India

by John Keay

  But in a significant move it was Clive who personally handed Mir Jafar to the throne. British arms had placed him there and British palms now awaited his greasing. The compensation promised to the Company for its recent losses and expenses, plus the massive cash ‘presents’ promised by Mir Jafar to Clive and his associates personally, left the new nawab heavily indebted to his British benefactors. ‘Over £1,250,000 were eventually distributed to individuals’9 from the Bengal treasury, of which Clive’s share from this and subsequent pay-offs, and from an infamous jagir which he later secured, would come to over £400,000. Despite the ‘moderation’ at which he stood so amazed, it was ‘much the greatest fortune ever made by a [British] individual in India’.10

  Moneys due to the Company itself could be defrayed by the nawab’s cession of revenue rights over convenient territories. A cluster of two dozen districts (parganas) south of Calcutta which now passed to the Company are still today officially known as the ‘24 Parganas’. Clive saw revenue rights as much more remunerative than the profits of trade, and had promised his employers that revenue receipts would quickly eliminate the need to finance imports from India by the export of bullion from Britain. This forecast proved over-optimistic, largely because of the Company’s escalating military expenses and its commitments elsewhere in India. But in Bengal as around Madras, relieving a neighbouring nawab of revenue rights now became a standard procedure whenever debts remained unserviced or indemnities unpaid. No less important were the purely commercial concessions extracted from the nawab. In the wake of Plassey, Company men fanned out into Bengal, Bihar and beyond to acquire a virtual monopoly over choice export commodities like saltpetre, indigo and opium and over the lucrative internal trade in sea-salt. More private fortunes were made; more revenue was lost to the nawab.

  The nawab’s plight became critical when Company troops were employed at his expense in repelling intruders. In 1759 and again in 1760–1 Bihar, still part of Bengal, was invaded by Shah Alam, the Mughal crown-prince, supported by troops of the autonomous Nawab of Awadh (Oudh). To defray the military costs, the Company demanded more revenue rights from Mir Jafar; when he refused, the British simply replaced him in a bloodless, but rewarding, coup. Mir Qasim (Kasim), the son-in-law of Mir Jafar, had agreed to transfer to the British most of lower Bengal and was duly installed as nawab.

  This was in 1760, and during the next three years Mir Qasim made a valiant effort to re-establish the viability of his truncated state. But whereas the ageing Mir Jafar had been deemed ineffective, the young Mir Qasim was soon deemed too effective. He dismissed officials suspected of collaboration with the British, greatly increased revenue demands, and began reorganising and rearming his forces along European lines. In this he anticipated the reforms which would be so successfully introduced in the armies of Mysore, the Marathas and the Sikhs. Initially, however, they proved of little avail and, following a dispute over the commercial liberties being taken by private British traders in Bengal, Mir Qasim was defeated and fled to Awadh. Plucked from a comfortable retirement in Calcutta, Mir Jafar, now into his dotage, was again placed on the throne.

  In 1764 the deposed Mir Qasim was back in Bihar, this time in a hostile alliance with the now-emperor Shah Alam and his formidable ally, the Nawab of Awadh. The war which ensued, and in particular the battle of Baksar (Buxar), marked more convincingly than Plassey the true beginning of British dominion in India. Despite five thousand veteran Afghan cavalry from Abdali’s army, despite Mir Qasim’s disciplined forces, the Mughals’ prestige and the Awadh army of perhaps thirty thousand, it was Major Hector Munro’s force of 7500 largely Indian sepoys which gained a hard-fought but decisive victory. All that separated Indian-led troops from British-led troops was ‘regular discipline and strict obedience to orders’, according to Munro. Just before the battle he had made his point by punishing twenty-four mutineers; they were fired from guns in front of their quaking colleagues. The enemy, on the other hand, was nearly as divided as at Plassey, with Mir Qasim’s troops unpaid and Shah Alam sidelined by his allies and already engaged in overtures to the British.

