The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

He had no other instruments than a knife, a pair of scissors and an iron spatula, and no other medicines than a large pot of ointment full of dirt and of the colour and consistence of hair oil; but they gave us half a bottle of arrack per day to wash our wounds which, though small the quantity amongst so many, was of infinite service to us.

Munro, whose failure to rescue Baillie had been a major factor in the disaster, and who on his return to Madras with what was left of his panic-stricken army, was jeered and hooted at in the streets, called the Battle of Pollilur ‘the severest blow that the English ever suffered in India’.

Of the 7,000 prisoners Tipu captured in the course of the next few months of warfare against the Company, around 300 were forcibly circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam and given Muslim names and clothes.

By the end of the year, one in five of all the British soldiers in India were held prisoner by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam.

At the end of ten years’ captivity, one of these prisoners, James Scurry, found that he had forgotten how to sit in a chair or use a knife and fork; his English was ‘broken and confused, having lost all its vernacular idiom’, his skin had darkened to the ‘swarthy complexion of Negroes’ and he found he actively disliked wearing European clothes.126 This was the ultimate colonial nightmare, and in its most unpalatable form: the captive preferring the ways of his captors, the coloniser colonised.

The Company – now more than £10 million* in debt and unable to pay its own salaries – was now faced by a combination of all the strongest powers in India, supported by the French.

Had Haidar pursued his success after the defeat of Baillie considering the shattered and dispirited state of the rest of the army, there could scarcely have been a hope of it not falling, together with Fort St George, almost a defenceless prey into the hands of the enemy.’

The Company kept its toehold in the south only by the lack of confidence and initiative shown by its adversaries, and the quick supply of reinforcements from Calcutta. Over the months to come, with a mixture of imaginatively wide-ranging military action and deft diplomacy, Hastings managed to break both the Triple Alliance and the unity of the Maratha Confederacy when, on 17 May 1782, he signed the Treaty of Salbai, a separate peace with the Maratha commandor Mahadji Scindia, who then became a British ally.

Elsewhere in the world, 1780 saw the British suffering other major reverses – and these were indeed followed through to their logical conclusion. In America, the Patriots had turned on the King, partly as a result of government’s attempts to sell the stockpiles of East India Company tea, onto which was slapped British taxes: the Boston Tea Party, which opened the American War of Independence by dumping 90,000 pounds of EIC tea, worth £9,659 (over £1 million today), in Boston harbour, was in part provoked by fears that the Company might now be let loose on the thirteen colonies, much as it had been in Bengal.

The American watchmen on their rounds, he said, should be instructed to ‘call out every night, past Twelve o’Clock, “Beware of the East India Company.”’133

Even as Haidar was pursuing a terrified Munro back to Madras, British forces in America were already on their way to the final defeat by Washington at Yorktown, and the subsequent final surrender of British forces in America in October the following year.

When Sir David Baird’s Scottish mother heard that her son had been captured by Tipu, and that the prisoners had been led away handcuffed two by two, she remarked, ‘I pity the man who was chained to oor Davie.’

The moment was recorded, for it marked what was recognised, even at the time, as a crucial turning point in the politics of eighteenth-century India. Shah Alam had now finally given up on the Company ever honouring its many promises to give him an army, or even just an armed escort, to help him reconquer his capital.

Behind this apparently benign concern for the Emperor lay a deep anxiety on the part of the Company. Shah Alam’s announcement of his imminent departure had been entirely unexpected. Not only did the Emperor’s keepers want him in their own hands to legalise and legitimate whatever decisions they made, they also feared the consequences if others should seize him with the same intention.

In fact, the Company had no one to blame but themselves for the Emperor’s dramatic decision. The discourteous treatment he had received from EIC officers in Allahabad since he arrived there six years earlier was the principal reason he had decided to hazard everything on the gamble of the Delhi expedition:

the Emperor’s letters to the King had been intercepted by Clive, along with the nazr (ceremonial gift) of rare jewels worth Rs100,000,* and neither were ever delivered. Meanwhile, Shah Alam’s presents to the King were given on his return to London by Clive, as if from himself, without any mention of the Emperor.

