4

A Prince of Little Capacity

Twelve months later, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Plassey Revolution, Mir Jafar paid a state visit to Calcutta.

It was the new Nawab’s first visit since he had led the assault on the town as a general of Siraj ud-Daula two years earlier, and his last before Clive would return to London to pursue his parliamentary ambitions. It was therefore as magnificent an affair as the still somewhat battered trading settlement could muster: there was a visit to the theatre, several concerts and a grand ball at the slightly surprising venue of the Calcutta courthouse, where the few women present danced ‘until their feet were sore’.

Even more of a surprise was the choice of decoration selected to beautify the halls of justice for the entertainment of the pious Shia Muslim Nawab: ‘twelve standing waxwork Venuses’, unveiled to the sound of trumpets, horns and kettledrums. ‘We have been so much taken up with balls, musick and visits to do honour to the Nabob,’ wrote Luke Scrafton, ‘that all publick affairs have been totally neglected.’¹

But behind the external show of friendship between allies, perhaps inevitably, distrust and mutual dislike were now growing between the two rival governments of Bengal. ‘Thank God His Excellency is at last gone,’ wrote Scrafton a week later. ‘He has led me a hell of a life here by the constant attendance I have been obliged to pay to him and his wenches, for he never went twenty yards from his house but they were with him.’² Clive, characteristically, was more cutting: the ‘humane, generous and honest prince’, whose impeccable character he had vouched for to the directors before Plassey, and who he had claimed to honour ‘with the same regard as a son has for a father’, he now regularly referred to as ‘the old fool’, while his son Miran was dismissed as ‘a worthless young dog’.³ Indolence, incompetence and opium had changed Mir Jafar, Clive wrote to London. The man he had raised to the throne had now become ‘haughty, avaricious, abusive … and this behaviour has alienated the hearts of his subjects’.⁴

If anyone had changed it was in reality the smugly victorious and now supremely wealthy Clive. Indeed, such was Clive’s swaggering self-confidence at this period that he began to show signs of regretting sharing power with the Mughals at all. In despatches to London he flirted with the idea of seizing full and immediate control of Bengal with the now greatly enhanced power of his ever-growing cohort of tightly disciplined sepoy regiments. By the end of 1758 he was dismissively writing to the chairman of the EIC directors, ‘I can assert with some degree of confidence that this rich and flourishing kingdom may be totally subdued by so small a force as 2,000 Europeans’:

The Moors are indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly beyond all conception … The soldiers, if they deserve that name, have not the least attachment to their Prince, he can only expect service from them who pays them best; but it is a matter of great indifference to them whom they serve; and I am fully persuaded that after the battle of Plassey I could have appropriated the whole country to the Company and preserved it afterwards with as much ease as Mir Jafar, the present Subah [governor] now does, through the terror of English arms and their influence …

The power of [the Mughal] Empire is greatly broken by intestine commotions, and perhaps its total ruin has been prevented only by the sums of money sent to Delly [from Bengal] … You are well acquainted with the nature & dispositions of these Musselmen: gratitude they have none; [they are] bare Men of very narrow conceptions, and have adopted a system of Politicks more peculiar to this Country than any other, viz: to attempt everything through treachery rather than force. Under these circumstances may not so weak a Prince as Mir Jafar be easily destroyed, or be influenced by others to destroy us? What then can enable us to secure our present acquisitions, or improve upon them, but such a force as leaves nothing to the power of Treachery or Ingratitude?⁵

Even more than the distrust and contempt, what emerges from the letters of the period is the sense of mutual incomprehension between these two very different worlds which had now been brought into such close proximity. Mir Jafar, for example, clearly imagined the Company to be an individual. When he learned that Clive was returning to Britain, the packet of presents he sent to his esteemed ally the Company was accompanied by a courteous Persianate letter addressed to what Mir Jafar clearly thought was a single sovereign ruler rather than an impersonal corporate board made up of rich London merchants. In Warren Hastings’ translation from the Persian it expressed Mir Jafar’s ‘earnest desire to see you … which exceeds anything that could be written or spoke … I proceed to address myself to your heart, the repository of friendship … The light of my eyes, dearer than my life, the Nabob Sabut Jung Bahadur [Clive], is departing for his own country. A separation from him is most afflicting to me. Despatch him speedily back to these parts and grant me the happiness of seeing him again soon.’⁶

The incomprehension was mutual. In London, the directors were still dimly digesting the news of the overthrow and murder of Siraj ud-Daula, leading one anxious but inattentive Company director to ask another, was it true that the recently assassinated Sir Roger Daulat was a baronet?⁷

What the people of England did understand very clearly was the unprecedented amount of money – or to use the newly Anglicised word, loot – that Clive was bringing back with him. Not since Cortés had Europe seen an adventurer return with so much treasure from distant conquests.

