The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

In November 1784, Scindia met Shah Alam at Kanua near Fatehpur Sikri. Scindia again prostrated himself, placing his head on the Emperor’s feet and paying him 101 gold mohurs, so taking up the office of Vakil-i-Mutlaq vacated by Mirza Najaf’s death.

The Maratha general, after all, had his own priorities, and protecting the Emperor had never been one of them. Visitors reported the imperial family occasionally going hungry, as no provision had been made to supply them with food.

In mid-July 1788, Ghulam Qadir finally put his words into action. He saddled up and rode out with a Rohilla army towards Delhi, determined to avenge his father, take his retribution on the Emperor and make his former captors pay for what they had done to him and to his people.

Malika-i-Zamani Begum,

Najib ud-Daula.

Bedar Bakht.

Anupgiri Gossain,

Qudsia...

Mansur Ali Khan,

The soldiers of Najaf Khan’s Red Platoon were still eager to fight. In the Diwan-i-Khas throne room, Shah Alam’s favourite son, Prince Akbar, gathered the other young Mughal shahzadas and asked for permission to engage: ‘One choice is yet left,’ he said. ‘If you will allow us, we brothers will fall upon these traitors, and will bravely encounter martyrdom.’ But the Emperor shook his head: ‘No one can escape the decrees of the Almighty,’ he said. ‘There is no contending against doom. The power is now in the hands of others.’

George Thomas,

Rana Khan,

Benoît de Boigne,

The sight of the Emperor was even more traumatic. He had somehow managed to barricade himself into his prison cell and had to be cajoled out by Rana Khan.131 He initially refused all treatment. When a surgeon was sent to dress his wounds, he ‘turned out the surgeon, and flung the ointment for his eyes on the ground, saying “many of my children and grandchildren have already died of hunger and thirst, and now we are also waiting for death.”’132

Charles James Fox.

Sarah Siddons,

Joshua Re...

Fanny ...

Edward G...

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Edmund Burke,

Charles James Fox.

The Company in India does not exist as a Nation. Nobody can go there that does not go in its service … They are a Nation of Placemen. They are a Republic, a Commonwealth, without a people … The consequence of which is that there are no people to control, to watch, to balance against the power of office … Out of this has issued a species of abuse, at the head of which Mr Hastings has put himself against the authority of the East India Company at home and every authority in the Country … He has corrupted his hands and sullied his government with bribes. He has used oppression and tyranny in place of legal government; and instead of endeavouring to find honest, honourable and adequate rewards for the persons who served the public, he has left them to prey upon it without the slightest degree of control.

Burke’s opening speech alone took four days. In it he alleged widespread use of torture by the Company in its ruthless search for plunder, and he accused Hastings of ‘geographical morality … as if when you have crossed the equatorial line all the virtues die’.

Company rule, he continued, had done nothing for India, except to asset-strip it: ‘Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost to India for ever.

In May 1787, after five years of obsessive campaigning to blacken Hastings’ name and reputation, Burke and Francis persuaded Parliament that there was enough evidence to impeach him. On the 21st, the recently returned Hastings was taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-Arms, who passed him on to Black Rod. He was then made to kneel at the bar of the Lords, bow his head and hear the charges against him.

Hastings was certainly no angel; and the EIC under his rule was as extractive as ever. After Francis’s departure, Hastings began to take a more old-fashioned, pseudo-monarchical and even despotic idea of his powers, something Burke particularly disliked.

Asaf ud-Daula,

Chait Singh,

Nandakumar,

All of these were potentially grave charges. But Hastings was nevertheless by far the most responsible and sympathetic of all the officials the Company had yet sent to India. From his early twenties, his letters had been full of outrage at the unprincipled way Company officials were exploiting India and mistreating Indians.

Nor did he even look the part: far from being an ostentatious and loud-mouthed new-rich ‘Nabob’, Hastings was a dignified, intellectual and somewhat austere figure.

As a result of Francis’s influence, the Articles of Impeachment were full of demonstrable fantasies and distortions, which traded on the ignorance of the audience about the issues and personalities involved.

If anything, the Impeachment demonstrated above all the sheer ignorance of the British about the subcontinent they had been looting so comprehensively, and profitably, for thirty years.

