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March 24 - April 27, 2020
In contrast, he wrote, the British felt nothing for the country, not even for their closest allies and servants.
took five years for the full effects of this regime of unregulated plunder to become apparent; but when it did so the results were unparalleled in their horror. The stage was now set for the great 1770 Bengal famine.
They ate the leaves of the trees and the grass of the field; and in June the Resident at the durbar affirmed that the living were feeding off the dead.
Five hundred a day were now dying of starvation in the streets of Murshidabad.
Rice was scarce even in Calcutta, where 76,000 died on its streets between July and September.
in all perhaps 1.2 million – one in five Bengalis – starved to death
fully one-third of all the peasants died, and two-thirds of the old Mughal aristocracy were ruined.
Half of all the rural artisans perished.
Moreover, the Company administration as a whole did not engage in any famine relief works. Nor did it make seed or credit available to the vulnerable,
Platoons of sepoys were marched out into the countryside to enforce payment, where they erected gibbets in prominent places to hang those who resisted the tax collection.
In February 1771, the Council was able to tell the directors in London that ‘notwithstanding the great severity of the late famine, and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase [in revenue] has been made’.
there was no question of cuts to the military budget, even as a fifth of Bengal was starving to death.
in 1770–71, at the height of the Bengal famine, an astounding £1,086,255 was transferred to London by Company executives – perhaps £100 million in modern currency.
Word was spreading about the Company’s inhumanity in Bengal: the number of dead and dying was simply too vast to hide.
‘Trade and the Sword ought not to be managed by the same people,’ wrote Arthur Young
of weavers who ‘cut off their own thumbs’ in order to prevent them being press-ganged to wind silk in prison-like factory camps.
King. George III wrote that he believed ‘the real glory of this nation’ depended on the wealth of India
the contrast between the bankruptcy of the Company and the vast riches of its employees was too stark not to be investigated.
Ultimately, it was saved by its size:
the Company now came close to generating nearly half of Britain’s trade and was, genuinely, too big to fail.
history’s first mega-bailouts, an early example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and rein it in.
on 22 November 1774, at the age of only forty-nine, Robert Clive committed suicide in his townhouse in Berkeley Square.
There the suicide was buried in a secret night-time ceremony, in an unmarked grave, without a plaque,
‘Dark allusions, mysterious insinuations, bitter invective and ironical reflections are weapons to which I have become accustomed,’
Under the malevolent influence of Clive, who had always distrusted Hastings’ Indophilia, Francis had arrived in India already convinced that Hastings was the source of all the evils and corruption of Bengal.
Company servants, he wrote, were often ignorant of local languages and customs, but Indian petitioners were still powerless to resist their abuses and oppressions.
He unified currency systems, ordered the codification of Hindu laws and digests of Muslim law books, reformed the tax and customs system, fixed land revenue and stopped the worst oppression being carried out on behalf of private traders by the local agents.
Underlying all Hastings’ work was a deep respect for the land he had lived in since his teens.
‘Our Indian subjects,’ wrote Hastings, ‘are as exempt from the worst propensities of human nature as any people upon the face of the earth, ourselves not exempted. They are gentle, benevolent, more susceptible to gratitude for kindness shewn them than prompt to vengeance for wrongs sustained, abhorrent of bloodshed, faithful and affectionate in service and submissive in legal authority.
Haidar, who was of Punjabi origin, had risen in the ranks of the Mysore army,
large bullock ‘park’ of white Deccani cattle to allow them rapidly to deploy infantry and their supplies through their kingdom, a logistical innovation
They win over any disconnected member of the State and through him work its ruin. Divide and grab is their main principle. They are so blinded by selfish interest that they never observe written agreements. God alone can fathom their base intrigues.
They know best how to destroy Indian cohesion. They are adept at the art of creating insidious differences and destroying the harmony of any State.
Battle of Pollilur ‘the severest blow that the English ever suffered in India’.123
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.
By 1770, they were back again, this time with an ‘ocean-like army’ of 75,000, which they used to defeat the Jat Raja of Deeg and to raid deep into Rohilla territory east of Agra.
the Jat Raja of Deeg had usurped much of the territory immediately south of the capital, between Delhi and Agra.
Among those liberated were a number of Maratha women who had been captive since the Battle of Panipat, more than a decade earlier.
the mighty fortress of Ramgarh, which he took by surprise, then renamed Aligarh.
Finally on 29 April 1776, after a siege of five months, the impregnable Jat stronghold of Deeg fell to Najaf Khan after the Raja fled and starvation had weakened the garrison.
‘Abdul Ahad was Kashmiri, over 60 years old, but as nimble and energetic as a man in the prime of life,’
On the surface, there could not be a more civil and decent person than this Abdul Ahad Khan, but all his political ambitions were nothing other than a tissue of disingenuous trickery, designed to extract money for himself, and to supplant anyone who gave him umbrage.
Though this prince has several good qualities – intelligence, gentleness, and a perceptive understanding – his occasional pettiness can ruin everything.
he uses his influence on the spirit of Shah Alam for the sole purpose of distancing the prince from the servants who were truly loyal, and then replacing them with his own creatures.
This did not, however, stop him from allowing his Company colleagues to remit much larger amounts of their savings back to England.
In 1774, Hastings finally made the formal decision to cease all payments to Shah Alam.
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.
Day and night Gujars commit dacoity [violent robbery] and rob wayfarers.
In Lucknow at the same time, the Nawab Asaf ud-Daula built his great Imambara mourning hall in order to provide employment for 40,000 people as famine relief work;
‘The Rohillas swore [on the Quran] that they had no intention of doing any harm,’
