By the mid-1740s relations between the Company and Alivardi Khan were taking a turn for the worse. More was at stake than legal interpretations of the firman. As the Company’s economic penetration of Bengal gathered momentum, the nawab was forced to consider the political implications for a Muslim state whose roots were still shallow among a predominantly Hindu population. Alivardi died in April 1756, bequeathing his anxieties to his grandson and heir, Siraj-ud Daula. The 21-year-old nawab was determined to engineer a showdown with the intruders which would confirm his supremacy throughout Bengal. He was ill-equipped for the task: resolute by starts, he was easily disheartened and his fickle vindictiveness lost him friends among his courtiers and more powerful subjects. He did not, for instance, help himself by threatening forcibly to convert and circumcise leading members of the Hindu banking oligarchy.3
Siraj’s greatest error was to misjudge the resources and determination of his adversary. This mistake was forgiveable given the remarkable ease with which his troops occupied the Company’s bases at Kasimbazar and Calcutta during the summer of 1756. The one-sided war had been the consequence of the Company’s refusal to stop strengthening the defences of Fort William, work then being undertaken in expectation of a war with France. This challenge was contemptuously dismissed by Roger Drake, the governor in Calcutta, who went so far as to remark that he could easily overthrow Siraj if he continued to make trouble.4 This was empty bluster from a coward who lacked the muscle to carry out his threats. Kasimbazar was guarded by a polyglot rabble largely untrained in arms, and Calcutta had neglected to send replacements for its worm-eaten gun carriages. Fort William was also weakly defended; in 1753 its arsenal had contained only 200 serviceable muskets and its garrison of twice that size was largely made up of Swiss mercenaries of fragile loyalty.5
Kasimbazar surrendered and Calcutta was taken on 20 June in circumstances which combined farce with tragedy. On the approach of Siraj’s army, Drake and a handful of officers took flight to the ships anchored off shore. In the meantime, the leaderless and disheartened garrison took to the bottle.6 During the night of 20–21 June, an unknown number of Siraj’s prisoners were herded into a small room where over half suffocated during a hot and airless night. For the British, ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’ was an atrocity which demanded vengeance and, on one level, the events of the following year could be interpreted as the punishment of a brutal autocrat. In fact, no one was certain how many were crammed into the Black Hole and how many perished. Estimates vary between 100 and 200 incarcerated and between 40 and 140 dying. Siraj may not have been directly responsible, and one Indian writer has blamed the incident on Eastern ‘negligence, indifference and inefficiency’.7 This explains but does not excuse: by the same token the deaths of sixty-seven Mapillas (Malabari Muslims), stifled in railway cars in 1921, was the consequence of Western incompetence. It might well be added that neither Siraj nor the British authorities in Malabar were unduly disturbed by what had happened.
The loss of Calcutta was a signal blow to the Company’s prestige and temporarily overturned the myth of European invincibility. It disappointed those Bengal Hindus who had secretly hoped that Siraj might get a bloody nose from the British.
News of the disaster reached Madras on 16 August. There was no question that a counter-offensive had to be launched to recapture Calcutta and bring Siraj to heel. Delivering it was an unwelcome distraction from the task then occupying the minds of the Madras authorities: a campaign in partnership with the Marathas to extinguish all French influence in the Deccan. The recovery of Calcutta took precedence and an expeditionary force was mustered of 600 white soldiers and 900 sepoys who were conveyed to the port by five warships. Command was placed in the hands of Clive and the local senior naval officer, Admiral Charles Watson, a straightforward sailor of impeccable character who found himself dominated by his more forceful and devious partner. Both men hoped to profit from the expedition, but Watson shrank from compromising his integrity by playing politics in the Indian fashion.
