V
An example of what officials in India might get up to if they were left to their own devices was the squalid Ruhela war of 1774. It had been waged by Company troops on behalf of the Nawab of Awadh, who had paid for their services, so helping Hastings to balance his budget. The affair naturally attracted the attention of the Commons during the Governor-General’s impeachment and several officers involved were closely cross-examined. One, Major Marsack, revealed that the Hindu peasantry had been benevolently ruled by their Ruhela masters and as a consequence the country reached ‘the greatest Height of Opulence’. After conquest and on the arrival of the nawab’s tax collectors, the region’s prosperity disappeared.16
The incident raised one significant question: by what moral right did the Company conquer lands in India? The evidence strongly suggested that the Ruhela state was orderly and flourishing and, therefore, in the eyes of eighteenth-century Englishmen, deserved to be considered as civilised. Moreover, its inhabitants were fulfilling, unknowingly of course, the will of God, who had ordained that the fruits and treasures of the earth belonged naturally to those who used them to the best advantage. Post-Reformation theology had provided a mandate for European expansion in America and Africa where, it was alleged, native populations had ignored or neglected what God had provided. Amerindians and Negroes could be evicted from their lands by interlopers who had the will and capacity to develop them. The law of man concurred with that of God: at the time of the Ruhela war Captain James Cook was cruising in the Pacific armed with a ruling of Justice Sir William Blackstone, who had declared that Australia was ‘terra nullius’, a land owned (as yet) by no one.
By no stretch of the imagination could India, or any other Asian country, be considered an empty, uncultivated land, lacking what the philosopher John Locke had called ‘industrious and rational people’ to exploit it. Nor was it without a society whose hierarchy and government would have been recognisable as ‘civilised’ by men of reason. India lay firmly within the compass of that civilised world which had been known to Greek and Roman historians and geographers and, unlike America, it had always had cultural and economic relationships with Europe.
James Forbes, an amateur anthropologist of indefatigable curiosity, who served the Company in the Bombay presidency between 1765 and 1783, detected a closeness between Hindu morality and legends and those of the ancient Greeks. Hindu ‘village nymphs’ appeared to wear robes similar to those of Greek maidens as they appeared on statues. The natives of the Malabar coast had enjoyed exchanges with the civilisations of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome, but Forbes regretted that the cumulative effect of these associations had been limited, for the Malabari inhabitants had remained ‘for a thousand years in the same state of mediocrity’. Like many others, he blamed imaginary Indian stagnation on the heat. Nonetheless, he concluded that the Indians were on a far higher plane of civilisation than the Amerindians and Negroes, since India possessed ‘eloquence, poetry, painting and architecture, in a considerable degree of perfection’.17
Forbes was also impressed by the skills of Indian eye surgeons, and William Gilchrist, a surgeon and proto-vet in the Company’s service, was happy to use native remedies when treating sick elephants.18 An officer in the Company’s army noticed that Indian junior officers and NCOs displayed ‘greater penetration and intelligence’ than their European counterparts.19 His judgement confirmed a view which was already well established. Thomas Bowrey, who visited India during the second half of the seventeenth century, encountered clever craftsmen, merchants and mathematicians and judged Indians as intelligent a race as any on earth.20 Ample evidence of this was provided by Indian art, architecture and artefacts: an eighteenth-century man of discrimination would happily fill his house with Indian chintzes and miniatures, but would disdain the native handiwork of Africa or America as barbaric.
Visitors to Bombay regularly undertook sightseeing trips to the Elephanta Island cave temples to examine the erotic sculpture, which were taken by some as a basis for the ‘supposition of high civilisation among the Hindus’.21 The Marquess of Hastings, who became Governor-General in 1814, compared the statues of gods in Indian temples to the carved figures he had seen in mediaeval churches.22 James Mill, relying on illustrations, disagreed and contemptuously dismissed both Gothic and Indian art as products of a ‘very low stage of civilisation’.23 Indian sculpture stood comparison with Greek and Roman, at least in the eyes of connoisseurs of pornography. An engraving of one carving showing, among other things, fellatio, found its way into An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, a series of engravings which appeared in 1786. The original drawing had been made by a naval officer.24
All travellers to India were alternately fascinated and repelled by the connection between religious practises and sexual enjoyment, something unknown in Europe since pre-Christian times. Alexander Hamilton, a Scot who toured India at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, came across one Hindu holy man, a giant with a massive penis to which was attached a gold ring. He was greatly revered by young married women who knelt before ‘the living Priapus, and taking him devoutly in their Hands, kist him, whilst his bawdy Owner strokt their silly Heads, muttering some filthy prayers for their Purification’.25 This was but one manifestation of what other visitors saw as the mindless submission of the Hindus to their clergy. Thomas Bowrey was shocked by the ‘Seduceing and bewitchinge Brahmins’ who misled the simple-minded with superstitious fancies.26 A naval officer, visiting the Coromandel coast in the 1750s, was appalled by the sight of ‘Pagans of many Sects, who have a great number of Pagodas or Temples in which they worship Images of different kinds of Animals &c., being grossly and ridiculously impos’d upon by their Priests and Brahmins’.27
Both observers held to that Protestant world-view which coloured the thinking of most Britons. It had found its most trenchant expression in John Milton’s Second Defence of the People of England (1654), in which he contrasted the ‘liberty’ and civil life and worship of his countrymen with the abjectness of peoples who were ‘stupified by the wicked arts of priests’ and ‘merely worship as gods those demons they are unable to put to flight’. The author had in mind Roman Catholics, but he could have easily been referring to Hindus as they were perceived by Britons then and during the next century. When not deriding the follies of India’s Hindus, Hamilton was jeering, in typically Protestant vein, at its Catholics. In Portuguese Goa he heard the church bells ringing continuously and remarked: ‘They have a specifick Power to drive away all Manner of evil Spirits, except Poverty in the Laity and pride in the clergy.’
