The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

Hastings was now the rising star of the East India Company’s Bengal administration. He had never known either of his parents: his mother had died in childbirth, and his father disappeared to Barbados soon after, where he first remarried, then promptly died. Warren was brought up by his grandfather and educated in a charity school with the poorest children in the Gloucestershire village of Daylesford. At some point he was rescued by an uncle who sent him to London to be educated at Westminster, where he is said to have played cricket with Edward Gibbon, the future historian of Roman decline and fall.*

Battle of Helsa,

Monsieur Law de Lauriston,

But Mir Jafar had a son-in-law, Mir Qasim, as different a man as could be imagined from his chaotic and uneducated father-in-law. Of noble Persian extraction, though born on his father’s estates near Patna, Mir Qasim was small in frame, with little military experience, but young, capable, intelligent and, above all, determined.58

Mir Qasim was duly sent down to Calcutta to meet the new Governor, Henry Vansittart. During the interview he came up with a sophisticated scheme both to solve the Company’s financial problems and to repay the Murshidabad debt, by ceding to the Company Burdwan, Midnapur and Chittagong – sufficient territories to pay for the upkeep of both armies. Vansittart was impressed, and decided to back a coup, or second revolution, to put Mir Qasim on the throne in place of his father-in-law. A series of large bribes, including a cash payment of £50,000 to Vansittart personally, and £150,000* to be distributed among his council, cemented the deal.60

Walter Reinhardt, nicknamed Sumru or Sombre,

Khoja Gregory, an Isfahani Armenian

Yet it was only now, after the Company had defeated Shah Alam, and his army had largely dissolved, that the British began to understand the moral power still wielded by the Emperor. Shah Alam had lost everything – even his personal baggage, writing table and calligraphy case, which had fallen from his howdah when his elephant charged off the battlefield – and he could now offer his followers almost nothing of any practical value. And yet they continued to revere him: ‘It is inconceivable how the name of the king merely should prepossess all minds so strongly in his favour,’ wrote Carnac. ‘Yet so it is that even in his present distressed condition he is held by both Musselmans and Gentoos [Muslims and Hindus] in a kind of adoration.’

In the aftermath of his defeat, Shah Alam had also had time to revaluate his position with regard to the Company and realised that both sides had much to offer each other. After all, he had no wish to rule Bengal directly. Ever since the time Akbar made his former Rajput enemy Raja Jai Singh the commander of his army, the Mughals had always had the happy knack of turning their former enemies into useful allies. Perhaps now, Shah Alam seems to have wondered, he could use the British in the same way Akbar used the Rajputs to effect his ends? In the eyes of most Indians the Company lacked any legal right to rule. It was in Shah Alam’s power to grant them the legitimacy they needed. Maybe an alliance could be formed, and British arms could carry him back to Delhi, remove the usurper, Imad ul-Mulk, and restore him to his rightful throne?

So it was that Mir Qasim finally met his Emperor, the Refuge of the World, sitting on a makeshift throne, within an East India Company opium factory. After some courtly haggling behind the scenes, a deal had been fixed. Mir Qasim duly bowed three times, offering the Emperor his obedience, and made a formal nazar [offering] of 1,001 gold coins, ‘and a number of trays covered with precious and curious stuffs for apparel, to which he added a quantity of jewels and other costly articles. The Emperor accepted his homage, and honoured him with a chaplet of pearls, and an aigrette of jewels, adorned with black eagle’s feathers.’

Both sides had reason to be happy with the unexpected way events had been resolved. Shah Alam in particular found himself richer than he had ever been, with a steady flow of income that he could only have dreamed of a few weeks earlier. Only in one thing was he disappointed: Shah Alam wanted his useful new ally, the Company, to send a regiment of sepoys immediately, to install him back on his throne in Delhi.

Three months later, seeing that he was making no progress with his plan to return home to the Red Fort, an impatient Shah Alam announced his departure. His next port of call, he said, would be Avadh. There he hoped the rich and powerful Nawab Shuja ud-Daula would be more pliable.

Major Carnac escorted him to the banks of the Karmanasa with full military honours. The Emperor crossed back into Avadh on 21 June, where he was greeted by Nawab Shuja ud-Daula, whom he formally appointed Vizier of the Mughal Empire. But Shuja, like the British, warned the Emperor about returning to Delhi while the Afghans were still occupying the city.

Over the next two years, 1761–2, relations between the two rival governments of Bengal became openly hostile. The cause of the steady deterioration was the violent and rapacious way private Company traders increasingly abused their privileges to penetrate the Bengali economy and undermine Mir Qasim’s rule.