On 5 February 1760, Clive and his wife Margaret set sail for home on the Royal George, and even before they landed the gossip of the capital was focusing on the unprecedented wealth that Clive was said to be shipping home: Edmund Burke speculated in the Annual Register that ‘it is supposed that the General can realise £1,200,000 in cash, bills and jewels; that his lady has a casket of jewels which are estimated at least at £200,000.^* So that he may with propriety be said to be the richest subject in the three kingdoms.’

The true sums were somewhat less than this. Nevertheless, on arrival, the 35-year-old former Governor of Bengal bought the Shropshire estate of Walcott and leased a townhouse in Berkeley Square, the most fashionable part of London’s Mayfair. A year later the Clives bought, in addition, the Claremont estate from the Duchess of Newcastle for £25,000, as well as a weekend retreat at Esher and several tracts of surrounding land, which they improved and combined into a single estate for an additional £43,000. They also purchased extensive lands in Co. Clare whose name Clive promptly changed from Ballykilty to Plassey. ‘The cost of living rose immediately with the coming of this Croesus,’ wrote Horace Walpole, the waspish Whig, in his diary. ‘He was all over estates and diamonds … and if a beggar asks charity, he says, “Friend I have no small brilliants with me.”’ By this time the rumour mill was in overdrive and the Salisbury Journal was reporting that even Lady Clive’s pet ferret had a diamond necklace worth over £2,500.^**8

Meanwhile, the Bengal that Clive had just conquered sank quickly into chaos.

The young Warren Hastings, now the Company’s Resident (effectively ambassador) at Murshidabad, had been the first to sound the alarm, urging his boss to stay on and settle the anarchy he had helped unleash. In particular, he cited the growing instability at the Murshidabad court. Just before Clive left, Mir Jafar had been able to pay only three of his army’s thirteen months’ arrears of pay. As a result the unpaid troops were openly mutinous and some were starving: ‘their horses are mere skeletons,’ he wrote, ‘and their riders little better. Even the Jamadars [officers] are many of them clothed with rags.’⁹ It had taken only three years since Plassey to impoverish what had recently been probably the wealthiest town in India.

Mir Jafar himself certainly bore some of the responsibility for this mess. As with his mentor Clive, Plassey had brought him great personal enrichment, which he did not hesitate to show off, even as his soldiers went hungry: according to Ghulam Hussain Khan, he had always had a taste for fine jewels, but now ‘was actually loaded with those glittering things; and he actually wore six or seven bracelets at his wrists, every one of a different species of gem; and he also had hanging from his neck, over his breast, three or four chaplets of pearls, every one of inestimable value … He at the same time amused himself with listening to the songs and looking at the dances of a number of singers, who he carried with him wherever he went upon elephants.’¹⁰

It was now clear to everyone that Mir Jafar was simply not capable of ruling Bengal: an almost uneducated Arab soldier, he had no political skills and little conception how to run a state or administer its finances. As Clive himself calmly noted before boarding ship with his fortune, Mir Jafar had proved ‘a prince of little capacity, and not at all blessed with the talent of gaining the love and confidence of his principal officers. His mismanagement has thrown the country into the greatest confusion.’¹¹ By 1760, three simultaneous rebellions had broken out across his dominions in Midnapur, Purnea and Patna. The Mughal nobility and officers of the army came to be increasingly resentful of the massive tribute that Mir Jafar had so thoughtlessly agreed to pay for Company support in overthrowing Siraj ud-Daula, and which was now daily depriving them of the payments and salaries that sustained the engine of state.

The ever astute and watchful Jagat Seths were among the first to realise they had for once backed a loser, and began to refuse loans for military expeditions to put down the different revolts which had begun to spread across the state like wildfires. To avoid further embarrassments, the bankers announced they were heading off with their families on an extended pilgrimage to the temple of their deity, Parasnath, in the mountains of Jharkhand. When the Nawab ordered his troops to block their way, the Seths called his bluff and forced their way through.

