Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  The same certainty of purpose which Wellesley brought to the battlefield, he now applied to the establishment of the College of Fort William. The governor-general deliberately ignored the Writers’ Building and opted for virgin land at Garden Reach, south of Fort William, to be drained and cleared for his new complex. The cosmopolitanism of Warren Hastings’s and William Jones’s Calcutta was revived as over a hundred original works in oriental languages were published by the college between 1801 and 1805. Among the first was Rajabali by Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, a chronicle of India in the Bengali language telling the history of ‘the Rajas and Badshahs and Nawabs who have occupied the throne in Delhi and Bengal’. Young Company writers, expecting the dissolute nabob life of their predecessors, were now grilled in Persian, Arabic and ‘Hindustani Languages’ and inspired to interrogate the teachings of the Koran or ancient Sanskrit texts. They wrote essays with titles such as ‘On the character and capacity of Asiaticks, and particularly of the natives of Hindoostan’ and disputed in Persian on topics such as ‘An Academical Institution in India, is advantageous to the Natives, and to the British Nation’. Wellesley himself, with orientalist flamboyance, took a personal interest in public examinations at the College. ‘In a state chair covered with crimson velvet and richly gilt, with a group of aides-de-camp and secretaries standing behind him, sat the Governor-General,’ was how one resident remembered his visit. ‘Two servants with state punkahs of crimson silk were fanning him, and behind him again were several Native servants bearing silver staffs.’ Protected by a bodyguard ‘drawn up in full uniforms of scarlet with naked sabres’, Wellesley sat alongside the professors, listening to the College disputants argue their case.73 He was delighted with what he heard. ‘The principles on which this Institution is founded, the spirit which it is designed to diffuse, and the purposes which it is calculated to accomplish, must enhance the importance of its success, in proportion to the exigencies of every public crisis, and to the progressive magnitude, power, and glory of the Empire.’74

  Such extravagant, ornamental regard for the display and rituals of power was elemental to Wellesley’s Empire. He believed in awing his Indian subjects with ceremony and, like Cornwallis, instilling some sense of civic discipline into Calcutta’s dissolute ruling class. ‘I am resolved to encounter the task of effecting a thorough reform in private manners,’ Wellesley had written to the British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, upon his arrival in 1798. ‘The effect … has been to compel me to entrench myself within forms and ceremonies, to introduce much state into the whole appearance of my establishments and household to expel all approaches to familiarity, and to exercise my authority with a degree of vigour and strictness nearly amounting to severity.’75 The lax, dissolute Calcutta of William Hickey came under sustained assault from Wellesley’s reformation of manners: extra-marital affairs, interracial liaisons, drinking and gambling and a critical, free press were all now subject to close supervision. In their place, the governor-general promoted a new code of colonial honour based upon the army, the Company and the Anglican church. Morality and pageantry, deference and duty were to provide the templates of colonial Calcutta, and they were all carefully codified in the design and iconography of his greatest architectural legacy to the city: Government House.

  ‘Of all the public buildings of Calcutta, the government-house, built by Lord Wellesley, is the most remarkable,’ eulogized Maria Graham.

  The lower story forms a rustic basement, with arcades to the building, which is Ionic … The centre of the house is given up to two rooms, the finest I have seen. The lowest is paved with dark grey marble, and supported by Doric columns of chunam, which one would take for Parian marble. Above the hall is the ball-room, floored with dark polished wood, and supported by Ionic pillars of white chunam.

  Then there was the throne room, in which sat, pride of place, Tipu Sultan’s captured dais. Government House was, in the words of Jan Morris, ‘the original great palace of British India’.76

