By the end of the century, placing a son in the Company’s army had become a valuable source of additional income to many middle-class families in Britain. Lacking the means to buy a commission in the regular army and provide a private income to supplement the low pay of junior officers, they had the satisfaction of seeing their offspring established in a gentlemanly occupation. Perhaps for this reason, officers of the king’s army looked down their noses at their Indian counterparts.
* * *
Late eighteenth-century India was a bustling society, peopled by men on the make whose judgements in Company matters were always swayed by self-interest. The free-for-all which followed Plassey encouraged others to promote thrusting, acquisitive policies from which they had everything to gain. Moreover, as the Company annexed land and infiltrated the princely states, the demand grew for administrators, collectors of revenue, surveyors and residents. All these posts were well-paid and many were filled by ambitious young army officers. The dynamic of expansion generated bellicosity; Robert Blakiston thought there was something in the air of India which made British soldiers more ‘blood thirsty and ferocious’ than usual. Even some of the Company’s directors, who were uneasy about the process of conquest and war, found themselves intoxicated with the new spirit. One, interviewing the twelve-year-old John Malcolm in 1781, asked, ‘Why, my little man, what would you do if you were to meet Hyder Ali?’ ‘Do, Sir, I would out with my sword and cut off his head,’ was his answer and it qualified Malcolm for a commission in the Company’s army.11
Hyder Ali Khan, Sultan of Mysore, was the most persistent of the Company’s enemies after Plassey. He had invaded the Carnatic in the 1760s, and in harness with the French made war on the Company and its allies in southern India in the late 1770s and 1780s. His son, Tipu (the Tiger) Sultan, continued the duel and was only narrowly beaten by Lord Cornwallis of Yorktown fame in 1793. Tipu, like the other independent princes of southern and central India, knew that survival depended on beating the Company at its own game, warfare in the European manner. During 1791 his agents in Paris were procuring arms from dealers in the Netherlands and, according to Admiralty intelligence sources, had purchased 50 cannon, 80 gun carriages, 100,000 cannon balls, 10,000 muskets and 20,000 ‘best tempered sabres’.12 The nizam of Hyderabad had acquired a 14,000-strong corps, armed with muskets and instructed in European methods by French mercenaries, and the princes of the Mahratha Confederacy possessed an estimated 30,000 troops, drilled and organised by freelance European officers.
The late eighteenth-century arms race presented a challenge to the Company, which was accepted with relish by the Marquess Wellesley when he took up the governor-generalship in 1798. Britain had been at war with Revolutionary France since 1793, and the Company’s intelligence officers made much of the fact that French mercenaries in India were all left-wing Jacobin Republicans, and that Tipu, who obligingly called himself ‘Citizen Tipu’, was begging for French assistance. Invoking the bogey of French Revolutionary subversion made sense in 1798, the year of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, which was seen in London and Calcutta as a prelude to an overland attack on India. Wellesley, a passionate opponent of the French Revolution, did not wait on events; he struck. Hyderabad was neutralised and neutered by coercive diplomacy, and in 1799 the Company’s army overran and conquered Mysore.