II
Clive had no such inhibitions and complete freedom of action. His mandate from the Madras council was to reoccupy Calcutta and restore all the Company’s trading concessions. No one was yet clear just how this could be achieved, although Watson imagined that, once he had been ‘well thrashed’, Siraj would toe the line. Before he could be taught his lesson, it was imperative to expel his garrison from Calcutta, which was achieved with little bloodshed on New Year’s Day, 1757. By then, if not before, Clive had convinced himself that the Company’s trade in Bengal could only be truly safe when Siraj had been dethroned and replaced by a puppet nawab. The means to carry out this coup were at Clive’s disposal; he had men-o’-war, including two ships of the line, and a well-trained army. This force would soon have to withdraw to engage the French, and so it was necessary to strike immediately. The alternative was to leave behind a wounded and therefore dangerous tiger; so long as he occupied the throne of Bengal, Siraj was free to take his vengeance on Calcutta, possibly with French assistance.
For the next six months Clive threw himself into organising what he and the council in Calcutta afterwards called a ‘revolution’. It was a consummate exercise in chicanery in which Clive was abetted by two colleagues, Luke Scrafton and William Watts, men of quick wits and elastic conscience, who acted as emissaries to Siraj. The nawab had been taken aback by the speed of the Company’s reactions and the strength of its forces, although the fighting which followed the recovery of Calcutta had been indecisive. Realising that he may have bitten off more than he could chew, Siraj grudgingly agreed to make peace in February. He was probably no more sincere in his professions of goodwill than Clive, but for the time being he had to tread carefully. Large Afghan forces were operating in the Punjab and might strike south-east into Awadh and Bengal, and therefore he was glad to hear that George II and the Company were now his friends and would come to his rescue if his lands were invaded. British soldiers and ships could not render this service without first capturing the French base at Chandanagar, and so Siraj was persuaded to stand back and permit it to be taken in March.
Siraj had been gulled; it now remained for him to be ensnared and dethroned. Shedding whatever scruples they may have had, Clive and his accomplices proceeded swiftly and with serpentine cunning. During April and May they cobbled together an alliance of influential Bengali dissidents, all of whom had much to gain from Siraj’s deposition. At the heart of the conspiracy were Bengal’s leading money men, the Sikh merchant Omichand, and the two brothers who headed the Jagat Seth (merchants of the world) banking house. Bengal’s commerce relied heavily on the silver with which the Company paid for its goods and, so long as the province was ruled by a prince at loggerheads with the British, their company and fortunes were in danger. There was also an alternative nawab, Mir Jafar, a nobleman and one of Siraj’s senior commanders. All the plotters were to have their rewards: Mir Jafar would get a throne, the European community in Calcutta would receive £550,000 for property looted by Siraj’s army, the Hindu community £222,000, the Armenian £77,000, the army and navy £275,000 and members of the Company’s council £275,000. Omichand set a high price on his co-operation and got it according to a bogus agreement on which Clive had faked Watson’s signature. This piece of legerdemain was a victory of guile over greed, although in the eyes of Clive’s enemies it was a disgraceful example of an Englishman dropping his own moral code and embracing that of the Orient.
Clive knew that he, as a council member and commander-in-chief of the Company’s land forces, would rake in the lion’s share of the compensation, not to mention whatever customary gifts that might have come his way from the grateful Mir Jafar. He also knew that there was no intrinsic dishonour in merging his own interests with those of his country and employer. The age in which he lived allowed its public men the right to grow rich through their service to the state, although there was, as Clive would soon discover, much disagreement as to where the line between public and private
interest should be drawn. He sincerely believed that in all his decisions he had achieved a proper balance and was therefore beyond reproach, and yet there can be no question that he was well aware that he would be the chief British beneficiary from the coup and, like everyone else involved, expected to leave Bengal a richer man.8
With the agreement signed, Clive was ready to pounce. The plot required a battle in which Siraj would be defeated by a combination of the Company’s army and defectors from his own led by Mir Jafar. Clive had about 3,000 troops and sailors, two-thirds of them sepoys who marched from Kasimbazar. The white fighting men travelled by boat, the better to preserve them from fevers and the sultry midsummer heat. Against them Siraj had 50,000 men, many unpaid and disgruntled.
