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August 6 - August 10, 2020
By the end of the week, of the 5,000 EIC troops in Bihar, 3,000 had been killed, arrested or gone over and joined Mir Qasim’s army. Among the dead was the envoy sent by the Calcutta Council, James Amyatt.
There was now no going back. Across Bihar and Bengal, the provincial Mughal elite rose as one behind Nawab Mir Qasim in a last desperate bid to protect their collapsing world from the alien and exploitative rule of a foreign trading company.
A week later, on 4 July 1763, the Council in Calcutta formally declared war on Mir Qasim. As a measure of their cynicism, they voted to put back on the throne his elderly father-in-law, the former Nawab, Mir Jafar. The latter had used his retirement to become a fully fledged opium addict and was now even more befuddled than before.
Making war against the Nawab they had personally installed only five years earlier was not only a political embarrassment for the Company; it was a financial disaster: ‘The Company was sinking under the burden of war,’ wrote Luke Scrafton, ‘and was obliged to borrow great sums of money from their servants at eight per cent interest, and even with that assistance were obliged to send their ships half-loaded to Europe [as they did not have spare bullion to buy the Indian goods to send to London].’
The Company was certainly taking much higher casualties than it had done when facing old-fashioned Mughal cavalry armies, but each time the two infantry armies closed it was Mir Qasim’s troops who eventually fled. The Company victory at Katwa, where Major Adams ambushed and killed one of Mir Jafar’s bravest generals, Mohammad Taki, was followed by a second at Gheria three weeks later:
It was here that the remaining 20,000 troops of Mir Qasim’s New Army made their last stand. During the first month of the siege, Major Adams’ heavy guns made no impression on the fortifications. But lulled into complacency by their spectacular defences, Mir Qasim’s generals let their guard down. As Ghulam Hussain Khan put it, ‘They trusted so much to the natural strength of that post, and to the impracticability of the enemy forcing the passage, that they became negligent in their duty;
Only one of Mir Qasim’s generals made any effort to harass their besiegers at the bottom of the hill. This was an energetic and intelligent young Persian cavalry commander who had recently arrived in India from Isfahan. His name was Mirza Najaf Khan, a name that would be long celebrated in Mughal histories.
Mir Qasim was not in the fort that night; he had just left for Monghyr and so lived to fight another day. But he never entirely recovered from the loss of Udhua Nullah.
In his enveloping paranoia, Mir Qasim first ordered the assassination of Gurgin Khan, the Wolf, his most loyal Armenian commander.
The Jagat Seths were next. When Ellis and his companions were arrested, Mir Qasim had carefully examined the private papers of the English which had been captured at the factory. Among these was found a letter from Jagat Seth Mahtab Rai and his cousin Maharaj Swaroop Chand to Ellis, encouraging him to attack the Nawab, and offering to pay the costs of the military campaign.
Hastings was sympathetic to the situation which had driven his protégé to such savagery, but he also realised it was much too late to save him from his own actions: he had now waded too deep in blood.
Forty-five Company servants perished in what came to be known by the British as the Patna Massacre. In addition to this number, though rarely referred to in British histories, were 200 of their sepoys who were killed because they refused to join Mir Qasim’s ranks, and who were being kept in various places under guard by the local military chiefs.
Only one man spoke out against the proposed alliance – the young Persian cavalry officer, Mirza Najaf Khan, who was the only one of Mir Qasim’s commanders to have acquitted himself with honour on the campaign.
Shuja was a man’s man: impulsive and forthright, he had the capacity – notably rare in eighteenth-century India – to inspire loyalty in his followers.
Observers estimated that an unprecedented host, over 150,000-strong, had now gathered from across the Mughal Empire. On one side there were the remnants of Mir Qasim’s New Army under the leadership of Sumru, whose reputation for cold-blooded ruthlessness had been greatly enhanced by the Patna Massacre. Next to these, ranged along the riverbank, were the magnificent scarlet tents of Shah Alam’s Turani Mughal cavalry. Shuja’s forces were even more diverse. There were contingents of Persian Qizilbash cavalry in their red felt hats, and 3,000 pigeon-coated and long-booted Afghan Rohillas, who had
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Shuja, convinced that a great victory was imminent, wrote to Calcutta as the vizier of the Emperor, with an ultimatum to the EIC. In his letter he cast the Company as ungrateful aliens – unruly and disobedient rebels against the legitimate Mughal order who had usurped ‘different parts of the royal dominions … Hand over all the territory in your possession,’ he demanded, ‘and cease to interfere with the government of the country.
