The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

His imprudence was so great that, in the middle of a military expedition, he would set daggers in the hearts of his bravest and ablest commanders by his harsh language, and his choleric disposition. Such usage naturally rendered them regardless, and utterly neglectful … In time he became as hated as Pharaoh. People on meeting him by chance used to say, God save us from him!

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.

In the early days of his rule, when he wished to arm and equip a force to take on his cousin in Purnea, Siraj ordered the bankers to provide Rs30,000,000;* when Mahtab Rai said it was impossible, Siraj struck him.

Yet for all this, Siraj had a strange hold on his grandfather. The old man had had no sons of his own, only three daughters, and after the death from smallpox of his only other grandson, Siraj’s elder brother, all his hopes rested on the survivor.

He told the new Nawab that Drake had had him seized and expelled from the city without so much as an audience. ‘“What honour is left to us,” he asked, “when a few traders, who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms, reply to a ruler’s order by expelling the envoy?” Siraj ud-Daula, on hearing such words, with a vast force, turned back and in one night’s march came and alighted at the back of the English factory at Kasimbazar.’

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.

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.

Hobesss!!!!!

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. He was only twelve when Nader Shah rode into Delhi and looted the Mughals of almost all their treasures; and he grew up constantly aware of what his dynasty had lost to the Persians, Afghans and Marathas, and the urgent need to rebuild.

Following a court conspiracy against him, the Vizier Safdar Jung, Nawab of Avadh, had battled it out in the streets of Delhi with his former protégé, the sixteen-year-old Imad ul-Mulk, the teenage megalomaniac grandson of Nizam ul-Mulk. The civil war between the old vizier and his teenage replacement raged across the suburbs of the city for six months, from March to November, with the old and new cities of Delhi held by rival factions. The fighting reduced the space between them to ruins.

Having successfully conspired to bring down his first benefactor, Safdar Jung, at the tender age of sixteen, at seventeen Imad ul-Mulk decided to depose his other great patron, the Emperor himself.

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.

The prince slowly returned to Delhi, anxiously considering his options, stopping to camp at several Mughal gardens on the way and making a pilgrimage to pray at his favourite shrine in Mehrauli. Several friends at court had ridden out to Haryana to warn him to be very careful, telling him that he was walking into a trap.

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.

What was at first just a trickle grew into a torrent and then a flood; before long the prince found himself being supported by many old Mughal families whose fortunes had been wrecked by half a century of civil war. According to Ghulam Hussain Khan, within a few months of his leaving Delhi nearly 30,000 troops had rallied to his standard. Among these was Ghulam Hussain’s own father, whom the queen, Zinat Mahal, Shah Alam’s mother, had secretly sent from the Red Fort to act as his adviser: ‘The Prince had with him several persons of character and distinction, all attached to his fortune; but all in as much distress as their master.’

Clearly a blind, mad man, not well-versed in history, power, politics would keep on going down the route aurengzeb went on. Clearly the more force Aurangzeb devoted, the more the solution eluded him. The easier route in this case for him would have been for him to just chill and enjoy the empire created by his forefathers. Instead he decided to use force to implement “his vision” which ended up setting up a hegelian dialectic of events which spiraled out of his control Life is like the butterfly effect, it is inter-connected, each action is meant to have an opposite reaction. One should not go against the way of the Tao, but embrace it and use it to ones benefit

Colonel Minchin,

That evening, having ‘swept the town of Calcutta with the broom of plunder’, Siraj ud-Daula was brought in his litter to visit his new possession.18 He held a durbar in the centre of the Fort where he announced that Calcutta was to be renamed Alinagar, after Imam Ali – appropriately for a prominent city in a Shia-ruled province. He then appointed one of his Hindu courtiers, Raja Manikchand, to be the Fort Keeper of Alinagar and 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.

Whatever the accurate figures, the event generated howls of righteous indignation for several generations among the British in India and 150 years later was still being taught in British schools as demonstrative of the essential barbarity of Indians and illustrative of why British rule was supposedly both necessary and justified. 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. The Company had just lost its most lucrative trading station, and that, rather than the fate of its feckless garrison, was what really worried the Company authorities.

News of the fall of Kasimbazar, and a first request for military assistance, reached Madras on 14 July. It was a full month later, on 16 August, that the news of Siraj ud-Daula’s successful attack on Fort William finally arrived. 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.

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. He forcefully, and ultimately successfully, argued for a more aggressive course of action, eventually winning over the other Council members, and persuading Watson to come with him, along with all four of his battleships and a frigate.

Clive wrote to Raja Manikchand, the new Fort Keeper of Alinagar-Calcutta. He announced that he had come with a force of unprecedented size – ‘a larger military force than has ever appeared in Bengal’ and that ‘we are come to demand satisfaction’. But 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’.

