Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  The driving force behind the Asiatick Society and embodiment of Calcutta’s cosmopolitan ethos was the jurist, Sanskrit scholar and Enlightenment radical Sir William Jones. Appointed as a judge of ‘his Majesty’s supreme court of judicature at Fort William in Bengal’ in 1783, Jones embraced the intellectual ambition of Hastings’s Calcutta and immersed himself in the romance of Sanskrit literature. ‘I am in love with the Gopia, charmed with Chrishen, an enthusiastic admirer of Ram,’ while the warriors of the Mahabaharat ‘appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles appeared, when I first read the Iliad’. He thought Sanskrit ‘more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. Jones’s ideas for governing India were conservatively paternalist, but he stood in awe of the country’s cultural and linguistic heritage. Month after month, he published papers for the Asiatick Society, setting out his translations, historical researches into Hinduism, and rediscoveries of Sanskrit texts. And while he failed in his attempts to secure entry to the Asiatick Society for Indian scholars, he did ensure their papers were published in the in-house journal Asiatick Researches, and he worked closely with Indian ‘court-pundits’ (assistants) to craft new legal manuals, on both The Mohammedan Law of Inheritance (1792) and the Institutes of Hindu Law (1794). ‘Jones’s close co-operation with Hindu pundits and Muslim maulavis provides a model of cultural contact between the European and Asiatic intelligentsia.’53 Indeed, his activities exemplify the way in which the British authorities, rather than crushing Indian culture and learning, seemed keen to sustain and deepen it.

  The unorthodox religious thinker Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) was another product of Bengal’s thriving East–West exchange, living as a theist in Bengal and dying as a Unitarian in Bristol. His life as a scholar was funded by wisely managing his inheritance on the Calcutta money markets, securing returns from investments both in the East India Company and among private traders. In politics, he was a progressive actively opposed to the practice of suttee and he shared with Jones an interest in the linguistic history of Sanskrit and Bengali; but his real passion was for theological investigations into the roots of Hindu polytheism and Christianity. In pursuit of his conviction that ‘the doctrines of the unity of God are real Hinduism’, he established an Amitya Sabha (‘friendly society’) of like-minded free-thinkers. It was just one of a number of associations, or sabha, formed in early nineteenth-century Calcutta as part of the city’s increasingly diverse civil society.54 By far the most important was the Hindu College, forerunner of today’s University of Calcutta, which was established in 1817 to introduce the Hindu elite to ‘the literature and science of Europe’ in a liberal manner and without any reference to Christianity. The curriculum comprised not only ‘reading, writing, grammar and arithmetic’ in both English and Bengali, but also ‘instruction … in history, geography, chronology, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and other sciences’.55 Along with the Calcutta Book Society and the city’s myriad newspapers – Bengal Gazette, Calcutta Journal, Bengal Harkaru, India Gazette – the College was another component of the city’s confident intellectualism – ‘a new social space for the activities of an urban public, mixed in its racial, religious, and caste composition’.56

  These cosmopolitan sensibilities were reflected in the city’s racial topography. Of course, there existed stark distinctions between the European ‘White Town’ around Tank Square in the southern half of the city and the indigenous ‘Black Town’ in the northern parts. ‘The upper division to the north of Muchoa Bazar is, comparatively speaking, but thinly covered with habitations,’ noted one British doctor. ‘It is surprising how much of the condition of the native portion of the town has been neglected in this great city and its suburbs, in which are to be found all the faults of all the cities in India.’57 The visiting Lord Valentia was altogether blunter about the state of Black Town. ‘Its streets are narrow and dirty; the houses, of two stories, occasionally brick, but generally mud, and thatched, perfectly resembling the cabins of the poorest class in Ireland.’58 However, between the extremities of north and south, black and white, there was a rewarding degree of racial intermingling. For all the Westerners’ masonry walls and wrought-iron railings, the ethnic boundaries within Georgian Calcutta were remarkably fluid, and the self-declared White Town never carved out an exclusive, homogeneous space for European residents. What was more, both districts were also shaped by similar, internal differences of income and status: in the midst of the ‘native’ quarter there were large colonnaded mansions, rivalling Chowringhee’s palaces, for the homes of such wealthy Indians as the Company agent and entrepreneur Dwarkanath Tagore and the merchant Maharajah Rajkissen.59

