by Jon Wilson
Hard country
The decentralized, continually contestable character of politics created space for challengers to grow within the political structures of Mughal government. Rebellion was ever-present in the Mughal empire. It was not rare for insurgent local lords to ally themselves with the emperor’s rivals in court to try to loosen his grasp on central power. The fate of a regime depended on its capacity to create a broad but authoritative base of support, enticing potentially recalcitrant supporters with political and financial opportunity while demonstrating power by crushing out-and-out rivals. Emperors did not see it as beneath them to haggle over the terms on which a minor landholder would submit. In this fluid, argumentative political world there were few permanent alliances. Friendship, maintained by continual favours and constant conversation, was the only way to make sure someone stayed onside.
The greatest challenge to Mughal power came from a group of lower-caste peasant-warriors originally from the hilly regions of western Maharashtra. The Marathas started off as military contractors, guarding and raiding the trade routes which transported goods, particularly cotton, between the Deccan plain and the coast; commerce with Europe was significant in the initial build-up of Maratha power. Shahji Bhonsle, born in around 1600, built an army of perhaps 20,000 men as a sub-contractor of the Muslim Sultanates which ruled land south of Mughal territory in the Deccan. His son Shivaji built his own independent authority in the hills around Pune from the 1650s. With tactics honed in their home landscape, the Marathas avoided confronting enemies in battle, raiding their supply trains to strip them of food, then leaving them to starve in the dry Deccan before retreating to the mountains. ‘[E]ven the steed of unimaginable exertion is too weak to gallop over this hard country,’ Shivaji wrote to the Emperor Alamgir. ‘My home’, he said, ‘is not situated on a spacious plain.’12
There was little to distinguish the Maratha style of conquest and politics from that of the Mughals, other than short-term military tactics. In fact, they continually negotiated with Mughal authorities, constantly seeking good terms on which to submit to Mughal power. Only a set of avoidable misunderstandings ensured negotiations continually broke down, and allowed the Marathas to have more independence than other political forces. Shivaji had initially written to the Emperor Alamgir asking for the Mughal empire to acknowledge his authority over his lands in return for sending 500 soldiers to the Mughal army. He demanded portions of the land tax from neighbouring regions called cauth (a quarter), paid in return for not unleashing devastation on a particular area, plus the one-tenth share which usually went to the local king; together making 35 per cent of local resources as, in effect, protection money.13
To deal with these claims Alamgir sent his uncle and leading military commander Shaista Khan to negotiate Shivaji’s submission, offering the Maratha leader land grants but not giving in to his full demands. When negotiations broke down in 1663, Shivaji broke into the Mughal camp and killed Shaista’s son. Alamgir sent more soldiers. Even then, talking continued, and a deal was briefly reached. Shivaji was invited, along with 250 of his troops, to the Mughal capital to discuss with the emperor his submission to Mughal power. But the Maratha leader was insulted about being treated like a mere landholder rather than a king; he refused to put on the ceremonial robes he was offered, stormed out of Alamgir’s audience hall and fled back to Maharashtra. Even then, Shivaji agreed to peace, sending his son to Alamgir’s court to be recognized as a Mughal official as well as a small army to join the emperor’s main force.
Shivaji died in 1680. His last eleven years were spent in constant war with Mughal armies, leading to his eventual decision to have himself crowned as an independent Hindu king, an audacious act for a man who did not belong to the kingly Kshatriya caste. After his death, Shivaji’s empire was divided between factions that wanted to ally with members of the Mughal ruling class and those that did not. The Maratha regime was driven back to a series of hilltop hideouts scattered throughout southern India, and was all but extinguished. It expanded after Alamgir’s death in 1707, when weakened Mughal leaders sought the submission of Maratha generals on easier terms. Eventually, in 1719, the Mughals granted them 35 per cent of all local resources in western India as a way of keeping the area under some form of Mughal authority. The Marathas went on to become the leading political force in eighteenth-century India, powerfully shaping the process by which British power emerged. But their growth took place as a vassal of the Mughal empire.14
An absolute externality
The Marathas were very much part of the pattern of early modern Indian politics, with its shifting alliances, constant negotiation and capacious political structures able to embrace radically different faiths, institutions and ways of life. Christian Europe was a different world altogether, often as much as ten months away by sea. Stepping ashore after thousands of miles at sea, the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English knew little of the country and were unknown quantities. Europeans saw themselves as, in the words of Ranajit Guha, an ‘absolute externality’ to Indian society, an attitude that was often reciprocated. A Sinhalese observer of the Portuguese in the 1500s described them as ‘a race of white and very beautiful people, who wear boots and hats of iron and never stop in any place. They eat a sort of white stone and drink blood’.15
Since the days of the Roman empire, Europe had been connected to Asia, but it was linked by such an extensive chain of trading connections that the origins of communication were quickly lost. Gujarati merchants would buy spices and cloth, which they sold to Ottoman traders across the Arabian Sea, who in turn traded with Venetian merchants for widespread distribution throughout northern Europe. Some Europeans did travel to India but direct contact was limited.