As Mir Jafar stumbled and as his treasury emptied, as intrigue festered in the Murshidabad court and as its military machine seemed locked in paralysis, Mir Jafar’s vigorous but violent son Miran turned increasingly vicious. ‘His inclination was to oppress and torment people,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, who knew him well. ‘He was expeditious and quick-minded in slaughtering people, and in committing murders, having a peculiar knack at such matters, and looking upon every infamous or atrocious deed as an act of prudence and foresight. For him, pity and compassion answered no purpose.’¹²

Miran’s first concern was systematically to wipe out what remained of the house of Aliverdi Khan to prevent any counter-coup. He had already sent his henchmen to drown the entire harem of Aliverdi Khan and Siraj ud-Daula. Next came the turn of five of Siraj ud-Daula’s closest relatives. His teenage younger brother, Mirza Mehdi, was despatched with especially savage cruelty: ‘that unfortunate innocent youth was forced between two of those wooden frames called takhtahs [planks], where they conserve shawls and other precious goods; and the ropes having been strained hard at one and the same time, he had been squeezed to death, and it was from that kind of rack that that guiltless soul took its flight to regions of unalterable innocence and eternal repose’.¹³ Miran later justified the act by quoting an aphorism of Sa’di: ‘killing the snake and keeping its young is not the act of a wise man.’

Other potential rivals, including several favourites of the old regime and two senior ministers of his own court, he either stabbed in durbar, or at the gates of the palace, or despatched ‘with a strong dose of poison’. Miran’s paranoia grew in proportion to the chaos: the list of potential victims he kept scribbled in a special pocket book soon extended past 300.¹⁴ As Warren Hastings reported to Calcutta when he heard about the mass murder of Siraj’s family, ‘no argument can excuse or palliate so atrocious a villain, nor (forgive me, Sir, if I add) our supporting such a tyrant’.¹⁵

But the Company, far from helping Mir Jafar, was actively engaged in undermining the economy which sustained him, so helping wring the neck of the Bengali goose which had been laying such astonishing golden eggs. After Plassey, unregulated private English traders began fanning out across Bengal, taking over markets and asserting their authority in a way that had been impossible for them before the Revolution. By 1762, at least thirty-three of these private businesses had set themselves up in more than 400 new British trading posts around the province. Here they defied the power of local officials, refusing to pay the few taxes, tolls or customs duties they were still required to pay, as well as encroaching upon land to which they were not entitled. In this manner they ate away at the economy of Bengal like an invasion of termites steadily gnawing at the inside of an apparently sturdy wooden structure.¹⁶

‘They began to trade in articles which were before prohibited, and to interfere in the affairs of the country,’ wrote the brilliant but weak young Henry Vansittart, a friend of Hastings who had just taken over from Clive as Governor, and who was attempting, largely in vain, to try and rein in such abuses. ‘The Nabob complained very frequently.’¹⁷ Some of these traders operated on a large scale: by 1762–3, Archibald Keir was employing 13,000 men to manufacture 12,000 tons of salt, although the trade was officially out of bounds to any but the Nawab.¹⁸

Nor was it just Company officials who took advantage of the situation to use force to make a fortune: passes, permissions and sepoys were available to anyone who paid enough to the Company. Mir Jafar made particularly strong complaints about a French merchant who had managed to avail himself of Company dastaks (passes) and a battalion of sepoys to impose trade on the people of Assam in ‘a very violent and arbitrary manner’.¹⁹ According to his compatriot, the Comte de Modave, M. Chevalier ‘took a great stock of salt and other articles to offload in the rich province of Assam, shielded by English passes and an escort of sepoys to safeguard his merchandise. He used this armed escort to facilitate the disposal of his goods, and as soon as he was established in the valley, sent his soldiers to the richest inhabitants, violently forcing them to purchase quantities of salt at prices determined by himself. With the same violence, he disposed of all his other trade goods.’²⁰

Modave noted that the further away you went from Calcutta, the worse the situation became: ‘A European visiting the upper parts of the Ganges finds mere robbers in charge of Company affairs, who think nothing of committing the most atrocious acts of tyranny, or subaltern thieves whose despicable villainy dishonours the British nation, whose principles of honour and humanity they seem totally to have rejected.’

The morals of this nation, otherwise so worthy of respect, have here become prodigiously depraved, which cannot but cause distress to any decent and thoughtful observer. British soldiers and traders permit themselves all sorts of liberties in the pursuit of private profit or in the hope of impunity. I have seen some so far forget their duty, that they beat to death unfortunate Indians to extract money not owed to them.