Towards sunset, as they drew near the Fort, Raja Manikchand sprung an ambush, appearing suddenly out of the jungle, attacking from an unexpected direction and achieving complete surprise. The confused skirmish lasted an hour, with high casualties on both sides.

On 3 January, Clive declared war on Siraj ud-Daula in the name of the Company; Watson did the same in the name of the Crown. It was the first time that the EIC had ever formally declared war on an Indian prince:

Two weeks later, on the 23rd, having gathered together another enormous army 60,000-strong, Siraj ud-Daula again descended on Calcutta. As before, he moved at speed. On 4 February, Clive was surprised by the news that Siraj and his forces were already camping in a pleasure garden on the northern outskirts of Calcutta, just to the north of the walls.

By 11 a.m., Clive’s force had returned dispirited to the city, having lost nearly 150 men, including both Clive’s aide-de-camp and his secretary, both of whom were killed by his side: ‘It was the warmest service I ever yet was engaged in,’ Clive wrote to this father, ‘and the attack failed in its main object’ – capturing or killing the Nawab.43 Clive was unsure whether the manoeuvre had been a success or a failure, but suspected the latter. Their guides had got lost in the fog and they had narrowly failed to attack the royal enclosure, shooting wildly into the gloom, unclear if they were hitting or missing their targets.

Quite unknown to Clive at the time, his night attack was in fact a decisive turning point. Terrified by the unexpected nature of the assault, Siraj struck camp and retreated ten miles that morning. The following day he sent an ambassador with proposals for peace. Even before the night attack, he had been aware of the damage done to the Bengal economy by the destruction of Calcutta, and he was prepared to be a little generous.

But on 9 February he signed the Treaty of Alinagar, which granted almost all the Company’s main demands, restoring all the existing English privileges and freeing all English goods of taxes, as well as allowing the Company to keep their fortifications and establish a mint. His only insistence was that Drake be removed – ‘Tell Roger Drake’ not to ‘disturb our affairs’ – something the Company was more than happy to grant.45

For his part, however, Watson reported to the Crown, not the Company, and for him things had just become a great deal more complicated.47 A few days earlier, he had been officially notified of the outbreak of what future generations would call the Seven Years War. Around the world, from Quebec to the Senegal River, from Ohio to Hanover, Minorca to Cuba, hostilities were now finally breaking out between Britain and France in every imperial theatre. Watson’s instructions arrived in a packet from London, with an official copy of the declaration of war and a letter from the Admiralty directing ‘all officers under the King to distress the enemy as far as it is in their power’.48

On 8 March, Clive began his march at the head of a small army which had now swelled to 2,700. He took his time, taking three days to cover the twenty miles separating the two rival trading stations.

Early on the morning of 23 March, Clive stormed and took the principal French battery commanding the river. From that point on, Admiral Watson took over and it was to sea power, not Clive’s land forces, that most casualties fell.

While the battle was taking place, Siraj ud-Daula remained in an agony of indecision: wishing to help the French against the British, but not daring to give the Company any excuse to break their treaty with him.

Only now that Clive had demonstrated his military capacity in taking back Calcutta, then seizing Chandernagar, did the plotters decide to reach out to the Company as a third option, hoping to harness the EIC’s military forces for their own ends. William Watts, who had just returned to the looted English factory of Kasimbazar under the terms of the Treaty of Alinagar, was the first to hear these murmurs of discontent.

Watts passed on the offer to Clive, who was still encamped outside Chandernagar and who had also, quite independently, begun to hear rumblings about a possible palace revolution.

The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.

The Secret Committee then began to haggle over their terms of service, again using Khwaja Petrus as the intermediary for their coded correspondence. Before long, Mir Jafar and the Jagat Seths had significantly raised their offer, and were now promising the participants Rs28 million, or £3 million sterling – the entire annual revenue of Bengal – for their help overthrowing Siraj, and a further Rs110,000 a month to pay for Company troops. In addition, the EIC was to get zamindari – landholding – rights near Calcutta, a mint in the town and confirmation of duty-free trade. By 19 May, in addition to this offer, Mir Jafar conceded to pay the EIC a further enormous sum – £1 million* – as compensation for the loss of Calcutta and another half a million as compensation to its European inhabitants.62

On 13 June 1757, a year to the day since Siraj had begun his attack on Calcutta, Clive sent an ultimatum to Siraj ud-Daula accusing him of breaking the terms of the Treaty of Alinagar. That same day, with a small army of 800 Europeans, 2,200 south Indian sepoys and only eight cannon, he began the historic march towards Plassey.

But the following morning, having reread Mir Jafar’s letter, Clive again grew increasingly convinced he was walking into a trap, and wrote angrily to his self-professed ally: ‘It gives me great concern that in an affair of so much consequence, to yourself in particular, that you do not exert yourself more.’

