The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

It was near Pune, twelve years later, in 1779, that the Company received its first major defeat since the victory at Plassey. In February, without consulting Hastings in Calcutta, the Bombay Council got itself entangled with internal Maratha politics and signed an agreement with one of the Marathas’ ousted leaders, Raghunath Rao, offering to reinstate him on the throne of Pune as regent to the young Maratha Peshwa. On 24 November, this rogue expedition, unauthorised by Calcutta, left Bombay harbour and set off towards Pune with just 2,000 sepoys, a few hundred European cavalry and artillery, and a force of 7,000 of Raghunath Rao’s Maratha cavalry. Commanding the expedition was the elderly Colonel Egerton. The second-in-command was Shah Alam’s old adversary John Carnac, who had recently taken over a senior position in the Bombay Presidency.

The reputation of the Company’s army would never be the same again. But as well as exposing the limits of the Company’s military power, the failed Pune expedition also revealed the degree to which the Company now had ambitions to reshape and interfere in the politics of the entire South Asian region. For the brilliant Maratha Prime Minister Nana Phadnavis, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, this was the moment that he realised the urgent need for the various Indian powers, whatever their differences, to pull together and form an alliance against the alien intruders, and to attack them with a united front while their leadership was still weak and divided.103 On 7 February 1780, a year after the Treaty of Wadgaon, Nana Phadnavis picked up his pen and wrote a letter to his old enemy Haidar Ali, offering to bury the hatchet if the Mysore Sultan would join forces and together make war on the Company: ‘The British,’ he wrote, ‘have grown intolerably belligerent. During these five years, their blind aggression has led them to violate solemn treaties.’

Surgeon Thomas Davis wrote, ‘I have been as sparing of Limbs as possible’, but was compelled to remove many of them for lack of adequate medical supplies.124 Of the 7,000 prisoners Tipu captured in the course of the next few months of warfare against the Company, around 300 were forcibly circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam and given Muslim names and clothes. By the end of the year, one in five of all the British soldiers in India were held prisoner by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam. Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear dresses – ghagra cholis – and entertain the court in the manner of nautch (dancing) girls.

In 1766 Shah Alam had gone as far as sending an envoy to his fellow monarch George III, one sovereign to another, to appeal to him for help, ‘considering the sincerity of friendship and nobility of heart of my brother in England’. In his letter Shah Alam had offered to recognise the Hanoverian King’s overlordship in return for being installed in Delhi by Company troops. But the Emperor’s letters to the King had been intercepted by Clive, along with the nazr (ceremonial gift) of rare jewels worth Rs100,000,* and neither were ever delivered. Meanwhile, Shah Alam’s presents to the King were given on his return to London by Clive, as if from himself, without any mention of the Emperor. Shah Alam’s envoy did make it to Britain, and wrote a remarkable book about his travels, The Wonders of Vilayet, which revealed for the first time to an Indian audience the bleakness of the British winter and the quarrelsome nature of whisky-fuelled Scots; but the Company made sure he never succeeded in getting an audience with the King or near anyone in government.

In late 1770 a secret message from Scindia reached Allahabad, offering Shah Alam Maratha protection if he were to return home. In response the Emperor discreetly sent an envoy to both Maratha leaders to explore the possibility of an alliance. Both rival camps responded positively and an understanding was reached. On 15 February 1771, an agreement was settled between the Marathas and Shah Alam’s son, the Crown Prince, who was in Delhi acting as Regent, that the Marathas would drive Zabita Khan and his Afghans out of Delhi, after which Scindia would escort Shah Alam to Delhi and hand over the palace to him. All this would be done in return for a payment by Shah Alam of Rs40 lakh.* The terms were secretly ratified by the Emperor on 22 March 1771.