The two armies collided at Plassey on 23 June and a battle followed which, by European standards, was little more than a skirmish, and a messy one at that. Much of it was taken up by an exchange of cannon fire in which the Bengalis came off worst. They had massive twenty-four and thirty-two pounder pieces, each mounted on platforms dragged by forty or fifty yoke of bullocks and nudged into position by elephants. Their transport proved the gunners’ undoing, for three elephants were killed and the rest became ‘unruly’. The oxen, too, were terrified by the fire and stampeded, taking their drivers with them.9 If this was not enough, one observer noticed that the Indian gunners seemed clumsy and once accidentally set alight their own powder barrels, which exploded and added to the pandemonium. All this was watched by Mir Jafar, who, judging the moment right, sent a message to Clive warning him of his imminent defection. The trouble was that Clive was unaware of where Mir Jafar’s contingent was placed and had already accidentally bombarded his troops. The fire was so hot that the messenger refused to cross the lines. In the end, the bungling on both sides did not matter; Siraj’s hesistant army disintegrated and took to its heels, with the nawab leading the way on a camel.
He was eventually taken and stabbed to death by the servants of his successor, Mir Jafar, who seems to have imagined that Clive would have asked for him to be spared. This exercise in king-making had cost few lives: British casualties were only seventy and ‘those chiefly blacks’, according to Clive’s report to the directors.10 No one counted the dead Bengalis, but a rough and probably exaggerated estimate put them at about 500.11
III
No one who had taken part in the battle of Plassey imagined for a moment that it had marked a turning point in British and Indian history. For them it was merely a solution to a local problem: the future security of the Company’s operations in Bengal. It also offered a means of dealing with another problem, the French, as Clive pointed out in his despatch to the directors written in August. With Mir Jafar’s cash in the Company’s war chest, the balance of power in southern India would swing further against the French. In Bengal the Company was henceforward free to trade as it wished with the blessing of a grateful nawab. It was this aspect of Plassey which George II’s poet laureate, William Whitehead, had in mind when he wrote in 1759:
If protected Commerce keep
Her tenor o’er yon heaving deep,
What have we from War to fear?
Commerce steels the nerves of war:
Heals the havoc Rapine makes,
And new strength from conquest takes.12
There were distant political gains as well, vaguely discerned by Clive, who told the directors that they now possessed the ‘power to be as great as you please in the kingdom of Bengal’.13
Plassey’s significance became apparent only with hindsight. In 1823 the compiler of the East India Military Calendar, following what was already a standard line of imperial mythology, detected the hand of Providence at work. Clive and his brother officers had behaved ‘as if decreed by fate to erect the British standard in the East’.14 As that flag advanced, the battle assumed a symbolic significance; in the words of one Victorian schoolroom text, Plassey laid ‘the foundation of the British empire in India’.15 Another historian was more emphatic: ‘In 1757 the English had established their dominion of India by their conquest of Bengal.’16 And yet, strangely given the Raj’s obsession with public monuments, no attempt was ever made to distinguish the site of Plassey. By 1800 much of the battlefield had been washed away by the adjacent Bhagrithi river and all that remained of the village was ‘a few miserable huts’. Eighty years later, when the Raj was enjoying its heyday, the whole area had reverted to jungle.17
Just as well, many Indians may have thought, for the battle marked the beginning of an era of alien government and the disturbance of ancient habits and customs. Plassey was also an uncomfortable reminder that there had been many Indians, especially from the country’s élite, who willingly collaborated with the intruders and helped them win this and many subsequent victories. Their behaviour was evidence that at a crucial moment in their history there had been no ‘national’ sentiment among Indians, a fact which nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists frequently deplored.
