The history of Kolkata is written along the Hooghly shores: on one side Kolkata, on the other the industrial suburb of Howrah. Peeping out of the bush on both banks are the old deserted garden houses of the British. Here and there is a pastoral scene of people bathing and doing the wash on the steps of the ghats. Surinam Dock, a vacant space on the Kolkata side, stands as a haunting reminder of servitude. It was from here that indentured laborers—slaves, for all intents and purposes—were shipped to the Guianas on the northern shore of South America in the nineteenth century, creating an Indian diaspora in the Caribbean basin. Moorings, the shape of turbans, bob and tilt in the water: gigantic, rusted, and no longer in use. There is the darkened, collapsed, and empty hulk of Garden Reach jetty, one of several such battered ruins of the former downtown port complex. Where jute mills used to be the forest now encroaches, the jute industry having moved to Bangladesh. The river seemed so calm, a smoky still life, though it is anything but. Most of the distance to the Bay of Bengal requires a pilot. Seven-foot tides coming up from the bay and hidden sandbars make it treacherous. Though the Hooghly is three quarters of a mile wide during part of its stretch through Kolkata, the navigable part is much narrower, made worse by hidden shipwrecks.
We passed cargo boats laden with logs from Burma and Malaysia, then a feeder vessel with conventional hydraulic cranes hugging the Howrah side of the river, where its hull would not run aground on a sandbar. The larger cargo ships with gantry cranes cannot come this far up-river because of the shallow draft, so they transfer their containers to feeder vessels a few miles south of here. Though the downtown port still exists, it is greatly diminished because of new harbors closer to the Bay of Bengal. Because of these other harbors spaced miles apart from one another, Kolkata is considered a multi-draft port. The largest and deepest of these is at Haldia near the Bay of Bengal. But as the metropolis ever expands, there is word of developing Diamond Harbor into an even bigger shipping complex.
Just a few miles downriver of the city, the Hooghly opens out to become a vast inland sea of seemingly Amazonian dimensions. Here, amid the “nauseous verdure,” in the words of British historian John Keay, civilization is reduced to a bare minimum: nothing but fishing villages with small wooden boats stranded on the beaches against palm jungles.14 The only sign of a higher civilization is the procession of towering kilns for brick-making that extends on both shorelines almost the entire distance to the Bay of Bengal, for such is the appetite for building materials as Kolkata expands by the day. Availability of water feeds its expansion, even as rising sea levels from global warming threaten the mega-city’s survival. The Bali climate conference of 2007 listed Kolkata as among the top ten cities most threatened by coastal flooding and by storm surges caused by rising sea levels that accompany global warming. And by late in the twenty-first century, because of its soaring population, Kolkata is slated to top the list.
Until the expansion of the British railway system in India in the second half of the nineteenth century, you would likely have arrived in Kolkata by boat, up the Hooghly from the Bay of Bengal. Except for the kilns, the scenery—water and junglescape—would have been similar to now. Thus, as my boat continued south along the ever-widening river, turning around close to Diamond Harbor and continuing back north to Kolkata, I could not help thinking about the career of the most pivotal and perhaps colorful character in Kolkata’s history, one who traveled up this same river the first time he arrived in the city: Robert Clive.
It was not only that he knew this same river that now made me think of Clive, it was also that he was a perfect counterpoint to the direction of my thinking. The boat journey was a vivid lesson in just how much geography matters. Indeed, the centrality of the Indian Ocean in the twenty-first century is a lesson in geographic and demographic determinism. But on the other hand, one needs to ask: is history only the result of vast impersonal forces—geographical, cultural, economic, and technological—about which we can do little? Or is history also the record of ordinary and extraordinary individuals who, in many cases, against great odds, succeed at overcoming these very forces? Is history also an account of sheer luck and misfortune? As Machiavelli indicated, he could only counsel his “prince” in the ways of virtù, not in the ways of fortuna, which was just as important. The career of Lord Robert Clive provides a dramatic illustration of the individual man theory, with all of the good luck and bad luck and moral choice that goes with it, and thus a refutation of the belief that vast impersonal forces determine the future.15
In hindsight, Great Britain’s domination of India appears inevitable, given the rise of British sea power throughout the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet without Lord Clive, it is to be sure arguable whether Britain would have gained control of India in the way that it did and to the extent that it did. One might even argue that without Clive’s magnetic personality, Britain would not have gotten control of India at all. Clive, in and of his own extraordinary self, constitutes an argument that nothing should be given up to fate; that nothing is inevitable.