  Mrs Kindersley would have liked a much more clearly demarcated Black Town – ‘as in Madras’ – for the servants to live in. Unfortunately, ‘Calcutta is partly environed by their habitations, which makes the roads rather unpleasant … the smoke of the fires with which they dress their victuals, comes all out at the doors, and is perhaps more disagreeable to the passenger than to themselves.’60 The trading, market and business bazaars which dotted Calcutta – most notably, the city central yarn and cloth market of Burrabazar – were places of informal ethnic and racial integration. The adventurous Maria Graham particularly enjoyed visiting the bazaars during the Kali Puja festival in late October. ‘In all the bazaars, at every shop door, wooden figures and human heads, with the neck painted blood-colour, are suspended, referring, I imagine, to the human sacrifices formerly offered to this deity, who was, I believe, the tutelary goddess of Calcutta.’61 In Leadenhall Street, such enthusiasm for the culture and civilization of Bengal only intensified suspicions towards the practices of its employees in Calcutta. There was a paranoia about local officials ‘going native’, adopting Asiatic habits and indulgences. Ironically enough, Warren Hastings’s appointment as governor-general was an attempt to bring the East India Company to heel and prevent any spread of ‘oriental corruption’ within its lucrative Bengal operation.

  For in the early 1770s the Company was facing growing financial and political pressure. As well as a failure to plan for the full costs of policing the new Company possessions in Bengal and the mismanagement of the Bengal famine, a minor military set-back in Madras in 1769 had punctured the equity bubble which had been inflating its stock over the previous decade. The shock sparked a set of painful readjustments in London’s banks and merchant houses which, by the early 1770s, was sending over-leveraged financial institutions to the wall. ‘There never was since the South Sea year [1720] so great a crush in stock matters,’ wrote the financier Israel Barre.62 The Company thought it could find a way out of falling revenue in Bengal by piling into the Chinese tea market – an equally disastrous venture that led to the dumping of excess supply in America and setting in train the events of the Boston Tea-Party (see here). When that wheeze failed, the directors went cap in hand to His Majesty’s Treasury to seek a £1.4 million bail out. Parliament was recalled as government ministers seized on this valuable opportunity to humble the over-mighty Company and its nabob allies by enacting the 1773 East India Regulating Act. The new legislation curtailed the Company’s freedom to manage its own affairs in India, withdrew its privileges of commercial confidentiality, gave government ministers access to all correspondence and introduced the new post of governor-general of India based in Calcutta complete with powers over the other presidencies of Madras and Bombay. However, to prevent any whiff of ‘Asiatic despotism’ emerging from such an office, the governor-general was to be part of a five-person council of whom three members were nominated by parliament.

  It was desperately unfortunate for Warren Hastings that among those first council appointees was the brilliantly destructive bureaucrat Sir Philip Francis, who made his primary purpose the forcing of the first governor-general from office. For much of the 1770s, Calcutta was engulfed in a dirty war of political attrition, as allegations of corruption, judicial murder, forced resignations, extra-marital aff
airs and dishonourable conduct – leading to a melodramatic, if non-fatal, duel between Hastings and Francis in 1780 – bedevilled the relationship between governor-general and council. This, in turn, spilled over into Westminster party politicking when Edmund Burke used these events to mount a broader condemnation of the plunder and corruption of the East India Company and led the charge for Hastings’s impeachment on his return from India in 1785. The trial lasted eight years and, at the end, Hastings was found not guilty.

