Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Such unexpected levels of preservation are partly the product of contemporary Kolkata’s ex-urban growth. Even as the city revives its Bengali heritage, the Bengali middle classes have been leaving the old municipal area.9 The energy in this city is now on the boomburb rims – along the motorways, around the airport, hurtling into the countryside – as tower-blocks and commuter villages lure the professional and managerial classes away from the civic centre and into the eastern peripheries. Kolkata’s traditional manufacturing economy of jute, engineering, steel and textiles has been superseded by a service economy of retail, hospitality and education suited to out-of-town business parks. And so the urban core of Kolkata is left to the past, with its crumbling warehouses, power outages, streets regularly flooded by rainstorms and political in-fighting between the Communist and Congress parties. This is a cityscape of walking tours through Rudyard’s Kipling’s Old Calcutta – ‘the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent’, with its ‘deep, full-throated boom of life and motion and humanity’.10 It is, in the words of one New York Times flâneur, ‘more a journey through the grimy layers of time. History is inscribed on every lane, like tattoos on an aging diva.’11 And the Chai conversation is all of decline – how the one-time ‘Second City of the British Empire’ has, like Glasgow or Liverpool, been left behind as Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi come to embody the materialist ambition of liberalized, ‘BRIC’ India: a nation whose accelerating growth rates, following the early 1990s deregulation, herald a very different ‘Swing to the East’. It is a city out of joint with the times. ‘India changed rapidly, often disturbingly, after 1991,’ writes the novelist Amit Chaudhuri of his home city, ‘Calcutta remained resistant to globalisation and the new world order, cultivating their irrelevance to itself, and its own to theirs.’12

  In 2011, the Kolkata authorities had become so concerned by their relative decline that the new chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, decreed a £60 million development plan not just to match Mumbai or Chennai, but to turn the city ‘into another London’.13 Plans were announced for a Kolkata Eye, modelled on London’s South Bank ferris wheel; the redevelopment of Alipore Zoo along the lines of London Zoo; and a redesign of Curzon Park as a Hooghly-side version of Hyde Park. In the face of declining business investment and urban irrelevance in the New India, a century of West Bengal anti-colonialism was done away with as Ms Banerjee looked, of all places, to the old imperial capital for inspiration and the past re-emerged replete with colonial irony. As Kipling himself had once written of Calcutta, ‘Why, this is London! This is the docks. This is Imperial. This is worth coming across India to see!’14

  THE PLASSEY REVOLUTION

  ‘August 24. This day at Sankraal, I ordered Captain Brooke to come up with a vessel to Chuttanuty, where we arrived about noon, but found the place in a deplorable condition, nothing being left for our present accommodation, the rains falling day and night,’ recorded Job Charnock, an agent in the East India Company, in his diary for 1690. ‘In consideration that all the former buildings here are destroyed, it is resolved that such places be built as necessity requires and as cheap as possible … these to be done with mud walls and thatched till we get ground whereon to build a factory.’ So, at the tail end of the seventeenth century, the foundations of British Calcutta were laid among the Indian villages of Kolikata, Govindapore and Sutanuti – themselves surrounded by a series of smaller hamlets (dihis), formed of agricultural and fishing settlements, inhabited by weavers, potters, oil-pressers, as well as farmers and fishermen. This territorial toehold was the outcome of a disastrous military incursion by the Company into Bengal in 1686 to carve out a proper trading operation along the Hooghly River. In the event, British forces made little substantive progress against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. After three years of skirmishing – which ‘only rendered our nation ridiculous’, according to Charnock – they ended up with a small ‘factory’ and fort. Just as at Bridgetown, few were impressed with Charnock’s original site. ‘He could not have chosen a more unhealthful place in all the River,’ commented Captain Alexander Hamilton. A nearby saltwater lake, subject to periodic droughts, meant that ‘putrefaction affects the air with thick stinking vapours which the North-east winds bring with them to Fort William’, so causing ‘a yearly Mortality’.15

  As with the Massachusetts Bay Company in Boston, the slave traders in Bridgetown, and the VOC in Cape Town, the original energy for Calcutta came from a semi-public corporation – in this case, the most powerful colonial agent of them all, the Honourable East India Company, often known as ‘John Company’. Established on New Year’s Eve 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I as ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading to the East Indies’, its remit was to bring back valuable commodities – pepper from Java, cloves from the Moluccas, tea from China – which should be ‘bought, bartered, procured, exchanged, or otherwise obtained’. As part of its Royal Charter, the Company was also entrusted with a broader policy remit for the ‘advancement of trade’ for England (and eventually Great Britain) around the world. Accompanying the grant were a series of privileges, the most valuable of which was a monopoly over all commerce between England and the lands beyond the Cape of Good Hope.16