The country lies groaning under the Anarchy, laws have no power of sanction, morals are corrupt to the ultimate degree, the people groan under a multitude of vexations, all caused by the decay and confusion into which this once-great empire has fallen, with legitimate rulers having neither credibility nor authority. This rich and fertile land is turning into a desert. It is lost, unless some sudden general revolution restore its ancient splendour.²¹

Again, it fell to the young Warren Hastings, upriver in Murshidabad, to blow the whistle on many of these illicit activities, exposing the unbridled extortion now going on everywhere in the province: ‘I beg leave to lay before you a grievance which calls loudly for redress,’ he wrote to his friend and ally Vansittart, ‘and which will, unless attended to, render ineffectual any endeavours to create a firm and lasting harmony between the Nabob and the Company; I mean the oppressions committed under the sanction of the English name.’

This evil, I am well assured, is not confined to our subjects alone, but is practised all over the country by people falsely assuming the habits of our sepoys, or calling themselves our gomastas [agents/managers]. As, on such occasions, the great power of the English intimidates people from making any resistance, so on the other hand the difficulty of gaining access to those who might do them justice, prevents our having knowledge of the oppressions, and encourages their continuance, to the great scandal of our government.

I have been surprised to meet [along the Hughli] with several English flags flying in places which I have passed; and in the river I do not believe there was a boat without one. But whatever title they may have been assumed, I was sure their frequency can bode no good to the Nawab’s revenues, or the honour of our nation; but evidently tend to lessen each.²²

‘Nothing will reach the root of these evils,’ he added, ‘’till some certain boundary is fix’d between the Nabob’s authority and our privilege.’²³

Hastings was now the rising star of the East India Company’s Bengal administration. He had never known either of his parents: his mother had died in childbirth, and his father disappeared to Barbados soon after, where he first remarried, then promptly died. Warren was brought up by his grandfather and educated in a charity school with the poorest children in the Gloucestershire village of Daylesford. At some point he was rescued by an uncle who sent him to London to be educated at Westminster, where he is said to have played cricket with Edward Gibbon, the future historian of Roman decline and fall.^* There Hastings quickly excelled as the school’s top scholar but was forced to leave, aged only sixteen, when his uncle died. His guardian found him a place as a writer in the Company, and shipped him straight out to Bengal, just in time to become a prisoner of Siraj ud-Daula at the fall of the Kasimbazar factory in 1756.²⁴

By then, working as a buyer of silk in the villages around Murshidabad, fluent in Urdu and Bengali, and working hard on his Persian, Hastings had already fallen for his adopted country, which he always maintained he ‘loved a little more’ than his native one. A portrait from the period shows a thin, plainly dressed and balding young man in simple brown fustian with an open face and a highly intelligent, somewhat wistful expression, but with a hint of sense of humour in the set of his lips. His letters chime with this impression, revealing a diffident, austere, sensitive and unusually self-contained young man who rose at dawn, had a cold bath then rode for an hour, occasionally with a hawk on his arm. He seems to have kept his own company, drinking ‘but little wine’ and spending his evenings reading, strumming a guitar and working on his Persian. His letters home are full of requests for books.²⁵ From the beginning he was fierce in his defence of the rights of the Bengalis who had found themselves defenceless in the face of the plunder and exploitation of Company gomastas after Plassey: the oppressions of these agents were often so ‘scandalous,’ he wrote, ‘that I can no longer put up with them without injury to my own character … I am tired of complaining to people who are strangers to justice, remorse or shame.’²⁶ Brilliant, hardworking and an unusually skilled linguist, he was quickly promoted to become the Company’s Resident at Mir Jafar’s court where his job was to try and keep the hapless Nawab’s regime from collapse.

This was every day becoming more likely. The absence of taxes and customs duty all added to the financial pressure on the Nawab and led to growing violence in the streets of Murshidabad where the Nawab’s hungry sepoys were now taking matters into their own hands. But it also did much to alienate powerful individuals who might otherwise have been tempted to throw in their lot with the Company-backed regime. One of the first victims of the new power equation in Bengal was an influential Kashmiri trader named Mir Ashraf. Mir Ashraf was part of a dynasty of cultured Patna-based merchant princes who had grown rich on the manufacture and trade of saltpetre, derived from the mineral nitrates which appeared naturally in the soils of Bihar. As well as being an important ingredient of gunpowder, it was also used by the Mughals to cool their drinks.

Mir Ashraf’s dynasty had good political connections at the Murshidabad court, and until the Battle of Plassey they had found it easy to dominate the saltpetre trade with the support of the Nawab. This irritated their British counterparts, who were unable to compete with the Mir’s efficient procurement organisation, and who had for some years been complaining unsuccessfully that he was monopolising all saltpetre stocks and so shutting them out of the market.