The Portuguese nobleman Vasco da Gama led the first European ships to sail around the African coast, landing near Calicut in the summer of 1498. The plan was to open up the spice trade between India and Europe, and find isolated groups of Christians who would help the Portuguese challenge the Muslim Ottoman empire in Europe. The absence of everyday contact with Indian society meant the Portuguese were seen, and saw themselves, as strangers in a strange land. So great was their ignorance that Vasco returned to Europe believing that Kerala’s Hindu temples were in fact the churches of a heterodox Christian sect. The next decade saw an average of fifteen ships a year arriving to conquer a succession of forts on India’s south-west coast.16
The Portuguese would dominate the seaborne trade of this sliver of land for the next century. Their power was centred in Goa, halfway down the Indian peninsula. It spread by peppering the west coast of India with seventy sea forts. The Portuguese traded with a string of small principalities which were defended from the Mughals and Marathas by India’s great escarpment, the Western Ghats. Western India’s geography made it hard for land-based powers to interrupt their maritime activities, but it also stopped the Portuguese from having any impact on India’s interior.
From the 1500s, Portugal had claimed to be ‘lords of the sea’ throughout Asia. The theoretical basis of their assertion lay in Pope Alexander VI’s bequest of the trade of ‘the eastern extremities of Asia’ to Portugal in 1493. ‘[T]oo mad for the veriest visionary that ever played with the imagination’, this was a claim Europe’s Protestants fiercely contested. The Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius calling it ‘empty ostentation’, but the Portuguese tried to make it a reality by installing a form of military bureaucracy in the sea lanes of western India. Concerned first of all to establish a monopoly on commerce in spices and then horses, the Portuguese found it more profitable to tax other people’s trade. Heavily armed Portuguese ships forced every vessel sailing in the region to buy a pass, or cartaz, from them, and then to dock at Portuguese forts where they were required to pay customs duties.
Portuguese sea power was based on the fact that they, just like the Mughals, had bigger and better cannon than their rivals to begin with. Their naval artillery did not help the Portuguese control the trade in spices, horses or anything
else, but it did ensure that their system for taxing other people’s trade was effective, if ‘not excessively irksome’, as historian Michael Pearson puts it. As Pearson points out, local Indian regimes could have invested in better cannon and ships to defeat the Portuguese. A concerted effort by land-based powers would have overcome the barrier of the Western Ghats and driven them into the sea. But it was cheaper for Indian merchants simply to buy Portuguese passports and pay their taxes. By 1600 a European power had a foot in India, but it was a hold which had little impact on the rest of the subcontinent. ‘Wars by sea are merchants’ affairs’, said one ruler of Gujarat, ‘and of no concern to the prestige of kings.’17
The Portuguese presence on India’s west coast was challenged by a rival European maritime state, in the shape of the Netherlands. Merchant adventurers from republican, Protestant Holland sent dozens of fleets in the 1590s to challenge Catholic Iberian control of the spice trade. In 1601 sixty-five ships left for the Indian Ocean. The following year the Dutch East India Company was founded to merge and coordinate the actions of competing Dutch traders and provide an effective military challenge against Portugal’s fleets and forts. It always focused more on Indonesia than India, but by the 1650s the Dutch Company had built a network of eleven forts, centred at Kochi in Kerala, and had a significant presence at the Mughal port of Hughli in eastern India. By then it had driven Portugal from her domination of the pepper trade on India’s south-west coast, and had a good stake in the export of Indian silk and cotton from the subcontinent. The Dutch maintained their supremacy over European trade to South East Asia until the late 1700s; but from the 1680s their brief hegemony over trade with India was being challenged by a new power from the west, the English East India Company. The island of Bombay was handed by the Portuguese to England in 1661. Twenty-five years later the English had built a string of pepper forts in Kerala, too.
The rise of the English East India Company during the next century and a half was based on the exercise of violence on land more than sea. Robert Clive, the East India Company officer usually associated with Britain’s first conquests in India, was a leader of armies not navies. The forces which conquered India were commanded by generals with military experience drawn from land wars in America or Europe, from Charles, Earl of Cornwallis, to Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, Francis, Marquess of Hastings to Sir Henry Havelock. The British were the first Europeans to build a landed empire in southern Asia. They were able to conquer on land because of transformations that occurred in the structure of India’s great agrarian empires in the eighteenth century, not in the disposition of sea power. Those changes were wrought by invading forces that marched over land from Persia and Afghanistan.
Yet throughout the years when the power of the British grew they remained strangers from over the ocean. Invariably, Britons arrived after long sea voyages with little practical knowledge of the society from which they hoped to profit. Unlike Europe for their compatriots or India for Persians, for the British the path to India was not well-worn. In many places in the Indian subcontinent, British institutions grew from the wreckage of organizations created by European maritime powers. They used Portuguese scribes and soldiers, established trading bases where the Portuguese and Dutch had built theirs, and sometimes even used their language to communicate. Spending two months in Brazil on his first voyage to India, Robert Clive thought the most important thing he could do there was learn Portuguese. Like most other governors, however, he never learnt an Asian language.