  Lieutenant Charles Wyatt of the Bengal Engineers was the architect of this pioneering display of neo-classical bombast in the capital of Bengal. He took for inspiration the work of his uncle, Samuel Wyatt, who collaborated with Robert Adam on Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, the seat of Lord Scarsdale – the great-great-grandfather of the future Indian viceroy Lord Curzon (who would come to inhabit both buildings). It was a suitably authoritative and expensive prototype for the Augustan ambitions of the victor of Mysore. Just as the world was coming to appreciate Edward Gibbon’s meditation on the collapse of Roman civilization in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1772–89), on the banks of the Hooghly Richard Wellesley was confidently inaugurating a new era of imperial might. Calcutta’s old Council House and ‘sixteen other handsome private mansions’ were ripped down for Wellesley’s riposte to the counting-house ethos of the East India Company. The building was designed with four wings – in contrast to Kedleston’s more modest two – a rounded and colonnaded south face with a large dome for a roof. An Ionic portico, complete with huge processional staircase, faced north towards the centre of Calcutta; looking south across the gardens, towards the Maidan, was a domed front, completed with a figure of Britannia. The high ceilings, wide passageways, Venetian blinds and windows with fretwork valances ensured the residency, in the words of Curzon, ‘was admirably adapted to a climate where every breath of air from whatever quarter must be seized, and where a perpetual current relieves the petty aggravations of life’.77

  Government House’s comfort was always overshadowed by its pomp and circumstance: the arched and columniated gateways topped by sphinxes, lions and globes, all spoke to a conscious declaration of imperial power and success. It was the embodiment of Wellesley’s serious, formal, Roman-style Empire, which he thought essential for the governance of India. Inside, protocol was everything. ‘The Levees at the Government House will in general be holden in the centre room of the upper floor,’ read an advertisement in the 1803 Calcutta Gazette, setting out the rigid social requirements of colonial hospitality. ‘The general entrance into the Government House on all occasions is from the northward; but on Levee Days, Public Balls, and entertainments, the southern entrance will be open to the Chief Justice, Members of Council, Judges of the Supreme Court,’ and so it went on.78 Every visitor was unsurprisingly awed by Government House’s neo-classical majesty. ‘The length of the verandahs and the flights of stairs almost wore me out before we reached the principal reception room,’ exclaimed one party-goer at a Government House ball. ‘The coup d’œil of these rooms is indeed calculated to impress a young person with delight, particularly when filled by a brilliant assembly.’79 The young Elizabeth, heroine of Anna Monkland’s Calcutta novel Life in India, was certainly impressed on entering the ballroom – ‘the roof supported by two rows of pillars running down each side, leaving within that beautifully chalked area for the dancers … The quantity of red coats and jewels, to say nothing of ostrich plumes, adds much to the effect.’ Indeed, Elizabeth perceptively concluded that, ‘His Majesty on the throne of Britain is not a more sovereign prince than is the Governor-General of India.’80

  But Wellesley nonetheless chafed at the restrictions on his power – particularly in governing his capital. ‘Some doubts have arisen with regard to the legislative power of the Governor-General in council as applicable to the town of Calcutta,’ he grumbled to Henry Dundas in 1799. The governor-general wanted a special Act of Parliament to allow total authority to reshape the city before it relapsed ‘into its ancient state of filth, and unhealthiness’ and become again ‘fatal to European constitutions’. ‘It is my intention immediately to proceed to improve the drains and roads, to widen the streets and avenues, to clear the jungles, and remove the [water] tanks, and other nuisances situated in the neighbourhood of the town.’81 Unsurprisingly, he began with the environs of Government House, and plans for a trunk road linking his official residence to his country estate at Barrackpore, an exotic bungalow compound some 23 ki
lometres up the Hooghly River. This imperial boulevard never quite succeeded, but he had more success with laying out The Strand, a large, open avenue hugging the Maidan and then stretching along the banks of the Hooghly, which became a useful arterial road and an embankment for new warehouse developments. It was a perfect setting for the Ochterlony Monument, then the Victoria Memorial and the endless processions of imperial self-congratulation which cluttered up the Maidan.