Few were surprised when, after seven years, on 23 April 1795, Hastings was ultimately cleared of all charges. But it scarred the final decades of his life,

The trial, however misconceived and misdirected, did have one useful outcome: to demonstrate that the Company’s many misdeeds were answerable to Parliament, and it helped publicise the corruption, violence and venality of the EIC, so setting the stage for further governmental oversight, regulation and control. This was a process which had already begun with the 1773 Regulating Act and had been further enhanced by Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which made the Company’s political and military transactions subject to government supervision.

Amid all the spectacle of Hastings’ trial, it made sense that the man sent out to replace him was chosen by Parliament specifically for his incorruptibility. General Lord Charles Cornwallis had surrendered the thirteen American Colonies of the British Empire over to George Washington, who then declared it a free and independent nation. Cornwallis’s mission was now to make sure that the same never happened in India.

On arrival in Calcutta in August 1786, Cornwallis inherited a far more flourishing Bengal than the famine-wrecked dustbowl which had greeted Hastings fourteen years earlier.

The city was prosperous and fast growing. All it lacked was proper planning regulations: ‘It is not without astonishment and some irritation that a stranger looks at the city of Calcutta,’ wrote the Comte de Modave. ‘It would have been so easy to turn it into one of the most beautiful cities in the world, by just following a regular planned layout; one cannot fathom why the English failed to take advantage of such a fine location, allowing everyone the freedom to build in the most bizarre taste, with the most outlandish planning.

Nor was it just the British who did well out of this new boom or who lived extravagantly: Bengali merchant and money-lending dynasties also flourished.

The finances of Bengal were in fact in a healthier state than they had been since the time of the Aliverdi Khan in the 1740s and 1750s: by the end of the decade, Cornwallis was able to report back to London that revenues exceeded expenditure by £2 million.

It was not just agriculture and land revenues which had turned around. Trade was flourishing, too.

By 1795, tea sales had doubled in less than a decade to 20 million pounds (9,000 tons); one former director of the EIC wrote that it was as if tea had become ‘the food of the whole people of Great Britain’.29 The only thing holding back further growth was the question of supply: ‘the demand for Bengal goods exceed double the quantity that can be procured,’ Cornwallis reported back to London.

All this meant that the Company state was able to keep building its army and apportion over £3 million annually to military expenditure, a sum no other South Asian power could possibly match.

The Company also had the pick of the best candidates in the military labour market since it paid its sepoys significantly more, and more regularly, than anyone else: Bengal army sepoys classed as ‘gentlemen troopers’ earned around Rs300 a year, while their equivalents in Mysore earned annually only Rs192 (four times the Rs48 Tipu paid an ordinary soldier); those in Avadh earned annually as little as Rs80.*33 As Burton Stein nicely put it: ‘The colonial conquest of India was as much bought as fought.’34

These sepoys were in turn supported by a sophisticated war machine, run out of the armouries of Fort William and the arms factories of Dumdum. When in 1787 the Hyderabadi minister Mir Alam spent several months in Calcutta he was amazed at the scale of the Company’s Calcutta military establishments. He was particularly impressed by the arsenals he saw in Fort William:

Forty years earlier, in 1750, the Company had been a trading corporation with a small security force and a few crumbling forts; by 1790 it had effectively transformed its Indian holdings into a tightly run fiscal-military state guarded by the most powerful army in Asia.

In 1783, Haidar Ali of Mysore had died of a suppurating tumour ‘the size of a dinner plate’ on his back. His son Tipu moved quickly to take over his father’s throne.

The Governor of Madras called Tipu ‘the youthful and spirited heir of Haidar, without the odium of his father’s vices or his tyranny’.36 According to one British observer, Tipu, now thirty-three, was ‘about 5ft 7ins in height, uncommonly well-made, except in the neck, which was short, his leg, ankle and foot beautifully proportioned, his arms large and muscular, with the appearance of great strength, but his hands rather too fine and delicate for a soldier … He was remarkably fair for a Mussulman in India, thin, delicately made, with an interesting, mild countenance, of which large animated black eyes were the most conspicuous feature.’

He suggested that Tipu’s best chance of doing this lay in dividing and ruling: ‘The resources of Hindustan do not suffice to expel the English from the lands they have invaded. Put the nations of Europe one against the other.