The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  A succession of claims and counter-claims was made in a stream of letters between Kanhoji Angre and the British Governor of Bombay. They show how entangled British trade had become with the mercantile life of western India, and how difficult it was to map the flow of commodities on to national communities. In this fast-moving world of shifting identities, it was impossible to say what belonged to the Company and what did not. The exchange of goods between states could only be sustained if people were willing to talk, and give each other the benefit of the doubt. A big man with a reputation for talking plainly and simply, Kanhoji complained that the British did not treat him with respect or amity. Moments of tension were inevitable, Kanhoji said, but could be resolved if people were willing to trust one another. But the Company’s officers treated him as someone who could only be dealt with through threats and bribes, Kanhoji complained, and let ‘doubts and disputes’ corrode their relationship. After one dispute, Kanhoji forbade the Company’s ships from entering Maratha rivers and the British prepared for war.

  Bombay’s council issued a proclamation blocking Kanhoji’s ships from British ports, sending troops with drums and trumpets to read it ‘in a thousand places’ throughout the island. The British then started raiding. They sent twenty small ships to seize vessels ‘and if possible plunder his country’. In two such expeditions in May 1718, they ‘destroyed some villages and cattle’. Panic inspired a wave of new fortification in Bombay, and the search for new sources of money to pay for it. To cover the extra costs, traders were charged additional duties, and an extra tax levied on the owners of houses within the fort. Eventually, on 1 November, a Company fleet of seven ships, two ‘bomb ketches’ and forty-eight rowing boats attacked Kanhoji’s fort at Khanderi. The raid was a disaster. The ships could not get close enough to bombard the fort with cannon, and the soldiers who landed got stuck in marshy ground. Eventually the Company’s force of 558 Indian troops refused to march into the relentless cannon and small arms fire coming out of Angre’s fort, and the English had no choice but to return, defeated, to Bombay.14

  In practice, the East India Company had neither the money, the men nor the strategy to defeat the powerful Maratha military at sea. The idea that Kanhoji could be subdued was yet another example of British hubris. But Company officers were driven by their mad rage against the ‘pyratical’ behaviour of Kanhoji Angre. Even when a peaceful settlement was possible, they were not willing to negotiate. After another humiliating defeat, their response was not to question the decision-making that led to the beginning of such a disastrous war, but to blame their failure on the supposedly treacherous action of Indian allies.15

  Bombay in the 1710s and 1720s was a fast-growing settlement with a tiny English population trying, and usually failing, to impose authority over between 10,000 and 20,000 Indian inhabitants. As well as merchants, Parsis, Muslims and Brahmins, the island was populated by weavers and landholders, shopkeepers and fishermen, toddy-tappers, ‘enemy’ sailors and ships’ captains. A tiny fraction of this population was engaged in the export trade to Europe, working as weavers, dyers, washers or beaters in the textile trade, for example. Most of Bombay’s residents had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the Company as the supplier of an export market, but were attracted instead to live in a fortified city that was becoming a central node in western India’s complicated networks of coastal trade. Beyond the tiny, half-mile-square enclave of Bombay fort, the Company did not establish anything like a rule of law. Robbery was a continual problem and the wealthy needed to employ their own guards. Taxes were collected through the same network of local intermediaries that the Portuguese had appointed. The East India Company did not even rule its own soldiers. Bombay’s militia had over a thousand men under arms. They relied primarily on Portuguese and Brahmin brokers to recruit Bhandari troops. This was the same community that provided most of Kanhoji Angre’s seafarers.16

  The Company blamed one of these military recruiters for defeat at Khanderi. Rama Kamath was a wealthy Indian merchant who had long been an ally and commercial partner of the English. Kamath was a Gaudi Saraswati Brahmin, a member of a Hindu community that once flourished in Goa but was driven out when religious dogmatism made it harder for non-Christians to live under Portuguese rule; the Catholic Inquisition had spread to Goa in the 1560s. By 1686, Rama Kamath was living most of the year in Bombay, using his connections throughout the Brahmin diaspora to build a formidable trading network based primarily on the cultivation of tobacco. An ‘old trusty servant of the Right Honourable Company’, he helped during the war with the Mughals ‘not only in procuring [troops] but encouraging them to fight the enemy’. Kamath was an important trading partner of John Harvey’s predecessor as chief at Karwar, William Mildmay. In 1709, Kamath borrowed 10,000 rupees at what, by contemporary standards, was the very low interest rate of 9 per cent, proving there was a degree of trust between the two men.

