India: A History. Revised and Updated (72 page)

To Alivardi Khan as Nawab of Bengal Calcutta’s success was both irritating and tempting. But wisely preferring the golden eggs to the big white geese which laid them, he dealt as fairly with the British as with his other nesting colonies of French and Dutch merchants; he merely demanded of them additional, but always negotiable, subsidies. His successor and grandson, Siraj-ud-daula, proved less of a conservationist, indeed ‘imprudent to the highest degree’. Within a year he had alienated his grandfather’s officials, his greatest
zamindars
, his major bankers and all the European trading companies. ‘His ultimate achievement was perhaps to make Frenchmen in Bengal hope that the English would defeat him.’
⁷
Considering that the Seven Years’ War was about to pitch the European rivals into global confrontation, this was no mean feat. Siraj enjoys the distinction of having challenged not just one bumptious merchant community but seemingly the entire mercantilist presumption.

This should make him an obvious candidate for nationalist rehabilitation. But Siraj has found few champions amongst even Bengal’s rabid revisionists, perhaps because his ejection of the British was not obviously intended. His demands – concerning the surrender of certain dissidents who had taken refuge in Calcutta, the demolition of unauthorised fortifications like the ‘Maratha Ditch’, and the withdrawal of trading concessions not clearly specified in the
farman
– were neither unreasonable nor original. A willingness to resolve them, or a cash offer to that effect, might well have satisfied him. But channels of communication between the new nawab and the European Companies had barely been opened, and Calcutta’s governing council was exceptionally supine. It was also dangerously complacent. ‘Such was the levity of the times,’ recalled the city’s adjutant-general, ‘that severe measures were not deemed necessary.’
⁸
The city itself had long since engulfed the walls of Fort William and was probably indefensible. When Siraj appeared on the other side of the Maratha Ditch with a large army, British confusion positively invited attack.

Although the fighting lasted five days, no serious attempt was made to open the negotiations which might still have saved Calcutta. Successive British withdrawals culminated in a panic-stricken dash to the ships, and Siraj suddenly found himself master of the city. He also found himself responsible for an assortment of European men, women and children who had failed to get away. Unharmed, they were lodged overnight in the fort’s detention cell, otherwise ‘the Black Hole’. How many went in is not certainly known; but next morning only twenty-three staggered out. Dehydration and suffocation had accounted for possibly fifty lives.

The tragedy seems to have been quite unintentional. Nevertheless, Siraj was held responsible. Dramatised and magnified by the survivors, the Black Hole greatly reduced the nawab’s chances of restoring relations with the British and lent to Clive’s retaliation a self-righteous venom. When seven
months later Clive and Admiral Watson fought their way back up the Hughli river and easily retook the city, it was Clive who, against strong resistance from his colleagues, insisted on continuing the war. Peace on demeaning terms was offered to Siraj only for as long as it took the British to defeat the French at Chandernagore, a move for which the timely news of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War provided justification. With the risk of a French attack removed, Clive resumed hostilities against the nawab and proceeded upriver towards Murshidabad. Meanwhile Siraj’s army took up a defensive position at Plassey.

Had the supposed battle of Plassey actually been fought, it is far from certain that Siraj would have lost it. The numerical odds, at perhaps fifty thousand to three thousand, were heavily in his favour; so was the disposition of his troops; and despite the superiority of the Company’s guns, the initial artillery exchanges proved indecisive. Clive himself seems quickly to have despaired of a straight victory and to have rested his hopes entirely on the treachery of Mir Jafar and other dignitaries amongst the nawab’s commanders with whom he had already signed a secret pact. When, after some delay, Mir Jafar opted to honour this pledge and duly made his hostile sentiments clear to Siraj, the nawab had little choice but to flee. Deserted by well over half his army, he was indeed as much the victim of a revolution as a rout.

Mir Jafar was related to Siraj as well as being his commander-in-chief. He had as good a claim to succeed him as anyone. It was in fact a standard palace revolution not unlike that which had resulted in Alivardi Khan’s installation. Arrangements were swiftly made to have Mir Jafar’s accession recognised by the emperor in Delhi, while Clive publicly insisted that the Company would not interfere in his government.

