The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  In theory, the English were sovereign over the island of Bombay in a way that they were sovereign over nowhere in Bengal. In practice, such sovereignty meant little as the island was enmeshed in a tight network of western Indian trade and politics, in which the Company played only a small part. The East India Company had no choice but to let Mughal and Maratha sailors and soldiers treat the island as their home.

  In the 1680s ships belonging to Sidi Kasim wintered at Bombay. Sidi Kasim was a seafaring Ethiopian chieftain whose maritime force effectively acted as the Mughal navy. Tension between the Sidi’s soldiers and the English led to violence. In May 1683, an English soldier was killed in a fight with Ethiopian sailors in the bazaar. Soon, after an English officer was thrown off one of the Sidi’s ships when he tried to procure a slave girl for sex in a drunken late-night encounter. Sir John Child, the Company’s governor (no relation to Sir Josiah), refused to seek revenge, arguing that any critical response would be ‘like a tolling bell for us all’. A group of soldiers decided to take matters into their own hands, staging a coup in order to more effectively assert their ‘honour’ against Mughal power. Their rebellion did not last long, however, talking and drinking itself out of steam over a few months. But the rebels did evict Sidi Kasim’s Mughal fleet from Bombay harbour and seriously corroded the relationship between the English and the Mughals in western India.25

  There had been ‘murmuring and complaint’ as the customs on the Company’s goods was raised from 2 to 3½ per cent in the Mughal port of Surat. As in Bengal, company officers complained about Mughal ‘harassment’. Relations broke down so badly that, according to an English chaplain, customs were demanded on the gold buttons ‘which the chief Factors wore upon their Cloaths’ so ‘in a short time the very Intrinsick Value of his Gold Buttons would be spent in Custom’. The English castigated the Mughals for siding with interlopers, and ended up issuing a list of thirty-five grievances to the Mughal Governor of Surat. Once war started in Bengal, Sir John Child switched from pusillanimity to violence. ‘It will’, he said, ‘become us to Seize what we cann & draw the English sword, as well on this Side of India as the other.’ The aim in the west was the same as in the east, to ‘gaine a New Settlement’. Child captured a few small Mughal ships carrying provisions for Sidi Kasim’s fleet on his way back from Surat and he wrote to the Sidi saying, ‘should he dare to come with forces to Bombay, he would blow him off again with the wind of his bum’. The Sidi then demanded the return of his ships; if they were not returned he would occupy Bombay three days later. When they were not, he did just that.26

  As in Bengal, in Bombay English hubris vastly outweighed its military capability. ‘Buoyed with a strong opinion of their own Valour, and of the Indian’s Pusillanimity’, as one observer put it, the English in Bombay were rapidly overwhelmed by Sidi Kasim’s troops. Company officers imagined that a show of English power would cause Indian soldiers to flee. In fact, it was the Company’s troops who deserted, as 116 fled from the tiny English contingent, and officers ran so quickly they left behind ten chests of treasure and four of arms for the Mughals. ‘On the Siddy’s comeing on this your Island, the whole Inhabitants left us, hardly one struck a stroke in the defence of the Island,’ Child wrote. The governor suggested the English were fighting alone, but the reality was very different. A militia of Koli fishermen was formed by the Parsi merchant Rustom Dorabji. The defence of Bombay depended particularly on Bhandaris, Marathas who made money by distilling alcohol but who had been driven out of Bombay by an increase in tax. Another group whom the British called ‘Sevajees’, possibly after Shivaji, also offered support. These various communities were part of the complex network of alliances that made up the Maratha polity. Conceivably, their loyalty to the Marathas led them to be hostile to Bombay’s Mughal attackers.27

  The Anglo-Maratha forces, no more than 2,500, were massively outnumbered by Sidi Kasim’s invasion army of 20,000. In February 1689, the same month Heath was driven from Chittagong, the Sidi pushed the English into Bombay castle, using ‘men enough to have eaten up all the Company’s servants for breakfast’. They were besieged there for a year. Eventually, as supplies ran out and desertion made defence unsustainable, the Company had no choice but to sue for a humiliating peace.28

