by Jon Wilson
When the Peshwa’s land was taken over in 1818 the region came under the Company’s rule, but there was no peace. Thousands of militiamen still wandered the countryside around Dharwad and Kittur, unpaid but loyal to enemies of the Company. British officers were anxious ‘about the approach of any body of freebooters’. The Company’s troops were themselves a source of disorder. Even shutting shops selling alcohol could not stop them looting and stealing cattle. No one seemed able to fix the price of anything that could be sold in the markets, so merchants found it impossible to trade and the Company could not collect taxes. In this fractious region, the fort of Kittur seemed a solitary source of stability.43 Once again appointed to settle a territory after conquest, Thomas Munro decided to offer relaxed terms for the Desai of Kittur to sign up to the new order to keep the peace. The Desai of Kittur was exempted from paying revenue for three years in recognition of his ‘fidelity and attachment to the British Government’.44
What kind of authority did the British government possess as Kittur’s new master? That question was asked in earnest in 1824 when the Desai died childless. The British believed they had the right to approve an heir and appoint managers to run the estate. The court at Kittur, led by the Desai’s aunt and his stepmother Chinnamma, did not consider that the Company had any such power so they wrote to the man who had taken over from Munro as Commissioner, St John Thackeray, announcing the adoption of a son. Thackeray despatched his surgeon to Kittur to investigate. The Desai’s body, cold and stiff, indicated that he could not have approved the adoption before he died. The surgeon believed there was a plot afoot to deny the East India Company its right to manage the estate and worried that the treasury of Kittur was about to be plundered. St John Thackeray took a small team of officers and troops to guard the money in the fort. Arriving in mid-October, he worked on Kittur’s accounts by day, sleeping in tents a few hundred yards outside the fort at night. The two women who managed the estate refused to see him and there were rumours that they had called for armed men to gather from the surrounding villages. On the morning of 23 October, the Company men found they had been locked out of the fort, and saw that its ramparts were occupied by hundreds of men with guns and spears. When Company artillery threatened to blow the gates open, British soldiers were shot up and then cut down by a rush of troops coming from inside. Thackeray believed he could command on horseback, leading from the front, but he was shot and hacked to pieces and his two British assistants captured and taken inside the fort.
Rani Chinnamma, the Queen of Kittur, then tried to negotiate. She condemned St John Thackeray’s intervention in the affairs of the estate but offered to release the two prisoners if the British accepted her choice of heir. The ‘rebel’ leaders said they wanted to recreate the friendly relationship they had had with the Company in 1801 and 1817, but Wellesley and Munro had only conciliated Kittur because they thought they had to. In 1824, when war with the Marathas was long over, the British Collector in Kittur thought peace and order relied on Kittur’s rulers prostrating themselves in front of the Company’s sovereign power.
To oppose that power and take revenge for the death of Thackeray, six regiments of Company troops gathered to subject Kittur fort to the Company’s power. Chinnamma released the two hostages in a desperate effort to get the Company to negotiate, but there was to be no talking now. The fort was stormed in a quick battle in late November, in which Thomas Munro’s nephew and two other British soldiers were killed and twenty-three injured. The principality of Kittur was abolished, and its 286 villages placed under the direct government of British collectors and judges. Chinnamma was given a pension, but deprived of any authority. Even then, fighting did not stop. Some of Chinnamma’s allies gathered armed men from Kittur’s villages together to defend their homeland. The insurgency reached its height in 1830, when Company offices and treasuries were attacked. As one British army officer lamented, ‘the insurgents had the sympathies of . . . the whole population of the province’. The rebel leader himself was captured and hanged from a banyan tree a few miles north of the fort where the insurgency had started.45
