal, ‘His Majesty, in order to show his appreciation of Kampani Sahib Bahadur, bestowed on the two men rich robes and awarded the title Nawab Samsam al-Daula, Khan Dauran Khan, to General Gerard Lake. The Colonel [Ochterlony] also received a gift of suitably fine robes, and the title Nasir al-Daula, Muzaffar Jang.’160h Ochterlony, in turn, announced Wellesley’s gift of 600,000 rupees to be made available for Shah Alam’s immediate expenses, and undertook to provide 64,000 rupeesi monthly ‘for the costs of the servants of the Imperial Household, the Princes and the chief courtiers, the Pillars of the State’.161

  In the days that followed, Lord Lake held a durbar in Delhi for all the nobles of the Mughal court, and some others ‘who declared themselves to be attached to the English’.162 These included the Begum Sumru, who had sent a battalion of her troops to fight with the Marathas, and was anxious that this, in addition to her husband’s role in the Patna Massacre, might mean that her estates would now be confiscated. During the dinner that followed the durbar, she however charmed Ochterlony, who would in time become a close friend.

  She also introduced herself to Lord Lake. This proved more problematic. Lake was deep in his cups, and clearly surprised to be approached by a woman once celebrated as one of Delhi’s most beautiful courtesans; ‘instead of some well-bearded chief, and,’ wrote Skinner, ‘being a little elevated by the wine which had just been drunk, he gallantly advanced, and, to the utter dismay of her attendants, took her in his arms and kissed her’. This broke every rule of Mughal etiquette and a ghastly silence descended on the dinner. ‘The mistake might have been awkward, but the lady’s presence of mind put all right. Receiving courteously the proffered attention, she turned calmly round to her astonished attendants – “It is,” said she, “the salute [of forgiveness and reconciliation] of a padre to his daughter.” The Begum professed Christianity, and thus the explanation was perfectly in character, though more experienced spectators might have smiled at the appearance of the jolly red-coated clergyman, exhibited in the person of his Lordship.’163

  Shortly afterwards, Lake set off to Agra to capture the fort, mop up remaining Maratha resistance and win his final great victory over Scindia at Laswari. Ochterlony, who had just been appointed the new Company Resident, took up residence in the ruins of an old Mughal building which had once been the library of the Sufi prince Dara Shukoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan, and more recently the house from which the young prince Shah Alam had escaped Imad ul-Mulk nearly fifty years earlier.164 Meanwhile, a hospital and accommodation for the cavalry and artillery were set up near the Kashmiri Gate, while Qamar al-Din’s haveli near the Ajmeri Gate became the new Custom House. Several other old mansions were taken over for official use by the new Company administration, and a twin Anglo-Mughal court system was set up.165 A new joint Anglo-Mughal administration quickly fell into place.

  The Company conquest of Delhi was, by any standards, a hugely significant moment. For the sightless and powerless Shah Alam, described by the poet Azad as ‘only a chessboard king’, it represented a final resolution to the conundrum that had been haunting him all his life: how to rule the Empire of his Timurid ancestors, from where, and under whose protection.166 He was now in his seventy-seventh year. As a boy he had seen Nader Shah ride into Delhi, and leave carrying away the Peacock Throne, into which was embedded the great Koh-i-Noor diamond. He had escaped Imad ul-Mulk’s attempt to assassinate him and survived repeated battles with Clive. He had fought the Company at Patna and Buxar, awarded the Diwani to Clive at Allahabad and defied the Company with his cross-country trek back to Delhi. There, with Mirza Najaf Khan, against all the odds he had nearly succeeded in rebuilding the empire of his ancestors; only to see it vanish like a mirage after the premature death of the last great Mughal general. Finally, at his lowest point, the Emperor had been assaulted and blinded by his psychotic former favourite, Ghulam Qadir. Now under the wings of Wellesley’s protection, and with a Company pension, he could at least spend his last years on the throne of his ancestors, in his beloved Red Fort, in comfort and safety, and with some measure of dignity.

  Three years later, on 1 April 1806, Ochterlony’s deputy, the newly arrived William Fraser, one of the first graduates of Lord Wellesley’s new Fort William College, wrote home to his father in Inverness about his impressions of the old Emperor and his court: ‘On one of the late Mussulman festivals,’ he wrote, ‘I accompanied the King to the Mosque, and was much struck by the dignity and humility with which the whole court offered their prayers to the Almighty.’

  At this time, I was constantly by the side of the King; and could not but admire the extreme of nobility in his gait, aspect
and mien. The loss of his eyes does not at all disfigure his countenance; but the history of their loss and his misfortune exalts to the highest our pity and veneration. On his death, and not till then, we may say, the Line of Timour is extinct as a Dynasty; beginning with the lame, and ending with the blind.167

  It had hardly been a glorious reign, but his was, nonetheless, a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when all such qualities were in short supply. Above all, Shah Alam showed an extraordinary determination through successive horrific trials. Throughout his life, he had suffered a long series of repeated reverses; but he never gave up, and only briefly – after the rape of his family and his blinding by the Rohillas – did he allow himself to give way to despair. In the most adverse circumstances imaginable, that of the Great Anarchy, he had ruled over a court of high culture, and as well as writing fine verse himself he had been a generous patron to poets, scholars and artists.

  Moreover, he had guided his dynasty through its lowest moments and managed to keep the Mughal flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy. He also succeeded in creating a new model of Mughal rule, where the absence of real power lay well disguised beneath the aura of divinely appointed kingship and the gilt screen of high culture and courtly manners, both of which were derived from his Timurid ancestors. It was a vision that was still sufficiently inspiring, some half a century later, for the court of his grandson to become the centre of the greatest anti-colonial revolt in history. This uprising very nearly ended British rule and might well have initiated a new phase of Mughal rule.168