Tipu died fighting in his capital, Seringapatam, and the nocturnal scene in which Company officers discovered his body became a favourite with British genre painters. His famous mechanical tiger was brought to London in 1808 and displayed as a trophy in the Oriental Repository, a museum attached to the East India Company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street. This contraption immediately aroused enormous curiosity and made a deep and lasting impression on all who came to see it. They stared at a brightly painted, life-sized tiger mauling a uniformed Company officer and heard one emit roars and the other shrieks which subsided as he succumbed; sounds created by a crank-operated barrel organ within the beast.13 This was the ‘Man-Tiger-Organ’ that entertained the Indian emperor in John Keats’s fairytale, ‘The Cap and Bells’, an exotic toy which, in the original, seemed a fitting plaything for an oriental despot. In fact Tipu had been nothing of the kind, but this did not stop the wars between him and the Company from being publicly presented as a contest between fickle tyranny and civilising order. The point was graphically made by contemporary prints and paintings of Tipu’s sons surrendering themselves to the trustworthy and benevolent Company officers. Indians saw things differently; Muslims venerated Tipu as a martyr for Islam, whose name was being used thirty years later to encourage resistance against the British.14
After the conquest of Mysore, it was the turn of the Mahratha states. The initiative came from Wellesley who, by a mixture of force and diplomacy, secured the impoverished and weak Mahratha overlord, the Peshwa, as a Company ally. The result was the Mahratha War of 1803 against the armies of Sindia Daulat Rao of Gwalior and Raghugi Bhonsle of Nagpur. After a whirlwind campaign, their armies were defeated by Arthur Wellesley at the battles of Assaye and Argaon, while in the north, General Sir Gerard Lake occupied Aligarh, Delhi and Agra. With two of the leading Mahratha princes on their knees, the Marquess snatched at the chance to eliminate the third and declared war on Jaswant Rao Holkar in 1805. The second phase of the war went badly; a Company column was roughly handled near Agra and Lake found Bharatpur too tough a nut to crack. The Marquess Wellesley had overreached himself and in 1806 he was recalled to London.
The Marquess had come unstuck because of over-confidence and temerity. He had not gone to India to enrich himself, but to prove his worth as a dynamic and visionary administrator (he founded a college for Company civil servants at Madras), and hoped that his achievements would qualify him for high office in Britain. He was the first of a breed of highhanded, patrician proconsuls who relished the exercise of absolute power; when he visited Cawnpore in 1802, he rode on a magnificently bedecked elephant and ‘in the true style of Eastern pomp, distributed his [the Company’s] rupees with a liberal hand’ just like an Indian potentate.15 A man of such temperament had nothing but disdain for balance sheets and the Company’s directors who were, he wrote confidentially in 1799, ‘held in universal contempt and ridicule in every branch of the service in India’.
The businessmen in London had profound misgivings about the Marquess Wellesley and those men of similar stamp who, over the past forty years, had engineered a revolution in the Company’s affairs. This apprehension was well founded since the policies of these wilful and sometimes venal servants had thrown the Company’s accounts into chaos, and given it responsibilities it did not want and for which it was unfitted. In 1744 the Company had loaned the government £1 million; twenty-eight years and various wars later, it was in the red and seeking to borrow £1.4 million from the Treasury. By 1815 the Company’s debt was £40 million and just over three-quarters of its annual budget was consumed by the expenses of its army, which was now 150,000 strong. There had been brief signs of financial resurgence in the mid-1760s as the land taxes from Bengal began to pour in, but these quickly vanished and the Company lurched from crisis to crisis. In order to stay afloat, it had fallen back on the dubious expedient of raising capital by regular share issues, and had created what in effect was a private version of the national debt.
Where would it all end? A considerable body of opinion, stronger in London than in India, feared that the Company was becoming dangerously overstretched. In 1779, when it was locked in combat with Hyder Ali and his French sponsors, Major-General James Stuart, the resident in Tanjore (Thangayu), voiced the widely-held anxiety that the Company ‘already possesses more Territory and Influence than they well know how to make good use of’.16 Twenty-five years later, the naturally cautious Arthur Wellesley was convinced that his brother had overstepped himself in his efforts to subdue the Mahrathas. He also believed that there were great risks in making treaties with native princes which left them with the façade of their former power, while real a
uthority was exerted by the Company with the result that they lost respect and their puppet-master gained none.