The Rohilla Nawab of Farrukhabad, Ahmad Khan Bangash, had just died. Shah Alam decided to demonstrate his resolve by demanding that all the Nawab’s estates should now escheat to the crown, in the traditional Mughal manner. His demands were resisted by the Nawab’s grandson and successor, who gathered a Rohilla army, surrounded and cut off the Emperor’s column, and prepared to attack the imperial camp. Shah Alam sent urgent messages to Mahadji Scindia, requesting immediate military assistance. This was the moment of truth: would the Marathas honour their promise and become imperial protectors, or would they stand by and watch their new protégé be attacked by their Afghan enemies? Two days later, just as the Rohillas were preparing for battle, several thousand of Scindia’s Marathas appeared over the horizon. The young Bangash Nawab saw that he was now outnumbered and appealed for peace, quickly agreeing to pay Shah Alam a peshkash (tribute) of Rs7 lakh* in return for imperial recognition of his inheritance. The Shah confirmed the young man in his estates, then moved with his winnings to Nabiganj, twenty miles from Farrukhabad, to spend the rest of the monsoon.31 On 18 November, Mahadji Scindia finally came in person to the imperial camp. He was led limping into the Emperor’s durbar by Prince Akbar, as everyone watched to see whether the Maratha chieftain would conform to Mughal court etiquette and offer full submission to the Emperor. After a moment’s hesitation, to the relie...

On 16 March, the gates of Pathargarh were thrown open: ‘The Marathas took their stand at the gate of the fort,’ recorded Khair ud-Din. ‘At first the poorer people came out; they were stripped and searched and let off almost naked. Seeing this, the rich people threw caskets full of gems and money down from the ramparts into the wet ditch to conceal them. Others swallowed their gold coins.’40 After this, the Marathas rushed in and began to carry away all the terrified Rohilla women and children to their tents, including those of Zabita Khan himself. All were robbed and many raped and dishonoured. In the chaos and bloodshed, the tomb of Zabita Khan’s father, Najib ud-Daula, was opened, plundered and his remains scattered. The Emperor and Najaf Khan intervened as best they could, and saved the immediate family of their adversary, whom they put under armed guard and sent on to Delhi. The families of other Afghans who wished to return to their mountains were marched back to Jalalabad under escort.41 Among those liberated were a number of Maratha women who had been captive since the Battle of Panipat, more than a decade earlier.

A little later, the Mirza’s army was joined by a very different class of soldiers: the dreadlocked Nagas of Anupgiri Gossain. Anupgiri had just defected from the service of Shuja ud-Daula and arrived with 6,000 of his naked warriors and forty cannon. These Nagas were always brilliant shock troops, but they could be particularly effective against Hindu opponents. The Comte de Modave records an occasion when the Company sent a battalion to stop the Nagas ‘pillaging, robbing, massacring and causing havoc … [But] instead of charging the Nagas, the Hindu sepoys at once laid down their arms and prostrated themselves at the feet of these holy penitents – who did not wait to pick up the sepoys’ guns and carry on their way, raiding and robbing.’

Nevertheless, in less than four years, Najaf Khan had reconquered all the most important strongholds of the Mughal heartlands and brought to heel the Emperor’s most unruly vassals. The Rohillas were crushed in 1772, again in 1774 and finally, in 1777, the Jats’ strongholds were all seized. By 1778, the Sikhs had been driven back into the Punjab, and Jaipur had offered submission. A token suzerainty had been re-established over both Avadh and parts of Rajputana. The Mughal imperium was beginning to emerge from its coma after forty years of incessant defeats and losses. For the first time in four decades, Delhi was once again the capital of a small empire.

On 9 September 1773, Shah Alam wrote to Warren Hastings asking for the tribute of Bengal. He said he had received no money from the Company ‘for the last two years and our distress is therefore very great now’. He reminded the Company of their treaty obligations – to remit revenue and to allow him the lands awarded to him at Kora and Allahabad.77 The appeal was unsuccessful. Hastings, appalled by the suffering of the Bengalis in the great famine, made up his mind to stop all payments to ‘this wretched King of shreds and patches’.78 ‘I am entrusted with the care and protection of the people of these provinces,’ he wrote, ‘and their condition, which is at this time on the edge of misery, would be ruined past remedy by draining the country of the little wealth which remains in it.’79 This did not, however, stop him from allowing his Company colleagues to remit much larger amounts of their savings back to England.