The condition of British institutions in India in 1824 ‘was not exempt from sources of uneasiness’, as Horace Wilson later euphemistically wrote. It was not only Kittur. Wilson noted ‘a general sentiment of discontent’ throughout the whole of north India, and others assessed a similar mood in the west, east and south. The harvest was poor. Traders did not have confidence in the market to buy and sell. Squabbling about the eastern border of British India had led to war with Burma, and the Company began to ship ever larger quantities of food and manpower into the Burmese jungle without a sign of victory. At the end of May 1824, the Indian public had learnt of a humiliating British defeat. Looking back thirty years in 1858, Wilson thought the mood of hostility in these months was expressed only in ‘acts of petty and predatory violence’ that were easily suppressed by the Company’s forces. But that was not how it felt for the British at the time. Throughout their enclaves and cantonments, British residents were afraid. They could not trust the Indian soldiers they paid to defend them, sometimes organizing their own militias, sometimes locking themselves up in the few forts they did control. From Delhi, Charles Metcalfe thought the public was filled with an ‘expectation of our immediate downfall’. The Company’s soldiers mutinied at Barrackpore, near Calcutta, and at Jaipur in Rajasthan. British authority evaporated through much of central India, as Shaikh Dalla, a notorious, never captured Pindari leader, started to rebuild his authority, linking up with some of the relatives of overthrown Marathas. At Bharatpur in Rajasthan, 140 miles south of Delhi, it took nine regiments of British troops just under a year to put a ruler who the British recognized as raja back on the throne. The combined result of these moments of resistance was more British officer casualties – 260 – than in any other single year over the previous twenty years of ‘conquest’. Throughout India, thousands ‘repeated with the most enthusiastic exultation, “The English reign is over!”’46
The events of 1824 illustrate the limited character of Indian submission to British rule, and the unstable nature of Britain’s conquest. From Barrackpore to Bharatpur, Kolhapur to Kittur, resistance occurred when Indians felt humiliated by the way the Company asserted its power. In reality, stable authority depended on give and take. Each moment of insurgency began when British officers refused to negotiate when their power started to look precarious. Instead, they thought they were the sole judges of what was just and good, and tried, catastrophically, to impose their will without talking to those they ruled. It was their refusal to negotiate that made British power seem so vulnerable and fragile.47
Yet contact between Indian institutions and British power was not necessarily fatal. During these years, some Indian ways of life were able to flourish amid the East India Company’s limited but chaotic and violent dominance. The early nineteenth century was a poor time for Indians who relied on networks that involved contact with British power. Old, mobile ways of life such as horse-breeding or cattle-droving, for example, died out. The greatest economic change during the first half of the nineteenth century was the retreat of artisans and traders, warriors and nomads to the villages, and to lifestyles that relied on the direct cultivation of the soil. Increasingly, India became ‘a land of settled arable farming’ as C. A. Bayly puts it. The complex, mobile meshing of commercial roles was replaced by ‘the more homogeneous society of peasants and petty moneylenders’.48
In matters of religion Indians also found they could retreat from the vicissitudes of imperial power. There were always points of contact with the imperial regime, but the British promise to leave religious institutions unmolested enabled such places to thrive in the early nineteenth century. Pilgrimages increased as British noninterference was signalled by the abolition of pilgrim taxes. The early nineteenth century was a boom time for centres of pilgrimage such as Benares. Mosques and temples were rebuilt in many places. In India, religious revivalism has often occurred at ti
mes of great social upheaval. The ornate style of the new religious architecture was not a sign of India’s prosperity, but an indication that religious institutions were one of the few places in which it was safe to invest.