The sacred text of Clive’s career is the long essay written about him by the English historian and India hand Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1840, nearly a century after the young Clive had captured Calcutta.* Macaulay’s essay races along, as though a cover story in a contemporary magazine. It does not seem old at all, not just in its subject matter, but in its poised, cocksure rhythm.
As Macaulay informs us, when Clive set sail for India in 1743 at the age of eighteen, in the service of the British East India Company, India was in a state of political confusion. In a sprawling Subcontinent that stretches two thousand miles from north to south (a greater distance than from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico), and more than fifteen hundred miles from west to east (nearly the distance from New York City to Denver), the Moghul dynasty was in utter disarray: on its way to becoming an assemblage of independent hereditary princedoms, many of which were besieged by the Marathas, a warrior caste that occupied the mountains east of Bombay, and ravaged the entire Deccan plateau, and—with its own piratical navy—India’s western coast. This chaotic landmass, writes Macaulay, was inhabited by a population ten times as numerous as the Aztecs and Incas, whom the Spanish had vanquished, even as the population was as highly civilized as the Spanish themselves.16 Therefore, the idea that a single foreign power from half a world away would one day hold decisive bureaucratic sway over all these sophisticated people was simply unimaginable.† Yet that is what the charismatic, dynamic, moody, suicidal, corrupt, and fearless Clive was able to set in motion.
Clive’s triumph in Calcutta is a story that starts in Madras, where he began at the age of twenty-one as a “writer,” the lowliest category of East India Company bureaucrat. He was drawn into military service owing to the outbreak of hostilities between the British and French East India companies and their rival indigenous princes in southeastern India, an area known as the Carnatic.* It was these Carnatic wars that elevated the European trading companies to territorial powers in their own right. Until this point, the only man with the vision of a European empire built on the ruins of the Mughal dynasty was not a Briton but a Frenchman, Joseph-François Dupleix, who had managed through military maneuver and political manipulation to make himself and his native surrogates masters of southern India. In a few years, Dupleix had gone from appeasing the local native powers to usurping them.17 In particular, this was a period when the superiority of European arms over indigenous populations became manifest, for in Europe war had already become a science, whereas in places like India it was still sport.18
The lone obstacle to French domination was the fortress of Trichinopoly, seventy miles inland from the Bay of Bengal, held by the British surrogate, Mohammed Ali. In the summer of 1751, a Dupleix ally, Chunda Sahib, helped by French auxiliaries, laid siege to it. The situation was dire. As Macaulay writes, “At this moment, the valor and genius of an obscure English youth [Clive] suddenly turned the tide of fortune.”19
&nbs
p; Clive took command of two hundred British soldiers and three hundred Indian sepoys (native soldiers in British service), but did not head to Trichinopoly. Instead, in the midst of a thunderstorm he overwhelmed the provincial capital of Arcot, forcing Chunda Sahib to send reinforcements there from Trichinopoly, thus saving British forces. But the French immediately laid siege to Arcot, where Clive and his followers had holed up in the fort. Their defenses were meager. As Macaulay recounts, the walls were “ruinous,” the ditches “dry,” and the ramparts too “narrow” to admit their guns. As death and hunger set in, “the devotion of the little band to its chief [Clive] surpassed any thing that is related of the Tenth Legion of Caesar, or of the Old Guard of Napoleon.”20
Although he had scant training, Clive turned out to be a military natural, given that the essence of soldiering is leadership or “undaunted resolution”—that is, the ability to rally men to your side, especially in adversity. Indeed, in such fluid little wars and engagements, tipping the balance owed much to improvisation and plain luck.21 Having successfully withstood a fifty-three-day siege at Arcot through ingenuity, sheer endurance, and seeming ubiquitousness during the fighting, the twenty-six-year-old Clive single-handedly turned the tide against the French. Madras and its interior hinterland were about to be secured for Great Britain.