  ‘At Buxar all that still remained of Mogul power in northern India was shattered;’11 it was ‘perhaps the most important battle the British ever fought in south Asia’.12 Mir Qasim fled into obscurity, the emperor transferred his vestigial prestige to the British, and next year (1765) he awarded to Clive and the Company the diwani of Bengal. Meanwhile Awadh had been largely overrun as Varanasi, Chunar and Allahabad all fell to the British. The Nawab of Awadh, although restored to his kingdom, then found himself saddled with the same combination of a crippling indemnity, a one-sided political alliance and a reduced revenue (the British detached the valuable territories of Varanasi and Allahabad) which had brought about the downfall of Bengal’s nawabs.

  Seven years later, armed with instructions to ‘stand forth as diwan’, Warren Hastings took full advantage of the changed situation. Until 1774 the Company’s establishments in India were still administered as three separate ‘presidencies’ – Calcutta, Madras and Bombay – each under its own ‘president’ or ‘governor’. As governor of Calcutta and now of all Bengal, Hastings assumed such residual powers, largely judicial, as remained to Mir Jafar’s successor and thereby effectually terminated the nawabship. He also moved the Bengal treasury from Murshidabad to Calcutta and endeavoured to increase revenue receipts during a time of financial anxiety for the Company. First Company ‘supervisors’, then Indian agents and finally British ‘collectors’ were designated to oversee and enforce the demands of individual zamindars. Although the intention was to uphold the Mughal revenue system, the effect was to redistribute zamindari rights amongst a larger class of tax-farmers and, through the courts and police, to superimpose British ideas of enforcement. From such interventionist experiments, often disastrous and always oppressive, in late-eighteenth-century Bengal would emerge the administrative structures of the British Raj.

  In 1773 the Company’s directors, recognising the territorial responsibilities that had resulted from the conquest of Bengal, ordained that their Madras and Bombay administrations be subordinate to Calcutta, whose governor now became governor-general of all the Company’s Indian establishments. Assuming this role in 1774, Hastings stayed on in Calcutta for another decade during which he would anticipate the spread of British rule throughout the subcontinent. On behalf of the now puppet-cum-buffer state of Awadh, Company troops penetrated to within two hundred kilometres of Delhi when in 1774 they invaded Rohilkand (now the Bareilly district). Its rulers, Afghan Rohillas, were defeated and their country attached to Awadh. Although the fiction of Awadh’s independence would long be maintained, in effect the British were now supreme throughout the Gangetic plain. Between them and the Mughal capital there lay only the shifting sands of an encroaching Maratha hegemony. This obstacle would also be explored during Hastings’ term of office. Meantime in the south a more direct and more obvious challenge to British supremacy demanded immediate attention.

  MYSORE TAMED

  Madras had paid a heavy price for Clive’s ‘Famous Two Hundred Days’ in Bengal. When the Seven Years’ War broke out in 1756, the city most vulnerable to French attack because of its proximity to Pondicherry had found itself without its most inspirational commander, without his troops and, worst of all, without his artillery. All the British possessions on the Coromandel coast were at risk and Fort St David (or Cuddalore), second only to Madras in importance, quickly fell. Madras itself was only saved thanks to visits by the Royal Navy.

  But by 1759 the tide of French success was turning, most notably in neighbouring Hyderabad. It will be recalled that, following French support in the earlier Carnatic Wars, the Nizam of Hyderabad had been placed in much the same relationship to Pondicherry as Mir Jafar to Calcutta. Dupleix had installed him and de Bussy, in several brilliant campaigns, kept him there. But Dupleix had since returned to France and, with the outbreak of the war, de Bussy was recalled to Pondicherry. French troops still served
in the nizam’s army and more were based in the Northern Circars, the coastal regions of the Hyderabad state which had been earlier ceded to France by the nizam. In 1758–9 these Northern Circars were invaded by a small force sent by Clive from Bengal. It was meant to draw off French troops from Madras but resulted in an unexpected French defeat. Suddenly the nizam began to feel decidedly exposed. He now promised part of the Northern Circars to the British and began courting British support. From 1759 may be dated the brittle but long-lasting relationship between Hyderabad and Calcutta. To the British it would secure the collaboration of another of the Mughal successor states so that, just as Awadh ‘ring-fenced’ Bengal from Maratha attack, so Hyderabad would partially shield Madras.