Before Plassey, these complaints about Mir Ashraf were simply ignored by Nawab Aliverdi Khan, who dismissed the petitions against his friend by English interlopers as absurdly presumptuous. But within two months of the overthrow of Siraj ud-Daula, the Company’s merchants in Patna were not only successfully encroaching upon Mir Ashraf’s trade, they actually seized his entire saltpetre stocks by force of arms: in August 1757, a particularly aggressive Company factor named Paul Pearkes, whose name appears in several letters of complaint from Mir Jafar, actually broke into Ashraf’s warehouses in an armed attack, using the 170 sepoys stationed to guard the Company’s fortified upcountry base, the great Patna factory. His excuse was the patently invented charge that his business rival was sheltering French goods. Pearkes seized all the saltpetre in the warehouse and adamantly refused to return it, despite the intervention of several British officials in Patna. Only when Mir Ashraf personally appealed to Clive himself was his property restored.²⁷

As a result of these abuses, by 1760 both Mir Ashraf and the influential Jagat Seths had turned against the new regime and were actively writing letters to the one force they thought might still be able to liberate Bengal from the encroachments of the Company. This was the new Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam, who since his escape from Delhi had been wandering the Ganges plains, actively looking for a kingdom to rule, and surrounding himself with followers hoping for a return of the old Mughal order.²⁸

On 9 February 1760, just four days after Clive had left India, Shah Alam crossed the Karmanasa, the boundary of Mir Jafar’s dominions, and announced to his followers that the time had come to retake ‘the prosperous and rich province’ of Bengal for the Empire. His ultimate aim, he said, was to ‘earn the money and revenue required to put down [the psychotic teenage vizier in Delhi] Imad ul-Mulk, and all who were acting against his government’.²⁹

But his first goal, encouraged by Mir Ashraf, who used Hindu ascetics to carry his secret messages back and forth, was to take advantage of the growing anarchy in Mir Jafar’s dominions to attack his western headquarters, Patna. Within a few days, large numbers of the old Mughal nobility of Bengal had thrown off their allegiance to Mir Jafar and offered their support to the young Emperor in his quixotic quest to rebuild the hollowed-out Mughal imperium.³⁰

While Murshidabad had been falling apart, the Mughal capital of Delhi was faring even worse: like some rotting carcass preyed upon by rival packs of jackals, what was left of its riches provided intermittent sustenance to a succession of passing armies, as the city was alternately occupied and looted by Maratha raiders from the south and Afghan invaders from the north.

Throughout these successive occupations, Imad ul-Mulk had some how clung to power in the ruins of Delhi with the backing of the Marathas, sometimes ignoring, sometimes bullying his powerless puppet monarch, Shah Alam’s father, Alamgir II. Eventually, on the eve of yet another Afghan invasion by Ahmed Shah Durrani, who was now married to Alamgir’s daughter, and who he feared would naturally side with his father-in-law, the vizier decided to rid himself of his royal encumbrance entirely before the latter did the same to him.³¹

According to the account of Khair ud-Din Illahabadi in his Book of Admonition, the Ibratnama, Imad ul-Mulk finally took action in the early afternoon of 29 November 1759, at the fourteenth-century Firoz Shah’s Kotla, south of the Red Fort, overlooking the Yamuna River. ‘Imad ul-Mulk mistrusted the King, and equally the minister Khan-i Khanan, whom he knew to be party to the King’s secret counsels.’

So, he first murdered the Khan-i Khanan while he was at his prayers, then he sent to the King the fake news that, ‘A wandering dervish from Kandahar has come and settled in the ruins of Firuz Shah’s kûtla, a wonder-worker definitely worth visiting!’ He knew that the pious King had a penchant for visiting fakirs, and that he would not resist an invitation to see one who had come from Ahmad Shah Durrani’s homeland.

The King could not contain his eagerness, and immediately set off: when he reached the chamber, he paused at the entrance, and his sword was politely taken from his hand and the curtain lifted: as soon as he was inside, the curtain was dropped again and fastened tight. Mirza Babur, who had accompanied him, saw that the Emperor was in danger and drew his sword to take on the attackers: but he was over-powered by a crowd of Imad al-Mulk’s men, disarmed and bundled into a covered litter, then whisked off back to the Salateen prison in the Red Fort.