In 1753, Clive returned to England triumphant, whereas the equally brilliant and psychologically complex Dupleix—more than twice Clive’s age—returned to France the following year in disgrace and, stripped of his considerable fortune, died in obscurity.
In 1755, Clive set sail once more for Madras. Arriving there the next year to take command of Fort St. David, where his mission was to complete the expulsion of the French, he nevertheless became embroiled in the affairs of Bengal far to the north, the richest part of India, which had been a main revenue source for the Mughals to fund their Deccan wars. As Macaulay puts it in his matchless prose:
Of the provinces which had been subject to the House of Tamerlane, the wealthiest was Bengal.… The Ganges, rushing through a hundred channels to the sea, has formed a vast plain of rich mould which, even under the tropical sky, rivals the verdure of an English April. The rice fields yield an increase such as is elsewhere unknown. Spices, sugar, vegetable oils, are produced with marvellous exuberance. The rivers afford an inexhaustible supply of fish.… The great stream which fertilizes the soil is, at the same time, the chief highway of Eastern commerce. On its banks, and on those of its tributary waters, are the wealthiest marts, the most splendid capitals, and the most sacred shrines of India. The tyranny of man had for ages struggled in vain against the overflowing bounty of nature. In spite of the Mussulman [Muslim] despot, and of the Mahratta freebooter, Bengal was known through the East as the Garden of Eden.…22
It was also a filthy and sodden fen astride the Tropic of Cancer, consisting of “new mud, old mud, and marsh,” in the words of a geographer quoted by the British travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse.23 The commercial heart of this fecund and rotting vastness was Calcutta, a port on the Hooghly River that, in turn, emptied into the Bay of Bengal. Here the British East India Company operated under the protection of a nawab (viceroy) who ruled the territories of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar in the name of a Mughal figurehead. In 1756, the nawab, Aliverdy Khan, died and was succeeded by his grandson, a youth of less than twenty, Surajah Dowlah. Macaulay describes him as cruel, selfish, drunken, debauched, and full of hatred of the English. Furthermore, he surrounded himself with “dregs … recommended by nothing but buffoonery and servility.”24
And so it was that the nawab, after finding some pretext, marched with his army upon Fort William, the English stronghold in Calcutta. Whereas the specter of Dupleix and his army had forced the British in Madras to be not only traders but soldiers and statesmen besides, in Calcutta the English seemed to have only the first quality, and were consequently terrified. Fort William fell without much of a fight. Then what Macaulay calls “that great crime” occurred, to be immortalized in British lore, with its likely exaggerations.25
In 1756 the monsoon rains did not arrive until June 21, meaning that the night of June 20 was the most horrid, sultry night of the year, with flesh-disintegrating humidity. On this night the nawab’s guards threw dozens of English men and women into the “Black Hole of Calcutta,” an eighteen-foot airless cube, where most perished before the guards opened the doors the next morning—after the nawab had “slept off his debauch,” in Macaulay’s recounting, and “permitted the door to be opened.”26 Though it was claimed that 146 people were thrown into the hole, the actual number was more likely sixty-four, of whom twenty-one survived.*
When news of the events in Calcutta reached Madras that August the cry for vengeance was universal. Clive was put at the head of nine hundred British infantry and fifteen hundred native sepoys to punish a nawab who, as Macaulay points out, “had more subjects than Louis the Fifteenth or the Empress Maria Theresa.”27 They set sail north along the Bay of Bengal in October. However, owing to adverse winds that meant detours to the coasts of Ceylon and Burma, they did not reach Bengal until December. Clive was all business, quickly routing the native garrison at Fort William and reconquering Calcutta. The nawab sued for peace, but Clive was against dealing peaceably with him, given the nawab’s character and previous actions. But the East India Company in Calcutta was eager to resume business, and in Madras it was anxious for the return of its army and weapons. Thus, Clive consented to negotiate. Macaulay explains:
With this negotiation commences a new chapter in the life of Clive. Hitherto he had been merely a soldier, carrying into effect, with eminent ability and valour, the plans of others. Henceforth he is to be chiefly regarded as a statesman.… That in his new capacity he displayed great ability, and obtained great success, is unquestionable. But it is also unquestionable, that the transactions in which he now began to take a part have left a stain on his moral character.28
In fact, Clive lacked slyness and cunning. According to Macaulay, he was “constitutionally the very opposite of a knave.” Clive’s dynamism—the ability to get things done on and off the battlefield—had arisen not from sleaziness, but simply from a larger-than-life energy and enthusiasm, especially when it came to taking risks. In fact, there is little evidence that he ever acted improperly with a fellow Englishman. As it turned out, this “stain on his moral character” was confined to dealings with Indians: “he considered Oriental politics as a game in which nothing was unfair.”29 In other words, his immorality did not flow naturally from his personality, but rather represented a calculated—we could even say, strategic—decision.
He seems to have imagined, most erroneously in our opinion, that he could effect nothing against such [Indian] adversaries, if he was content to be bound by ties from which they were free, if he went on telling truth, and hearing none, if he fulfilled, to his own hurt, all his engagements with confederates who never kept an engagement that was not to their advantage. Accordingly this man, in the other parts of his life an honorable English gentleman and a soldier, was no sooner matched against an Indian intriguer, than he became himself an Indian intriguer.…30
Meanwhile, the nawab, Surajah Dowlah, was nothing if not calculating. He concluded a treaty with Clive, even as he conspired quietly with the French at nearby Chandernagore to drive out Clive’s forces from Calcutta. The British, who got wind of the nawab’s designs, successfully attacked Chandernagore before the French could send reinforcements from their bases in the Carnatic in southeastern India. “By depriving the French of their most profitable operation,” writes Keay, “and of the base from which both Pondicherry [in the Carnatic] and their Mauritius establishment were provisioned, it undermined” France’s whole position in the Indian Ocean.31
Clive decided next—against the advice of some of his fellow Britons—to support a coup against Surajah Dowlah, to be led by Meer Jaffier, the principal commander of the nawab’s troops. When one of the Bengalis involved in planning the coup threatened to reve
al it if he was not guaranteed a sum of money, Clive drew up two treaties: a real one with no mention of a reward for this fellow, and a fake contract that did. When a fellow British officer refused, out of conscience, to sign the counterfeit treaty, Clive simply forged the man’s signature. His scruples were limited to contacts with his own race, making him in the final analysis, claim his severest critics, reprehensible.*
Though moody and suicidal after the fact, Clive was not given to worry or reflection in the midst of an operation. His bravado was on full display before the battle that—perhaps more than any other individual event—would determine the fate of the Indian Subcontinent. The armies of Surajah Dowlah and Clive had gathered a few miles from each other, when it was agreed that once hostilities commenced Meer Jaffier would desert with his forces to the side of the British. But Meer Jaffier’s fears overcame his ambition; he dithered with cold feet.
For Clive at this moment, it was no easy decision to cross a river and engage an army twenty times the size of one’s own, so he called a war council. The majority of his fellow officers advised against giving battle, and Clive concurred momentarily. “Long afterwards,” Macaulay writes, Clive said “that he had never called but one council of war, and … if he had taken the advice of that council, the British would never have been masters of Bengal,” and ultimately of India. According to Macaulay’s account, Clive retired under the shade of some trees and passed an hour in thought. “He came back determined to put every thing to the hazard, and gave orders that all should be in readiness for passing the river on the morrow.”32 He decided henceforth to take the responsibility for whatever happened completely on himself.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 21