  In the interim, William Pitt the Younger set about trying to fix the remaining deficiencies of British governance in India. The outcome was the 1784 India Act, whose purpose, according to Pitt, was ‘to give the crown the power of guiding the politics of India with as little means of corrupt influence as possible’. Against the spectre of ‘Asiatic corruption’ and nabob excess, the Act expanded parliamentary supervision over the Company, widely resented as an imperium in imperio of unaccountable wealth and power, and separated its civil service and military functions from its commercial operations, in the hope of ending the tension between the Company’s roles as merchant and government in India. Lest anyone was in any doubt as to the future direction of British policy in Bengal, Pitt appointed as his new governor-general Charles, Earl Cornwallis – the bluff, colonial veteran of the American War of Independence (and future Viceroy of Ireland). Having endured the personal indignity of surrendering Yorktown to George Washington, Cornwallis brought to Bengal a joint appointment as commander-in-chief and governor-general with powers to override the council, and a bitter suspicion towards any settled colonial class which might grow to question British sovereignty (the same instinct he would show in dealing with the 1798 Irish Rebellion). None of this boded well for the cosmopolitan world of Warren Hastings’s Calcutta.63

  In fact, Cornwallis thought he had inherited ‘a system of the dirtiest jobbery’, and his mission was to bring to an end ‘the good old principles of Leadenhall Street economy – small salaries and immense perquisites’. He set about raising salaries; banning Company writers from engaging in private trade on their own account; instituting a new system of law courts with ‘European principles’; and reducing the role for Indians and mixed-race within the Bengal administration, to avoid any ‘Asiatic contamination’. The political function of the East India Company was now separated off from the trading interests so that British civil servants in India – collecting taxes, adjudicating disputes and running the bureaucracy – would not be tainted by any commercial transactions. Most significant of all was Cornwallis’s ‘Permanent Settlement’ of 1793, which aimed to end the cycle of crises wrought by the absence of a sustainable revenue base for the Company. The fault lay, it was decided, with the haphazard taxation and short-term leases of Bengali land tenure, which meant Indian farmers had no true financial incentive in cultivating their lands, leaving the Company with an unreliable income. There was, to British eyes, nothing more dangerous to good governance than insecure property ownership. So, the ‘principle of property’ had to be embedded in Bengali society, which would allow it to abandon its feudal, Mughal past and embrace the sound principles of Whig England: looking after the land and paying taxes. Working to a system drawn up by Sir Phillip Francis, Cornwallis’s reforms ended the old arbitrary taxation of land and replaced it with a set revenue from Bengal at £3 million per annum, which, at the same time, allowed the creation of permanent private property rights for Indian landowners. This dramatically increased the value of Bengali land, with the aim of both spurring investment and securing stability at a time of renewed military danger from revolutionary France.64 But it had an unexpected disadvantage: the effects of this transformation of land-ownership patterns sucked the mercantile energy out of Calcutta. Realizing that there were greater and more reliable riches to be made from being a zamindar (landlord) in country estates than being traders in Calcutta warehouses, the banians or agents of the eighteenth century became the rural rentiers of the nineteenth century and lost ‘the instinct for business’.65

  THE GLORIOUS LITTLE MAN

  None of this bothered Cornwallis’s fiercely aristocratic successor as governor-general, Richard Wellesley, who arrived in Calcutta from Cape Town in 1798 unconcerned about such technocratic reforms. His ambition was to craft an empire of military glory rather than commercial profits. In London, colonial officials had come to realize the limitations of the Cape Town model of light-touch mercantilism and patchwork naval bases; now, territorial Empire and the commercial and military power it brought were back in fashion. Securing India against competing European powers was a regrettable and expensive necessity for the maintenance of prosperity of the United Kingdom. The attempted invasion of Ireland in 1798 and the assault on British interests in the Caribbean had only underlined the global nature of the Anglo-French conflict. India had to be rid of French influence to create a bulwark against Napoleonic influence on the European continent – and Wellesley was the man to do it. His period of governor-generalship ‘was to be the decisive phase in the establishment of British dominion over the Indian subcontinent and witnessed the beginnings of the projection of British military and maritime power into the Middle East and south-east Asia’.66