  Meanwhile Madras, besieged by the French in 1759, had been relieved. The arrival of more British troops also resulted in a hefty French defeat at Wandiwash, and in 1761 Pondicherry itself fell to the British. Although the city was later restored to French rule, the 1763 Treaty of Paris which ended the Seven Years’ War also looked to have ended French ambitions in India.

  But if the French Compagnie had lost its most important ally and surrogate in Hyderabad, the British soon credited it with another. During the siege of Pondicherry French hopes had briefly soared when a detachment of cavalry under the little-known Haidar Ali Khan had swept past the British to come to the aid of the hard-pressed defence. They departed a month later, dissatisfied; but it was a sign of things to come. From the Mysore region of the southern Deccan two formidable and ferociously anti-British dynasts in the persons of Haidar Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, were about to pose a direct challenge to British hegemony in the Carnatic. Compared to these new challengers, the over-extended and seldom united Marathas were more an irritation than a threat; they could be ‘ring-fenced’ and then picked off as occasion offered. But in British eyes Mysore was a serious contender, a peninsular rival with the political and military credentials of genuine statehood. Whether or not Mysore was championed by France, it must be defeated.

  The so-called ‘kingdom’ of Mysore had been one of the several dependent chieftancies and nayak-ships to survive from the ruins of the Vijayanagar empire. Although vulnerable to the expansionist ambitions of the Deccan sultanates in the seventeenth century and of the Marathas in the eighteenth century, its relations with the Mughal empire had been inconspicuous. Exceptionally, therefore, it was not a legatee of Mughal authority. Unlike, say, Hyderabad or Awadh, it did not correspond to a Mughal province; unlike the rajput and Maratha ruling families, its Wodeyar rulers had not been top-ranking mansabdars; and unlike the Nawab-Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Awadh or the Nawab of Bengal, the Mysore Wodeyars and their successors lacked the stature and legitimacy of high imperial office. If precedents be sought for the relationships on which their kingdom was based and for the economic and geographical factors which determined its expansion, they lurk in the history of earlier Hindu dynasties in southern Karnataka like the Hoysalas of Belur/Halebid or even the Chalukyas of Badami/Aihole.

  Yet the Mysore which confronted the British was not a born-again Hindu kingdom like that which was so self-consciously reconstituted by Shivaji in Maharashtra. For in the 1730s the incumbent Wodeyar raja had been relieved of authority by two brothers, and it was in their service that Haidar Ali Khan, a devout Muslim whose ancestors had fought in the armies of the sultans of Bijapur, rose to prominence. In 1749, while participating in the succession struggle which followed the death of Nizam-ul-Mulk of Hyderabad (the first nizam), Haidar Ali had obtained both considerable wealth and the services of some French deserters. The first enabled him to increase his forces and the second helped train them in European techniques. During the Carnatic Wars he learned more about European tactics and acquired both artillery and French gunners. Thus in 1758, when Mysore was attacked by the Marathas, Haidar Ali was the obvious choice for commander of the Mysore forces. He acquitted himself well and, following a brief trial of strength with the incumbent brothers, had by 1761 become the undisputed ruler of Mysore.13

  Meanwhile in Hyderabad the French-installed nizam had been deposed by his brother, Nizam Ali. The latter proposed an assault on Mysore to which the British in Madras, fearful that recent Mysore conquests in Kerala might be repeated in the Carnatic, readily agreed. Unconsciously treading the ancient trail of countless Pallava and Chola armies, an Anglo-Hyderabad expedition duly toiled up to the Deccan plateau and, with this piece of gratuitous and unashamed aggression, the First Mysore War got underway in 1767.

  It was the first of four. No one could seriously maintain that the British conquest of India partook of the premeditated. The four Mysore wars, the three Maratha wars and the two Sikh wars, not to mention a host of lesser campaigns, hint at piecemeal policies and unco-ordinated direction. They also suggest a willingness on the part of Company officials to disown or disguise aggressive designs and on the part of subsequent British scholarship to diminish the scale of resistance. Where no long-term rationale for conquest was available, the exigencies of the moment provided a compelling logic for only limited mischief. Moreover, many short wars attracted less attention than a few long ones; ideally they were fought and won before London’s usually negative response could reach India. In retrospect they would seem so chronologically jumbled together as to throw all but the more dogged historians off the scent. Premeditation may indeed be discounted; yet a pattern of conquest, a progression of arms, does emerge. The conquest of Bengal by the Company in Calcutta fuelled the ambitions of its Madras establishment in Mysore; Mysore’s conquest opened the way to intervention in the Maratha territories; and the conquest of the Marathas brought the British up against the Sikhs.

