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

by William Dalrymple

Aliverdi proved to be a popular and cultured ruler; he was also an extremely capable one. It was his bravery, persistence and military genius which had succeeded in keeping the Maratha invasions at bay, something few other Mughal generals had ever succeeded in doing.

Among the many who emigrated from the ruined streets of Delhi at this time was the Nawab’s cousin, the brilliant young Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, for whom Aliverdi Khan was a great hero.

Ghulam Hussain paints an attractive portrait of a cat-loving epicure who loved to fill his evenings with good food, books and stories:

Aliverdi’s other great passion was white Persian cats, and the French and English in Bengal competed to find him the most beautiful specimens from around the world, a present always guaranteed to win them favour.

On one occasion Aliverdi Khan told his elderly general, Mir Jafar Khan, that the Europeans were like a hive of bees, ‘of whose honey you might reap benefit, but if you disturbed their hive they would sting you to death’.

Bengalis came to remember the last years of Aliverdi Khan as a golden age, which all subsequent epochs failed to match: the country was rich and flourishing – Bengal’s revenues had risen by 40 per cent since the 1720s – and one single market near Murshidabad was said alone to handle 650,000 tons of rice annually.55 The region’s export products – sugar, opium and indigo, as well as the textiles produced by its 1 million weavers – were desired all over the world, and, since the defeat of the Marathas, the state enjoyed a period of great peace.

For Ghulam Hussain Khan, as for many members of the court, there was only one cloud on the horizon: Aliverdi Khan’s grandson and heir apparent, Siraj ud-Daula. Not one of the many sources for the period – Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English – has a good word to say about Siraj: according to Jean Law, who was his political ally, ‘His reputation was the worst imaginable.’

The women of the Gentiles [Hindus] are in the habit of bathing in the Ganges. Siraj was informed by his henchmen of those who were of some beauty. He would send his henchmen in small boats to carry them off while they were still in the water.

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Siraj’s most serious error was to alienate the great bankers of Bengal, the Jagat Seths. The Seths’ machinations had brought Aliverdi to power, and anyone who wanted to operate in the region did well to cultivate their favour; but Siraj did the opposite to the two men of the family who were now in charge of the banking house, Mahtab Rai, the current holder of the title Jagat Seth, and Swaroop Chand, his first cousin, who had been accorded the title ‘Maharaja’ by Aliverdi Khan.

Aliverdi Khan was wise and disciplined, while his grandson was an ignorant debauchee; yet still Aliverdi’s love knew no bounds.

So when reports came in, shortly afterwards, that the EIC had been caught red-handed making unauthorised repairs, and in some places completely rebuilding the walls of Calcutta, Aliverdi summoned Siraj and determined to write to both the English and the French, telling them both to dismantle their fortifications completely.

Aliverdi Khan died on 9 April 1756, at 5 a.m. He was buried that day, next to his mother in the Khushbagh. That same evening Siraj ud-Daula attacked the palace of his aunt Ghasiti Begum, killed or disarmed her household troops and seized all her money and jewellery.

The EIC factory closed its gates and primed the cannon on the battlements with grapeshot; for several days there was a standoff, with the factory first blockaded then besieged, and the factors divided on whether to offer military resistance with the few troops and limited weaponry they had at hand, or to meekly submit to Siraj ud-Daula.

Among those captured, plundered and shackled was a young, 24-year-old apprentice factor named Warren Hastings. The commander of the surrendered garrison, Lieutenant Elliott, rather than endure such insults, humiliation and imprisonment, chose instead to blow out his own brains.

What Siraj wanted was for the British to behave as the Armenians had done for centuries: to trade in the province as a subject merchant community, relying not on their own fortifications but on the protection of the Mughal governor.

Prince Ali Gauhar, Shah Alam, was a tall, handsome, well-built man gifted with all the charm, sensitivity and learning that Siraj ud-Daula lacked. He was no soldier, but he was an exceptional poet in several languages; it was in this field, rather than in the arts of war, that his interests lay, even though he was personally renowned as courageous in battle and a fine swordsman.

It was the Prince’s ill fate that he was born during an era when naked aggression and brute force seemed to yield more reliable results than either charm or conciliation.

Since the dramatic contraction of the Empire during the reign of Muhammad Shah Rangila two decades earlier, the hinterlands of Shahjahanabad had succumbed to a feral, dog-eat-dog disorder, where every village was now a self-sufficient, fortified republic, at war with its neighbours.