  That meant India and, in particular, it meant Bengal. The quality of Bengal’s cotton yarn and textiles – as well as its salt, opium, indigo and saltpetre – had been attracting European interest since the early 1500s. First the Portuguese and then the Dutch put down trading stations along the Hooghly River to warehouse and then export Bengal’s material riches back to Europe. By the time the English established themselves, the Danes were at Serampore, the French at Chandernagore, and the Dutch at Chinsura. Taking ruthless advantage of the crumbling dominion of the Mughal Empire, the East India Company was quick to overtake its European competitors. In 1696, ramparts for Calcutta’s first Fort William were constructed between the Hooghly on the west and Lal Dighi (a pool of fresh water) on the east, much of it where today’s BBD Dagh roundabout now stands. It soon housed a trading hall, warehouses, the governor’s residence, an armory, soldiers’ barracks, and officers’ lodgings for the East India Company. In 1698, Prince Azim-ush-shan, the Mughal emperor’s viceroy for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, was persuaded to grant the Company lordship or zamindari rights, including powers of tax collection, over the surrounding villages. ‘The best money that ever was spent’ was the judgement of Company directors in Leadenhall Street of the Bengal investment. By the early 1700s, some 90 per cent of East India Company cargoes were coming out of India: cotton textiles from Gujarat; pepper from Bombay; and silk and cotton cloth from Bengal. Just as sugar from Barbados changed the British diet, textile imports from Bengal transformed fashion and allowed for the mass consumption of cheap, lightweight fabrics. From the 1720s, assisted by the granting of further trading rights by the local governor (or nawab) of Bengal and working closely with local banking networks, shipments from Calcutta amounted to almost 50 per cent of Indian cargoes, with new wharfs (ghats) and factories established up and down the Hooghly to meet demand. By the mid-eighteenth century, the city of Calcutta building up around Lal Dighi could boast upwards of 100,000 people, making it larger than any British conurbation bar London.17

  Soon enough, the East India Company started to break its contract with the Mughal princes. Contrary to agreement, agents started to dabble in duty-free private trade, while tax exemptions were sold to local merchants which deprived the nawab of his revenues. In 1756, the new, 21-year-old nawab, Siraj-ud-Daula – with assistance from the French – brought an end to the Company’s illegal profiteering by storming Fort William and taking Calcutta. It was during the course of this assault that over 100 Company prisoners died, it was reported, of asphyxiation in the notorious ‘black hole’, a cell in the grounds of the fort. In turn, the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ became an indelible and useful tale of Indian barbarism and British stoicism – ‘Many to the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon suffocated; for now a steam arose
from the living and the dead, which affected us in all its circumstances, as if we were forcibly held with our heads over a bowl full of strong volatile spirit of hartshorn, until suffocated’ – that would be recycled time and again to justify the extension of Empire across India.18 The nature of the confinement and the numbers of casualties were nowhere near as dramatic as suggested. But all too real was the impact of Siraj-ud-Daula’s capture of Calcutta: the East India Company share price collapsed, calico prices rose 50 per cent, and plans for a British counter-attack had to be rapidly drawn up.19

  ‘We have always thought it strange,’ the Victorian historian and Indian statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay would later muse in his celebrated ‘Essay on Lord Clive’:

  that while the history of the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest … It might have been expected that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not only insipid but positively distasteful.

  In Macaulay’s judgement, this remarkable history of subjugation began with the retaking of Calcutta and Clive of India’s victory at the 1757 Battle of Plassey.20

  Robert Clive sprang from an unremarkable wing of the eighteenth-century Shropshire gentry and was sent off as a Company writer to Madras in 1742 to seek his fortune. Having been blooded in a series of battles against the French in the struggle for control of southern India, Clive advanced up the military wing of the Company. His martial capacities overshadowed his accountancy skills, but he was always very good at numbers when it came to his own enrichment. As victory followed victory, a relieved East India Company advanced the avaricious Clive suitably generous attestations of gratitude. So, together with Vice Admiral Watson, Clive was the obvious choice to lead the campaign against Siraj-ud-Daula. Calcutta was retaken in January 1757 and in June, at Plassey in Bengal, Clive’s force of 3,000 troops (two-thirds of whom were Indian) routed the nawab’s army. Siraj-ud-Daula was deposed and then assassinated; in his place came the new nawab, Mir Jafar, installed as a client prince of the East India Company. In swift succession, French factories were eliminated, Clive garnered presents worth £234,000 alongside land revenue rights, and the Company extracted various compensation funds from the new nawab. ‘This great revolution, so happily brought about, seems complete in every respect,’ Clive breezily wrote back to the Company directors.21