Mirza Najaf Khan died on 6 April 1782, aged only forty-six. For ten years he had worked against all the odds, and usually without thanks, to restore to Shah Alam the empire of his ancestors. Thereafter, as one historian put it, ‘The rays of hope for the recovery of the Mughal glory that had begun to shine were dissipated in the growing cloud of anarchy.’87 Najaf Khan was remembered as the last really powerful nobleman of the Mughal rule in India and was given the honorific title of Zul-Fiqaru’d-Daula (the Ultimate Discriminator of the Kingdom).88 He was buried in a modest tomb in a garden a short distance from that of Safdar Jung.* Like much of his life’s work, it was never completed.

Shafi, who organised a counter-coup on 10 September 1782, directing military operations from the top of the steps of the Jama Masjid. The two rival factions battled each other in the streets of Delhi, while outside the city the Sikhs, Jat and Rohillas all took the opportunity to rise as one in revolt. Shah Alam’s attempt to reconcile both sides with marriage alliances came to nothing.89 Within two years, both claimants had been assassinated and almost all of Mirza Najaf Khan’s territorial gains had been lost. For the first time, jokes began to be made about how the empire of Shah Alam ran from Delhi to Palam – Sultanat-i Shah Alam az Dilli ta Palam – a distance of barely ten miles.

Unable to impose order on his court, and threatened by resurgent enemies on all sides, Shah Alam had no option but to reach out again to Mahadji Scindia, who had finally returned to Hindustan from the Deccan after an absence of eleven years: ‘You must undertake the Regency of my house,’ Shah Alam told him, ‘and regulate my Empire.’95 With the letter of supplication, he sent Scindia an Urdu couplet: Having lost my kingdom and wealth, I am now in your hands, Do Mahadji as you wish.

To lead his attack on Ghulam Qadir, Scindia had sent two of his most trusted lieutenants. One was Rana Khan, who seventeen years earlier had found Scindia bleeding to death in a ditch after the Battle of Panipat, and had carried him to safety. In thanks for saving his life and nursing him back to health, Scindia had trained up this Muslim former bhisti, or water-carrier; and his own talents and bravery led to his rapid promotion to be one of Scindia’s most senior generals. The other leader of the rescue operation was the refined Savoyard mercenary Benoît de Boigne, who had just been begun training up a modern infantry army for Scindia.

did not get far. Like Siraj ud-Daula, he had made himself too notorious to slip away unnoticed. ‘In the darkness of the night his companions lost him,’ wrote Khair ud-Din. ‘He went one way and they went another.’ He endeavoured to find them but did not succeed. The road was full of water and mud, and the horse putting his foot into a hole, rolled Ghulam Qadir into a ditch. The night was dark, and the way bristled with thorny acacias, so that he knew not what way to turn. When morning came, seeing some inhabited place, he proceeded thither. On reaching the habitation, he put his head into the house of a Brahmin. But the Brahmin, in days gone by, had suffered at the hands of the ruffian, and his village had been ravaged. His oppressor was now in his power, and having invited him in, he made the door fast.134 The Brahmin sent a message to his zamindar, who in turn alerted the Marathas. At noon, Scindia’s men rode into the village and surrounded the house. They then seized Ghulam Qadir, bound him and locked him in a cage. They despatched him on a humble bullock cart, with chains on his legs and a collar around his neck, to Scindia’s headquarters, ‘guarded by two regiments of sepoys and a thousand horse’. For a while Ghulam Qadir was displayed in his cage, suspended in front of the army, to be jeered at and mocked.135 Then, ‘By the orders of Scindia, the ears of Ghulam Qadir were cut off and hung around his neck, his face was blackened, and he was carried around the city.’ The ...

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.

From 2,900 sepoys in 1757 after Plassey, the Bengal army had grown to around 50,000 men by the arrival of Cornwallis.32 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

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: ‘Three hundred thousand muskets hung up in good order and easy to collect, ammunitions factories hard at work, and two to three thousand cannons in place with five to six thousand more in reserve and ready for use.’35 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.

Remember above all that valour can elevate us to the throne, but it does not suffice to keep it.

