by Jon Wilson
Landholders thought they should have a similar relationship of give and take with the government. Mangapati Devi Reddy, the Raja of Polavaram in the 1780s, maintained a friendly relationship with the East India Company in the first years after conquest. Every few years he travelled to meet British officials in their fortified enclaves at Madras or Masulipatam, negotiating the terms on which he would pay taxes to the Company. The deal was reciprocal. When family members tried to oust him in the early 1780s, the British backed Mangapati with troops, proclaiming that anyone who supported his rivals would be considered ‘traitors and rebels’ to both him and the British regime. But the coming of the new system transformed Mangapati’s relationship with the Company.
Benjamin Branfill was the British officer who arrived, in 1794, to put the new system into practice. Branfill was from a typical East India Company family. His great-grandfather had been a sailor in Devon but made a fortune shipping slaves from Africa to the Caribbean around the time William Hedges was travelling in Bengal. He used his money to buy a mansion at Upminster, fifteen miles from London, starting a business that traded with Portugal. Eventually he sank its capital into the East India Company. Two generations later, income from the amoral activities of global commerce had been converted into the seeming security of a civil servant’s salary. Branfill began his Indian career as a nineteen-year-old in Madras in 1780, the same year Mangapati Devi became Raja of Polavaram. Fourteen years later he was appointed to the new position of District Collector in the town of Rajahmundry, twenty miles south of Polavaram. He arrived with his wife, one British assistant, a small retinue of Indian officers, a pile of empty ledgers and account books and a set of rules defining how British officers were supposed to govern rural India for the first time.
The early 1790s had been years of heavy rains and bad harvests. The weather, together with disputes within the Polavaram Raja’s family, made it difficult for Mangapati to collect rent from villagers. He got into debt, and complained to the new Collector that he could not afford the Company’s revenue demands. Branfill did not know what to do. To begin with he pleaded with his superiors in Madras to let the landholder postpone his revenue payments. After all, Mangapati had been a good ally in previous years. But the new system prevented this kind of negotiation. Branfill’s next request took the opposite tack, suggesting the Company violently dispossess the Raja and find another ally, waiting, though, until an armed force was available to do so.
In the stream of correspondence between Rajahmundry and Madras, Branfill began to write about Mangapati in the vocabulary typical of British officers when things did not go their way, describing him as a ‘refractory’ and ‘contumacious’ character. This condescending language was only a thin veil for Branfill’s fears. Mangapati had marshalled a large force of armed men, of peasant-warriors as well as tribesmen from the nearby hills, and the rigid demands of the new system were alienating him. In his letters to Mangapati, Branfill postured and blustered, threatening that if revenue was not paid ‘the Company would exterminate him, and his adherents wherever they take refuge’. In response, Mangapati prepared for a violent struggle, strengthening his fort and recruiting an army of peons to defend himself. With only a tiny garrison thirty miles away, the second half of 1799 was an anxious time for the small, new British enclave at Rajahmundry.5
Luckily for the British a detachment of East India Company soldiers was marching through the area on its way from fighting in the south. Branfill was given permission to use them and to ‘proceed with vigour for subduing the rebel by force of arms’. Two hundred Bengal Volunteers captured Polavaram fort after a tougher fight than they expected, but still with only four soldiers injured. Mangapati fled. Fearing a counter-attack, Branfill sent soldiers into the hills in pursuit of Mangapati, hacking some of his followers down, burning the villages of allies on the plains.6
By the beginning of 1801, the Raja of Polavaram was on the run and his estate was up for sale. Over the next few years, the Polavaram estate passed from one owner to another. In the process, the authority needed to maintain its prosperity collapsed. A succession of Mangapati’s relatives and neighbours briefly gained control but failed to persuade its villagers to pay them revenue. Eventually they were forced to sell. The man who eventually profited from decline and chaos was Koccharlakota Jaggayya, a locally-born Indian officer who worked for both the East India Company and the rajas collecting revenue and marshalling armed men. Jaggayya had been Branfill’s most trusted official, a vital source of information about local society when the Collector first arrived. It was Jaggayya who led the British army’s attack on Polavaram fort. Over the next decade he made enough money manipulating the district’s accounts to buy what was left of the Polavaram estate, paying 43,210 rupees for it in 1813. This ‘money was certainly made somewhat too rapidly’, one British officer complained. Jaggayya’s swift rise did not make him popular with local residents. He tried to enlist support by building temples on the plains, but his possession of Polavaram was resisted by its one-time subjects in the hills, over whom he never gained control. The hills remained a source of ‘trouble’ for the British throughout the nineteenth century. With no funding for irrigation work, and little money advanced to farmers during difficult economic times, Jaggayya’s lands got poorer. Nonetheless, the new raja, as he styled himself, lived into old age.7
Benjamin Branfill fared less well. Madras had a new governor, Lord William Bentinck, a political Whig who preferred a more conciliatory approach to the Indian subjects of the East India Company. Branfill was castigated for undermining the reputation of the Company by using too much violence, marching to the hills ‘to the destruction of the health of the soldiers and to the degradation in the eyes of the inhabitants of a military reputation’. The Company’s policy, Governor Bentinck said, should always be ‘to reclaim by gentle methods’, and be careful of ‘the religious prejudices’ and ‘ordinary customs and manners’ of ‘the natives’. Branfill thought that this softer approach would have left him dead.8