But in a significant move it was Clive who personally handed Mir Jafar to the throne. British arms had placed him there and British palms now awaited his greasing. The compensation promised to the Company for its recent losses and expenses, plus the massive cash ‘presents’ promised by Mir Jafar to Clive and his associates personally, left the new nawab heavily indebted to his British benefactors. ‘Over £1,250,000 were eventually distributed to individuals’
⁹
from the Bengal treasury, of which Clive’s share from this and subsequent pay-offs, and from an infamous
jagir
which he later secured, would come to over £400,000. Despite the ‘moderation’ at which he stood so amazed, it was ‘much the greatest fortune ever made by a [British] individual in India’.
¹⁰

Moneys due to the Company itself could be defrayed by the nawab’s cession of revenue rights over convenient territories. A cluster of two dozen
districts (
parganas
) south of Calcutta which now passed to the Company are still today officially known as the ‘24 Parganas’. Clive saw revenue rights as much more remunerative than the profits of trade, and had promised his employers that revenue receipts would quickly eliminate the need to finance imports from India by the export of bullion from Britain. This forecast proved over-optimistic, largely because of the Company’s escalating military expenses and its commitments elsewhere in India. But in Bengal as around Madras, relieving a neighbouring nawab of revenue rights now became a standard procedure whenever debts remained unserviced or indemnities unpaid. No less important were the purely commercial concessions extracted from the nawab. In the wake of Plassey, Company men fanned out into Bengal, Bihar and beyond to acquire a virtual monopoly over choice export commodities like saltpetre, indigo and opium and over the lucrative internal trade in sea-salt. More private fortunes were made; more revenue was lost to the nawab.

The nawab’s plight became critical when Company troops were employed at his expense in repelling intruders. In 1759 and again in 1760–1 Bihar, still part of Bengal, was invaded by Shah Alam, the Mughal crown-prince, supported by troops of the autonomous Nawab of Awadh (Oudh). To defray the military costs, the Company demanded more revenue rights from Mir Jafar; when he refused, the British simply replaced him in a bloodless, but rewarding, coup. Mir Qasim (Kasim), the son-in-law of Mir Jafar, had agreed to transfer to the British most of lower Bengal and was duly installed as nawab.

This was in 1760, and during the next three years Mir Qasim made a valiant effort to re-establish the viability of his truncated state. But whereas the ageing Mir Jafar had been deemed ineffective, the young Mir Qasim was soon deemed too effective. He dismissed officials suspected of collaboration with the British, greatly increased revenue demands, and began reorganising and rearming his forces along European lines. In this he anticipated the reforms which would be so successfully introduced in the armies of Mysore, the Marathas and the Sikhs. Initially, however, they proved of little avail and, following a dispute over the commercial liberties being taken by private British traders in Bengal, Mir Qasim was defeated and fled to Awadh. Plucked from a comfortable retirement in Calcutta, Mir Jafar, now into his dotage, was again placed on the throne.

In 1764 the deposed Mir Qasim was back in Bihar, this time in a hostile alliance with the now-emperor Shah Alam and his formidable ally, the Nawab of Awadh. The war which ensued, and in particular the battle of Baksar (Buxar), marked more convincingly than Plassey the true beginning
of British dominion in India. Despite five thousand veteran Afghan cavalry from Abdali’s army, despite Mir Qasim’s disciplined forces, the Mughals’ prestige and the Awadh army of perhaps thirty thousand, it was Major Hector Munro’s force of 7500 largely Indian sepoys which gained a hard-fought but decisive victory. All that separated Indian-led troops from British-led troops was ‘regular discipline and strict obedience to orders’, according to Munro. Just before the battle he had made his point by punishing twenty-four mutineers; they were fired from guns in front of their quaking colleagues. The enemy, on the other hand, was nearly as divided as at Plassey, with Mir Qasim’s troops unpaid and Shah Alam sidelined by his allies and already engaged in overtures to the British.