Critics of expansionism were also uneasy about the swiftness with which senior Company officials resorted to war as an instrument of policy. A quick and unexpectedly arduous foray into Nepal in 1814–15 troubled the Duke of York, the commander-in-chief of the British Army, who wondered why ‘it was ever necessary’.17 There was, of course, little that he or anyone else in London could do about it, for the men who made the decisions were thousands of miles away. If challenged, they fell back on a stock explanation which involved local prestige and the refusal of the Company’s strategists to tolerate a powerful or obstreperous independent state on their borders. The government and the directors were not always convinced; in 1816 there was some reluctance to allow the Nepal campaign’s hero, Major-General Sir David Ochterlony, a £1,000 annuity, which was understandable given the Company’s debts.18
Behind the debates that had flared up in Britain whenever the men-on-the-spot in India adopted aggressive policies, lay a deep unease. Altogether the events of the fifty years after Plassey suggested that those who held power in India considered themselves beyond the restraint of either the Company or the British government. The growing Indian empire was becoming a state within a state. At the same time, it appeared that those responsible for India underwent a moral transformation, abandoning British habits of mind and codes of public behaviour and embracing those of the subcontinent.
Clive had recognised the temptations, to which he had earlier succumbed, when he returned to Bengal as governor-general in 1765 with a mandate to establish honest and fair government. ‘In a country where money is plenty, where fear is the principle of government, and when your arms are ever victorious,’ he observed, ‘I say it is no wonder that corruption should find its way to a spot so well prepared to receive it.’ For the next two years he did what he could to stamp out the worst abuses and the task was taken up by two of his successors, Warren Hastings (1772–85) and Lord Cornwallis (1785–92); but in a country where highly-paid posts proliferated, and the opportunities for graft were still plentiful, old attitudes died hard. In 1791, when a storming party at the siege of Cuddadur had been halted by fears of a mine, an officer rallied them with the cry, ‘If there is a mine, it is a mine of gold!’19
Efforts to cleanse an administration which, among other things, tolerated torture as a means of extracting taxes, were regarded sceptically by many in Britain who felt that there was something disturbingly un-English about the Indian empire. Hitherto, imperial conquest and annexation had been confined to America and accompanied by emigration from Britain. Along with the emigrants had gone Christianity, British political values and systems of government which had been reproduced in the colonies. In India things had been different. In the space of sixty years the Company had acquired provinces that possessed their own machinery of government, which had evolved along autocratic lines and sophisticated, well-organised societies with their own deeply-rooted religions and customs.
There was no reason for the Company’s officials to upset the established order in India, a course of action which they lacked the means to undertake and which would have caused untold havoc. Instead, the Company behaved as an inheritor, accepting what it found, and making changes only when practical necessity demanded. This pragmatism involved compromises; religious practices repugnant to Christians were tolerated, and wherever possible Hindu and Muslim legal traditions were accommodated. The prevalent attitude was summed up by an incident in 1814 at Jaganath, when the acting magistrate encountered a widow about to commit sati, that is the Hindu custom of throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her husband. He tried to dissuade her, but ‘she said that she loved her husband, and was determined to burn with him’, so the magistrate departed and the ceremony went ahead.20 Elsewhere, officers of the Company’s army would attend Hindu rituals with their men and allow Hindu priests to bless regimental colours.
There were limits to toleration which were invariably defined by the need to maintain public order. Small-scale campaigns were fought to suppress organised banditry, which was an integral part of the Indian social order, but which interfered with trade and represented a challenge to the Company’s authority. Drastic measures such as executions without trial were commonly adopted by officers, who claimed that they were a medicine which both doctor and patient understood. Arthur Wellesley, who never had any qualms about hanging bandits whenever he found them, later commented that the ‘liberal’ ideals which held sway in Britain were utterly unsuited to a country whose people were conditioned to authoritarian government and expected their rulers to act with a firm hand.
The nature of Indian society and the conditions which Company administrators faced ruled out any importation into India of the freedoms and political rights taken for granted in Britain. And yet, as liberal thinkers in Britain argued, despotic forms of government were corrupting, and the Company was growing into an institution so powerful that it might subvert the British state. Edmund Burke, the most persistent and trenchant critic of the Company and its officials’ behaviour, claimed in 1783 that ‘a corrupt, private interest’ had come into existence ‘in direct opposition to the necessity of the state’. This was hyperbole, but it highlighted contemporary misgivings about an institution which seemed outside the control of parliament. Brakes, not always effective, were placed on the Company by the 1772 and 1784 India Acts which imposed parliamentary control over the board of directors, the latter setting up a board of control chaired by the Secretary of State for India, who was also a cabinet member. Gradually a private interest came under public control.