If traveller-writers such as Hamilton were to be believed, and they generally were, Hinduism and an enervating climate were together responsible for the Indian character. By the end of the century the stereotype of the sly, timid and servile Bengali was well established in the British consciousness, and in this unflattering form he took his place in a gallery of national caricatures, alongside the foppish Frenchman, the ridiculous Italian and the haughty Spaniard.28 Imagined deficiencies in character did not, however, give the Company the right to conquer and govern Indians. Whatever their moral disabilities, they were clearly a hard-working, skilful people whose industry qualified them for a place in that Divine ordering of the world under which all races were judged according to their usefulness and productivity. Unlike the African Negroes, the Indians were never condemned wholesale to a life of plantation slavery. Indeed, by the early 1800s the Company was endeavouring to suppress domestic slavery within its territories and those of its princely allies and clients.
Clive and Hastings had created an empire in what was, in effect, a moral vacuum. Their only justification for their actions had been political expediency. To protect its commerce, the Company had been driven to take control of Karnataka and Bengal and the quest for security proved unending. From 1770 onwards the Company found itself engaged in one war after another, either against hostile neighbours or its rebellious su
bjects. What one warrior proconsul later called ‘the Red Mark of the British Empire’ was spreading crablike and inexorably across the map of India.29
Seen from an Indian perspective, the Company was a highly successful competitor in the power struggles which marked the disintegration of Mughal authority. It was acting according to that local political theory which was summed up by the Persian proverb: ‘He who can wield the sword shall have money struck in his name.’ This philosophy did not prevail in Britain where, for the past century and a half, traditions of government through consent and individual liberty had taken deep root. Moreover, as Parliamentary scrutiny of the Company’s affairs revealed, an empire based upon military might was being governed without justice or humanity. Even those involved were repelled; an officer who had taken part in the infamous Ruhela campaign of 1774 felt that it had destroyed ‘our Character for Justice and Clemency’. It was painful, therefore, to find that those virtues which underpinned the eighteenth-century Briton’s sense of superiority had somehow been jettisoned in India.
The controversies about how the affairs of India ought to be managed occurred at a time when there was a far wider and more far-reaching public debate about the nature of Britain’s overseas empire. To some extent, India was peripheral to the disputes which centred on relations with the American colonies and whether or not their inhabitants were entitled to the same political and legal rights enjoyed by their kinsfolk in Britain. The matter had been resolved by the end of 1782, with the end of the War of Independence and the emergence of the independent United States of America. Superficially, India presented a very different set of moral problems: the Company’s provinces had been acquired by conquest; its peoples possessed their own culture and systems of government which were utterly unlike those of Britain; and its British population was transient. Were Indians, therefore, perpetually excluded from the enjoyment, even in the least degree, of the rights which their rulers considered as their special birthright? Put another way, would India remain an Oriental despotism overseen by British officials in the name of commerce?
The answer had been a qualified ‘no’. Public opinion in the late eighteenth century had refused to tolerate a tyranny run in Britain’s name and had insisted, in the teeth of the Company’s opposition, on extending to India the framework of honest and fair government. While British politicians had been seeking some kind of ethical basis for the new empire, officials in India were groping towards a moral justification for the fledgling Raj. The result was a compound of pragmatism and idealism. Experience showed that for the time being Indians lacked that sense of public responsibility which was necessary if a people were to govern themselves. In the words of one official, their ‘Disposition, Manners and Prejudices require that the legislative and executive Powers be lodged in one Hand’, which, it went without saying, would be British. John Shore, a member of the Calcutta council who became Governor-General in 1793, justified what amounted to an alien autocracy on the grounds of the superiority of the British character. ‘A Sense of Humour and Virtue’ and a reputation for ‘Bravery, Clemency and Good Faith’ were the distinguishing marks of the Company’s servants which ideally qualified them to rule over those without these virtues. Such paragons might bring about a limited regeneration of the Indians:
The more we are aquainted with their [the Bengalis’] Genius and Manners, the more it is incumbent upon us to make them useful and happy Subjects; and if they are incapable of meriting and enjoying the Freedom of British Laws let us endeavour to leave them the Happiness and Security of their own institutions unviolated.30
He was writing in 1785, by when, it seemed, the Bengalis were already ‘the happiest Subjects of any great state in India’.