He had only 19,000 troops – the largest army the Company had yet fielded, but one that was dwarfed by the huge host of 150,000 who were now heading fast towards him.
Carnac had faced a wave of mutinies among his exhausted sepoys; but as they closed in on Patna, the cracks within the Mughal forces became apparent, too.
It was the Naga sadhus, ‘naked before and behind’, who bore the brunt of the fire. They were mown down in their hundreds, but high on their bhang (hash-ish), wave after wave kept running on towards the English entrenchments, regardless of the danger.
The siege of Patna continued for another three weeks, through the intense heat of May. Surprised at the scale of the bloodshed and the savagery of the fighting they had just witnessed, both sides initially kept to their lines. If the battle had been inconclusive, so now was the siege.
rather than drilling his troops and actively preparing for the coming campaign, Shuja instead ‘sank again into a circle of entertainments, pleasures, and amusements, without once bestowing a thought on the necessary quantity of [cannon] balls, or their quality, or that of the powder; and without consulting anyone about the methods of fighting the enemy. He even declined listening to the requests of one of the officers of the artillery who wanted necessaries for their office.
In the space of a few months, Mir Qasim had transformed from being one of the richest and most powerful rulers in India to become Shuja’s shackled and penniless prisoner.
Reinforcements of Company sepoys and a single King’s regiment had arrived fresh from Calcutta, commanded by one of the most effective British officers in India, a dashing, cool-headed but utterly ruthless 38-year-old Scottish Highlander named Major Hector Munro.
That night, Shuja sent his women and treasure back to his capital of Faizabad under guard, while his troops slept under arms, alert for the sort of night attack for which the Company was now feared. But no such attack materialised.
So it was that Shuja ordered an advance out of his strong defensive position, to the surprise of Munro, who initially did not believe his runners’ reports: he could not understand why Shuja would throw away such an immense defensive advantage.
By nine o’clock, the two armies were lined up facing each other, with a marsh between them, and the wide, flat expanse of the Ganges flanking the Mughal left wing.
once the Mughal cavalry had broken through, they carried on into the Company camp, where they put to flight the irregular cavalry guarding the baggage, the treasure and the ammunition. Then they promptly dismounted and began to loot. Thereafter they were lost to Shuja’s control and played no further part in the battle.
Munro liked to remind his troops that ‘regular discipline and strict obedience to orders is the only superiority that Europeans possess in this country’, and the events that day proved him right.58 Despite the loss of their baggage and ammunition, Munro’s sepoys grimly held their squares, even while suffering unprecedented casualties from the concentrated artillery fire aimed at them from Madec and Sumru’s heavy guns.
Munro galloped down his line, braving the volleys of shot aimed at him by the Mughal guns, waving his hat and ordering a general advance. ‘By this bravura act of desperation,’ wrote Gentil, ‘Munro became master of the same battlefield which he believed he had been forced to abandon only a few moments earlier.’
As the Mughal lines dissolved around him, it was the Naga chieftain Anupgiri, though himself badly wounded in the thigh, who persuaded Shuja ud-Daula to escape: ‘This is not the moment for an unprofitable death!’ he said. ‘We will easily win and take revenge another day.’
As soon as Shuja, Sumru and he had all crossed it, the Naga leader ordered it to be destroyed behind him. This stopped the Company’s advance, but also doomed those of his troops who had failed to make it across – notably the brave Naga rearguard.
Buxar was a short and confused battle, but a bloody one: Company forces lost 850 killed, wounded or missing, of the 7,000 men they brought to the field – more than an eighth of their total; Mughal losses were many times higher, perhaps as many as 5,000 dead.
The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India.