Haidar ali farewell advice to tipu

Tipu was already one of the most feared and admired military commanders in India: able and brave, methodical and hard-working, he was above all innovative, determined to acquire the arsenal of European skills and knowledge, and to find ways to use them against his enemies. Tipu had already proved his capacity to do this on the battlefield, defeating the Company not only at Pollilur but also twice more since then: in 1782, he had annihilated another British army under Colonel John Braithwaite just outside Tanjore and then, a year later, immediately before his accession, ambushed and destroyed a third Company column on the banks of the Coleroon River. The surprise was that within a few years Tipu showed that he was just as imaginative in peace as he had been in war. Tipu began to import industrial technology through French engineers and experimented with harnessing water power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today. He introduced irrigation and built dams so that even his British enemies had to admit that his kingdom was ‘well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities [including Bangalore] newly founded and commerce extended’. More remarkably still, he created what amounted to a state trading company with its own ships and factories. Regulations issued to Tipu’s ‘commercial department’ survive, providing details of a state trade ...

The British consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian, but he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual, with a library containing some 2,000 volumes in several languages, mainly on law, theology and the secular sciences, as well as amassing a large collection of modern scientific instruments including thermometers and barometers.45 When in the course of a raid on the outskirts of Madras, Tipu’s troops captured some scholarly volumes on Indian botany, Tipu had the books rebound and added to his library. The culture of innovation Tipu fostered in Mysore stands record to a man very different from that imagined by Calcutta: a modernising technocrat who, as Christopher Bayly nicely put it, attempted to fight ‘European mercantilist power with its own weapons: state monopoly and an aggressive ideology of expansion’. His imported French military technology was if anything more advanced than that of the Company; he failed only because the resources of the Company were now larger, and expanding significantly faster, than those of Mysore. Tipu did, however, have some severe flaws which left him vulnerable to his enemies. For Tipu was prone, even by the standards of the time, to use unnecessary violence against his adversaries and those he defeated, creating many embittered enemies where conciliation would have been equally possible and much wiser. Rebels had their arms, legs, ears and noses cut off before being hanged. He routinely circumcised and brutally...

In early February 1791, the portly figure of Marquess Cornwallis could be seen mounting his charger and trotting out of Madras at the head of an army of 19,000 sepoys. By 21 March he had climbed the Eastern Ghats and reached the plateau beyond without encountering opposition. He then seized by assault Tipu’s second-largest city, Bangalore. Here he was joined by his Hyderabadi ally, Mir Alam, who brought with him 18,000 Mughal cavalry.

Finally, on 26 January 1792, the three armies marched out of Bangalore for a second attempt to corner the Tiger of Mysore in his lair. Cornwallis now had 22,000 sepoys, plus 12,000 Marathas and a slightly larger number of Hyderabadis.54 Tipu had a larger army than this – more than 50,000 sepoys and cavalry troopers – but he was too careful a general to risk open battle against such a formidable force. Instead he stayed within the magnificent fortifications of Srirangapatnam which had been designed for him by French engineers on the latest scientific principles, following Sébastian de Vauban’s research into artillery-resistant fortification designs, as adapted by the Marquis de Montalembert in his book La Fortification Perpendiculaire. These provided the most up-to-date defences that the eighteenth century could offer, and took into account the newly increased firepower of cannon, bombs and mines, as well as the latest developments in tactics for storming and laying siege to forts.55 Penetrating these defences was the challenge now facing Cornwallis’s army.

The following day, Tipu made a series of ineffectual counter-attacks, but, as the hopelessness of his position became apparent, more and more of his troops deserted and he was forced to send a message to Cornwallis, through some captured Company officers, suggesting peace negotiations. Cornwallis accepted, but his terms were severe: Tipu must surrender half his kingdom, and pay an indemnity of 30 million rupees,* release all his prisoners of war, and give his two eldest sons as hostages to guarantee full payment. The borderlands next to the Marathas were to be handed over to the Peshwa; those next to Hyderabad to the Nizam; and the Company was to receive his territories in the Eastern Ghats as well as those in Coorg and spice-rich Malabar. The treaty was finally signed, and the two young princes – Abdul Khaliq, who was eight, and Muizuddin, aged five – handed over to Cornwallis on 18 March 1792. The boys were taken off by elephant to Madras, which they appeared in general to like, though they clearly did not enjoy being made to sit through entire performances of Handel’s Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus.58 Having created a sensation in Madras society with their dignity, intelligence and politeness, they were sent back two years later when Tipu delivered the final tranche of his indemnity payment.