  War was a financial disaster for the East India Company, weakening its position with its competitors. In 1689 eleven Dutch ships returned to Amsterdam stuffed with goods, but ‘we have but one ship come, and that not rich laden’ as one newswriter put it. Another thought ‘most men conclude that the East India trade is all lost’. Tiny shipments came from Bengal between 1688 and 1696. Exports from Bombay dropped to a quarter of their value in the early 1680s, and did not recover until the last years of the 1690s. There was a rapid decline in the Company’s stock price. With reports of English officers and troops being paraded in chains in the streets of Dhaka and Surat, of Company representatives kneeling and begging for mercy from the Emperor Alamgir with their hands tied behind their backs, it began to sink in that this was a moment of English humiliation as well as commercial loss. The East India Company’s first attempt to challenge the Mughal empire had ended in catastrophic disaster.29

  In London, defeat in the first Anglo-Mughal war brought about the end of the Company’s privileges. The Company’s crisis coincided with the Glorious Revolution. In November 1688, William of Orange, the Dutch head of state, invaded England with the support of Protestant nobles and merchants opposed to King James’ Catholicism and absolutism. Since Sir Josiah Child had stitched up James’ backing for the East India Company, William’s supporters included many fierce rivals of its corporate power, including many interlopers. Once William had taken the throne alongside his wife, Mary, their first response was to deregulate English commerce with India, passing an Act of Parliament that allowed free access to Asian trade in 1694. Next, in 1698, they created a new rival organization, ‘the English Company trading to the East Indies’ backed by King William and his supporters in Parliament.30

  The first decade of the eighteenth century was a period of squabbling and financial catastrophe, as rival groups of English traders in India competed for trade and favours from the Mughal empire. But despite a dramatically different political scenario, too many people had an interest in the existence of a single monopolistic company trading with Asia. Queen Anne’s accession to the throne in 1702 brought with it an attempt to revive some of the institutions of Jacobean authority and create a more centralized form of power. One consequence was the union of the separate crowns and parliament of England and Scotland, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. Another was the merger of England’s rival East India Companies and the return of a single organization with a monopoly on trade with Asia. These efforts to create unity allowed the Company’s revival, but the humiliation of defeat by the Mughal empire created twenty years of crisis and instability in Britain’s relationship with India.

  The Company only survived in Britain because it had become an inextricable part of the economic lives of the country’s political elite. It only survived in India because the Mughals thought it could benefit them, too. After 1690, the Company was the beneficiary of the classic Mughal tactic of offering friendship only once a rival had been defeated. For Alamgir and his ministers, the English were no different from any other group within the Mughal polity’s patchwork of communities. They could prosper, Mughal officers argued, as long as they submitted to the authority of the emperor and did not too dramatically undermine the balance of power within the places they resided.

  In Bengal, Shaista Khan returned to Delhi and was replaced by a new Nawab. Ibrahim Khan had been Governor of Patna, where he had been an ‘old friend to [the Company’s] affairs, and particularly known to the agent Charnock’. When he learnt that the East India Company had ‘repent of their irregular proceedings’ and submitted to Alamgir’s authority, Ibrahim Khan wrote to the English asking them to return. Job Charnock came back to Bengal in 1690 to create a new settlement. Ibrahim Khan offered
the Company a site two miles south of Hughli in order to keep the English close at hand. But, rather than choosing a settlement so close to a centre of Mughal authority, Charnock returned to the tract of land further south where he had first fled after the attack four years earlier. As usual, the English story about settlement was one which left out its Indian origins. Company officers in Madras complained that Charnock had settled in an empty swamp. His plan was ‘contrary to all reason, or consent of the [Mughal] Government, who will neither permit building or factory’. In fact, the Company landed at a cluster of villages that was home to merchants, weavers and an important Kali temple. The name Sutanati, one of the villages, means cotton bale. It was a place where a group of five merchant families had created a market for selling textiles on a piece of land raised three or four metres above the river, with Portuguese traders just across the water.31