A commission led by Thomas Thackeray, uncle of the author of Vanity Fair, was sent to Rajahmundry to find out what had really happened. Thackeray believed the demise of Polavaram was caused by a plot of Indian officers against Mangapati. Collector Branfill had not noticed that Indian officials, including Jaggaya, had demanded large bribes from landholders to massage the revenue accounts. Mangapati only got into trouble when he stopped paying the bung. It was, Thackeray argued, ‘partly through their intrigues that the Country was reduced to a state of anarchy, and the Zamindar harassed into rebellion’. By the spring of 1805, complaints against Branfill were making their way from India to London. Believing he had done everything possible to protect the honour and revenue of the Company, Branfill felt let down by this challenge. He returned to London and at the beginning of 1806 resigned from the East India Company’s service.9
Benjamin Branfill, Mangapati Devi Reddy and the peasants of Polavaram were all victims of a system of government that replaced negotiation with written rules and thus made political power far less accountable in practice. The premise of the new system was that the judgement of British officers could not be trusted, so their conduct needed to be dictated by regulations and checked by a continual flow of correspondence up the chain of command. As the ‘Examiner of Indian Correspondence’ at the East India Company John Stuart Mill smugly put it a few years later, the ‘great success of our Indian administration’ was because it was ‘carried on in writing’. The existence of detailed rules and the capacity to check every act performed by British officers ‘was a greater security for good government than exists in almost any other government in the world’.10
In reality, the extraordinary flow of paper that Mill celebrated constructed a world of letters, ledgers and account books that had its own pristine order but could not comprehend or rule the forces which shaped rural society. Paperwork created new centres of British power, whether in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras or London, and these new centres created thei
r own stories about the success or viability of British rule. But the new maze of paperwork blocked the creation of the public, reciprocal relationship between the state and local lords which political authority and economic prosperity had relied on before. It also meant that decisions were increasingly made behind closed doors. As the public places where Indians could hold officers to account were closed off, so the opportunities for intrigue and corruption expanded. The old lords were replaced by new men, good at manipulating the paperwork created by the new rules but with little inclination or capacity to create authority or order. In the early nineteenth century, institutions which had previously supported the local economy collapsed, corruption became rife in the Company’s offices, district officers became ever more embattled and anxious. The new system meant that much of rural India ended up being ruled by chaos.
Perhaps none of this should surprise us. The new system was not designed to create a stable political order in the Indian countryside. Its aim was to defend the integrity of the East India Company from accusations in Britain of venality and vice. It began life as an effort to manage metropolitan moral anguish, not to handle the complaints of Indians about what Company officers were doing in India. Its ostensible purpose was to uphold the property of Indians as a block to the potentially corrupt power of British officers. But transmitted from the debating halls of London to the paranoid writing chambers of Calcutta and Madras, these intentions were twisted as they were turned into action. Paradoxically, a policy whose purpose was to protect existing rights caused a revolution in the social structure of Indian society.
Ancient constitutions
The origins of the new system lay in the relationship between the East India Company’s fragile fortunes in India and the febrile political atmosphere of London. The 1770s and 1780s was a rare moment in which British politics mattered to the way India was ruled. The East India Company had come under venomous criticism from its opponents in London once again. Critics made the same arguments they had been making for a century: the Company wielded a wicked kind of despotic power, illegitimately combining trade and political authority, corroding the balance of interests which sustained Britain’s polity. The Company had built its own ‘common interest’ in tension with the interests of both Britain and India, as the Company’s greatest critic, Edmund Burke, put it. The Company was ‘a kingdom of magistrates’, ‘separated both from the Country that sent them out and from the Country in which they are’. It was, in other words, a power no one could control.
A few opponents argued that Britain needed to sever entirely its connection with India. The Yorkshire MP Sir George Savile complained that the Company’s commerce ‘brought too great an increase in money, which would overturn the liberty of this country’. But the Company paid too much in duty to the British Treasury for the connection to be cut and 40 per cent of MPs held Company stocks. Instead of arguing for abolition, politicians in London called for the Company and its rapacious officers to be brought under greater scrutiny from politicians in Britain. ‘The publick’, Prime Minister Lord North argued, ‘have a right to call to account all persons civil and military.’ When the Company almost went bankrupt in 1772 British taxpayers lent the Company £1.5 million. In return, the Company had to agree to a Regulating Act which introduced new forms of scrutiny and gave Parliament the power to appoint the Company’s chief officer. The Governor of Bengal was given a new title, Governor-General, and handed authority over the provinces of Madras and Bombay as well. The man given this office was the 41-year-old Company officer Warren Hastings.11
On his appointment Hastings was seen as a far more virtuous man than most of his compatriots in India, but his approach was fundamentally at odds with the clamour for more control from London. Hastings wanted Indian officers and Indian principles, not British MPs, to hold the East India Company to account. In particular he wanted to revive a Mughal style of government. A Company servant since 1750, Hastings spent his early career close to the centres of Mughal power in Bengal where he became unusually fluent in the languages of Indian government, particularly Persian and Urdu, and developed a rare sympathy for Mughal styles of rule. Hastings argued that the Company needed to assert its sovereignty aggressively over its Indian territories, creating ‘one grand and systematic arrangement’ to settle ‘so divided and unsettled a society’. But British sovereignty would be exercised through Mughal officers and institutions. Hastings wanted Indian officials to be stationed in the districts of British-ruled India, who would then negotiate with Indian landholders. Justice would be secured by courts of law staffed by Indians, not British lawyers, administering Indian jurisprudence. To prove that India had a viable system of justice, Hastings commissioned a ‘synod’ of ten pandits to write a code of Hindu law which he sent to the Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, in London.