In many ways 1792 was the major turning point for the East India Company in India: before this, the Company was often on the defensive and always insecure. After this year, the Company appeared increasingly dominant. Up to this point, too, the EIC was still, in terms of land, a relatively small Indian power, controlling only 388,500 out of 4.17 million square kilometres – about 9.3 per cent of the Indian land mass, almost all in the north and east.60

Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers. Cornwallis was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America. By this period one in three British men in India were cohabiting with Indian women, and there were believed to be more than 11,000 Anglo-Indians in the three Presidency towns.61 Now Cornwallis brought in a whole raft of unembarrassedly racist legislation aimed at excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives, or bibis, from employment by the Company. In 1786 an order had already been passed banning the Anglo-Indian orphans of British soldiers from qualifying for service in the Company army. In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no one with an Indian parent could be employed by the Civil, Military or Marine branches of the Company.

It was under Cornwallis, too, that many Indians – the last survivors of the old Murshidabad Mughal administrative service – were removed from senior positions in government, on the entirely spurious grounds that centuries of tyranny had bred ‘corruption’ in them.63 Increasingly, all non-Europeans began to be treated with disdain by the exclusively white officials at the Company headquarters of Fort William.

These reforms quickly produced a revolution in landholding in Company Bengal: many large old estates were split up, with former servants flocking to sale rooms to buy up their ex-masters’ holdings. In the ensuing decades, draconian tax assessments led to nearly 50 per cent of estates changing hands. Many old Mughal landowning families were ruined and forced to sell, a highly unequal agrarian society was produced and the peasant farmers found their lives harder than ever. But from the point of view of the Company, Cornwallis’s reforms were a huge success. Income from land revenues was both stabilised and enormously increased; taxes now arrived punctually and in full. Moreover, those who had bought land from the old zamindars were in many ways throwing in their lot with the new Company order. In this way, a new class of largely Hindu pro-British Bengali bankers and traders began to emerge as moneyed landowners to whom the Company could devolve local responsibility. So even as the old Mughal aristocracy was losing high office, a new Hindu service gentry came to replace them at the top of the social ladder in Company-ruled Bengal. This group of emergent Bengali bhadralok (upper-middle classes) represented by families such as the Tagores, the Debs and the Mullicks, tightened their grip on mid-level public office in Calcutta, as well as their control of agrarian peasant production and the trade of the bazaars.

In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through the collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field. The biggest firms of the period – the houses of Lala Kashmiri Mal, Ramchand-Gopalchand Shahu and Gopaldas-Manohardas – many of them based in Patna and Benares, handled the largest military remittances, taking charge of drawing bills of exchange in Bombay or Surat or Mysore, as well as making large cash loans, all of which made possible the regular payment, maintenance, arming and provisioning of the Company’s troops. The Company in turn duly rewarded these invaluable services in 1782 when they announced that the house of Gopaldas would henceforth be the government’s banker in the place of the Jagat Seths. Support from the Company then enabled the house to break into western India from where they had previously been absent.

As Rajat Kanta Ray put it, ‘With regard to the indigenous systems of commercial credit, the Company was better placed than the Indian powers by virtue of its reputation as an international capitalist corporation with a developed sense of the importance of paying its debts. It was known, moreover, to have the biggest revenue surplus available in the country to offer as collateral for large contract loans obtained from sahukaras [moneylenders].’68 The Company was perceived as the natural ally of Indian traders and financiers; the British, wrote Hari Charan Das, did not ‘interfere with the wealth of any rich men, bankers and merchants, and other people who reside in their cities, but on the contrary they are kind to those who are wealthy.’69 As the Jagat Seths had discovered forty years earlier, the East India Company spoke a language Indian financiers understood, and offered a higher degree of security to Indian capital than its rivals.70 In the end, it all came down to money. By the end of the century, Bengal was annually yielding a steady revenue surplus of Rs25 million at a time when Scindia struggled to net Rs1.2 million* from his territories in Malwa.