There is a coda to the story of the sacking of Manjeshwar temple with which this chapter began. The hanging of Ravivarma Narasimha Domba Heggade, and the seizure of his property by the British, led to the rebirth of the Antaneshwar temple on the site of the old temple. Before the Company arrived in the region, the existence of temples had been wrapped up with the vicissitudes of local political authority. But to Kanara’s inhabitants, the events of 1799 seemed to demonstrate that while political power was fickle and vulnerable, religious authority was safe as long as it did not challenge British power. In 1804, the region’s Gaudi Saraswati Brahmins returned from exile and rebuilt the Manjeshwar temple with a new image of the god Narasimha installed by a priest from Benares. The modern temple was founded on that date. For the Hindus who have prayed before the Narasimha image in the last 200 years it has been a centre of social action, funding schools and cultural activities, but never of political power.49
7
THE IDEA OF EMPIRE
Four years after the great rebellions of 1824, the after-effects of one particular pilgrimage seemed to threaten the end of the British empire in India once again. But this time the new danger took place in law courts and council rooms, not in battles in front of forts. The crisis was a dispute between different groups of Britons, not between the Company and Indian powers and armies. It created a fracas that seemed to demonstrate the unstable and fractured nature of British authority in India. At least one official thought it undermined the basis of British power altogether. John Malcolm, by then Governor of Bombay, believed ‘there is more danger [in the dispute] than in the defeat of our armies or the loss of provinces’. It might force the East India Company to ‘shut up shop’ entirely if a solution was not quickly found, Malcolm said. The response was the first great reconfiguration of British rule in India.1
The crisis began as a dispute over who should pay the costs of a trip to the holy city of Benares. Pandoorang Dhamdhere was from a family of wealthy Maratha noblemen, important enough to send a few thousand troops to any war the Marathas were involved in. Warlords like him had travelled to Hinduism’s holiest city for generations to sanctify their status as kings, turning the city of Kasi, as they called it, into a refuge for merchants and money escaping from their own troubled lands. Wealthy Marathas built the city’s grandest temples. Pandoorang visited in 1816, journeying with an expensive armed guard through the ungoverned lands of central India to get there. The journey pushed Pandoorang almost half a million rupees into debt. He thought the money should be paid equally by all parts of his family, including the branch headed by his dead brother’s grandson, a boy named Moro Raghunath. Pandoorang tried to split the family’s extended family then collect half the cost from the boy’s property. By 1824, he had persuaded the East India Company’s courts in Pune, a city that had only been under British rule for six years, to order the boy to pay 245,762 rupees (£16,384 or £1.2 million in 2016 prices) to his great uncle. The boy was placed under house arrest until he paid. But there was another English court that took Moro Raghunath’s side.2
Like Calcutta and Madras, Bombay had a tribunal staffed by English judges independent of the East India Company, called by various official titles but usually known simply as the King’s court. It was supposed to put into practice the English principle of ensuring that the action of one authority was checked by another, so was entirely independent of the Company. In 1826, Moro Raghunath’s father-in-law travelled ninety miles down through the steep passes that guard the Maratha highlands to the island of Bombay, to persuade the King’s Court to free his son-in-law. By 1828 the court had been persuaded to issue a writ of habeas corpus, demanding Moro Raghunath be freed and brought before them. It was this act which seemed to radically challenge the basis of the East India Company’s power.3
In Britain the decade after 1828 was one of reform. These years saw the great parliamentary Reform Act of 1832, the transformation of local government, the abolition of slavery and the inclusion of dissenters and Catholics in the polity for the first time. Economic depression connected to an escalating critique of old institutions throughout Britain and Ireland. Aristocrats realized they needed to appear as moral leaders, and include at least some of the voices of the marginalized if they were to survive. In India after 1828, reform was provoked by political crisis, too. British officers tried to restructure the institutions they had created in seventy years of haphazard conquest on more rational, systematic lines. But unlike reform in Britain, in India it emphatically excluded the population being governed from having any say in the way they were ruled. If the 1830s started Britain itself slowly on the road to democracy, in India they saw an attempt to consolidate a fragmented regime by creating a form of centralized, absolute power.4
In 1828, the British in India were divided between a chaotic conglomeration of different ‘establishments’. There were four different kinds of regime, whose origin we have traced in the previous chapters. First, the old fortified ports of Madras, Calcutta and Bombay that dated from the 1600s. Second, the coasts and deltas of eastern India conquered in Robert Clive’s wars, and ruled by Lord Cornwallis’s new system of revenue collection and law. Third, territories conquered from Mysore and the Marathas which came under a more flexible but violent kind of martial law, where the Company dispossessed local lords where it could. Finally, there were cantonments and residencies in the capital cities of ‘native states’, which mostly ruled over arid and less profitable lands that could be left to be governed by Indian princes, such as Amir Khan’s Tonk, Hyderabad, Mysore and Gwalior.