Meanwhile, some ghoulish Mughal soldiers, who had been awaiting the King’s arrival, appeared out of the dark and stabbed the unarmed man repeatedly with their daggers. Then they dragged him out by the feet and threw his corpse down to the sandy river bank below, then stripped it of its coat and under-garments and left it lying naked for six watches before having it taken to be interred in the Mausoleum of the Emperor Humayun.³²

The news of his father’s assassination finally reached Shah Alam three weeks later. The prince was still wandering in the east. His official court chronicle, the Shah Alam Nama, paints a picture of the young prince touring the Ganges plains giving titles and promising estates, and trying to gather support rather as a modern Indian politician canvasses for an election: visiting shrines, seeking the blessings of holy men and saints, holding receptions and receiving supporters and recruits.³³

Shah Alam had no land and no money, but compensated as best he could for this with his immense charm, good looks, poetic temperament and refined manners. The Lord of the Universe may have been unable to enter his own capital, yet there was still some lingering magic in the title, and this penniless wanderer was now widely regarded as the de jure ruler of almost all of India, able to issue much-coveted imperial titles.³⁴ The young Shah Alam proved adept at drawing on the hallowed mystique associated with the imperial person, and the growing nostalgia for the once-peaceful days of Mughal rule. In this way, he managed to collect around him some 20,000 followers and unemployed soldiers of fortune, most of them as penniless and ill equipped as he was. It was as if the value of the royal charisma was growing in importance, even as the royal purse emptied.

Apart from money, what Shah Alam really lacked was a modern European-style infantry regiment, and the artillery which would allow him to besiege walled cities. Shortly before he learned of his father’s death, however, fortune brought him a partial solution to both in the person of the dashing fugitive French commander of Scottish extraction, Jean Law de Lauriston. Law had managed to escape from Bengal soon after the twin disasters of the fall of Chandernagar and the Battle of Plassey temporarily ended French ambitions in eastern and northern India. He was still on the run from the Company when he came across the royal camp. He was delighted by what he saw of the ambitious and charming young prince.

Characteristically, Shah Alam did not try to hide the difficulty of his situation from Law. ‘Wherever I go I find only pretenders,’ he told him, ‘nawabs or rajas, who have become accustomed to an independence which suits them so much they have no wish to bestir themselves on my behalf. I have no resources except theirs – unless the heavens declare in my favour by some extraordinary blow. Here, with the whole of Bengal in turmoil, it is just possible that the heavens might intervene in my favour. It might also be the end for me. One can only wait and see.’³⁵

Flattered as he was by his royal reception, hard experience made Law sceptical about the new Emperor’s chances, particularly given his experience of the Mughal nobility on whom Shah Alam relied. He confided to the historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘I have travelled everywhere from Bengal to Delhi, but nowhere have I found anything from anyone except oppression of the poor and plundering of way-farers.’

Whenever I wanted that one of these famous potentates like Shuja ud-Daula [the Wazir of Avadh], Imad ul-Mulk or their peers, out of honour and a regard for the regulation of the government, should undertake to put in order the affairs of Bengal and suppress the English, not one of them felt any inclination for the task. They did not once weigh in their minds the shamefulness of their conduct … The Indian nobles are a set of disorderly, inconsistent blockheads, who exist solely for ruining a world of people.³⁶

With him, Law had brought a ragged but determined force of one hundred of the last French troops in north India, and a battle-hardened battalion of 200 highly trained and disciplined sepoys. These troops he now offered to Shah Alam, who accepted with pleasure. On 23 December 1759, at Gothauli near Allahabad, the young Emperor emerged from the royal tents having shut himself away for three days of state mourning for his father.

According to the Mughal historian Shakir Khan, ‘On the victorious day of his ascension to the imperial throne, His Sacred Majesty, the Shadow of God, Vice-Regent of the All-Merciful, the Emperor who is a Refuge to all the World, with general support and acclamation, commanded coins to be struck and khutba sermons to be given in the name of Shah Alam, King of the World, Warrior, Emperor, Exalted Seed, with the glorious Aureole of Kingship of the ancient Persian Kings, may God grant him eternal rule!’³⁷

Soon after, the court artist, Mihir Chand, painted the Shah’s dignified accession portrait, and newly minted rupees in the name of Shah Alam were distributed around the camp, as the commanders and army officers came to offer their compliments. ‘I was honoured with the office of Mir Atish,’ wrote Law, ‘that is Master of Mughal Artillery, without actually having any heavy guns, although notionally, all the cannons and firelocks in the Empire were now under my orders’:

Thereafter offices were bestowed upon many other officers. The ceremony was conducted perfectly, accompanied by the sound of music by the naubat [trumpet] and artillery salutes …

