Calcutta (6 page)

The problem arises because of a gravestone in the Armenian Churchyard in Calcutta. The building is eighteenth century, a cool oasis in the middle of a crammed bazaar. But half way across the yard, which is completely paved with graves, there is a black granite slab marking the tomb of ‘Rezabeebeh, wife of the late charitable Sookias.’ And the date on it is 21 July 1630. Does it mean that there were Armenians already trading from Sutanuti or Kalikata when Charnock finally dropped anchor and that his log forgot to mention them? Or is it just the slip of a mason’s chisel? A small point, maybe. But in the Calcutta Club of an evening they can engross themselves for hours in lighter topics than that. And the whisky, for an hour or two, might not taste quite as Scotch if it were suddenly established beyond doubt that the capital of the Raj had been started not by a gentleman
adventurer
from England, grown honourable in the Company’s
service
, but by a tradesman from Isfahan with no pedigree at all.

*

The start of the eighteenth century sees the middle of the three river villages giving its name, already Anglicized, to the whole spreading settlement; presumably because the first substantial
buildings (judiciously for storage, not comfort) have been erected at Kalikata, away from the still makeshift living quarters of Sutanuti. It sees Bengal declared a Presidency, junior by several years to Madras and Bombay, but soon to overtake both in power and prestige. It sees Job Charnock’s son-in-law, now Sir Charles Eyre, President of Bengal and Commander-in-Chief of the United East India Company’s Fort William. It sees the
beginnings
of a remarkable expansion throughout India which, as Philip Woodruff has remarked, is within little more than half a century to present the Company Directors in England ‘with an empire at which they looked with the incredulous elation, shot with sharp twinges of doubt, of a village grocer who has inherited a chain of department stores and is not quite sure whether they will pay him a profit beyond his dreams or drag him down to ruin’.

By now, young men are heading for the Hooghly in boatloads from the Thames. As Company servants they are required to salute the captain of the Indiaman on his quarterdeck whenever they see him during the voyage, they appear at meals to a roll of drums and they must have their cabin lights out at ten p.m. sharp. They are mere Writers on the Company payroll and the Company pay is not excessive. The young man has had to find for his passage and his keep on board ship. And although he is fed and accommodated free in a Writers’ building on arrival, he must furnish his rooms and obtain servants, washing, candles and many other necessities at his own expense. Young Robert Clive, making a similar journey (to Madras) within a few years, complains to his father that on the Company’s stipend of
£
3 10s. a month it is as much as he and his colleagues can do to live at all, what with the dearness and scarcity of everything. The immediate prospect, on top of all this, is three or four years of drudgery with account books. No wonder Clive twice tried to blow his brains out and pined, of all places, for Manchester.

It was a system based upon a grasping premise in England and it made for grasping behaviour in India. It spawned men with an eye to the main chance above all things, who were shortly to discover that although they might have come to
Calcutta
penny-pinching, they could rapidly acquire a fortune if
they set about it in the right way. Their sense of direction would soon be established for them if they took a look at their
immediate
lords and masters. The settlement was governed by a Council of nine members. The President, who was also First Member, received an emolument of
£
100 a year; his eight
assistants
by now received
£
40 a year. In addition to these salaries the Members in Council were given free board and lodging and a palanquin allowance of Rs 30 a month. On the face of it they were not doing much better than their Writers. But every one of them was also allowed to trade freely and privately – as other Company servants were not – and the profits on free trade in Bengal could easily amount to several hundred times a
Member’s
salary. And before very long, regulations notwithstanding, the Writers and other underlings were inspired by this example to follow it as best they could. The result was that even Clive, a fairly ruthless rogue from childhood, seems to have been shocked by his first acquaintance with Calcutta, and that was after an experience of Madras. It was not only the most wicked place in the Universe in vague terms. Precisely, it was that ‘Corruption, Licentiousness and a want of Principles seem to have possessed the Minds of all the Civil Servants, by frequent bad examples they have grown callous, Rapacious and Luxurious beyond Conception …’