This vision of a benign Raj actively promoting the happiness and prosperity of its subjects went a long way towards satisfying Burke’s demand for an Indian empire governed in accordance with British principles of equity and respect for the rights of individuals. Shore spoke with the voice of a new generation of Company servants who were coming into prominence towards the end of the century. They shared with their predecessors, the nabobs, the conviction that the Indians were, in Shore’s words, ‘wholly devoid of Public Virtue’. The Indian mind was afflicted by a form of mental astigmatism which prevented its owner from ever telling the truth or making an impartial judgement. If this sweeping generalisation was the case, British government could be defended on moral grounds because it was disinterested, just and directed by men of the highest integrity who placed public duty before self-interest.
But these administrators would have to proceed warily, for, as Shore had pointed out, the Company had no mandate to uproot well-established Indian institutions. None would ever have been given, for a conservative British political establishment would have shrunk from interference with the Indian social order which, like that at home, was an organism produced by a gradual historical development based upon practical needs. Old hierarchies were not to be dismantled and, wherever possible, the old live-and-let-live approach to local customs would be maintained.
And yet, for all its new and yet-to-be-defined good intentions and hopes that, in the future, the Indian empire might be one based upon goodwill, the Company’s Raj still depended ultimately on its formidable war machine. There were still plenty of disaffected Indians within its provinces, and beyond their borders there were hostile Indian states whose rulers were prepared to challenge the Company. No one understood this better than that tough realist Henry Dundas, who became president of the Board of Control in 1793. ‘Military men,’ he insisted, ‘are the best of all governors of India.’
PART TWO
THE CONQUEST OF
INDIA: 1784 – 1856
1
No Retreat: Grand
Strategy and Small Wars,
1784 – 1826
I
There was never a masterplan for the conquest of India. No minister in London or governor-general in Calcutta consciously decided that the ultimate goal of British policy was paramountcy throughout the subcontinent. Instead, there was a sequence of tactical decisions made in response to local and sometimes unexpected crises. A backsliding raja who evaded his treaty obligations, a client state in peril from its neighbours, encroachments on British territory, or an independent frontier state making aggressive noises were sufficient justifications for war. When the fighting was over, the Company found itself with additional land, responsibilities and revenues. The upshot was that by the middle of the century it had acquired a monopoly of power in India.
No single genius made this process of conquest and annexation possible. Its course was directed by a handful of individuals most of whom, if pressed on the matter, would have argued that British supremacy in India was the only practical and desirable solution to the problems they faced as commanders and administrators. The most forthright explanation of their principles was delivered by John Malcolm in 1805 as a protest against the recall of the Marquess Wellesley:
It was a true saying which the great Lord Clive applied to the progress of the British empire in India – ‘To stop is dangerous; to recede ruin.’ And if we do recede, either from our right pretentions and claims – nay, if we look as if we thought of receding – we shall have a host of enemies, and thousands who dare not even harbour a thought of opposing the irresistible tide of our success, will hasten to attack a nation which shows by diffidence in its own power that it anticipates its downfall.1
This was the gospel of the ‘forward’ school expressed by one of its most pugnacious members. Malcolm was one of seventeen children of a pious Borders farmer and his entry into the Company’s service was a fitting prelude to his career. Presented to the directors in 1781 at the age of twelve, he was asked, ‘Why, my little man, what would you do if you were to meet Hyder Ali?’ ‘Do, Sir?’ replied Malcolm. ‘I would out with my sword, and cut off his head.’ ‘You will do,’ said the astonished questioner. And he did; during the next forty-nine years, Malcolm discovered a flair for P
ersian, served successively as an assistant resident, Marquess Wellesley’s secretary, Ambassador to Persia, a brigade commander and Governor of Bombay. He never diluted his opinions. ‘No retreat’ was the sole basis for British policy in India, he told a Commons select committee a year before his death. ‘The liberality of our government gave grace to conquest,’ he added, perhaps sensing that his audience might have been taken aback by his robustness.2 Malcolm’s likeness, as rendered by the fashionable portraitist, Sir George Hayter, is that of a sturdy but genial John Bull, wearing an antique steel gorget which might have done service for Don Quixote, and a huge fur pellise. Were it not for the Order of the Bath round his neck, he might have been some Border chieftain from the pages of Scott.
In India, as on the Anglo-Scottish marches, war had a momentum of its own. Supremacy rested upon fear, and hesitancy would always be interpreted as weakness by a population that needed continual reminders of British invincibility. In March 1804, General James Stuart assured Lord Hobart, the secretary for war, that the defeat of the Marathas would ‘give a new Character to the British power, and promote that Superiority of Strength which will be the best means of securing the Tranquility of India’.3 The psychology of the Indian was such that he saw power solely in terms of winning or losing battles and his memory needed constant jogging.
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