The whole country was at this point in flames, torn apart by a multitude of factions. Moreover, the Shah’s officers were divided among themselves; there was no uniform command and they had not been paid for months. Money and war materiel were completely lacking … I had got some bayonets made which were fixed to long poles, and with these I armed about 300 of the Koli tribals who were following us. I made them march in formation behind my regular sepoys, and they greatly augmented our strength. I also added a squadron of about 15 Mughal horsemen, well mounted … It was not brilliant, but I was now Mir Atish, just as Shah Alam had become Emperor. The idea was everything.³⁸

Shah Alam’s campaign to recapture Bengal got off to a promising start. The Emperor successfully crossed the Karmanasa, and in durbar formally demanded the homage of the people, landowners and rulers of Bengal, who he commanded to ‘remove the cotton wool of negligence from their ears’. Within days, three of the important Bengali zamindars west of the Hughli announced their support, as did two of Mir Jafar’s most senior army commanders. All made haste westwards to join the Emperor with their troops.³⁹

Shah Alam decided to attack immediately, before Miran and the Company commander Major John Caillaud could arrive with reinforcements from Murshidabad. So on 9 February the Emperor’s forces moved forward and at Masumpur, a short distance outside Patna, engaged the Company sepoys commanded by the Governor of Patna, Raja Ram Narain. The battle was fought on the banks of the River Dehva. ‘Musket balls were falling from the English line like a storm of hail,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, but the young Emperor’s forces attacked first, ‘broke the enemy’s ranks, and made them turn their backs …’

As soon as the English fire was silenced, and the enemy was flying, [Shah Alam’s commander] Kamgar Khan fell on Ram Narain, who yet stood his ground [on his elephant] with a number of men … Ram Narain’s army was put to rout, and the Raja himself was obliged to fly for his life. Kamgar Khan ran a spear at him, wounding him grievously … and he fell speechless inside his howdah, where, luckily for him, he was sheltered by the boards … Ram Narain appeared senseless, so his driver turned his elephant around and fled … The Emperor, satisfied with his victory, ordered his music to play in token of rejoicing, but forbore pursuing the vanquished.⁴⁰

Allowing the defeated army to tend their wounded may have been a noble act, but Ghulam Hussain Khan believed it was also a fatal mistake: ‘Had the victorious followed their blow, and pursued the vanquished, they would have mastered the city of Patna at once, as there did not remain in it a single soldier; they would have plundered it, and would have finished Ram Narain, who could not move. But as it was ordered by fate that city should be saved, Kamgar Khan contented himself with plundering the flat country outside the walls, and laying it under contribution.’⁴¹

Part of the British community in Patna fled downriver by boat. But Ram Narain’s army remained quite safe within the city for, once the gates had been shut, the Emperor simply did not have the necessary artillery or siege equipment to attempt a storming of the walls.

Exaggerated rumours of the Emperor’s victory soon reached Murshidabad where it threw the court into panic, and where Mir Jafar, aware of the extreme instability of his regime, fell into deep despair.⁴² In the event, however, it proved a short-lived victory. Less than a week later, Major Caillaud and Miran marched into Patna, relieved the garrison, then marched out to confront the Emperor’s force. Caillaud commanded one wing, Miran the other, and it was upon his cavalry that the Emperor’s troops first fell.

‘The enemy came on with much spirit,’ wrote Caillaud afterwards, ‘though with some irregularity, and in many separate bodies, after the Eastern manner of fighting.’⁴³

Miran’s army shattered at the force of the charge: ‘Without minding his high rank and conspicuous station,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘Miran was struck with a panic and turned around; he fled, followed reluctantly by his commanders, who called in vain for him to return.’ He was followed by the Emperor’s bowmen who surrounded the elephant and fired into his howdah: ‘One arrow hit Miran, breaking his teeth; and whilst he was carrying his hand thither, another arrow lodged in his neck.’ But Caillaud’s highly disciplined Company sepoys held their ground, formed a square and attacked the flank and rear of the Mughal army at short range, with all the force of the musketry at their command. The effect was devastating. Hundreds were killed. Soon, it was the turn of the Emperor’s troops to flee.

But Shah Alam had not come so far from Delhi to give up now. Sending his baggage and artillery back to the camp under the care of Law, he took the bold step of gathering a small body of his elite, lightly equipped Mughal cavalry under Kamgar Khan. Instead of retreating he pressed onwards, heading east, cross-country. ‘He resolved to leave the enemy behind,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘and by cutting his way through the hills and mountains, to attack the undefended city of Murshidabad, where he hoped he would possess himself of Mir Jafar’s person, and of the wealth of so rich a capital.’⁴⁴

The speed and courage shown by Shah Alam’s small force took the Company by surprise. It was several days before Caillaud realised what the Emperor had done and where he was heading and was in a position to assemble a crack cavalry force to begin the pursuit.