  Kamath used the money he earned to invest in the social life of Bombay, paying particularly for the construction of Hindu places of worship. In 1715 he funded the reconstruction of Walkeshwar Temple, an old site of Hindu piety on Bombay’s Malabar Hill which had been demolished by the Portuguese. But Bombay’s public life involved a degree of religious plurality. Kamath paid for Parsi institutions as well, and helped support the construction of the city’s first British church, now St Thomas’s Cathedral, next to Horniman Circle Gardens, completed in 1718. The church was consecrated on Christmas Day of that year, and the Company paid another 1,175 rupees for a festival that started with the baptism of a child and ended with drunken revelry. Kamath celebrated this moment ‘with all his caste’. His entourage was ‘so well pleased by the decency and regularity of the way of worship, that they stood outside it for the whole service’.17

  Three months before those celebrations, it was Kamath who had recruited the soldiers sent into battle against Kanhoji’s fort at Khanderi. Kamath was blamed for the fact that they refused to walk into blistering Maratha gunfire. In the year after the defeat, Governor Boone and his colleagues on the Bombay council began to prosecute this once staunch ally of English power in Bombay for treason. Kamath wasn’t only accused of encouraging soldiers to mutiny, but also of informing Kanhoji Angre that the ‘Bengal ship’ sailing through Angre’s waters with a Company flag didn’t belong to a British merchant, and giving the Maratha admiral advance warning of English military actions.

  Kamath had certainly broken with the East India Company’s orders not to trade with the enemy, buying wool and turmeric from Kanhoji Angre during the war; but dividing commerce along national lines was always an impossibility in the multi-national city of Bombay. The remainder of the charges were pure fiction. The letters upon which the case against Kamath relied were forgeries; witnesses had lied. But Governor Boone, who led the charge against Kamath and his servant Dalba Bhandari, wasn’t deliberately making things up. He was furious about being defeated and extremely keen to find the simplest cause of British vulnerability in Bombay and purge it. The trial demonstrated the scale of British paranoia. Deeply enmeshed in political and commercial relationships they had little control over, Bombay’s British residents saw plots and conspiracies everywhere when things did not go their way. ‘The Angre was always on our brain then,’ as one writer later commented.

  Charged and convicted of treason, Rama Kamath was held in prison in Bombay fort until his death ten years later in 1728. The Company’s paranoia nearly caused a full-scale rebellion at the fort. Uncertain who would be next arrested, angry merchants gathered and protested against the Company’s government. Governor Boone quickly published ‘a proclamation for quieting the minds of the people’, and issued a full pardon for all but Rama Kamath and Dalba Bhanderi, also supposedly involved in the plot.

  War between the Company and Kanhoji Angre continued. A British attack in October 1720 failed. In March 1721, the Company persuaded the Portuguese at Goa to collaborate with them, but their joint attack led to nothing more than the loss of a large s
hip. The Court of Directors in London sent reinforcements later that year. When a fleet of ships commanded by a Commodore Matthews arrived in September 1721, another combined attack with the Portuguese was rebuffed by Angre’s boats and forts with the death of thirty-three British soldiers. In December, Kanhoji’s navy was reinforced by an army of 6,000 Maratha troops sent by Shahu from the Deccan and the British were defeated again. Balaji Vishwanath had died in 1720, and his young son and successor as chief administrator of the Maratha empire tried to persuade the English to negotiate. The Marathas stuck to their argument, insisting on their sovereignty over the sea, and free trade for ships of all nationalities, a right which would have undermined the British offer of physical protection. Mindful of the humiliating war with the Mughals forty years earlier, London reminded the Company’s officers that ‘the Society whom you serve are a Company of Trading merchants and not Warriors’, but fighting nonetheless continued throughout the 1730s and 1740s. The first British victory in its fifty-year sea war against the Marathas occurred in 1755 but by then Kanhoji Angre had died, and his sons had fallen out of favour with the Peshwa, the chief administrator of the Maratha regime. The Company only defeated the Angres because, by then, they fought as allies of the Maratha regime.18