Shah Alam had been born in the Red Fort, a grandson of the Emperor Bahadur Shah I. He was brought up and educated in the prince’s ‘cage’ – the salatin quarters of the Red Fort where the princes were raised in some comfort, but with no freedom to leave their prison.

So it was at the age of twenty-six that Shah Alam, the eldest son of Alamgir II, suddenly found himself freed from the salatin ‘cage’ and appointed the heir apparent of the crumbling Empire. He was given the titles Ali Gauhar and Shah Alam, Exalted of Lineage, Lord of the World, and forced to take an interest in politics as well as his first and most personal passion of poetics.

Steeped in Sufi literature and thought, his verses often make the link between the earthly fecundity of the monsoon, the season of joy, love and longing, and the Sufi spirituality of his favourite saint. His favourite raag, or musical mode, was the now lost monsoon raag, Raag Gaund, which was designed to be sung in the rains and to evoke its many pleasures:

Yet amid these Sufi reveries, the prince was becoming increasingly fearful of the very man who had just brought his father to power. The Vizier Imad ul-Mulk, nearly a decade his junior, made no secret of his jealousy of the handsome Crown Prince: according to the Shah Alam Nama, Imad ul-Mulk, ‘whose heart was full of malice and deceit, could never tolerate anybody else enjoying success.

They surrounded it from all four directions, like a ring surrounds a finger. Stationing his own troops around the perimeter of Ali Mardan Khan’s mansion, ostensibly as a guard of honour, Imad ul-Mulk then ordered his men to take the Prince into custody. The troops attacked the mansion from all sides, some breaking through the walls, others climbing onto the roofs and firing their muskets down into the courtyards. Some of the Prince’s companions offered a desperate resistance and were mown down.

Knowing now that Imad ul-Mulk would stop at nothing to have him killed, the prince decided not to return to Delhi but instead he ‘resolved to move East so that he could take charge of Bengal and Bihar [Purab] which were prosperous and rich provinces’.93 These he resolved to try to take back from the control of the Nawab governors who had stopped sending their proper dues to Delhi.

The prince fully expected the uncertainty and pain of the life of the exile, and ‘turned his face to the path of the wilderness in sole reliance on God’. He was not optimistic about his chances but was determined to do what he could to regain his inheritance. Yet as soon as word spread of his bravery in Delhi, and it became known that a new young, popular and dashing Mughal prince was intent on heading eastwards to restore the Empire and end the half-century of anarchy, followers began to travel across Hindustan to join this new Akbar.

According to Ghulam Hussain Khan, within a few months of his leaving Delhi nearly 30,000 troops had rallied to his standard.

But in truth, Shah Alam was already too late. The Bengal he was heading to was in the process of being changed for ever by a new force in Indian politics: the East India Company and, in particular, the machinations of Robert Clive.

As well as generous stock dividends, the other very valuable thing that the directors and the servants in India had to offer was, of course, patronage: that is, appointments to lucrative places in India for the connections of politicians. This was another major reason for MPs to rally around the EIC and send the fleets of the Royal Navy and regiments of British army troops to protect it.

Mughal armies were usually notoriously slow-moving, often managing no more than three miles a day; but Siraj urged his forces forward, making some 130 miles in ten days despite the drenching tropical heat of a Bengali June.

Governor Drake believed for several days after the fall of the Kasimbazar factory that the new Nawab was merely bluffing and would never dare to attack Fort William. So poor was his intelligence that he continued to think this even as Siraj’s forces were nearing his outer defences.

the northern suburbs near Dumdum,

Drake was not just incompetent, he was also deeply unpopular. According to William Tooke, one of the Calcutta civilians who volunteered to join the town militia, Drake was such a divisive figure that it was practically impossible for him to organise a coherent defence:

Nor was Drake’s military commander, Colonel Minchin, any more reassuring. As one survivor later wrote, ‘Touching the military capacity of our commandant, I am a stranger. I can only say we were either unhappy in his keeping it to himself if he had any, as neither I, nor I believe anyone else, was witness to any part of his conduct that spoke or bore the appearance of his being the commanding military officer.’

The first two attempts by Mughal forces to cross the Ditch were driven off with heavy casualties. But by evening, twenty of the defenders were dead and ‘just before dark, the whole body [of the Mughal advance guard had] inclined southward, and successfully crossed the Ditch that surrounds the Black Town, the extent of it being so great, and passable in all parts, that it was impossible to do anything to interrupt them’.