By the 1790s the Comte de Modave, for one, had no doubt what lay in store for India. ‘I am convinced that the English will establish themselves in the Mughal empire only precariously and with much uncertainty,’ he wrote, ‘and they will no doubt, eventually, in due course of time, lose it.’ But they will certainly control it for long enough to extract prodigious amounts of money from it, which will enable them to maintain the role they have arrogated to themselves of being the principal, or rather the one and only, power, exclusive of all others, among the trading nations of Europe. Who can stop them? In Hindustan, anarchy smothers the hope of anything good germinating or sprouting: the people live in want and misery, even though they have so many possibilities of living well. The English in Bengal are watching this curious situation attentively, hoping to profit by it, for their lust for gain is as voracious as their mania for conquest. I have no doubt that these ever-recurring disturbances, which pin down all the armed forces of this empire, are welcomed by the English as a sure means of taking over the empire itself, bit by bit. It strikes me that their behaviour corresponds exactly to this long-term strategy as they carefully stoke the fires of civil discord, which they then offer to resolve, backing up such mediation with a show of military strength as soon as they well can. This pattern of behaviour, from which they have not deviated for several years, has allowed the...

Modave’s own homeland, now in the grip of revolution and led by a heavily accented Corsican colonel named Napoleon Bonaparte, had just declared war against Britain on 1 February 1793. Four years later, in December 1797, Tipu despatched an embassy seeking Napoleon’s help against the Company. What the Sultan of Mysore did not know was that the army he needed was already being prepared in Toulon. By the time Tipu’s embassy arrived in Paris, in April 1798, Napoleon was waiting for an opportunity to sail his 194 ships, carrying 19,000 of his best men, out of Toulon, and across the Mediterranean to Egypt. Napoleon was quite clear as to his plans.

From Cairo in 1798 he sent a letter to Tipu, answering the latter’s pleas for help and outlining his grand strategy: You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible army, full of the desire of releasing and relieving you from the iron yoke of England. I eagerly embrace this opportunity of testifying to you the desire I have of being informed by you, by the way of Muscat and Mocha, as to your political situation. I wish you could send some sort of intelligent person to Suez or Cairo, possessing your confidence, with whom I may confer. May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies! Yours &c &c Bonaparte

Correspondance between Nepoleon and Tipu Sulttan

Then, on the morning of 25 March 1798, Raymond was found dead, aged only forty-three; there was gossip that the cause may have been poison, possibly administered by the pro-Company faction in the durbar. Whatever the truth, the sudden death of Raymond gave Kirkpatrick his chance. It helped that one of the Nizam’s ministers, Mir Alam, had recently visited Calcutta and been astonished by the size and scale of the Company’s barracks and arms factories, and that other senior officials in the Hyderabad durbar were equally convinced that the Company was the rising power in India. They argued that an alliance was essential for the safety of Hyderabad, surrounded as it was by two much more powerful neighbours, Tipu’s Mysore to the south and the Marathas in Pune, immediately to the west. Six months later, after weeks of hard negotiation, a secret treaty was signed, bringing Hyderabad and the Company into a close military alliance: 6,000 Company troops were to be resident in Hyderabad and available for the Nizam’s protection. In return the Nizam was to pay the Company an annual subsidy of £41,710,b and to dismiss the French corps. Exactly how or when this was to be done, however, was not made clear in the Treaty. Following the signing, an uneasy month passed as the new Company force of four battalions, along with a train of artillery, made its way slowly up the 150 miles from the coast near Guntur. This was the nearest Company-controlled town, where Wellesley had ordered them to col...