  Even the otherwise hostile William Hickey welcomed the new roads: ‘A prodigious improvement it assuredly was, not only proving conducive to the health of the inhabitants in general, but likewise affording an agreeable morning or evening ride to those Europeans who were fond of exercise.’82 Wellesley’s upgrading of the city was taken over in 1803 by Calcutta’s Town Improvement Committee, Bengal’s answer to the Wide Street Commissioners of Dublin. The Committee embarked on a major programme of draining and cleaning; building new squares and opening up avenues; clearing the riverbank and constructing new ghats; setting building regulations and rules on public monuments. The domestic finery of the City of Palaces was gaining an improved urban infrastructure. ‘The appearance and beauty of the town … and every improvement which shall introduce a greater degree of order, symmetry, and magnificence in the streets … will tend to ameliorate the climate and to promote and secure every object of a just and salutary system of Police,’ explained the Committee.83 City improvement would promote public health, which would foster civic pride and, with it, an instinctive sense of imperial virtue. But such a focus on magnificence, symmetry and public health did not extend to the ‘Black Town’ in the north of Calcutta. ‘Whoever has visited the native portion of the town before sun-rise, with its narrow lanes, and “rankest compound of villainous smells that ever offended nostril”, will require no argument in favour of widening the streets,’ wrote a British doctor in 1837, noting the lack of attention the district received, ‘so as to effect the two greatest improvements of all as respects the salubrity of a city, free exposure to the sun, to rarify and elevate the vapours, and to winds to dilute and dissipate them.’84

  Nor did improvements to the ‘White Town’ come cheap. ‘Marquis Wellesley was in no way sparing of the Company’s cash,’ recalled Hickey of the new roads, avenues and infrastructure. The price for the construction of Government House alone came in at some £168,000, while the costs of his ornate protocol and chivalry were also raising some hackles among ‘the cheesemongers of Leadenhall Street’ left to pick up the bill. The East India Company debt for the year 1805–6 reached a terrifying £28,523,804, two-thirds of which had been added during Wellesley’s time in Bengal. From the Castle of Good Hope, his most devoted supporter, Lady Barnard, warned him that his enemies were circling:

  by the mouth of a certain party here you are positively recalled, as being too proud, too expensive and too successful … in short your conquests have been too large – your reforms too large – your schemes too large – your house too large, and your pride and presumption on all you have done much too large and therefore it must be diminished.85

  Leadenhall bureaucrats grumbled about his war-mongering, financial excesses, infringement of their trading monopolies and autocratic style. Wellesley had his own gripes. Chief among them was the humiliation of his ‘potato peerage’ – his elevation to the Irish peerage in 1799 under the title of Marquess Wellesley, following his victory over Tipu Sultan. He regarded the title as an unforgiveable humiliation since, at the very least, he deserved to be made a British baron. With his amour propre so grievously wounded, the arrogance of ‘The Most Noble, the Governor General’ now assumed self-destructive new heights.

  Watching the approaching storm, wily Henry Dundas had sought to close off potential sources of tension between the Company and governor-general. He tried to steer Wellesley away from plans for Fort William College, with his ‘considerable doubts about the suggestion’. Dundas thought the Company training in London perfectly adequate and doubted if ‘any of the other accomplishments for Indian business are to be attained so well in any seminary of education’. Such reservations meant nothing to Wellesley – he was interested in imperial statecraft, not Indian business, and proceeded regardless. Dundas also warned Wellesley against over-expenditure and the growth of ‘unwieldy and unmanageable’ debt which might prevent Britain ‘from the means of extricating our affairs when peace shall have returned’. Again and again, Dundas reminded Wellesley of the economic necessities underpinning the British presence in India. ‘It is to the increased exports from India to Europe, that we are to attribute the increase of Indian prosperity, industry, population and revenue.’86 But Wellesley had no thought of Britain extricating itself from India; he ran an Empire of timeless horizon, not a trading station.

  Behind these tussles over costs and colleges was a more existential disagreement about the nature of Empire, between an East India Company which saw India as an economic venture necessarily accompanied by political consequences and Wellesley, who saw the British presence as fundamentally political with economic consequences.87 Reviewing Wellesley’s legacy in ‘Notes on Some Viceroys and Governors General’, Lord Curzon was ambivalent. ‘One class of writers has seen in Wellesley the courageous and far-sighted architect of Empire, who carried out and expanded the great work of Warren Hastings and reared the central edifice, lofty and strong, of British dominion in the East. The opposite school regards him as the embodiment of vanity in high places … The truth does not lie midway between these extremes. It is to be found in both of them.’ Yet the city of Calcutta, Curzon thought, certainly benefited from Wellesley’s reign. For, ‘while Anglo-Indian society stood aghast at Wellesley’s pretensions and was considerably awed by his magnificence, it regarded the presence and the patronage of the little autocrat as a compliment to itself, and saw a reflection of the nimbus which he habitually wore floating about its own head’.88