In April, Vansittart sent Hastings upriver to Monghyr and Patna in an attempt to defuse the growing crisis and restore harmony. On the way, Hastings wrote a series of letters, at once waxing lyrical about the beauty of Bengal, and expressing his horror at the way the Company was responsible for raping and looting it. On arrival in Monghyr, where ducks clustered on the marshes amid ‘beautiful prospects’, he wrote with eloquence and feeling of ‘the oppression carried out under the sanction of the English name’ which he had observed in his travels. ‘This evil I am well assured is not confined to our dependants alone, but is practised all over the country by people assuming the habit of our sepoys or calling themselves our managers …’ A party of sepoys who were on the march before us, afforded sufficient proof of the rapacious and insolent spirit of those people when they are left to their own discretion. Many complaints against them were made to me on the road; and most of the petty towns and serais were deserted at our approach, and the shops shut up, from apprehensions of the same treatment from us … Every man who wears a hat, as soon as he gets free from Calcutta becomes a sovereign prince … Were I to suppose myself the Nabob I should be at a loss in what manner to protect my own subjects or servants from insult.

In December 1762, just as Amyatt was about to leave Calcutta, Mir Qasim made a deft political move. After putting up with Ellis’s violence and aggression for two years, the Nawab finally concluded it was time to fight back and resist the encroachments of the Company. He decided to make a stand.

Realising his officials were only rarely successful in forcing armed Company outposts to pay the due taxes and customs duties, he abolished such duties altogether, across his realm, ‘declaring that so long as he failed to levy duties from the rich, he would hold back his hand from doing so in the case of the poor’.92 In this way he deprived the English of their unfair advantage over local traders, even if it meant enormous losses for him personally, and for the solvency of his government.

This was the moment that Ellis decided to hatch a plan to seize Patna by force. He had long regarded Hastings and Vansittart as weak and supine in the face of what he called Mir Qasim’s ‘pretensions’. Now he decided to take matters into his own hands. But Mir Qasim’s intelligence service had managed to place spies with the Patna factory, and the Nawab soon came to hear some details of what Ellis was planning.

His response was to write a last letter to his former patrons, Hastings and Vansittart: ‘Mr Ellis has proceeded to such lengths as to prepare ladders and platforms in order to take the fort at Patna; now you may take whatever measures you think best for the interest of the Company and your own.’96 Then he sent the Wolf to mobilise his troops.

By this stage, Ellis had at his command 300 Europeans and 2,500 sepoys. On 23 June, the anniversary of Plassey, Surgeon Anderson of the Patna factory wrote in his diary, ‘The gentlemen of the factory learned that a strong detachment of [the Wolf’s] horse and sepoys were on the march to Patna, so that a war seemed inevitable. They tho...

The Company sepoys formed into two bodies and fanned out across the town. One group made for the city walls. There they raised their scaling ladders and shinned silently up onto the wall-walks. Quickly and noiselessly they took all the bastions, bayoneting the small parties of sleeping guards that lay draped over their weapons in each chhatri-covered turret.

The English now had the city in their hands. Their army scum – dark, low-caste sepoys from Telengana – set about plundering goods from shops, dispersing across the city, pillaging the homes of innocent citizens.

Unknown to the Company factors, however, just three miles beyond Patna, the fleeing Governor ran into a large body of reinforcements, consisting of four platoons of Mir Qasim’s New Army. These the Nawab had sent from Monghyr by forced marches under General Markar, one of his senior Armenian commanders, as soon he was alerted by his spies to the preparations for the imminent coup. ‘They marched as fast as they could,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘and taking their route by the waterside they reached the city’s Eastern gate,

The Company troops were soon heavily outnumbered, their discipline broken and their factory surrounded and besieged. As the factory was overlooked by the city walls, it was quickly found to be indefensible. Ellis soon abandoned the position and led his men out through the water gate and ‘so managed to embark in a series of barges with around three platoons of their troops, and sailed westward towards the border with Avadh’, hoping to escape into neutral territory.

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.

An outraged Mir Qasim wrote to Calcutta complaining that Ellis, ‘like a night robber, assaulted the Qila of Patna, robbed and plundered the bazaar and all the merchants and inhabitants, ravaging and slaying from morning to the afternoon … You gentlemen must answer for the injury which the Company’s affairs have suffered; and since you have cruelly and unjustly ravaged the city and destroyed its people, and plundered to the value of hundreds of thousands of rupees, it becomes the justice of the Company to make reparation for the poor, as was formerly done for Calcutta [after its sack by Siraj ud-Daula].’

But it was far too late for that. 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. Whether Mir Qasim realised it or not, all-out war was now unavoidable.

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. As careless with the state finances as ever, the old Nawab promised to reimburse the Company up to Rs5 million* for the expense of fighting his ambitious son-in-law.

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].’9 But militarily, the campaign against Mir Qasim was a slow but steady success.

Udhua Nullah.

