by John Keay
Of more immediate concern to the directors of the Company were the activities of its employees in a personal capacity. English fortunes were notoriously made in India not by loyal service in the purchase and despatch of the Company’s piece-goods but by private investment in a variety of financial opportunities. Some were concerned with trade. Only over the ‘out and back’ traffic between England and the East was the Company able to enforce its monopoly. Within the East and within India itself, Company men took advantage of the decline in Indian-operated shipping which had begun during Portugal’s sixteenth-century Estado da India to invest heavily in the Indian Ocean trade. They owned or leased ships, freighted cargoes, sold insurance, and above all took advantage of the security and protection of their employer’s flag. Thus from Madras, as employees of the Company, the American-born Yale brothers amassed considerable fortunes in trade with Siam (Thailand) and Canton in China; part of Elihu Yale’s earnings would endow the college, and later university, in Connecticut which bears his name. Some Company men also invested in, and often defected to, shipping interests which did not recognise even the Company’s ‘out and back’ monopoly. These might be other European East India Companies like those of the Dutch or the French. They might be the ‘illegal’ English syndicates usually known as ‘interlopers’. Or they might be a bit of both – English interlopers sailing under a flag of convenience. Up the Hughli river in search of Bengal produce there sailed in the early eighteenth century vessels which, though largely financed by Englishmen, flew the colours of the Ostend Company, the Swedish Company, the Prussian Company, the Royal Polish Company and the Royal Danish Company.
Thomas Pitt, once an interloper, then a Member of Parliament, had already made and spent one Indian fortune when in 1699 he returned to Madras as governor of its Fort St George. He stayed there for twelve years, amassing a second fortune which included the Pitt diamond (bought for £45,000 and sold to the Regent of France for £135,000); it would comfortably sustain the political careers of his prime ministerial grandson (Chatham) and great-grandson (William Pitt the Younger). Governor Pitt also jealously protected the Company’s interests during the uncertain times before and after Aurangzeb’s death. In 1701 another English ambassador, the first since Roe, had toiled up to the emperor’s peripatetic court in the Deccan with a lavish presentation of cannons, horses and cartloads of glassware and crockery. But Aurangzeb would only entertain the idea of a farman if the English would undertake the expensive task of policing the Indian Ocean and suppressing the piratical activities of mainly European interlopers and renegades. No such undertaking was forthcoming, and nor was the farman. The embassy proved to be the expensive disaster which Pitt had predicted.
Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 and the subsequent succession struggle opened new possibilities. On behalf of Prince Muazzam, an imperial intermediary asked for English assistance in cutting off the retreat of one of the prince’s rivals; in return, Pitt was invited to draw up the terms of a farman. Although the prince’s rival never reached Madras, Muazzam duly ascended the throne as Bahadur Shah and the Company began assembling the elephants, horses, clocks and musical boxes deemed suitable to accompany another mission to the imperial court. When Pitt left India in 1709 he was still sanguine of its prospects, and in 1710 overtures from the same intermediary, who had now been posted to Bengal, were renewed. The clocks and elephants were duly shipped to Calcutta and by 1712 the mission to the Mughal was ready to start. Then news came from Delhi that Bahadur Shah had died.
His ‘imbecilic’ successor barely lasted long enough for an exchange of letters, but with the accession of Farrukhsiyar the Company’s hopes soared again. The new emperor had been brought up in Bengal, where his father had been governor after Shaista Khan. He was known to some of the English in Calcutta, and the Company had supplied his nursery with toys. Evidently the toys had been appreciated, for news that some forty tons of more adult exotica now awaited the emperor’s orders brought an interim confirmation of the Company’s existing privileges plus a request that the mission proceed to Delhi forthwith. In 1715, headed by the unexciting John Surman and guarded by some six hundred troops, a caravan consisting of 160 bullock carts, twelve hundred porters, and a choice assortment of carriages, cannons and camels headed west across the Gangetic plain.