  MAKING ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE HINDOOS

  The tripling of East India Company debt, the spiralling costs of the Maratha wars and accusations over ‘illegal appointments’ and ‘evasion of the law’ ensured Wellesley’s recall in 1805. The Company Court of Directors had had enough of Wellesley’s war-mongering and impossibly expensive territorial ambitions. He was succeeded as governor-general by Lord Cornwallis, who returned to Calcutta for a second tour of duty. ‘Lord Wellesley, with his customary attention to parade and show, sent down all his carriages, servants, staff officers, and general establishment to receive his noble supercessor at the waterside,’ Hickey recorded of the handover. But the austere Cornwallis ushered them all away and, with them, Wellesley’s flamboyant ethos of Empire. ‘Too civil, too civil by half. Too many people. I don’t want them, don’t want one of them, I have not yet lost the use of my legs.’ And he walked the short journey to Government House – whose grandiosity he found equally ridiculous. ‘It is as much too large as the other [Governor’s house] was too small. I shall never be able to find my way about it without a guide, nor can I divest myself of the idea of being in a prison, for if I show my head outside a door, a fellow with a musket and fixed bayonet presents himself before me.’89

  With the return of Cornwallis, the last embers of cosmopolitan Calcutta were snuffed out as a more assertive ideology of imperial righteousness took hold. In the few months before his death in October 1805, Cornwallis reasserted his strategy of racial hierarchy, anti-historicism and Utilitarian governance. High-level officials were now discouraged from keeping Indian companions, and lower-level soldiers and employees of the company were encouraged to turn to prostitutes to satisfy their impulses. Cornwallis also wanted a quick end to the ‘unprofitable and ruinous’ warfare against the Marathas. Any encouragement to Company officials to learn ‘Hindustani languages’ or ‘know’ Indian culture were quickly disavowed. Fort William College was a rapid casualty of this anti-orientalist agenda.

  As in Cape Town, so now in Calcutta, there took place a sustained process of cultural Anglicization. The future of British India bel
onged to men like the East India Company deputy chairman Charles Grant, who regarded Wellesley’s territorial project as ‘the road to ruin’ and sought to have the late governor-general – like Clive and Hastings before him – impeached for corruption. The East India Company College at Haileybury (founded in 1806), rather than Fort William College in Calcutta, was to be where the imperial ethos of the Victorian governing class would be laid. And in the quads of Hertfordshire, the young Company writers were taught the works of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham by the likes of Reverend Thomas Malthus. Free trade, transparent government, rational choice – these were to be the templates for governing the East. If students dared to know about Indian history and culture, it was most certainly not to the Bhagavad Gita they should turn; but rather James Mill’s History of British India, whose author was a staunch defender of the Company with the critical advantage of never having actually been to India. ‘We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue,’ wrote Macaulay, who had joined the Supreme Council of India in 1834, in his influential ‘Minutes on Education in India’. ‘We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West.’90 The Minutes also crudely decreed that ‘all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England’. The public mind of India, which the British had found ‘debased and contracted by the worst form of political and religious tyranny’, had to be instructed in European knowledge and Enlightenment thinking. There was little of true value to be learned from Indian literature or civilization; this subject race had to be raised towards self-governance on a course of Western culture. And it would be a noble calling. As Macaulay told the House of Commons, ‘To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens would indeed be a title to glory all our own.’91 Macaulay’s own work in Calcutta centred on crafting a new system of jurisprudence. In contrast to Sir William Jones, who worked with Indian assistants to reinterpret the Muslim and Hindu inheritance, Macaulay stuck to the Benthamite conviction that human nature was the same everywhere and would respond to the same mixture of pain and pleasure: what was wanted in India was clarity and uniformity, not tradition and custom.