Conquest had created chaos. The messy process in which Britons extended their power in India had produced a fractured set of conflicting regimes whose legal basis was uncertain.5 As one group of Calcutta judges complained in 1828, no one was clear who or what ruled where. Government happened with ‘shreds and patches of law of every texture and hue’. Dozens of disputes like the Moro Raghunath case seemed to show that ‘doubt and confusion’ were rife.6
In response, in the 1830s the British tried to mould these disparate regimes into a more centralized state, creating a unified system of command over its fragmented territories and divided authorities. Under the new order, authority was supposed to cascade down from ministers in London to the Governor-General and council in India, then be evenly imposed by district officials through every square mile of Indian territory.7 The British tried to take away the power of independent tribunals to challenge the Company’s will; they attempted to eradicate the possibility of Indians or Britons outside the Company’s hierarchy having a say in their own rule. They tried to use new technologies, from codified law to steamships, to more efficiently communicate orders and impose British command. In fact, though, British power remained fragile and fractured. Much of the imperial regime’s efforts at centralization remained a fantasy. But in the 1830s an idea of centralized authority was imposed on India that would have alarmed the most autocratic Tory in Britain. It was justified with the same argument Britons in India had used for more than a century and a half: India needed to be treated differently, because British authority was in danger in Asia in a way it was never vulnerable in the British Isles.
Fighting with the judges
In Bombay and Pune one of the earliest architects of the reformed order was the arch-Tory John Malcolm. At the age of fifty-eight he had had a long career in western India and Persia and was looking forward to a parliamentary seat and a leisurely life in Britain. But in 1827 he was lured back to India with an offer of money and the idea of excitement. Ever the romantic, Malcolm wanted to be the swashbuckling warrior not the ‘office man’. He thought he was returning to subdue the ‘wild Rajahs and Thakoors’ of central India, whose turbulence had partly caused Pandoorang Dhamdere’s great debt. But when he landed, Malcolm was
asked instead to take charge of the government of Bombay. There, quickly, he found his authority being challenged ‘not by honest fellows with glittering sabres, but quibbling quill-driving lawyers’. ‘I have been fighting with the judges’, he wrote to his wife in August 1828, ‘but hitherto have kept most of the commanding ground.’ Battle was fought about the case of Moro Raghunath.8
The judges’ argument was that India needed to be governed with the same institutions and laws as England. They claimed that the conquest of western India had made Pune ‘part of the vast fabric of the English empire’. Conquest gave Indians the rights which all ‘British subjects’ (England and Britain blurred in their writings) had been given by Magna Carta in 1215, even if those rights clashed with the power of the East India Company’s government. India was not different, which meant that Indians should be ruled by English institutions and English law. Indians viewed the court differently, as an independent centre of arbitration where Bombay’s mixed community of merchants could resolve disputes in a practical ad hoc way. In court English legal procedures were fudged or forgotten when they did not suit local circumstances. But Bombay’s merchants and British lawyers agreed that the East India Company should not have the power to lock people away without trial. ‘False imprisonment’, they argued, undermined commerce and civilized society.9
Malcolm was interested in preserving British power in India not resolving disputes. In 1828, he thought the East India Company was in a uniquely precarious position. To his mind, fractious forces in Britain’s newly conquered Maratha lands were continually plotting the downfall of the Company. If Moro Raghunath were freed, ‘appeals would have been made in a hundred other cases’. What’s more the Company needed to retain the acquiescence of influential nobleman like Pandoorang Dhamdhere. If such individuals had their cases dismissed the Company would be brought to the point of collapse. The Raja of Satara, heir of the Maratha emperor Shivaji, had already requested a meeting with the King’s Court’s judges to bring his own claims against the Company. Princes in Gujarat were refusing to pay debts to the British. Malcolm reported that a Maratha Brahmin ‘of some intelligence’ told him that Pune’s inhabitants spoke of the crisis as ‘resembling the great division of interests’ that tore the Maratha polity apart in the 1770s, when one group of Maratha lords had been ranged against another. ‘Pure and disinterested lawyers’ might try to ‘check misrule and oppression’, Malcolm sardonically suggested but ‘a knowledge of law and freedom . . . translated into Mahrattas, means litigation and sedition’. As historian Haruki Inagaki puts it, ‘the government’s anxiety was based on their perception that Indian society was always in a state of emergency.’ Malcolm spoke about ‘a secret war against our authority’, of plots and conspiracies fermented by ‘unseen hands’. In this kind of environment, Malcolm believed the law needed to be an instrument of command not a mechanism to contest state power. Anyhow, he argued, the case was based on a pack of lies. Moro Raghunath was not in prison at all. He ‘was one of the most lively spectators at a Fancy Ball last night’, Malcolm wrote in May 1828, reporting that the prisoner innocently asked the governor a series of difficult questions about European science.10