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; for most of the officers that had any money made it a practice on the beginning of the night to gorge themselves with wine, and to pass the remainder of it in looking at the performance of dancing women, or in taking them to their beds.’11

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. ‘He seemed broke in two; he betrayed every mark of grief and affliction, and passed the whole day in the utmost despondency … He threw himself onto his bed, tossing in a torment of grief, and ceased taking advice from Gurgin Khan.’14 With few other options, he fell back on Patna, taking his prisoners with him.

In his enveloping paranoia, Mir Qasim first ordered the assassination of Gurgin Khan, the Wolf, his most loyal Armenian commander.

After that, it was the turn of Raja Ram Narain, the former Governor of Patna, who had fought so bravely against Shah Alam. Raja Ram Narain was a Kayasth, from a Hindu community who served the Mughals as administrators, and who often used to send their children for a Persianate madrasa education.

In his crazed despair, on 29 August Mir Qasim wrote one last time to Warren Hastings asking for permission ‘to return to his home and hearth with a view to proceeding finally on a pilgrimage to the holy shrines [in other words, to be allowed to retire from office and go on the Haj to Mecca]’.19

It was seven o’clock in the evening when Sumru and his platoon of armed sepoys arrived at the haveli where the British prisoners were being kept. He first called out Ellis and his deputy Lushington ‘who, being acquainted that he had private business with them, went to him, and were instantly cut down’.

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.

Shuja ud-Daula, son of the great Mughal Vizier Safdar Jung and his successor as Nawab of Avadh, was a giant of a man. Nearly seven feet tall, with oiled moustaches that projected from his face like a pair of outstretched eagle’s wings, he was a man of immense physical strength. By 1763, he was past his prime, but still reputedly strong enough to cut off the head of a buffalo with a single swing of his sword, or lift up two of his officers, one in each hand.

He had conceived as high an opinion of his own power, as he had an indifferent one of what his enemies could perform; and he thought himself more than equal to the task of conquering all the three provinces [of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa]. Indeed he had a numerous army with plenty of artillery, great and small, and all the necessary requisites for war; but no real knowledge about the means of availing himself of so much power … Yet he fancied himself a compound of all excellence … [and believed] that asking advice would detract from his own dignity, even if the advisor were an Aristotle …

But perhaps Shuja’s most feared crack troops were a large force of 6,000 dreadlocked Hindu Naga sadhus, who fought mainly on foot with clubs, swords and arrows, ash-painted but entirely naked, under their own much-feared Gossain leaders, the brothers Anupgiri and Umraogiri.

Shuja expected to be congratulated by the poet. But the grey-bearded Shaikh merely smiled and said ‘With untrained troops like yours, who mostly haven’t learned how to un-sheath their swords or handle a shield properly, who have never seen the face of war close-up on a modern battlefield, where human bodies scatter and shatter and fall with their livers blown out, you intend to confront the most experienced and disciplined army this country has ever seen? You ask my advice? I tell you it is a shameful folly, and it is hopeless to expect victory. The Firangis are past-masters at strategy … only if unity and discipline entirely collapses among them will you ever have any chance of victory.’

Within a week, by 26 March, the whole army had crossed the Ganges by the bridge of boats and was now heading in the direction of the much-contested city of Patna: ‘The army proved so very numerous that as far as the eye could see it covered the country and plains, like an inundation, and moved like the billows of the sea,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan. ‘It was not an army but a whole city in motion, and you could have found in it whatever could be had in former times in Shahjahanabad itself, whilst that fair city was the capital and eye of all Hindustan.’42

Major John Carnac,

René Madec

But, 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. Upon all those subjects he was quite careless and inattentive, spending his time instead in playing at dice, in observing the flight of his pigeons, looking at performances of his dance women, and amusing himself with pastimes of all sorts.’52

In the morning the Nawab Vizier’s army went to surround His Bengali Highness’s tents, loading up whatever they could find in the women’s quarters or store-houses. Mir Qasim now despaired, and turned fakir, seeking refuge in a pretended fit of madness. He put on a vermilion red shirt and a hat, left his throne and went to squat on a mat in the middle distance, surrounded by some of his friends, whose wits had also altogether left them, and who also wore bright parti-coloured fools’ costumes,

Four months later, on 22 October, to the beat of regimental drums, the red coats of the first battalions of Company sepoys could be seen marching along the banks of the Ganges, through a succession of mango groves, closing in on Buxar.

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. Shortly afterwards, Madec’s heavy artillery opened up, and was answered by the lighter, more mobile and faster firing cannon of the Company:

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. Shuja’s Naga and Afghan cavalry, who had been placed on the right of the Mughal line, opened the battle by swinging around the marsh, wheeling to Munro’s rear and attacking the back of the Company’s formation, where the Grenadiers were stationed.

In the end it was, as ever, the superior discipline of the Company’s troops that won them the day. 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.