The Company, which had started off as an enterprise dominated by privateers and former Caribbean pirates, had already transformed itself once into a relatively respectable international trading corporation, with a share price so reliable its stock was regarded almost as a form of international currency. Now the Company was transformed a second time, not just as a vehicle of trade operating from a scattering of Indian coastal enclaves, but as the ruler of a rich and expansive territorial empire extending across South Asia.
A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: ‘Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.’
The Company had gambled everything – and won. The Mughal Empire now lay at its feet, comprehensively defeated, and the stage was set for the most extraordinary corporate takeover in history.
In the course of the headlong flight from Buxar, Mir Qasim was freed by Shuja from his imprisonment. But stripped of both his power and his fortune, and hunted by the unforgiving Company for his part in the Patna Massacre, this most capable of rulers never again found a place for himself in the kaleidoscope of eighteenth-century Mughal politics.
Shuja ud-Daula, characteristically, opted for the path of military resistance. As Munro’s Company battalions marched deeper into Avadh, he fought a string of mounted guerrilla raids against his pursuers, but was gradually pushed further and further into the margins, shedding his followers, while Major, now General Carnac appropriated Shuja’s Faizabad mansion as his personal residence.
Assured of his life and liberty, Shuja eventually gave himself up. He arrived out of the blue in Munro’s camp, sitting in his outsized palanquin with an escort of only 200 horsemen.
The Emperor Shah Alam, meanwhile, did his best to patch up relations with the Company, with whom he had been in secret correspondence throughout the Buxar campaign. From his point of view, Buxar was a battle fought between three of his servants, all of whom had sworn fealty to the Mughal throne, and was therefore a conflict in which he must remain neutral.
The Emperor wanted the Company to know that Shuja was not his friend, even threatening that if the vizier and the British were to come to terms, ‘I will go to Delhi, for I cannot think of returning again into the Hands of a Man who has used me so ill.’76 Munro, meanwhile, was well aware what a puppet Shah Alam could give to the Company’s expansionist ambitions in terms of a Mughal seal of legitimacy:
There was talk of defeats, mounting military expenses and financial chaos, which in turn produced a panic among investors and a run on the stock market. The Company’s share price quickly fell 14 per cent.
He left his wife and children at the quayside, and was accompanied instead by a French chef, a band of four musicians and twelve dozen chests of champagne.
When the Kent docked at Madras in April 1765, news was immediately brought on board of Munro’s victory at Buxar, the occupation of Avadh and the death of the recently restored Mir Jafar. Aware of the positive effect this would have on the Company’s share price, Clive’s first action was to write secretly in cipher to his agent in London to mortgage all his property and to buy as many Company shares as possible.
His first appointment was with Shuja ud-Daula. Clive appreciated the logic of the solution Gentil had first proposed: that rather than taking the whole of Avadh directly under Company administration, a much wiser course would be instead to reinstate a grateful Shuja as the Company’s puppet-dependant and milk him of his resources, while nominally taking him under protection.
He decided that a small portion of Shuja’s former dominions around Allahabad and Kora would be turned over to support Shah Alam as an imperial demesne. Vague promises would be made about supporting the Emperor’s long-dreamed-of return to Delhi, while taking in return the offer of financially managing the three rich eastern provinces of the Emperor dominions – Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This was the granting of what in Mughal legalese was known as the Diwani – the office of economic management of Mughal provinces.
This not only gave a veneer of Mughal legitimacy for the Company’s conquests, it also potentially gave the EIC the right to tax 20 million people, and generate an estimated revenue of between £2 million and £3 million a year* – a massive windfall by eighteenth-century standards.
The vast revenues of Bengal, which had for so long powered the Mughal exchequer, could, Clive knew, make the Company as unassailable as the Mughals had once been – and provide the finance for perhaps, one day, conquering the rest of the country.
with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India.
Even though the Company’s military power was now placed within a ritualised Mughal framework, the radical change on the ground brought about by what the Company referred to as the Treaty of Allahabad was immediately apparent. As the Riyazu-s-salatin noted shortly afterwards: ‘The English have now acquired dominion over the three subahs [provinces] and have appointed their own district officers, they make assessments and collections of revenue, administer justice, appoint and dismiss collectors and perform other functions of governance.