Dramatic changes in the politics of Hindustan helped spur the Emperor into action. In the decade following the defeat of the Marathas at Panipat in 1761, and the death of 35,000 – an entire generation of Maratha warriors and leaders – the Afghans had had the upper hand in Hindustan from roughly 1761 until 1770.

The main architect of the Afghan incursions into northern India, Ahmad Shah Durrani, had now returned to the mountains of his homeland to die. He was suffering the last stages of an illness that had long debilitated him, as his face was eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy or some form of tumour. Soon after winning his greatest victory at Panipat, Ahmad Shah’s disease began consuming his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place. By 1772, maggots were dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and his food as he ate.

In May 1766, the Marathas launched their first, relatively modest, expedition north of the Chambal since Panipat five years earlier. By 1770, they were back again, this time with an ‘ocean-like army’ of 75,000, which they used to defeat the Jat Raja of Deeg and to raid deep into Rohilla territory east of Agra.

Of humble origins, Scindia had been chased from the battlefield of Panipat by an Afghan cavalryman who rode him down, wounded him below the knee with his battle axe, then left him to bleed to death. Scindia had crawled to safety to fight another day but he would limp badly from the wound for the rest of his life. Unable to take exercise, Scindia had grown immensely fat. He was, however, a brilliant politician, capable, canny and highly intelligent.

Only one final matter remained to be decided: the commander of Shah Alam’s new army. Here the Emperor had a rare stroke of luck. His choice fell on a man who would prove to be his greatest asset and most loyal servant. Mirza Najaf Khan had only recently entered Shah Alam’s service.

On 2 May, the Emperor packed up and headed westwards by a succession of slow marches until his army reached the last Company cantonment at Bithur, outside Kanpur. Here General Barker came and personally bade the Emperor farewell. He took with him all the British officers of Shah Alam’s army, but as a goodwill gesture left him with two battalions of Company sepoys and a gift of four field guns.

The Rohilla Nawab of Farrukhabad, Ahmad Khan Bangash, had just died. Shah Alam decided to demonstrate his resolve by demanding that all the Nawab’s estates should now escheat to the crown, in the traditional Mughal manner.

The mission before Shah Alam in January 1772 was now nothing less than to begin the reconquest of his lost empire – starting with the region around Delhi.

The two armies, Mughal and Maratha, then closed in to besiege Zabita Khan’s great stone fortress at Pathargarh, where he had lodged his family and treasure for safety. The fortress was newly built and well stocked with provisions; it could potentially have resisted a siege for some time. But Najaf Khan knew his craft.

After this, the Marathas rushed in and began to carry away all the terrified Rohilla women and children to their tents, including those of Zabita Khan himself. All were robbed and many raped and dishonoured.

The Emperor and Najaf Khan intervened as best they could, and saved the immediate family of their adversary, whom they put under armed guard and sent on to Delhi. The families of other Afghans who wished to return to their mountains were marched back to Jalalabad under escort.

Zabita Khan’s young son, Ghulam Qadir, was among the prisoners and hostages brought back to Shahjahanabad. There he was virtually adopted by the Emperor and brought up in style in the imperial gardens and palaces of Qudsia Bagh, north of Shahjahanabad. This was an act that Shah Alam would later come to regret.

Before long, however, there were rumours spreading in the palace that the Emperor’s affections for his young Rohilla protégé had crossed certain bounds.

It may well be that there is no firm basis for this story, nor for Azfari’s homophobic joke that Ghulam Qadir suffered from ubnah – an itch in his arse.

Afzari’s joke lay in Ghulam Qadir being the ‘bottom’ (which established his inferiority) rather than the ‘top’, apparently an important distinction at the time. But some later sources go further.