At about this time a Nawab of Bengal, Mir Kasim, was writing to the Governor to describe what it meant for an Indian to be on the receiving end of this philosophy. ‘And this is the way your Gentlemen behave; they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, injure and disgrace my servants … Setting up the colours and showing the passes of the Company, they use their utmost endeavours to oppress the peasants,
merchants
and other people of the country … In every village and every factory they buy and sell salt, betel-nut, rice, straw,
bamboos
, fish, gunnies, ginger, sugar, tobacco, opium and many other things … They forcibly take away the goods of the peasants, merchants etc. for a fourth part of their value, and by ways of violence and oppressions they oblige the peasants to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee, and for the sale of five rupees they bind and disgrace a man who pays a
hundred rupees in land-tax; and they allow not any authority to my servants …’ There were good men in the Company
service
prepared to back all that to the hilt.

Calcutta was beginning to thrive on this creed and its
expatriates
were beginning to make themselves at home. They had built St Anne’s Church in 1709, they had completed the Fort in 1712, they had made George Pomfret the District Grand Master of the Freemasons in 1728 and their ‘Star of the East’ was to be the oldest Lodge outside England. They were to open their first theatre, in Lalbazar, in 1745. They had sent a deputation to Delhi, led by the merchant John Surman, to buy up another thirty-eight villages, including Howrah across the river; and,
remembering
two excellent precedents, they had not forgotten to include Dr Hamilton in the party. They were in luck once more, for the Emperor was thinking of marriage but had a
troublesome
swelling in the groin. Surgeon Hamilton worked wonders, like Dr Boughton before him, and in due course, when both treatment and marriage had been proven, the villages were made available for Calcutta’s first suburban development.

If there was already looting and corruption by the British on a growing scale, there was even more deeply established rapacity and greed by a line of Mogul Emperors in the capital and their placemen in the country. The Emperor and his senior ministers could be wonderfully accommodating if the foreigners presented them with chiming clocks, China screens, pieces of ambergris, Persian horses or plain rupees; but if a Bengali peasant fell
behind
with his rent, his zamindari landlord was quite liable to stitch him up in a pair of baggy pantaloons with two or three half-wild cats for company. And after Aurangzeb died in 1707, the Empire was in such a chaos of mismanagement that the English and the French were presented with perfect conditions for their fight to take the upper hand in India. Lord Macaulay, who was to know Calcutta well in the nineteenth century, is not always to be trusted for anything except a faultless ear for colourful English prose, but his summary of the four decades after Aurangzeb also rings true. ‘A succession of nominal
sovereigns
, sunk in indolence and debauchery, sauntered away life in secluded palaces, chewing bang, fondling concubines, and
listening to buffoons. A succession of ferocious invaders descended through the western passes to prey on the defenceless wealth of Hindostan … and every corner of the wide Empire learned to tremble at the mighty name of the Marathas … Wherever their kettle-drums were heard, the peasant threw his bag of rice on his shoulder, hid his small savings in his girdle, and fled with his wife and children to the mountains or the jungles, to the milder neighbourhood of the hyena and the tiger.’

It was the threat of assault by these invaders that had an alarmed Company finding Rs 25,000 for the excavation of the Mahratta Ditch in Calcutta in 1742. The English town was now a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, with a Black Town of natives, four miles in circumference beyond it. There were 400,000 people of both races living here and in outlying villages, and with nearly fifty vessels a year coming into the Hooghly, trade in Calcutta would soon be worth
£
1 million per annum. It was well worth Rs 25,000 spent on extra defences. So the Ditch was started in a great arc round the Company property, but after three miles had been dug the threat of the Mahrattas receded and it was never finished. Calcutta could sit back again and, always keeping a weather eye cocked for the gentlemen just upstream at Chandernagore, wait for the next blood-stirring thing to happen.