And yet, Plassey assumed a supernatural significance for some Hindus as the starting point of a predestined historical cycle that would take a century to run its course. The Muslim, Mughal Raj had been supplanted by a British one, which would last exactly one hundred years according to predictions found in some obscure Hindu scriptures. Then, reassuringly, a Hindu Raj would emerge to rule India. Rumours of this upheaval were current during the early 1830s and their circulation increased in the years immediately before 1857.18 The sepoy mutiny at Meerut on 10 May 1857 and the sudden collapse of the Raj in northern India was naturally taken as a fulfilment of the prophecy. Its new potency was exploited by the insurgent leader, Nana Sahib, who chose the precise anniversary of Plassey, 23 June, for a major assault on the residency of Cawnpore (Kanpur).
After the Indian Mutiny, even the most improbable seditious prophecies were taken seriously by the authorities. Official nerves were on edge during 1906–07, when a spate of nationalist agitation coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Meerut uprising.19 The 150th anniversary of Plassey had not been forgotten and the ex-Viceroy Lord Curzon was soliciting contributions for Clive memorials in London and Calcutta. His successor, Lord Minto, was dismayed and asked, ‘How would Bengal in these stormy days look upon a monument to Clive coupled with Plassey?’20 As wormwood was the answer, Minto scotched a project which would have raised tension everywhere in India. Meanwhile, Curzon was badgering Indian princes for subventions, reminding the Maharaja of Bikaner that money offered in Clive’s memory was a token of loyalty to Britain.21 In the space of 150 years, Plassey had become, in turn, a glorious victory which established the Raj; a source of hope for those who longed for its collapse; and finally an embarrassment to its rulers.
IV
On 23 June 1763, the sixth anniversary of Plassey, a handful of traders and army officers gathered at the Company’s factory (business premises) at Patna for a commemorative dinner.22 They had much to celebrate, for Plassey had been a key which had opened a treasure house whose contents they were now pillaging. The past six years had been quite literally a golden age, during which the Company’s servants had scooped up the riches of Bengal. The bonanza began with delivery of the compensation promised by Mir Jafar and the gifts he made to those who had engineered his elevation. Then there were the land taxes extracted from the Bengali ryots, whose parganas (tax districts) had been ceded to the Company and which, in time, would provide it with the means to buy goods with cash raised in India, rather than imported silver. Lastly, and most importantly for the men on the spot, were the new and lucrative openings in the huge internal commerce of Bengal.
The inland trade of Bengal had always been minutely regulated by the nawabs, who allocated monopolies to individuals and consortiums. With Mir Jafar’s accession, the system of state control fell apart under pressure from private traders seeking quick profits. The salt, betel-nut and opium concessions attracted the sharks who identified them as offering the best returns. Henry Vansittart, who followed Clive as Governor of Beng
al in 1759, made the running and was later charged with abusing his authority to get the biggest possible share of the province’s trade. Warren Hastings, resident at the court of Mir Jafar at Murshidabad, presided over a large-scale venture dealing in salt, opium, tobacco, timber and boat-building which had a capital of £30,000 and employed five Europeans. It was calculated that he and other predator entrepreneurs were making over £500,000 a year by 1760.
The methods of these men were brutal. They and the Hindu and Armenian merchants who were their factotums used coercion to dominate markets. The sword intruded into everyday business life, for the more ruthless commodity dealers encouraged their gumastahs (Indian clerks and business agents) to employ sepoys wherever pressure was needed to secure the best bargain. Competitors were scared off and unwilling suppliers or customers who objected to inflated prices were flogged.23 Vansittart noted with wry amusement that gumastahs, ‘who in Calcutta walk in rags’, once inland would ‘lord it over the country, imprisoning the ryots, and merchants, and writing and talking in the most insolent, domineering manner to the fougedars [rural policemen] and officers’.24 Minatory business methods were copied in southern India; in the early 1770s the native factor employed by Anthony Sadleir to buy cloth in the Vizagapatam district was accompanied by sepoys who beat those weavers who set what was thought to be too high a price on their goods.25 In Bengal, dastaks (tax exemption certificates) were liberally doled out to Indian and Armenian as well as British traders, some of whom flaunted their privileges by flying the Company’s flag on their boats.
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