According to Najib-ul-Tawarikh, compiled one hundred years later in 1865, Ghulam Qadir was very handsome and the Emperor Shah Alam II sensed or suspected that females of the royal harem were taking interest in him. So one day the Emperor had his young favourite drugged into unconsciousness and had him castrated.

A third of the city was completely wrecked.

The great Urdu poet Mir returned to Delhi from exile around this time, full of hope that Delhi’s downward trajectory might have been arrested after so many years of ill fortune. On arrival he could not believe the scale of the devastation he found. He wandered in despair around the abandoned and despoiled streets, searching for his old haunts, looking in vain for something familiar:

By December 1772 things had escalated to such a pitch of hostility that on Friday the 17th there was a full-scale Maratha attack on Shah Alam’s small army, as his troops made a stand amid the ruins of the old fort of Purana Qila. During this skirmish, the newly recruited Breton adventurer René Madec, who had just been lured to Delhi by his friend Mirza Najaf Khan, took a bullet in the thigh.

Things could easily have turned out very badly for Shah Alam, but at the last minute he was saved. In early September 1773, an unexpected message arrived by express courier from Pune, announcing the premature death from consumption of the young Maratha Peshwa, Narayan Rao.

In their hurry to get to Pune, they both departed within the week, leaving Shah Alam and Mirza Najaf Khan in complete, unmediated control of Delhi.

The Marathas, having helped install Shah Alam back in power in Delhi, now withdrew for several years, while they battled among themselves.

Shah Alam was now forty-five, late middle age by Mughal standards. For all his mixed fortunes in battle, he could still look back on many aspects of his life with gratitude: he had successfully eluded assassination at the hands of Imad ul-Mulk, and had survived four pitched battles with the Company’s sepoys, only to have the victors swear him allegiance. He had made it back to Delhi and now occupied the Peacock Throne, independent within his kingdom and beholden to no one.

There were new conquests to be made during the next fighting season, but first there was the monsoon to be enjoyed and thanks to be given. As the Emperor told the Maratha commanders just before they left, he could not come with them on their campaigns as he needed to be in ‘Delhi for the marriage of my spiritual guide’s sons and the urs [festival] of my pir’, the great Sufi saint Qu’tb ud-Din Baktiar Khaki of Mehrauli.

While Shah Alam relaxed and celebrated in Mehrauli, Najaf Khan was hard at work. He first secured the estates he had been granted in Hansi, and then used their revenues to pay his troops.

Mirza Najaf was well aware that the new European military tactics that had already become well known in eastern and southern India were still largely unknown in Hindustan, where the old style of irregular cavalry warfare still ruled supreme;

The Begum Sumru, as she later became celebrated, had become the mother of Sumru’s son, and travelled across northern India with her mercenary husband; she would soon prove herself every bit as resilient and ruthless as he.

Sumru, he noted, was not happy, and appeared to be haunted by the ghosts of those he had murdered: he had become ‘devout, superstitious and credulous like a good German.

A little later, the Mirza’s army was joined by a very different class of soldiers: the dreadlocked Nagas of Anupgiri Gossain. Anupgiri had just defected from the service of Shuja ud-Daula and arrived with 6,000 of his naked warriors and forty cannon.

By August, under these veteran commanders, Najaf had gathered six battalions of sepoys armed with rockets and artillery, as well as a large Mughal cavalry force, perhaps 30,000 troops in all.

Nawal Singh sued for peace, while actively preparing for war and seeking an alliance with Zabita Khan Rohilla, who had recently returned to his devastated lands and was now thirsting for revenge. But Najaf Khan moved too quickly to allow any pact to be stitched together.

the immense plunder taken from the Jat camp paid for the rest of the campaign.

On 8 February 1774, after Polier had fired more than 5,000 cannonballs at the walls of Agra Fort, he finally succeeded in making a breach.

Finally on 29 April 1776, after a siege of five months, the impregnable Jat stronghold of Deeg fell to Najaf Khan after the Raja fled and starvation had weakened the garrison.