It started to happen almost at once with the French and
English
going to war, but that was at home, and ships moved slowly, and the news didn’t reach India for ages. When the despatches arrived, the Governor of the French East India Company,
Dupleix
, made his first move for the mastery of Southern India, a thousand miles away. There followed a long, untidy, intermittent campaign, with the French manipulating one puppet prince, Chanda Sahib, and the English another, Mohammed Ali. And Robert Clive, his book-keeping abandoned, his commission as a Company soldier taken up, his age not yet being twenty-six,
discovered
and established his military genius, marched on the village of Arcot in terrible conditions, held it under siege for fifty-three days in worse, effectively ended Dupleix’s career, and went home to England to enjoy the applause. And that, for the time being, was that;

Calcutta had watched this at a distance, sharpening
meanwhile
its own primary instincts for trade, not war, welcoming the attention of the native princelings, who were increasingly minded to use its security as a bank. The latest batch of
Company
recruits from England had included a Junior Writer called Warren Hastings, who was beginning to struggle along in the Writers’ Building on
£
5 a year. Roger Drake had been made Governor at thirty and was otherwise engaged in the affairs of the Masonic Lodge. One of his Members in Council was John Zephaniah Holwell, magistrate and another Mason. Some
distance
from the city, the Company outpost at Kasimbazar was under the management of Mr W. Watts, but he was best known for his recent marriage to a very remarkable lady.

She had already been widowed twice, by Mr Templer and Mr Altham, and after Mr Watts had served his time she was to enjoy a fourth union with the Reverend William Johnson (known locally as the Reverend Tally-Ho), the Presidency chaplain. He eventually retired to England with a fortune but ‘Begum’
Johnson
was really wedded to Calcutta and stayed behind, holding celebrated whist parties in Clive Street, the ever engaging topic of conversation in the city. She died in 1812, when she was eighty-seven, much loved, much spoken of and always
absorbing
; having grandmothered an English Prime Minister (the second Lord Liverpool) and having chosen her burial place at the invitation of an Indian Governor-General; it was almost alongside Job Charnock’s in St John’s churchyard and richly deserved by then.

A little farther up-country, in his palace at Murshidabad, the Nawab of Bengal was dying. Mahabat Jang’s name meant terror of war, but he had been chiefly noted for a rule of some dignity and wisdom and for a singular aversion to the harem, having taken but one wife at a period when the Nawab of Oudh was said to accommodate 800 women in his quarters. He had no son, and when the throne became vacant in April 1756 it was
occupied
by his grandson Siraj-ud-Daula. He had certainly been spoilt as a child groomed for succession, and what followed after his enthronement at the age of twenty-five was doubtless an impulsive attempt to enrich himself quickly. He picked a quarrel
with the Company and, with the first signs of monsoon in the sky, he marched on Calcutta with 30,000 foot, 20,000 horse, 400 trained elephants and 80 pieces of cannon. He also held Mr and Mrs Watts captive, for Kasimbazar had been taken
en
route
without a fight, Ensign Elliott, in command, having shot
himself
in despair. This was the first British indignity in an episode which, wretched and heroic in turn, has been codified for ever as the Black Hole incident. It is a disputed story, but let us have it now in the standard version received from the man who comes best out of it, John Zephaniah Holwell.

Calcutta, in 1756, was a decently held place but it was not heavily fortified. Fort William protected a number of
warehouses
on the river bank, it included a large tank of rainwater, it could be used as a refuge by the Europeans of the city, who were only a fraction of the 400,000 population. It had four
bastions
, with between eight and ten guns apiece, and curtain walls that were eighteen feet high but not four feet thick, and the whole enclosure was 210 yards by 120. Apart from this,
Calcutta’s
only defence was the unfinished Mahratta Ditch and for at least a couple of years there had been an anxious
correspondence
with London on this inadequate state of affairs. ‘When the Nawab’s intention of marching on Calcutta was known,’ writes Captain Grant, who was the Fort’s Adjutant-General, ‘it was felt time to inquire into the state of defence of a garrison
neglected
for so many years, and the managers of it lulled in so infatuate a security that every rupee expended in military service was esteemed so much loss to the Company.’ The defences, such as they were, had about 250 men manning them, of whom only sixty were Europeans; the rest, mainly Indo-Portuguese, were commonly referred to as ‘black Christians’. And only one officer, Captain Buchanan, had ever seen active service. To this uncertain collection of soldiers was now added a swiftly
drummed
up militia of perhaps 260, again mostly Armenians,
Portuguese
and ‘Slaves’.