‘Considering the great pomp and state of the kings of Hindustan, we was very well received,’ wrote Surman on arrival in Delhi. He relished the impressive ceremonial and was soon dispensing lavish bribes. Meanwhile the mission’s doctor successfully treated some swellings in the imperial groin. He was handsomely rewarded, but as to the farman Farrukhsiyar remained infuriatingly indifferent. Only when threatened with the withdrawal of the Company from Surat and its other establishments in Gujarat did he relent. Losing the Company’s bullion and trade for the price of a piece of paper was unthinkable. On New Year’s Eve 1716, more than a century since Captain William Hawkins had first applied for it, the farman received the imperial signature.
Explicit as to the territorial and commercial rights enjoyed by the Company throughout India, the farman did indeed ‘indicate such favour as has never before been granted to any European nation’. In Calcutta, Madras and Bombay celebrations were held, toasts were drunk, and salutes fired as the document was paraded through the streets and proclaimed at the cities’ gates. ‘Our dear bought farman’ became ‘the Magna Carta of the Company in India’. It provided imperial confirmation of a host of privileges, some of which had hitherto been more assumed than assured. It inducted the Company into the political hierarchy of Mughal India through a direct relationship with the emperor which bore comparison with that enjoyed by imperial office-holders. And in that it legitimised action against anyone supposedly infringing its terms, it offered great scope for future intervention. Thirty years later it would be on the strength of Farrukhsiyar’s farman that Robert Clive would justify his advance to Plassey and the overthrow of Bengal’s nawab.
But if the Company’s direct participation in the emasculation of the empire was still a generation away, not so the participation of its employees in the Mughal economy nor of its troops in what has been called ‘the all-India military bazaar’.22 In a private capacity Company men invested not only in all those different forms of maritime trade but also in the whole range of monopolies, offices, franchises, revenue farms and commercial concessions which were now openly marketed within the empire. Office-holders and jagirdars had long since been in the habit of accepting cash advances against expected revenue receipts. But now, just as imperial authority was being devolved and farmed out, so were the constituent rights and revenues of nearly all subsidiary officials. Within the provinces of the empire, governors or autonomous nawabs increasingly leased their revenue rights to a handful of major zamindars who might, for a further consideration, be elevated to the status of subsidiary nawabs or rajas. Thus in Bengal ‘by 1728 over a quarter of the nominal revenue depended on the zamindars [and later rajas] of Burdwan and Rajshahi alone. By end of the Nawab’s rule 60 per cent of the revenue came from fifteen zamindars.’23 But these major zamindars in turn farmed out most of their rights to lesser zamindars, merchants, local warlords and substantial cultivators. Major Indian banking houses and powerful mercantile interests helped to finance this market in taxation rights and were amongst its principal beneficiaries. And, since the realisation of revenues, and their conversion into coin, often depended on a show of force, both local warrior aristocracies and freewheeling English factors joined in.
Typically, every Company man had his local agent, known as a ‘banian’ or ‘dubash’. Surman’s negotiations in Delhi had relied heavily on a mercurial Armenian; Pitt had employed ‘the cursedest villain that ever was in the world’ because he was also ‘the most dextrous indefatigable fellow in business’.24 Appreciating the farman-enhanced status of the Company and the credit-worthiness of its employees, such agents placed a high value on their English clients and readily arranged both their investments and the loans needed to
finance them. ‘The British were sucked into the Indian economy by the dynamic of its political economy as much as by their own relentless drive for profit.’25 Recent studies of colonialism emphasise the crucial role played by native elites willing to collaborate with the colonial power. Such were the dubashes and banians and, through them as intermediaries, British residents joined the new entrepreneurial class of later Mughal India.
The dynamic of the Mughal political economy was as much about troops as money. Military leaders financed their activities by engaging in entrepreneurial ventures, and entrepreneurs secured their investments by supporting military ventures. Thus, even before war broke out with the French in the 1740s, the English Company, through its employees, was already indirectly involved in the hire and maintenance of troops by neighbouring zamindars and revenue collectors. Encouraged by the farman’s confirmation of certain local revenue rights, the Company had also significantly increased the number of troops deemed necessary to defend its own establishments. The Madras garrison, for instance, increased from 360 in 1717 to some twelve hundred in 1742. Most were recruited locally, many being from the Indo-Portuguese community. But Indian troops, known as ‘peons’ or ‘sepoys’ (sipahis, soldiers), were also hired, there being a ready pool of professional soldiers – Marathas, Deccanis, Afghans, rajputs, Baksaris (from Awadh) – which Mughal rule had left stranded, and often unpaid, throughout the subcontinent. The existence of this market in troops, like that of the market in offices and revenue farms, positively invited European participation.