  Charnock’s decision was based on ‘his feares of being seiz’d by some of the Government [of Bengal]’. His first step was to negotiate a deal with the Portuguese merchants to hire a frigate to defend the settlement. Like Captain Heath and the Court of Directors, Charnock believed the Company’s commerce could only thrive if the English had a fortified base that it could defend against Mughal attack. Unlike them, however, Charnock’s strategy was to conquer by stealth rather than open fighting. His aim was to create a settlement away from the centre of Mughal politics, avoiding messy entanglement with the Nawab. Building a fort at Sutanati was one of the first British attempts to create power by evading the negotiations that everyday Indian politics required.

  To begin with, life in this new settlement was bleak for the English. The Nawab banned them from building in brick, so they lived in a ‘wild unsettled condition’, with only ‘tents, huts and boats’ and a retinue of soldiers. The traveller Alexander Hamilton worried that ‘he could not have chosen a more unhealthful place on all the River’. In August 1691, there were said to be 1,000 residents, but Hamilton counted 460 burials listed in the clerk’s book of mortality by the following January. One of those who succumbed was Job Charnock.32

  The new settlement was only able to grow because the new Nawab of Bengal’s troubles had started to multiply, and he needed the East India Company as an ally. The 1690s was a decade of war for the Mughal empire in Bengal once again. A rebellion of local landholders took advantage of the Mughal regime’s concentration on war in the Deccan to take control of large swathes of the province’s land, and by 1696 the rebels controlled half the province. Ibrahmin Khan saw an English fort in a peripheral part of the province as a cheap way of maintaining Mughal power. Chastened by their defeat, the East India Company would protect the interests of Mughal officers and merchants as well as English traders. In 1698 the governor even coerced local landholders to sell them land, in the process giving the East India Company a small income to pay the local cost of their new establishment.33

  A town grew around the new fort, amid the trading villages of Sutanati, Govindpur and Dahi-Kolkata, sustained by rent paid by local farmers and the income from trade up and down the Hughli river. This town grew into a city during the eighteenth century: it became Calcutta, India’s largest metropolis and the second city of the British empire until the early twentieth century. The city can trace many different points of origin, its expansion over two centuries fuelled by the movement of people and money from many different places – Portuguese seafarers, Bengali traders from upriver, Marwari merchants, Bihari labourers, Chinese opium sellers and cooks, a famous Albanian nun and, most recently, computer programmers and call centre workers from Hindi-speaking northern India. Until recently, Job Charnock, whose tomb still stands in Park Street Cemetery, was celebrated as the city’s founder. The association with this empire builder allowed the English to imagine that this was ‘a European city set down upon Asiatic soil’, ‘a monument to the energy and achievement of our race’, as Lord Curzon put it. Rudyard Kipling was more down to earth: ‘Power on silt’, he called it. In the last few years, patriotic Bengalis have challenged such hubris. In the twenty-first century descendants of the landholders who sold their villages to the East India Company in 1698 appealed to the High Court for school history books to be changed. After setting up a commission of scholars, the court declared that a settlement existed before Job Charnock landed on 24 August 1690. The city ‘does not have a “birthday”’, the court rightly pronounced.

  Mughal chroniclers, however, told another more interesting story, that is at least as true as the blustering British narratives. According to them, the East India Company’s house at Hughli was washed away in a flood. Job Charnock started to build a new dwelling two or three storeys high, ‘so high that they may spy into our homes and look upon our wives and daughters’. The governor banned masons and carpenters from working on the building, and Charnock ‘prepared to fight’. The English set fire to some houses. Hughli’s Mughal governor tried to keep them there so they could be held to account, but Charnock and his band of men fled by ship to the Deccan where the Mughals were fighting. There, so the story goes, Charnock met Emperor Alamgir and offered to help the Mughal army in their wars in the south of India. Charnock’s ships carried food to supply the Mughal military (just as we know Captain Heath was asked to do by Shaista Khan) and in some versions of the story led an army which helped defeat the Mughals’ enemies.

