Figure 6.1 James Moffat, New Government House, c. 1803–4 (WD 476)
Conclusion: The end of the Company
At the same time as Richard Jupp was refurbishing East India House in London, the Company’s headquarters in India were also undergoing a transformation. The building of a new Government House in Calcutta was begun in February 1799 and completed four years later. Richard Wellesley, the Governor-General behind this hugely costly scheme, would undoubtedly have agreed with those who expected the Company’s physical buildings to reflect its wealth and political importance. This new Government House, the seat of Company power in Bengal, was intended to advertise the significance and status of this institution. As he told Lord Valentia, Wellesley wanted India ‘to be ruled from a palace, not a counting house; with the ideas of a Prince, not those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigos’.1
According to William Hickey, Wellesley ‘determined upon building a palace suitable to his magnificent ideas, and such a one as would be proper for the residence of the British Governor General of India’:
This he immediately caused to be commenced, partly upon the site of the old Government House, but taking in the Council House and about sixteen other handsome private mansions, many of them not having been erected above five years, the whole of which were pulled down, the ground upon which they had stood being cleared away to create a superb open square area, in the middle of which his meditated palace was to stand.2
Wellesley plumped for a neoclassical design by Charles Wyatt, an officer in the Bengal Engineers (and a member of the famous family of architects), to fill the vast site on Esplanade Row (Figs 6.1 and 6.2). Wyatt’s design was not entirely original: just as Indian designs influenced Company servants returning to Britain, so European architectural styles inspired Wyatt and Wellesley in Calcutta. In fact, the plan for the new Government House was modelled on that of Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, so that Wellesley could truly be said to be transplanting a grand English country house to the heart of the Company’s Raj in India. A grand portico of Ionic columns and a flight of steps formed the main entrance to the building. And the four magnificent gateways on the perimeter of the garden were partly based on Robert Adam’s design for the gateway to Syon House near London. As with East India House in Leadenhall Street, the interior decoration projected wealth, power and authority. The magnificent state dining room, the Marble Hall, incorporated busts of the twelve Caesars ranged along its walls as well as an elaborate ceiling painting. The Throne Room housed the throne of Tipu Sultan, recently captured from his capital, Seringapatam, in 1799. The symbolism of incorporating the regal accoutrements of an Indian ruler into the regalia of the Company’s headquarters in the subcontinent made a powerful statement.
In his characteristically abrasive way, Wellesley pushed ahead with the expensive programme without recourse to, or the sanction of, the directors of the Company in London, his notional superiors. It was only later, in a retrospective and belated attempt to persuade the Company’s directors of the importance of the scheme, that Wellesley sent a letter of explanation and drawings by James Best to Leadenhall Street in order to illustrate the impressive structure that he was building on their behalf in Calcutta (Figs 6.3 and 6.4).
Figure 6.2 Indian artist, View of the North Front of Government House with the Marquess of Hastings Leaving It, c. 1817 (Add. Or. 3309)
Figure 6.3 James Best, Elevation of the North West front of the New Government House, c. 1803 (WD1319)
Wellesley’s plans for Government House represented more than simply a building project. The new edifice on Esplanade Row identified the Company as a great political and imperial power in addition to its commercial success. This corresponded to wider changes affecting the Company and the British engagement with the subcontinent more generally. The reasons for this development are complex – located in a combination of domestic British politics, local Indian politics and broader global developments – and are still debated by historians. But the general trend is clear. In many ways, then, Wellesley’s scheme symbolised the evolution of the Company. Thomas Pownall expressed what many others thought about the growth of this commercial company in the third quarter of the eighteenth century: ‘The merchant is become the sovereign … a trading company have in their hands the exercise of a sovereignty.’3 Robert Clive gave even more detail when he appeared before the House of Commons in 1769. He contrasted the current position of the Company with that of 1744, when he had first stepped ashore at Madras: ‘I was in India when the Company was established for the purposes of trade only, when their fortifications scarce deserved that name, when their possessions were within very narrow bounds.’ Now, however, the Company had changed into something entirely more powerful:
Figure 6.4 James Best, Elevation of the South East front of the New Government House, c. 1803 (WD1320)
The East India Company are at this time sovereigns of a rich, populous, fruitful country in extent beyond France and Spain united; they are in possession of the labour, industry, and manufactures of twenty million of subjects; they are in actual receipt of between five and six millions a year. They have an army of fifty thousand men. The revenues of Bengal are little short of four million sterling a year. Out of this revenue the East India Company, clear of all expenses receives £1,600,000 a year.4
By the end of the century, the Company had undoubtedly become more than a mere merchant, as represented most forcefully in the new Government House envisaged by Wellesley. It had become the sovereign power of a vast sweep of Indian territory and, in the first half of the nineteenth century, it would be confronted with all of the problems associated with territorial and political power. The Company’s rise to power and prominence, and the heightened importance of India to both the British economy and the British sense of global prestige, meant that the Company came under heightened scrutiny in London and increasing pressure in India.