… THEN THE DIWAN
But if the farman could be used to provide a legal basis for British interference, and if the lively market in commercial, fiscal and military opportunities encouraged such intervention, it was the Anglo – French wars which precipitated it. They furnished the pretext, demonstrated the method and inspired the confidence for the first British moves towards an Indian dominion.
The French Compagnie des Indes was a latecomer compared to the Dutch and English Companies. Founded by Bernier’s correspondent Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the 1660s, it had expanded rapidly in the early eighteenth century. Pondicherry, the French headquarters, challenged Madras on the Coromandel coast, and Chandernagore aspired to rival Calcutta in Bengal. But the rivalry had remained purely commercial even when England and France were at war in Europe over the Spanish succession. In Bengal both Companies similarly elected to ignore the war over the Austrian succession in the 1740s. Their colleagues in the south might have done likewise but for the operations of British and French fleets in the Indian Ocean. In the event prize-taking by the Royal Navy at sea provoked French reprisals on land and led to the capture of Madras in 1746. Both fleets also offloaded regular, or royal (as opposed to Company), troops and both Companies recruited extra ‘sepoys’; trained, drilled and uniformed, motley garrisons grew swiftly into disciplined armies.
Additionally both Companies looked to their immediate neighbours for support. Nizam-ul-Mulk, nominally Mughal governor of the Deccan but in fact autonomous Nawab of Hyderabad, still firmly ruled most of what is now Andhra Pradesh. But, to the south, the Tamil lands of the erstwhile Golconda sultanate, though part of the nizam’s subah (province), were under a subsidiary nawab known either as the Nawab of Arcot (his capital) or of ‘the Carnatic’. (The word was an Anglicisation of ‘Karnataka’ and had originally been used to designate both the southern half of modern Karnataka state – e.g. the Mysore-Bangalore area – and the adjacent Tamil lands, both having been acquired simultaneously from Vijayanagar’s nayaks by the Bijapur sultanate in the 1630s.)
It was this Nawab of the Carnatic whose territories lapped around Madras and Pondicherry, and it was he who, while coming to the aid of the British after their loss of Madras, unwittingly betrayed the superiority of regular European troops. Twice his army of about ten thousand horse was repulsed by barely five hundred well-trained French infantrymen and gunners. European regulars, armed with muskets and drilled to load and fire with synchronised rapidity, could produce sufficient firepower to halt a conventional Indian cavalry charge. It was a sensational revelation. Cavalry, especially the well-mounted and heavily armoured sowars of the Mughals, epitomised Indian military might. If they were vulnerable to European infantry, then so was the military system which supported them, and so were the regimes which espoused it. To the Companies’ long-acknowledged supremacy at sea was now added a potentially devastating capacity on land.
In 1748 news of peace in Europe brought the restoration of Madras to the British and a temporary lull in direct Anglo – French hostilities. But in the same year Nizam-ul-Mulk died and the Hyderabad succession was immediately disputed. One of the claimants ousted the Arcot nawab, whereupon both claimants for the throne of Hyderabad also fielded their own contenders for the subsidiary nawabship of Arcot. In such a situation it was inevitable that the European Companies would become involved. Their troops had just shown themselves the most effective in the peninsula, but were now without work and proving a heavy charge on their employers. Moreover Muhammad Ali, one of the Arcot contenders, had led the troops which had come to the aid of the British in the recent war; and Chanda Sahib, the other contender, kept his family in Pondicherry, spoke French, and was on close terms with Joseph Dupleix, the ambitious governor of Pondicherry.