‘At Buxar all that still remained of Mogul power in northern India was shattered;’
¹¹
it was ‘perhaps the most important battle the British ever fought in south Asia’.
¹²
Mir Qasim fled into obscurity, the emperor transferred his vestigial prestige to the British, and next year (1765) he awarded to Clive and the Company the
diwani
of Bengal. Meanwhile Awadh had been largely overrun as Varanasi, Chunar and Allahabad all fell to the British. The Nawab of Awadh, although restored to his kingdom, then found himself saddled with the same combination of a crippling indemnity, a one-sided political alliance and a reduced revenue (the British detached the valuable territories of Varanasi and Allahabad) which had brought about the downfall of Bengal’s nawabs.

Seven years later, armed with instructions to ‘stand forth as
diwan
’, Warren Hastings took full advantage of the changed situation. Until 1774 the Company’s establishments in India were still administered as three separate ‘presidencies’ – Calcutta, Madras and Bombay – each under its own ‘president’ or ‘governor’. As governor of Calcutta and now of all Bengal, Hastings assumed such residual powers, largely judicial, as remained to Mir Jafar’s successor and thereby effectually terminated the nawabship. He also moved the Bengal treasury from Murshidabad to Calcutta and endeavoured to increase revenue receipts during a time of financial anxiety for the Company. First Company ‘supervisors’, then Indian agents and finally British ‘collectors’ were designated to oversee and enforce the demands of individual
zamindars.
Although the intention was to uphold the Mughal revenue system, the effect was to redistribute
zamindari
rights amongst a larger class of tax-farmers and, through the courts and police, to superimpose British ideas of enforcement. From such interventionist experiments, often disastrous and always oppressive, in late-eighteenth-century Bengal would emerge the administrative structures of the British Raj.

In 1773 the Company’s directors, recognising the territorial responsibilities that had resulted from the conquest of Bengal, ordained that their Madras and Bombay administrations be subordinate to Calcutta, whose governor now became governor-general of all the Company’s Indian establishments. Assuming this role in 1774, Hastings stayed on in Calcutta for another decade during which he would anticipate the spread of British rule throughout the subcontinent. On behalf of the now puppet-cum-buffer state of Awadh, Company troops penetrated to within two hundred kilometres of Delhi when in 1774 they invaded Rohilkand (now the Bareilly district). Its rulers, Afghan Rohillas, were defeated and their country attached to Awadh. Although the fiction of Awadh’s independence would long be maintained, in effect the British were now supreme throughout the Gangetic plain. Between them and the Mughal capital there lay only the shifting sands of an encroaching Maratha hegemony. This obstacle would also be explored during Hastings’ term of office. Meantime in the south a more direct and more obvious challenge to British supremacy demanded immediate attention.

MYSORE TAMED

Madras had paid a heavy price for Clive’s ‘Famous Two Hundred Days’ in Bengal. When the Seven Years’ War broke out in 1756, the city most vulnerable to French attack because of its proximity to Pondicherry had found itself without its most inspirational commander, without his troops and, worst of all, without his artillery. All the British possessions on the Coromandel coast were at risk and Fort St David (or Cuddalore), second only to Madras in importance, quickly fell. Madras itself was only saved thanks to visits by the Royal Navy.

But by 1759 the tide of French success was turning, most notably in neighbouring Hyderabad. It will be recalled that, following French support in the earlier Carnatic Wars, the Nizam of Hyderabad had been placed in much the same relationship to Pondicherry as Mir Jafar to Calcutta. Dupleix had installed him and de Bussy, in several brilliant campaigns, kept him there. But Dupleix had since returned to France and, with the outbreak of the war, de Bussy was recalled to Pondicherry. French troops still served in the nizam’s army and more were based in the Northern Circars, the coastal regions of the Hyderabad state which had been earlier ceded to France by the nizam. In 1758–9 these Northern Circars were invaded by a small force sent by Clive from Bengal. It was meant to draw off French
troops from Madras but resulted in an unexpected French defeat. Suddenly the nizam began to feel decidedly exposed. He now promised part of the Northern Circars to the British and began courting British support. From 1759 may be dated the brittle but long-lasting relationship between Hyderabad and Calcutta. To the British it would secure the collaboration of another of the Mughal successor states so that, just as Awadh ‘ring-fenced’ Bengal from Maratha attack, so Hyderabad would partially shield Madras.