Wellesley was now busy putting the final touches to his invasion plans. The finances to fight the war were now secure and, having won the support of the Marwari bankers of Bengal, Wellesley sent to Bombay and Madras the vast sum of Rs10 million (£1 million, £130 million today), which he had managed to raise on the Calcutta money market.24 More money came in a timely injection of treasure from Europe.25 He wrote to the Resident in Pune, William Palmer, that he must at all costs get the Marathas to break off relations with Mysore and join the war against Tipu, in accordance with the Triple Alliance signed by Cornwallis. In due course a reluctant Peshwa promised Palmer that the Marathas would honour their commitments and send the Company 25,000 troops – though after much foot-dragging in Pune, these failed to arrive in time for action.26 A message was also sent to the Nizam to call up his troops to assist his new British allies, as had been agreed in the Treaty he and Kirkpatrick had signed five months earlier

Attack on Tipu

As he is alleged to have said when he heard the news that Wellesley’s invasion of his kingdom had begun, ‘I would rather live a day as a lion than a lifetime as a sheep … Better to die like a soldier, than to live a miserable dependant on the infidels, in their list of pensioned rajas and nabobs.’

On 3 February 1799, General Harris was ordered to mobilise his troops and ‘with as little delay as possible … enter the territory of Mysore and proceed to the siege of Seringapatam’. The Governor General sent characteristically detailed instructions on how to proceed and ordered that, whatever the circumstances, there were to be no negotiations until the army was standing in front of the walls of Srirangapatnam.38 On 19 February, the four East India Company battalions in Hyderabad under Colonel James Dalrymple, along with the four further battalions of Hyderabadi sepoys and more than 10,000 Hyderabadi cavalry, joined up with General Harris’s Company army. On 5 March, with some 30,000 sheep, huge stocks of grain and 100,000 carriage bullocks trailing behind them, the two armies crossed the frontier into Mysore.

That morning, after inspecting the breach and bathing, Tipu consulted his Brahmin astrologers. They warned the Sultan of particularly bad omens. Tipu gave them ‘three elephants, two buffaloes, a bullock and a she-goat’, as well as an iron pot full of oil, used for divination, asking them to ‘pray for the prosperity of the Empire’. He now suspected himself doomed.

When he heard the news that the assault had finally been launched, Tipu left his lunch in the palace and rode straight to the breach, accompanied by a bodyguard from his elite Lion of God battalion. But by the time he arrived, the Company troops were already well within the walls. There was nothing for him to do but to climb on the battlements and fight for his life. Outnumbered, bravely taking on the overwhelming incoming rush of Company sepoys, he quickly received two bayonet wounds and a glancing musket shot in the left shoulder. His attendants called on him to surrender, but he replied, ‘Are you mad? Be silent.’ Here, between the water gate and the inner ramparts of the fort, Tipu stood to make what even his most hostile British opponents acknowledged was ‘his gallant last stand’.50 A party of redcoats had forced their way between the gates, and one grenadier, seeing a gold buckle sparkling on the waist of the wounded man, tried to grab at it, and received a last fatal sword slash from the Sultan in return. Seconds later, one of his companions shot Tipu at point-blank range, through the temple. After four wars against the Company, over a period of thirty-two years, the Tiger of Mysore finally fell, sword in hand, among the heaps of dead and dying men.

Already, the Mysore casualties hugely outnumbered those of the allies: some 10,000 of Tipu’s troops were dead as opposed to around 350 of the Company and Hyderabadi sepoys: ‘It would be scarcely possible,’ wrote one British observer, ‘to describe, in adequate terms, the objects of horror, the ghastly spectacle, presented to the senses by the bodies of the slain, in every attitude, and in every direction; lying in the verandas and along the principal street.’55 But the horrors had barely begun. That night the city of Srirangapatnam, home to 100,000 people, was given over to an unrestrained orgy of rape, looting and killing. Arthur Wellesley told his mother, ‘Scarcely a house in the town was left unplundered, and I understand that in camp jewels of the greatest value, bars of gold etc etc have been offered for sale in the bazaars of the army by our soldiers, sepoys and followers. I came in to take command of the army of the morning of the 5th and with the greatest exertion, by hanging, flogging etc etc, in the course of that day I restored order …’

