The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

The monsoon of 1768 brought only the lightest of rains to north-east India. Then the following summer, 1769, no rain fell at all. Instead, the intense heat continued unabated, the rivers dwindled, the tanks dried and the pukhurs – the fish ponds at the centre of every Bengali village – turned first to sticky mud, then to dry earth, then to dust. The Company officials dotted around rural Bengal watched the deepening drought with concern, realising the effect it would have on their revenues: the rice lands had ‘so harden’d for want of water that the ryotts [farmers] have found difficulty in ploughing and preparing it for the next crop,’ wrote one, and the fields of rice, ‘parched by the heat of the sun are become like fields of straw’.1 The price of rice rose steadily, week by week, until it had multiplied five times. By October, as drought began to turn to famine, ‘great dearth and scarcity’ was reported at Murshidabad.2 By November, the farmers were stated ‘to be totally incapacitated to cultivate the valuable crops of Cotton and Mulberries … which usually succeed the rich rice harvest’.3 A month later, Mohammad Reza Khan, who now ran the Murshidabad administration, reported to Calcutta that things were so desperate that the hungry labourers had begun to ‘sell their children to raise money, much less do they spare their effects and cattle. The plough consequently stands still, and numbers of them desert their homes.’4 The first to go hungry were the landless ‘labourers, th...