Early modern England saw itself as a state which dominated the sea not the land, just like Portugal. Eighteenth-century Englishmen and women considered their empire ‘maritime, commercial and free’. The difference in India was that the English East India Company sailed around the other side of Cape Comorin at the southern tip of India.18
While the Portuguese Estado da India stayed locked into the narrow coastal strip between the Western Ghats and the sea, the East India Company tried to profit from a terrain whose rivers took it quickly deep into the interior. The English Company was concerned with making money from trade with the rice-growing hinterland, buying and selling cotton, silk and saltpetre which could be transported along inland rivers, not just spices which grew on trees near the coast. In the same way as the Portuguese, the English tried to assert their power by building forts, creating pockets of absolute control rather than negotiating with the complex structures of Mughal authority, but they adopted the attitudes and tactics from maritime dominance and, over time, used them to build an empire on land.
2
TRADING WITH GHOSTS
Nawab Shaista Khan was busy at work one morning soon after the end of 1682’s monsoon season, sitting under a red velvet canopy in his grand audience hall in the city of Dhaka. One of the Emperor Alamgir’s most important officials, Shaista had been moved from western India after losing his son in a surprise defeat by the Maratha ruler Shivaji. Eighty-one years old, he had been governor of the Mughal empire’s far eastern province of Bengal for sixteen of them.
One hundred and fifty years after Babur had first marched through the Khyber Pass, the Mughal empire was at the height of its authority yet there were many challenges. Most of Shaista’s career had been spent driving Mughal power through South Asia, but a century after Bengal was conquered its power was still being challenged by smaller neighbours, from Assam to the north, and Arakan and Burma to the east. There was also the prospect of rebellion from lords closer to home. The provincial capital of Dhaka, a city then seventy years old, was surrounded by jungle. It still felt like a military camp. To survive, the empire needed to be in a constant state of movement. One moment governors were sending troops to fight, the next they were conciliating rival chiefs with promises of money and order. In his audience hall, Shaista Khan listened to information from spies and despatched instructions in response. On this day he was hearing news of defeat. An army from Assam had routed Mughal forces, compelling them to retreat 60 miles, and every one of the 600 Portuguese mercenaries fighting for Shaista Khan had fled the battlefield. The Anglo-Irish merchant sitting opposite was the least of his worries.1
After three-quarters of an hour, Shaista Khan turned to William Hedges, chief officer of the English East India Company’s operation in Bengal. Hedges had been in Bengal for two months and Dhaka for two days. He had come with the intention of acquiring a guarantee that the English East India Company could trade without having to pay customs duties on the goods it exported to Europe. At their first meeting, however, it was Shaista Khan who asked the questions. How long was the sea journey from London? Had Hedges been to Germany? Where was Spain? Where did silver came from? Most importantly of all, Shaista Khan wanted to know about other English merchants in Bengal.
After a short initial conversation the two men met again two weeks later, during which the Mughal governor continued his interrogation. His big question was about the role of private English merchants exporting goods from Bengal. The Company had a monopoly on commerce between Britain and Asia and wanted to expel independent traders from India. In the 1680s the most important of these ‘interlopers’ was Thomas Pitt. Pitt’s venture was eventually bought out by the East India Company. An incredibly able merchant, he went on to become Governor of Madras and was grandfather and great-grandfather to two British prime ministers. In 1682, however, the Company regarded him as little better than a pirate. From the Mughal empire’s perspective, the East India Company’s relationship with men like Pitt was a puzzle. The idea of a corporation banning its fellow countrymen from trading in a foreign land was odd to say the least. Shaista inquired whether it was usual for private English merchants to trade ‘in these parts’? Hedges answered with a firm no, but was quickly contradicted by a Mughal nobleman, and nothing Hedges said could persuade the court that Thomas Pitt’s conduct was wrong.2
William Hedges was treated well in Dhaka, but he demanded privileges which the Mughal empire could not grant him. Hedges wanted the Company’s right to trad
e without paying taxes to be guaranteed in writing, but Mughal politics stressed the importance of face-to-face negotiation rather than written contracts. He demanded that the East India Company be favoured above independent English merchants like Thomas Pitt, but such preferential treatment would have corroded the Mughal empire’s claim to be a neutral broker between different groups of its subjects. He wanted Mughal officers to treat the Company’s merchants in exactly the same way in every part of Bengal, but local Mughal administrators governed with discretion, and were not controlled from Dhaka. These were the requests of a monopolizing maritime power, not compatible with a land empire held together by balance and negotiation. Hedges and the East India Company tried to assert a form of power that subverted the way the Mughal empire worked.
In the 1680s, the English presence in India was a small and anxious one. Company officers were scattered between twelve cities along the country’s rivers and coastline, half a dozen or so in each. When it did not get its own way, this small band felt beleaguered and undermined and saw violence as the only solution to an impasse. Eventually, Hedges concluded that the Company’s position in Bengal could only be guaranteed by war, the aim of which would be conquest: not the conquest of a country, but the capture of enough land to build a fort. The Company wanted a fortified base to allow it to trade without being ‘harassed’ by Mughal demands. But war wasn’t driven by the minute calculation of financial advantage. It was a battle for status. The English felt humiliated, and saw force as the only way to restore their honour.3