The British, all of whom had during the campaign been force-fed on Wellesley’s propaganda that Tipu was a brutal tyrant, were surprised to discover how much his people, both Hindu and Muslim, clearly loved him, just as they had been surprised to see how prosperous his kingdom was – ‘well-cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities newly founded and commerce extending’ – and how popular he was with his personal staff: ‘numbers of his confidential Hindoo servants who during the war fell into our hands, acknowledged him to be a lenient and indulgent master.’59

costly stuff, to surpass all estimate.’60 In all, around £2 milliond of gold plate, jewellery, palanquins, arms and armour, silks and shawls were accumulated: ‘everything that power could command, or money could purchase.’61 The most magnificent object of all was Tipu’s gold throne, inlaid with precious stones and with bejewelled tiger head finials ‘superbly decorated … [It took the form of a] howdah supported on the back of a Tyger, the solid parts made of black wood, and entirely covered by a sheet of purest gold, about as thick as a guinea, fastened on with silver nails, and wrought in tiger stripes, curiously indented, and most beautifully and highly polished.’62 Unable to decide who to award it to, the Prize Agents cut it up into small pieces, so destroying one of the great wonders of eighteenth-century India. Arthur

Knocking down kof tipu throne

Today most of Tipu’s capital is grazing land, and very little remains as witness of the former splendour of the kingdom of the Tiger of Mysore, the single Indian ruler who did more than any other to resist the onslaught of the Company.

The Peshwa’s traditional role was to act as mediator between the different Maratha warlords and to bring them together. But in April 1802, Baji Rao managed instead, quite unnecessarily, to initiate a new blood feud with the Holkars. When Jaswant Rao’s elder brother Vitoji was unexpectedly captured by the Peshwa’s troops, the gleeful Baji Rao hung him in chains and sentenced him to suffer a flogging of 200 strokes, followed by a lingering death, tied to the foot of an elephant. In this manner, Vitoji was dragged screaming around the palace, while Baji Rao looked on, giggling, from a palace terrace.

The Company’s army had expanded very quickly under Wellesley’s rule and within a few years its muster roll had gone up by nearly half from 115,000 to 155,000 men; in the next decade its numbers would rise again to 195,000, making it one of the largest standing European-style armies in the world, and around twice the size of the British army.

This dependable surplus in turn allowed the Company easy access to credit from the Bengal money market, so much so that under Wellesley, between 1798 and 1806, the Company’s debt in India more than tripled.

The Company was also able efficiently to redistribute these financial resources around India. The bankers of Benares and the west coast house of Gopaldas-Manohardas, both of whom were given the protection of the Company’s army, now began to send representatives to travel with it, supplying cash as required both to the troops themselves and their army paymasters. Indeed, bankers from across India began to compete among themselves to supply the Company army with finance. Two Benares banking houses, Mannu Lal and Beniparshad, went as far as asking for assurances that the Company ‘would honour them with a preference on being permitted to furnish supplies of cash that may be required for the use of the army’.

Ultimately the East India Company succeeded in war precisely because it had found a way to provide a secure financial base for its powerful mercenary army, and always found it easier than any of its rivals to persuade Indian seths, sahukaras and shroffs quickly to realise the cash needed to pay the army’s salaries and feed its hungry troops. In contrast, as the young Arthur Wellesley noted, ‘there is not a Maratha in the whole country, from the Peshwa down to lowest horseman, who has a shilling’. This was hardly surprising as, by 1801, Arthur had noted that after the devastations of the Maratha civil war, there was ‘not a tree or an ear of corn standing for 150 miles around Pune’.

In the end, Daulat Rao Scindia did not back down; instead, like Tipu, he began making preparations for hostilities. On 1 August 1803, he gave Collins a formal declaration of war and dismissed him from his camp. It took a week for express couriers to carry the news to Calcutta; but only a few hours for Lord Wellesley to give the order for his carefully laid war plans to be immediately put into action on no less than four fronts – with minor thrusts along the coasts of Orissa and Gujarat as well as the two main assaults which were designed to take control of the entire Deccan and all of Hindustan.

Major General Arthur Wellesley heard the news of Scindia’s declaration of war on 4 August. On the 6th he broke camp and with 40,000 troops headed off north towards the mighty fortress of Ahmadnagar which he captured on the 11th after a brief bombardment and the payment of a large bribe to the French and Arab mercenaries holding the fort for Scindia. Inside was found large amounts of gunpowder, part of Scindia’s remaining treasure and ample food supplies. Arthur Wellesley garrisoned the fort as his base while he sent scouts out to search for the main Maratha army.