The garrison did not make the slightest effort to protect the Black Town or offer shelter in the fort to the terrified inhabitants. No wonder, then, that by the second day all the Indian support staff had defected, leaving the garrison without lascars to pull the guns, coolies to carry shot and powder, carpenters to build batteries and repair the gun carriages, or even cooks to feed the militia.

A late-night Council of War established that there was a maximum of three days’ ammunition left, and that the soldiers were already exhausted and in many cases drunk:

The Nawab’s principal general, Mir Jafar Ali Khan, pressed forward with his assault and by noon, when it became known there was only two days’ supply of ammunition left, the majority of the Council argued in favour of abandoning the Fort altogether and retreating to the ships anchored in the river.

As flights of fire arrows poured into the Fort and onto the shore, one ship, the Dodally, headed upriver without orders, to avoid catching fire. The other vessels began to do the same. Thinking the ships were departing without them, the waiting women and children took fright, ran out of the Fort and stampeded down to the shore in an attempt to board and save themselves.

At that point, ‘many of the gentlemen on shore, who perhaps never dreamt of leaving the factory before everybody else did, immediately jumped into such boats as were at the factory and rowed to the ships. Among those who left the factory in this unaccountable manner were the Governor Mr Drake … [and] Commandant Minchin

Under the command of the Dublin-born John Zephaniah Holwell, the roughly 150 remaining members of the garrison who had failed to make their escape continued the resistance for one more morning. But the Mughal troops attacked fiercely and, just as Captain Grant had predicted, Mir Jafar sent his sharpshooters with their long-barrelled jezails onto the flat parapet of the church tower and the houses overlooking the ramparts,

ordered the demolition of Government House, whose beauty he admired, but considered it worthy to be ‘the dwelling of Princes rather than merchants’, apparently mistaking it for the private property of the detested Drake.

So far, the surrendered garrison had been treated unusually well by Mughal standards: there had been no immediate enslavement, no summary executions, no impaling, no beheading and no torture, all of which would have been, in the Mughal scheme of things, quite routine punishments for rebellious subjects. It was only after Siraj had left that things began to fall apart.

All the survivors were herded into a tiny punishment cell, eighteen feet long by fourteen feet ten inches wide, with only one small window, little air and less water. The cell was known as the Black Hole. There, according to the Mughal chronicler Yusuf Ali Khan, the officers ‘confined nearly 100 Firangis who fell victim to the claws of fate on that day in a small room. As luck would have it, in the room where the Firangis were kept confined, all of them got suffocated and died.’

The most painstaking recent survey of the evidence concludes 64 people entered the Black Hole and that 21 survived. Among the young men who did not come out was the nineteen-year-old Stair Dalrymple from North Berwick, who only two years earlier had been complaining of Calcutta’s cost of living and dreaming of becoming Governor.

But at the time, the Black Hole was barely remarked upon in contemporary sources, and several detailed accounts, including that of Ghulam Hussain Khan, do not mention it at all.

It was not just a loss of lives and prestige, the trauma and the humiliation that horrified the Company authorities, it was above all an economic body blow for the EIC, which could only send its share price into a possibly terminal decline:

In normal circumstances, Madras would probably have sent a delegation to Murshidabad, negotiations would have taken place, apologies and assurances would have been issued, an indemnity would have been paid and trading would have carried on as before, to the benefit of both sides. But on this occasion, due not to good planning so much as chance, there was another option. For, as fate would have it, Robert Clive and his three regiments of Royal Artillery had just arrived on the Coromandel Coast at Fort St David, south of Madras, aboard Admiral Watson’s flotilla of fully armed and battle-ready men-of-war.

Admiral Watson, as a loyal servant of the Crown, initially saw his role to defend British national interests against the French, not to defend the Company’s economic interests from local potentates. But Clive was not going to miss his big chance, especially as he had just lost substantial sums invested both directly in Bengal and indirectly in Company stock.

It was not until 9 December that the first ships of the task force, taking advantage of low tides, turned into the Hughli. By this stage half of Clive’s soldiers had already succumbed to various diseases, including an outbreak of scurvy. Six days later, the Kent dropped anchor at Fulta, where the survivors of the Calcutta debacle had taken shelter on the edge of a malarial swamp, and where just under half of the ragged refugees had already died of fever and were now buried in the alluvial Sunderbans silt.30

Clive’s threats had little effect. As Ghulam Hussain Khan commented, ‘the British were then known in Bengal only as merchants’, and no one at court ‘had any idea of the abilities of that nation in war, nor any idea of their many resources in a day of reverse