And there were other changes afoot too. Technology would play a major role in the development of British power in India, particularly as the nineteenth century progressed. The early signs of this are evident in a watercolour by Thomas Prinsep showing a new steam vessel on the river Ganges (Fig. 6.5). Prinsep learned drawing from T. H. Fielding at the East India Company Military Seminary at Addiscombe in Surrey. He joined the Bengal Engineers in 1818 and was subsequently employed in cutting a series of canals, before being appointed Superintendent of Canals in 1826. This image is taken from an album of thirteen watercolours recording the memorable voyage undertaken by Prinsep in 1828. The Governor-General at the time, Lord William Bentinck, wanted to know whether steam navigation was practicable on the Ganges, which would significantly reduce the time spent travelling upcountry. Captain Johnson commanded the Hooghley, a Calcutta-built wooden paddle-steamer, with a twenty-five-horsepower steam engine imported from Britain. The trip was a success: the round voyage of 1,000 miles to Allahabad was cut to just six weeks, down from the three months it normally took just to get to Allahabad. Commenting on his brother’s work, William Prinsep did not neglect the artistic effect of such work:
Tom made a series of the most beautiful drawings of the Ganges during the voyage portraying the peculiar colour of the water during the season and the lovely effects of blues over the picturesque fleets of native boats making their slow way against the fierce current.5
However, this image also marks a new phase in the development of transport and communications in British India. The same impression is conveyed in a view of Calcutta by Charles D’Oyly, and subsequently reproduced as a hand-coloured lithograph for wider dissemination in his Views of Calcutta and its Environs published in 1848 (Fig. 6.6). D’Oyly depicts the maidan, the park-like setting flanking the water’s edge just beyond Fort William, the nucleus of the Company’s military power in the city. We get a sense of the way travel had changed by this time. European civilians stroll around as clippers, a steamship and a variety of local boats crowd the water’s edge. John Bellew was struck with wonder in describing the scene that greeted him in the early 1840s:
Figure 6.6 William Roberts and Lowes Dickinson, after Charles D’Oyly, ‘Town and Port of Calcutta’, in Charles D’Oyly, Views of Calcutta and its Environs, 1848 (X 666)
I have seen few sights in my wanderings more beautiful and imposing than the approach to this Petersburgh of the East, this magnificent capital of our eastern empire. … Numerous boats glide up and down the river. … All, in fact, bespoke the close vicinity of a great capital.6
Developments in travel and communications were matched by a new questioning of the ultimate purpose and value of Britain’s imperial possessions. For example, Claudius Buchanan, a Company chaplain and Professor of Greek and Latin at the college at Fort William, identified the wider spiritual mission that he believed went hand in hand with the expansion of the British Empire, the defeat of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and the growth of British India:
Our extensive territorial acquisitions within the last few years, our recent triumph over our only formidable foe; and the avowed consequence of India in relation to the existing state of Europe; and that unexampled and systematic prosperity of Indian administrations, which has now consolidated the British dominion in this country – every character of our situation seems to mark the present æra, as that intended by Providence, for our taking into consideration the moral and religious state of our subjects in the East; and for Britain’s bringing up her long arrear of duty, and settling her account honourably with her Indian Empire.7
The feeling that God had entrusted Britain with its imperial responsibilities led to further developments that would translate, for example, into the British drive to eliminate local and, to British eyes, detestable practices such as suttee (or sati), whereby widows threw themselves onto their husband’s funeral pyres. But it also led to tension and suspicion in India as the old practices of the Company came under greater scrutiny.
Political, technological and social changes in the early nineteenth century transformed Britain’s relationship with India. Increasingly embattled at home, the East India Company’s rule was also under threat in India itself. The outbreak of mutiny and rebellion across northern India in 1857 was the spark that heralded the end of the Company and the beginnings of the formal British Raj. The crisis erupted at Meerut on 9 and 10 May when the sepoys stationed there killed their European officers and set off on the road to Delhi, forty miles to the south-west. Popular rebellion spread rapidly as the Company’s Bengal army mutinied, or attempted to mutiny, practically everywhere from the borders of Bengal to the gates of Lahore. Although the uprising was eventually suppressed, it changed things irrevocably. As early as 1857, civil officers in the North-Western Provinces claimed that the uprising was due to insensitivity among the British military establishment for Hindu ‘caste prejudices’. The military responded by saying that heavy tax burdens, and a high-handed approach to dealing with local rulers, who were sidelined and stripped of their authority, were really to blame. These factors were compounded, they argued, by the ill-advised annexations of several local states as a consequence of Lord Dalhousie’s ‘Doctrine of Lapse’, a controversial policy which gave the British Governor-General the right to annex an Indian state or province if the incumbent ruler died without a male heir or was deemed incompetent. Whatever the causes of the uprising – and it has long been a topic of controversy and debate among historians – it was clear that the East India Company could no longer govern India effectively. The passing of an Act of Parliament in Westminster transferred the Company’s assets and responsibilities to the British government in Whitehall and brought an end to this particular chapter of the relationship between India and Britain.
Although 1858 signalled the end of the East India Company, its impact on the visual representation of India was crucial, far reaching and long lasting. Picturing India has demonstrated the enduring importance of visual representations in brokering that relationship between Britain and India. Images of Indian people and places had long helped to mediate and define Britain’s engagement with the subcontinent. The portraits and landscapes produced by artists like Johan Zoffany, William Hodges, Thomas Daniell and others provide a powerful and evocative insight into the ways in which they and their patrons envisaged India.