  The First Mysore War was chiefly notable as a demonstration of Haidar Ali’s diplomatic and military skills. Having persuaded the nizam to defect, he drove the British back down to the Carnatic, sent his seventeen-year old son Tipu on a flying raid through the stately thoroughfares of Madras itself, and repeated this feat in person in the following year. Most unusually, when peace was concluded in 1769, no territories changed hands and no indemnity was mentioned. For the first time since Child’s ‘Mughal War’ the British had been militarily checked by an Indian regime.

  Included in the peace terms of 1769 was a defensive alliance which promised unequivocal British support in the event of an attack on Mysore by a third party. Haidar Ali set great store by this provision and soon had cause to invoke it. When Maratha forces swooped into southern Karnataka and laid siege to his great fort of Srirangapatnam (Seringapatam) near Mysore, he immediately turned to his British allies. They turned away. Haidar repeatedly invoked the defensive alliance, and Madras repeatedly prevaricated. Albion’s perfidy, of which Haidar had no doubt heard from his French employees, was amply demonstrated. He damned the British as ‘the most faithless and usurping of all mankind’ and, if not already rabidly Anglophobe, both father and son now became so.

  During the 1770s Haidar’s reputation soared. The Marathas were pushed back and, excluding the nizam’s territories and those of the British and their puppet Nawabs of Arcot and Tanjore, Mysore’s sway came to embrace most of the peninsula south of the Kistna-Tungabhadra rivers. A revival of Anglo – French hostilities in the context of the American War of Independence distracted Madras’s attention and brought Haidar more French arms and recruits. Meanwhile Governor-General Warren Hastings in Calcutta was preoccupied with Anglo – Maratha relations. It was a good moment to strike. Not without ample provocation, Haidar Ali launched the Second Mysore War with a pre-emptive assault on the Carnatic in 1780.

  In a distinct escalation, this war involved far more troops, lasted twice as long (1780–4), and was fought on two fronts; while Haidar Ali engaged the Madras forces in the Carnatic, his son Tipu was detached to the Malabar coast in 1782 to oppose an expedition from Bombay. Again the Mysore army impressed, most notably at Polilur (near Kanchipuram) where in 1780 a British relieving force of about four thousand was practically annihilated. Only sixteen of its eighty-six European
officers emerged unscathed; even Hector Munro, the victor of Baksar, had to make an undignified dash for the safety of Madras, abandoning his artillery and baggage in the process. Polilur was the greatest defeat hitherto inflicted on the British by an Indian power. In his new summer palace beside the rushing Kaveri at Srirangapatnam, Tipu celebrated victory by commissioning a wall-to-wall painting of the engagement. It displays a tactical awareness more reminiscent of European battle-scenes than anything in Mughal art.

  With Arcot captured and Haidar triumphant throughout the Carnatic, it was now Calcutta’s turn to come to the rescue of Madras. A Company army of five thousand began the long march down the east coast from Bengal to Madras while a smaller force was sent by sea. There followed what Penderel Moon, author of the hefty The British Conquest and Dominion of India (1989), rightly calls ‘three and a half years of profitless and uninteresting war’.14 The British made gains on the west coast and then lost them. On the east coast, British victories were negated by the greater manoeuvrability of the Mysore forces. In 1782 Haidar Ali died, in 1783 Tipu was enthroned, and in 1784 the Peace of Mangalore again did little more than restore the situation as at the beginning of hostilities.

  Tipu blamed his French allies for his failure to win a more convincing victory. Their support in the war had been negligible and their separate peace had been an act of treachery. To further overtures from Pondicherry he therefore replied by insisting on direct dealings with Versailles. In a refreshing reversal of roles, an Indian ruler was about to take the diplomatic game to the court of a European sovereign.