But Bengal’s years of chaos had corroded the Mughal system of government beyond repair. Since 1757 British traders believed the Company’s armed power gave it licence to maraud and rampage in search of private profit and India’s pre-colonial officials and institutions were too weak to offer a challenge. Hastings could not find Mughal officers of sufficient skill or grandeur to occupy positions in the countryside. There was no consensus about how a revived Mughal constitution would work. In practice, Hastings’ Mughal constitution was nothing more than an intellectual fantasy. The Governor-General spent his years in office tired and demoralized, constantly battling British enemies in Calcutta who thought the Company should put in place different systems of accountability. The pressure to maintain a stable stream of cash into the Company’s coffers meant he ended up selling the right to collect revenue to the highest bidder, a tactic employed by the Mughals and Marathas only in times of crisis.12
Hastings’ reputation in London was not helped by the ease with which accusations of corruption could be levelled against him. During his time in India Hastings sent over £218,000 (£2.7 million in 2016 prices) in private wealth back to Britain, mostly in diamonds and bills of exchange, and spent lavishly. ‘No man by all accounts takes less care of his money,’ one critic said. In 1784, his German-born second wife, Marian, returned as a dazzling ‘Indian princess’ who paraded through elite society in brilliant clothes and jewels. The diarist Fanny Burney wondered if Marian adopting a ‘modest & quiet appearance & demeanour’ might have been better for Hastings’ reputation. The money had, Hastings’ accusers argued, been made by taking bribes and selling offices. For many politicians and sketch writers, Hastings became a symbol of the very British corruption in India that he had been sent to stamp out.13
Hastings’ main accuser was Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish Whig politician most famous for his fervent critique of the French Revolution. Every prosperous, ordered society, Burke argued, was based on institutions that created bonds of trust between different classes in society. The submission of some people to others was, for Burke, a fact of life. But the institutions of modern civilization, the church, the law, the spread of refined manners and expansion of property rights, allowed submission to be enjoyed rather than suffered. By forcing rulers to act with moderation those institutions made ‘power gentle, and obedience liberal’, as Burke put it in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke was concerned that the desire to dominate, what he called the ‘spirit of conquest’, endangered the subtle balance between different social orders that prevented society from descending into anarchy. Burke’s most important political interventions occurred where he saw this spirit of domination unchecked by other powers. Worried by the domineering attitude of the British towards American colonists, Burke had been in favour of conciliating rebels there. He saw the French Revolution as the ill-mannered effort of a few out-of-control lawyers to conquer France in the name of nothing but abstract principles; it would destroy every means French society possessed of keeping tyranny in check. Burke levelled the same accusations against Warren Hastings, only adding the charge of theft from Indians on a massive scale. He believed Hastings had confiscated ‘all t
he landed property of Bengal upon strange pretences’. Land was handed over to men Burke described as ‘black tyrants scattered through the Country’ who annihilated the bonds which united rulers and the ruled. Aristocratic institutions were despoiled, wars against ancient monarchies prosecuted for private gain and India pushed, as a consequence, to the edge of anarchy. The worst thing, for Burke, was that Hastings’ tyranny and corruption had brought dishonour to the British nation.14
Burke’s attack on Warren Hastings began in 1781 and led to the East India Company’s decision to recall their Governor-General in 1784. Two years after stepping ashore at Plymouth early in 1785, Burke managed to get Hastings impeached by the House of Commons. Hastings was prosecuted for using the Company as a vehicle for tyranny on the same spot in Westminster Hall where Thomas Sandys had been tried for breaking the Company’s monopoly a hundred years before.
In fact, Burke and Hastings agreed about more than they realized; their rage marked a shared diagnosis of the problem facing British rule in India. Both were concerned to find ways to discipline the ‘spirit of conquest’ that had driven the East India Company’s military victories in India. Both men thought India had been better governed before the British had conquered Indian land. Neither thought it was possible to control British corruption from Parliament. Each wanted to restore Indian institutions which could check the power of East India Company officers. The disagreement was only about how it was possible to do that. Hastings thought accountability would return by reviving Mughal offices and officials to check on British avarice. Burke, by contrast, believed it came from restoring ‘ancient’ property rights, and giving power to landed magnates who, he imagined, had natural and enduring roots in local Indian society.15