  In fact, it would take the deposition of a further succession of nawabs followed by the Battle of Buxar in 1764 against combined Mughal forces for the British to gain a total grip over Bengal. But it was worth the wait. The 1765 Treaty of Allahabad, signed by Clive and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, granted the Company the imperial post of diwan, or revenue collector, over the Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in return for military support and an annual tribute of 26 lakhs of rupees a year to the emperor (equivalent to £330,000). The settlement gave the British power to rule over some 20 million people in Bengal together with access to an annual revenue of around £2–3 million, which could be used to fund a 25,000-strong army and grow the Company’s export business. This was Clive’s so-called ‘Plassey revolution’, in which conquest, administration and trade were all now intimately connected: a series of military advances which vastly enriched the East India Company, expanded the reach of British influence up to the edges of Delhi and began the bleeding of Bengal. ‘Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness,’ wrote Macaulay of Clive’s legacy. ‘They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never tyranny like this. They found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah.’ Company rule, ‘strong with all the strength of civilization’, proved ‘the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism’.22

  The ‘unrequited trade’, as it was known, saw some 85 per cent of Bengal’s external trade in the hands of the East India Company by the end of the eighteenth century, with funds leaving India for Britain at an annual rate of some £1.3 million. High levels of taxation, monopolistic trade practices, the squeezing of suppliers all served to beggar what had previously been one of the most prosperous and vibrant regions of India. The muslin weavers and silk winders felt the full force of Leadenhall economics as the open market for their goods was eliminated, prices slashed, and Company middle men enriched. According to the former Company official William Bolts’s chronicle of British rule in Bengal, Considerations on India Affairs (1772), ‘various and innumerable’ were ‘the methods of oppressing the poor weavers … such as by fines, imprisonments, floggings, forcing bonds from them, etc. by which the number of weavers in the country has been greatly decreased. The natural consequences whereof have been, the scarcity, dearness and debasement of the manufactures, as well as a great diminution of the revenues.’23

  And then the rains failed. Inadequate monsoons and the spectre of famine had long been a feature of Bengal life, to which the habitual response of Mughal rulers was to ease taxation and provide charitable relief. The approach of the East India Company was rather different: agents started to fuel price speculation by buying up rice grain and hoarding stock in Company warehouses. This was then not released to the starving Bengalis, but sold at inflated prices in Calcutta and Murshidabad. At the same time, Company agents hiked up land taxes. The inevitable result was a famine of grotesque proportions, needlessly exacerbated by the depravity of East India Company agents. ‘We have another scene coming to light of a black dye indeed. The groans of India have mounted to heaven,’ wrote the Whig politician Horace Walpole on 5 March 1772 in a letter to his friend, the British diplomat Sir Horace Mann. ‘We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company.’24

  Just as bad, according to one Calcutta merchant, was the fact that these self-same Company servants who, ‘after exhibiting such scenes of barbarity as can scarcely be paralleled in the history of any country, have returned to England loaded with wealth’.25 With relatively low regular salaries, the writers enriched themselves through private practice. They piled on the perquisites by means of either ‘country trade’ – transporting goods in private British vessels westward to the Persian Gulf, or eastward to China and South-east Asia – or ‘inland trade’, which entailed taking loans from Indian merchants and using their positions of power within the Company to carry on their own commerce. In the event, huge fortunes were made. These were the wealthy, vulgar, louche ‘nabobs’ (most likely a play upon the Indian nawab) who had started to overtake West Indian planters in the stocks of public opinion. ‘Arrived in England, the destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom will find the best company in this nation, at a board of elegance and hospitality,’ thundered Edmund Burke during one his regular denunciations of the corruption, jobbery and immorality of Company rule in India. ‘Here the manufacturer and the husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand, that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasants of Bengal.’26 While an estimated 1.2 million Bengalis starved to death from famine (rather than Walpole’s three million), the East India Company nabobs were swanning around Mayfair, buying up country seats and rotten boroughs, impregnating British society with their ill-gotten gains. As Britain’s territorial and trading interests in India expanded, the notion of Empire was changing. What had once stood out as ‘Protestant, commercial, maritime and free’ – the Atlantic imperium of Boston and Bridgetown, of battling against the absolutism of Bourbon France, preserving Great Britain against foreign invasion and securing the pas
sage of colonial traffic across the oceans – was now at risk of becoming visibly despotic, ‘oriental’ and corrupting. Empire as a bulwark of British liberty against the threat of continental tyranny was being undone by John Company’s activities in the east.27 ‘The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us,’ William Pitt the Elder warned, ‘and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but Asiatic principles of government.’ And now the British were becoming just as bad as any grasping imperialists. ‘Oh! my dear Sir, we have outdone the Spaniards in Peru!’ exclaimed Walpole. ‘They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal.’ No one embodied this plague of foreign wealth and power more shamelessly than Lord Clive – the general whom Walpole thought ‘seems to be Plutus, the daemon who does not give, but engrosses riches’.28 Whilst the hero of Plassey always stood astonished at his own moderation, critics noted his fortune touching £400,000, his purchase of the Okehampton estate in Devon and the Claremont estate in Surrey (where he knocked down a Vanburgh-designed Palladian mansion for a new one by Capability Brown and Henry Holland) and his deployment of personal wealth in pursuit of parliamentary ambition with at least seven MPs on the payroll.