So began a period of intense political conflict and governmental paralysis in Bengal, generating what Ghulam Hussain Khan, who was baffled by the Company’s methods of decision-making, called ‘an infinity of disturbances and confusions which perpetually impeded the wheels of government’. There was no ‘head over them all, with full power and authority’. Instead, authority was invested with the Council – ‘what the English call a committee, four or five men … that are perpetually at variance with each other, and perpetually in suspense about their own staying, and their being succeeded by
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