  The English feature first in this story as pirates and insurgents, as a community in rebellion against Mughal peace. But always believing enemies could become friends, the Mughals brought the English back into the fold once they had changed their ways. Having ‘rendered loyal and good service’ by feeding and fighting, showing that the English could be useful allies if they submitted to Mughal power, Job Charnock was given permission to trade in Bengal, to build a fort and thence found the great city of Calcutta.34

  3

  FORGOTTEN WARS

  The capture of Katherine Cooke was an event which was closely entangled with the emergence of a new political order in India. Her father, Thomas, was an army captain and military engineer involved in the building of Fort William at Calcutta, one of hundreds of lower-middle-class European men who made a living as functionaries of the East India Company’s enterprise. By 1709 he was struggling financially. Returning to Bengal from England, Thomas Cooke’s ship stopped at Karwar, a port 200 miles south of Bombay. There, he gave his daughter’s hand in marriage to the chief of the English settlement in return for a sum of money.

  John Harvey was old and crippled but he was rich, with assets scattered across the Company’s possessions in western India. Katherine, reputedly ‘a most beautiful lady, not exceeding thirteen or fourteen years of age’, spent the early months of their marriage helping her husband sort out his accounts and consolidate his wealth, in preparation for their return to Britain. Harvey died within a year, and Katherine soon married an attractive but penniless young officer by the name of Chown who had just arrived at Karwar. After a couple of years together the pair set off for Bombay to claim the money left to Katherine by the late John Harvey. Sailing to the seat of the Company’s power in western India in November 1712, Katherine’s ketch was attacked by a fleet of ships commanded by Kanhoji Angre, leader of the Maratha regime’s sea force and one of the most powerful figures in western Indian politics. Katherine’s new husband had an arm blown off by a cannonball and bled to death on deck in her arms. It was not the first time Katherine was widowed in India and nor would it be the last. She was taken prisoner and held at the Maratha fort of Kolaba for four months. Her release was surprisingly rapid, because her captor had a part to play in creating eighteenth-century India’s greatest political power.1

  In Katherine Cooke’s life we can see many of the forces that shaped the British presence in India during the early eighteenth century. Her military engineer father practised a profession in great demand during the years after the Anglo-Mughal war, as the East India Company tried to defend itself with gun embankments and thick walls designed to protect Britons from the very so
ciety they made money from. Katherine’s money came from John Harvey’s trade in cotton with India’s arid Deccan interior, a market which expanded quickly during the growing commercial prosperity of the early eighteenth century. Most importantly, the East India Company had to deal with a new kind of Indian power, with a series of regimes concerned more closely with the management of land, commerce and violence than the Mughal empire. These were decades when the Company’s room for manoeuvre was closely circumscribed by Indian politics. Tension was all but continuous. In Bengal and in the south, around Calcutta and Madras, minor incidences of violence did not escalate into conflict, but on India’s western seaboard the Company was involved in a succession of now long-forgotten wars.

  The main Indian protagonist in those wars was Kanhoji Angre. The English considered him a pirate, in doing so castigating him as a force of illegitimate violence and chaos in contrast to the disciplined regularity they claimed to represent. The use of the word pirate was part of the East India Company’s rhetoric in Britain; Britons were more likely to support retaliation against piracy than a war against a regular, legitimate state. In fact, Angre saw himself as a loyal servant of a legal power, an administrator imposing the authority of the Maratha state over sea lanes that were rightly his to control. Mrs Chown’s vessel was attacked because it did not have the correct paperwork.2