Because he now supplied this Chanda Sahib with troops, Dupleix is often credited with introducing into India the use of political surrogates. Henceforth, when not officially at war, British and French could continue their hostilities under the aegis of competing Indian princes. Through these same princes they would extend their authority without seeming to acquire territories. But the idea of surrogate expansion was scarcely novel, least of all in India. ‘The “subsidiary alliance system” was not a brilliant strategy developed by the French or the English, but a common and probably inevitable feature of post-Mughal, eighteenth-century politics.’26 Moreover the British were already undertaking a similar exercise on behalf of the Maratha ruler of Tanjore. Dupleix’s opportunism was not particularly original, just wholehearted.
The ‘Carnatic War’, ostensibly about the successions to the Arcot and Hyderabad nawabships but propelled by Anglo – French rivalry for hegemony in the south, spluttered on from 1749 to 1754. Dupleix’s ambition plus the military genius of Charles de Bussy quickly carried the French beyond the Carnatic. In their wake Robert Clive, a ‘writer’ (junior merchant) and part-time soldier with the English Company, was able to claw back early British reverses and install Muhammad Ali, the British candidate, as Nawab of Arcot. But the greater prize of Hyderabad went to the French when Muzaffar Jang, their candidate, was installed as nizam. Both Companies, as well as enjoying the prospect of exercising further power by proxy, had profited hugely from the hostilities. To pay for their own and the Companies’ troops, Muhammad Ali had ceded territory to Madras while Muzaffar Jang had awarded to the French the Northern Circars, comprising most of Andra Pradesh’s coastline. Additionally the Companies’ employees in a private capacity had invested heavily in their respective protégés. In fact the loans raised by Muhammad Ali made him as much a puppet of his English creditor-syndicate as of the East India Company.
With French troops under de Bussy now assisting the new nizam against other rivals like the Marathas and so penetrating deep into the Deccan, the British too were not averse to opening a new front. Robert Clive, returning from England after a hero’s reception, reached Bombay in 1755 whence he expected to lead an Anglo-Maratha assault on de Bussy in the Deccan. This was called off. Instead, he joined a Royal Navy squadron under Admiral Charles Watson for an epic assault on what the British called the ‘pirate stronghold of Gheriah’. The ‘pirate’ was Kanhoji Angria’s successor as admiral of the Maratha fleet and ‘Gheriah’ was otherwise Vijayadurg, still today a spectacularly fortified promontory near Ratnagiri to the south of Bombay. Taken and pillaged, Vijayadurg’s fall brought to an end both Maratha sea-power and those premature ‘Indian Wars’ which had so embarrassed Bombay. Cl
ive then sailed on to Madras with Watson. Barely four months later, in July 1756, news reached Madras that Siraj-ud-daula, the Nawab of Bengal, had stormed Calcutta and ejected the British. With Watson, his squadron, a regiment of royal troops, and a thousand sepoys Clive sailed for Bengal.
The next seven months, or ‘the Famous Two Hundred Days’, would witness the British conquest of the richest and possibly the largest of the Mughal provinces. Bengal duly became the ‘bridgehead’, ‘springboard’ and ‘foundation’ of British rule in India. It was not the new front against the French which Clive had expected, but the French presence at Chandernagore did provide a handy pretext for continuing his advance after Calcutta had been recaptured and all rights as per the farman restored. Chandernagore itself would be stormed by Watson’s ships in what was much the most ferocious engagement of the campaign. Thereafter it was the nawab’s supposed intrigues with the French which justified a further advance to Plassey. In the battle which followed, the nawab would be toppled by intrigue and, following Arcot practice, the first of several puppet nawabs installed.
Nine years later rule by proxy in Bengal would become rule by diwani. In a decidedly tacky ceremony the Emperor Shah Alam II, Muhammad Shah’s successor, formally inducted the Company, in the person of Clive, into the Mughal hierarchy. As diwan, or chancellor, for Bengal, the Company received a title which was now tantamount to sovereignty over a province that enjoyed virtual autonomy. Although the drama and scandals of ‘the Famous Two Hundred Days’ are often characterised as a ‘revolution’, no one could seriously contend that the Company had not observed the conventions of power-seeking under the later Mughal empire. Nor is it evident that most power-brokers in Bengal opposed their new superior. In fact many argued strongly in favour of British intervention. Foreign rule in India was seldom regarded as objectionable per se.