Of probably greater importance than the extension of parliamentary control over the Indian empire was a fundamental change in attitude of that generation of young Company servants who were taking up their posts at the turn of the century. They arrived having been exposed to evangelicalism, a creed which was making considerable headway among the British middle and upper classes during the 1780s and 1790s. Evangelicalism was a form of Protestantism which emphasised personal spiritual regeneration through the acceptance of Providence, and useful service to mankind, undertaken in accordance with Christian humanitarian principles. Cornwallis seems to have been one of the first to have been swayed by evangelical ideals for, on his appointment as governor-general, he listed his priorities as: ‘Try to be of some use; serve your country and your friends [and] take the means which God is willing to place in your hands.’21
Personal moral uprightness was essential if the evangelical was to perform his duties to the rest of the world. John Malcolm, whose Indian career began in the early 1780s, believed that British power there rested on the gallantry of British troops and the high moral standards of its administrators, in particular their truthfulness and integrity. ‘When they condescend to meet the smooth-tongued Mohammedan, or the crafty Hindoo, with the weapons of flattery, dissimulation, and cunning,’ he remarked, ‘they will to a certainty be vanquished.’22 In other words, if the British continued to adopt what were taken to be the values of the people they governed, they would be undone. Arthur Wellesley concurred, telling Malcolm in 1804, ‘I would rather sacrifice Gwalior or every frontier in India ten times over, in order to preserve our credit for scrupulous good faith.’23
Arthur Wellesley spoke with the voice of the British aristocracy, a class that considered the right to rule others as its birthright, and which enjoyed a monopoly of political power at home. The India Act extended this monopoly to India, where high offices were soon occupied by men such as Cornwallis, the Marquess Wellesley, and in the next century, Lord Hastings and the Earl of Minto. They applied, in varying degrees, the traditional principles of aristocratic government to the people of India, mingling firmness with benevolent paternalism, and endeavoured to keep a high standard of personal probity.
They and the home government accepted that Britain’s Indian empire was a national asset although its acquisition had never followed any prede
termined plan. By 1800, British domination of India was an accepted political fact of life despite parliamentary misgivings about the activities of grandee governor-generals who were just as pugnacious as their predecessors when it came to securing frontiers and enforcing Britain’s will on recalcitrant native rulers.
The momentum to acquire more and more power could not be allowed to slacken. India had become a base from which Britain could dominate southern Asia and the Indian Ocean and promote its commercial interests which were beginning to reach out towards China. The Indian army gave Britain the power with which to protect these interests, and enforce its will throughout a region which extended from the Red Sea to the Malay Peninsula. The potential of the Indian army was first revealed during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France when a combination of Indian manpower and local naval supremacy enabled the British to wage war in Egypt and conquer Mauritius and Java. After 1807, when it was clear that the French were supreme in Europe, British strategists began to lay plans for the conquest of Spanish America which involved conveying Indian troops across the Pacific to Mexico and Chile.
These schemes were laid in the knowledge that British-trained Indian units were more than up to the task; during the siege of Cuddadur in 1783 Madras sepoys overcame French troops who had previously repelled a European assault party, and, at Bharatpur in 1805, Indians had advanced into action when the British 76th Regiment had flinched.24 Nonetheless, those who ruled India had no illusions about the real source of their power, the legend of British invincibility. ‘Every European soldier’, wrote Cornwallis, ‘should be carried in a dooly to the scene of action, when, like a panther or a blood hound, he might be let slip against the enemy.’25 A wave of unrest among native troops during 1809 was an uncomfortable reminder that stability throughout the subcontinent ultimately rested on British troops alone.26 This fact would never be forgotten, even by those who dreamed of bringing European enlightenment to the people of India.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 17