  Atop flows of trade

  In the first half of the eighteenth century, conflict between the East India Company and Indian states was endemic. The anxious sensibility which ruled British actions in the subcontinent continually impelled the Company to war, but the Mughal empire’s successor states were simply too powerful for the English East India Company to have any chance of defeating them militarily. The closest it came to conquering territory during the period was much further to the south, beyond the influence of Mughal power.

  Katherine Chown once again found herself caught up in events. Soon after her release by Kanhoji Angre, she met the man who would become her third husband. He was 25-year-old William Gyfford, son of the senior officer who had succeeded William Hedges as chief of the Company in Bengal. Gyfford used his contacts, commercial skill and ‘smooth tongue’ to rise quickly in the Company’s trading establishment. He was first given charge of Bombay market, and then managed the Company’s trade with Mocha in the Middle East, all the while building a large private trading portfolio on the side. At the age of twenty-seven, in 1715, Gyfford took charge of the East India Company’s fort and pepper-trading operations at Anjengo, eighty miles from the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. There he was caught up in a moment of extraordinary violence.19

  In the early eighteenth century, the authority of the Mughals and Marathas stopped at Goa, but the Kanara and the Malabar coast extended 600 miles further south. Until the middle of the century, the coast south of Goa was ruled by a shifting succession of small polities and principalities. Each ruler claimed authority over no more than a small section of coastline: the Keladi Nayakas, the queens of Gersuppo, the Zamorin of Calicut, the rajas of Cochin and then the rulers of Valluvanad, Kollam, Attingal and, at the far south of the subcontinent, the state of Travancore. Only Cochin and Travancore survived as ‘native states’ until the end of British rule, the rest coming under British power in the early nineteenth century. Along this coastal strip the Western Ghats blocked the expansion of larger, more settled regimes, ‘shut[ting] Nayar country entirely out of the rest of India’ as K. M. Panikkar put it in 1918. Here, with no great, settled regimes, there were always many overlapping political authorities, as rulers tried to stitch together temporary, shifting alliances with armed peasant-warriors that allowed them to survive in power.20

  Money to fund these regimes came not from taxing these assertive bands of cultivators, but from each ruler’s capacity to tap into the networks of global trade, in particular that of pepper. Pepper had always been a staple in Kerala. In Europe it was a high-value commodity for those merchants who could find suppliers and the search for a stable source of the spice dominated European interest in the region; the supply of pepper structured local politics. As historian Dilip Menon puts it, regimes ‘sat atop the flows of trade’, making their situation precarious. The result was a tense, argumentative but mutually dependent relationship with European companies and traders.21

  The Company’s fort at Anjengo was built in the middle of a fifty-mile stretch of territory ruled by the queens of the small state of Attingal. It was constructed in the 1680s when Queen Aswati invited the East India Company to trade in the region. Described by a Dutch observer as a woman ‘of manly conduct, who makes herself much feared and respected’, Queen Aswati was no absolute despot. Her authority was a continual balancing act, as she shared power with four princes who competed for the allegiances of Nayar villagers and a share of the pepper trade. Aswati had wanted to introduce the same principle into her relations with European traders. Worried that Dutch dominance would drive down pepper prices and limit her power, she invited the English to open a factory to provide a balance.22

  The English, she said, were such loyal subjects, and ‘have always been obedient to me’, that in 1684 they were allowed to build a stone fort at Anjengo and ‘abide there for ever’. But the creation of a small military base at Anjengo turned the Rani of Attingal’s short overtures of friendship into a long story of petty violence. Just like Kanhoji Angre and the Mughal empire, Attingal treated the Company as a vassal with which she could negotiate. But the English didn’t act like vassals. They built a solid, square bastion, housing a garrison of 120 European and Portuguese soldiers, and informed the queen that the fort was intended to keep the Dutch at bay. But its sixty guns were pointed inland, towards Attingal, as well as to sea.