  In the first instance, it was Tipu Sultan, the Muslim ruler of the southern Indian city of Mysore, whom Wellesley had in his sights. With a ‘liberty tree’ planted in his capital, Seringapatam, Wellesley regarded ‘Citizen’ Tipu – ‘the tiger of Mysore’ – as a tool of French interests whose ambitions constituted an unacceptable design on British rule in India. Within a year, the governor-general’s aggressive militarism had provoked the sultan into war, and on 4 May 1799 British troops stormed Seringapatam, Tipu dying in battle. ‘Seringapatam I shall retain in full sovereignty for the Company, as being a tower of strength, from which we may at any time shake Hindostan to its centre, if any combination should ever be formed against our interests,’ Wellesley wrote back to Dundas in the afterglow of victory.67 However, he did not assume this defensive stance for long, and internal conflicts between the major Maratha rulers – the governing princes of western and northern India – allowed him to pursue a strategy of divide, rule and conquer. In a succession of ruthless wars against the Marathas, conducted in part by Wellesley’s younger brother Sir Arthur, the ‘glorious little man’ managed to stretch British power and influence into all corners of the Indian subcontinent. Victories at Assaye and Argaum, followed by General Lake’s success at Laswari, laid the foundations of British paramountcy in India. The dark memory of defeat in the American War of Independence was shed once and for all as British forces took Delhi itself, ancient capital of the Mughal Empire, in 1803. With the taming of the Marathas, the last major rivals to British power and influence on the subcontinent were vanquished. Britain was now the Empire in India, and the governor-general a de facto emperor – all of which suited Wellesley rather well. In Calcutta, victory over the Marathas would be commemorated with the Ochterlony Monument – a 49-metre fluted Doric column standing on a square Egyptian-style plinth and crowned with a Turkish cupola – dedicated to the heroism of Major-General Sir David Ochterlony in capturing and defending Delhi and providing one of the most recognizable icons in the city (now renamed Shaheed Minar in honour of the martyrs of the Indian independence movement).

  It had been the disingenuous boast of Horace Walpole and others that, during the growth of the British Empire, ‘a peaceable, quiet set of tradesfolks’ had somehow become the ‘heirs-apparent to the Romans’.68 In the aftermath of the conquest of Mysore, such faux-diffidence would no longer do: the British presence in India was now there for all to see as a political as much as economic project. ‘The Civil servants of the English East India Company … can no longer be considered as the agents of a commercial concern,’ Wellesley announced in 1800. ‘They are, in fact, the ministers and officers of a powerful sovereign; they must now be viewed in that capacity, with reference, not to their nominal, but to their real occupations … Their duties are those of statesmen in every other p
art of the world.’ As such,

  their education should be founded in a general knowledge of those branches of literature and science which form the basis of the education of persons destined to similar occupation, in Europe. To this foundation should be added an intimate acquaintance with the history, languages, customs and manners of the people of India, with the Mahommedan and Hindoo codes of law and religion, and with the political and commercial interests and relations of Great Britain in Asia.69

  Since the existing training for the John Company Griffins was so poor and parochial, Wellesley’s plan ‘for the improvement of the civil service at Bengal’ involved the establishment of Fort William College as the training ground for a new cadre of officials destined to run an empire. In this ‘Oxford of the East’, writers would be instructed in ‘the liberal policy which ought to actuate the government of a powerful empire’ rather than ‘the little spirit of a retail dealer’.70 They would learn theology; Sanskrit, Arabic and the six major languages of their colonial subjects (Hindustani, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada); Hindu, Islamic and English law; botany and chemistry; and the history and culture of India. Fort William College would ‘cherish in the minds of the servants of the Company, a sense of moral duty, and teach those who fill important stations, that the great public duties which they are called upon to execute in India are not of a less sacred nature than the duties of similar situations in their own country’.71 And Wellesley found ‘the mischief [of “extravagance, profusion and excess”] to be so pressing’ that he intended, ‘without waiting for orders from home, to proceed to found such an institution at Calcutta’.72