Clive had been due to enter the city on the 27th, but was warned by the Jagat Seths that an assassination plot was being planned. So it was only on 29 June that Clive was finally escorted into Murshidabad by Mir Jafar. Preceded by music, drums and colours, and escorted by a guard of 500 soldiers, they entered together as conquerors. Mir Jafar was handed by Clive onto the masnad, the throne platform, and saluted by him as Governor. He then stated publicly, and possibly sincerely, that the Company would not interfere with his government, but ‘attend solely to commerce’.83 The elderly general ‘took quiet possession of the Palace and Treasures and was immediately acknowledged Nabob’.

The pair then went straight to pay their respects to the man who had put both where they were now: Mahtab Rai Jagat Seth. ‘I had a great deal of conversation’ with the great banker, Clive recorded, ‘As he is a person of the greatest property and influence in the three subas [provinces – Bengal, Orissa and Bihar] and of no inconsiderable weight at the Mughal court, it was natural to determine on him as the properest person to settle the affairs of that government. Accordingly, when the new Nawab returned my visit this morning, I recommended him to consult Jagat Seth on all occasions, which he readily assented to.’84

Siraj ud-Daula was only twenty-five years old. Shortly afterwards, Miran wiped out all the women of the house of Aliverdi Khan: ‘Around seventy innocent Begums were rowed out to a lonely place into the centre of the Hooghly and their boat sunk.’ The rest were poisoned.

The same day that the remains of Siraj ud-Daula were paraded through the streets, 7 July, exactly 200 days since the task force had set off up the Hughli to Fulta, Clive finally got his hands on his money. It was one of the largest corporate windfalls in history – in modern terms around £232 million, of which £22 million was reserved for Clive. He immediately despatched his winnings downstream to Calcutta.

Clive’s winnings in 1757 was a story of personal enrichment very much in the spirit of the Caribbean privateers who had first founded the Company 157 years earlier: it was all about private fortunes for the officers and dividends for the Company, about treasure rather than glory, plunder rather than power.

Clive wrote to his father as he escorted his loot down the Bhagirathi, telling him that he had brought about ‘a Revolution scarcely to be parallel’d in History’.89 It was a characteristically immodest claim; but he was not far wrong. The changes he had effected were permanent and profound. This was the moment a commercial corporation first acquired real and tangible political power.

It was at Plassey that the Company had triumphantly asserted itself as a strong military force within the Mughal Empire. The Marathas who had terrorised and looted Bengal in the 1740s were remembered as cruel and violent. The Company’s plunder of the same region a decade later was more orderly and methodical, but its greed was arguably deadlier because it was more skilful and relentless and, above all, more permanent.

It initiated a period of unbounded looting and asset-stripping by the Company which the British themselves described as ‘the shaking of the pagoda tree’.92 From this point, the nature of British trade changed: £6 million** had been sent out in the first half of the century, but very little silver bullion was sent out after 1757. Bengal, the sink into which foreign bullion disappeared before 1757, became, after Plassey, the treasure trove from which vast amounts of wealth were drained without any prospect of return.

Bengal had always produced the biggest and most easily collected revenue surplus in the Mughal Empire. Plassey allowed the EIC to begin seizing much of that surplus – a piece of financial happenchance that would provide for the Company the resources it would need to defeat a succession of rivals until they finally seized the Mughal capital of Delhi itself in 1803. The Company was now no longer simply one of a number of European trading companies competing for Indian markets and products. Rather, it found that it had become a kingmaker and an autonomous power in its own right. It was not just that the East India Company had assisted in a palace coup for which it had been very well paid. With this victory, the whole balance of power in India had now shifted.

The British had become the dominant military and political force in Bengal. They now suspected that if they grew their army sufficiently they could probably seize any part of the country they took a fancy to, and rule it either directly or through a pliant puppet. Moreover, many Indians were beginning to understand this, too, meaning that the Company would become the focus for the attentions of all the dethroned, dispossessed and dissatisfied rulers, leading to a kaleidoscope of perpetually ref...

From now on there would be a slow drift to the Company of troopers, merchants, bankers and civil servants, leaving the Nawabs with nothing more than the shadow of their former grandeur. Clive and his colleagues had intended to do little more than re-establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a more friendly Nawab. But what they had in fact done was fatally and permanently to undermine the authority of the Nawabs, bringing chaos to what had been up to that point the most peaceful and profitable part of the old Mughal Empire.

After Plassey, unregulated private English traders began fanning out across Bengal, taking over markets and asserting their authority in a way that had been impossible for them before the Revolution. By 1762, at least thirty-three of these private businesses had set themselves up in more than 400 new British trading posts around the province. Here they defied the power of local officials, refusing to pay the few taxes, tolls or customs duties they were still required to pay, as well as encroaching upon land to which they were not entitled. In this manner they ate away at the economy of Bengal like an invasion of termites steadily gnawing at the inside of an apparently sturdy wooden structure.16