  The English built the fort because they were afraid of local warrior bands as much as other European companies. It gave them the belief that they could assert their autonomy from all local relationships, quite apart from the exchange of cash needed to buy pepper. This, they felt, was a land ruled by princes whose interests were ‘various and uncertain’. John Wallis, a British resident throughout the 1720s, thought pepper only came forth ‘when our weapons are good’. The reality, as ever, was that life for the British at Anjengo depended on their relationship with local rulers and merchants. Pepper only came when the British were on good terms with princes who could ensure supplies. Even Anjengo’s water supply relied on local women being paid to walk more than ‘a league’ to the nearest wells.

  These relationships sustained the private trading interests of Company servants as much as the Company’s corporate accounts. Much of the time, Anjengo seemed to act as the outpost for the private interests of English officials, whose defence was paid for by Company cash. The factory chief before William Gyfford, John Kyffen, worked with one prominent lord, Vanjamutta, to buy pepper privately, keeping the best to sell for himself and passing on the rest to the East India Company at a higher price. Wallis described Kyffen as a man who ‘thought of little else than driving a private trade in pepper even to quarrel with the heads of the country government’. He was dismissed for undermining the Company’s authority, but his successor, William Gyfford, continued in the same style.

  Tension grew early in 1720 when a Company employee, the Portuguese trader Ignatius Malheiros, took over land supposed to belong in perpetuity to a Hindu temple, angering local peasant-warriors in the process. Employees of the Company shaved off the beard of a Nambudiri Brahmin, then members of Malheiros’s household insulted a group of Muslim traders who had come to the fort to negotiate with Company merchants. They had come specifically to see Simon Cowse, a British Company servant who was also William Gyfford’s commercial rival. It was Shrove Tuesday, when local Catholics threw coloured paint ‘upon each other for pastime, and upon anybody else walking in the Street’. An intimate female companion of Malheiros daubed one of the merchants in paint. ‘The man’s passion was the sooner kindled even to have killed her’, but his companions persuaded the merchant that he should appeal to William Gyfford for justice instead. Gyfford’s private interests obscured his vision of the long-term
interests of the settlement. The three men had recently chosen to sell pepper to Cowse rather than Gyfford, finding the chief’s British rival, with his knowledge of local languages, a much better trading partner. Gyfford took his revenge by rejecting their complaint and dishonouring the men by breaking their swords on their head.

  The mood among the British in Anjengo in the early 1720s was an anxious mix of dread and a desire for domination. Their behaviour seemed to display the small-minded psychology of the embattled bully. Men like Gyfford responded to their sense of vulnerability and inability to get their way, to the absence of strong relationships with local society, by asserting power through petty acts of humiliation. Company servants engaged in insulting behaviour that the East India Company’s hierarchy, away from the scene, was embarrassed by. When officers elsewhere were critical, their intervention usually came too late.

  Gyfford’s insulting behaviour started a small war, instigating a cycle of violence in which different groups in the social patchwork of south-west India, Nayar warriors, Brahmin priests and Muslim descendants of Arab traders, joined forces to undo the humiliation Gyfford and his compatriots had caused. A mixed group of local residents tried to storm Anjengo fort. The pepper stored in the Company’s outposts was burnt and a few officers killed, but soldiers at the fort itself repulsed the insurgents. Four Company ships arrived towards the end of 1720 from Kochi, a frightening move that Queen Amutambaran, Aswati’s successor as Queen of Attingal said ‘so terrify’d the inhabitants that they quitted their places and came to me’. She sent Vanjamutta to ‘make up the differences between the English and the Inhabitants’. By now a trading partner of William Gyfford, Vanjamutta had every reason to patch things up. A combination of fear and contractual commitments maintained a fractious peace throughout the next year. Feeling safe behind their walls from the voices of local inhabitants as well as physical danger, Gyfford and his compatriots did not notice the growing tension beyond them.23