Meanwhile, with three days’ lead, the Emperor and Kamgar Khan, in the words of the Tarikh-i Muzaffari, ‘thinking it was essential to move by the most rapid route available, crossed over several high passes rapidly and clandestinely, passing with forced marches steep mountains and narrow, dark clefts before heading southwards, down through the Bengal plains, passing Birbhum and eventually reaching the district of Burdwan’. There the Raja, who was an uncle of Kamgar Khan, had already declared for Shah Alam and risen in revolt against Mir Jafar.⁴⁵

It was here, midway between Murshidabad and Calcutta, that the imperial army made the mistake of pausing for three days, while they rested and gathered more recruits, money and equipment from among the disaffected nobility of Bengal. As a relieved Caillaud himself wrote afterwards, ‘Either from irresolution or some dissention among his commanders, he [Shah Alam] committed an unpardonable and capital error in hesitating to attack the old Nabob immediately, while the two armies were still divided. The delay completely ruined his design, at first so masterly concerted, and till then with so much steadiness carried on.’⁴⁶

As with the failure to keep up momentum after the victory outside Patna, it gave Shah Alam’s opponents time to catch up and regroup. By the time the Emperor had ordered his now slightly larger force to head north from Burdwan, Miran and Caillaud had managed to catch them up, and on 4 April effected a junction with Mir Jafar’s small army. Together, they now blocked the road to Murshidabad.

The vital element of surprise was now completely lost. Mir Jafar’s combined force lined up at Mongalkote, on the banks of the Damodar River. Here they commanded the crossing place and prevented the Emperor from moving the final few miles north to take the city. Had Shah Alam headed straight to Murshidabad without diverting south to Burdwan he would have found it all but undefended. As it was, a week later further reinforcements were still arriving for Mir Jafar: ‘all these forces, with the English military contingent, turned to confront the Emperor’s army encamped on the opposite bank.’

Seeing such overwhelming enemy forces lined up on the bank of the Damodar, and realising that he could not now make the crossing and confront them with any hope of success, the Emperor decided he had no option but to return to Patna. Mir Jafar, seeing himself suddenly victorious, sent a military force to chase the retreating Emperor; however Kamgar Khan and the others kept the pursuing enemy busy, alternately with fighting and fleeing, and thus managed to get their troops and possessions back safely to Patna, where they were reunited with the sepoys of M. Law.⁴⁷

It had been a bold, imaginative and very nearly successful strike. But the game was almost up. The people of Bihar, who had welcomed Shah Alam so enthusiastically a few months before, were now tired of hosting a large, undisciplined and losing army. According to Ghulam Hussain Khan, people initially loved the idea of the return of the good order of Mughal government, but instead they ‘experienced from his unruly troops, and from his disorderly generals, every act of oppression and extortion imaginable; and, on the other hand, they saw every day what a strict discipline the English officers of those days did observe, and how amongst them that travelled, [the officers] carried so strict a hand upon their troops, as to suffer not a blade of grass to be touched; then indeed the scales were turned and when the Prince made his second expedition into those parts, I heard people load him with imprecations, and pray for victory to the English army.’⁴⁸

After several months of dwindling fortunes, and deserting troops, the final defeat of the Emperor’s army took place at the Battle of Helsa, near Bodhgaya, the site of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, on 15 January 1761. Here the imperial army was finally cornered by several battalions of red-coated sepoys.

The night before the battle, Law dined for the last time with the Emperor – ‘a very private affair, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and there were none of the usual constraints of etiquette and ceremony. I told him frankly that our situation was very bad. The Prince then opened up his heart about the misfortunes that had continued to dog him, and I tried to persuade him that, for the sake of his own security and peace, it might be better if he turned his gaze in some direction other than Bengal. “Alas!” he said, “what will they say if I retreat? Contempt will be added to the indifference with which my subjects already regard me.”’⁴⁹

Early the following morning, the Company troops took the initiative, moving rapidly forward from their entrenchments, ‘cannonading as they marched’. A well-aimed ball from a 12-pounder killed the mahout of the Emperor’s elephant. Another stray shot wounded the elephant itself, which careered off the field, carrying the Emperor with it.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, Mir Jafar, reverting to his usual devious tactics, had managed with large bribes to corrupt Shah Alam’s commander, Kamgar Khan, as well as several other courtiers in his retinue, ‘who soon crossed sides and joined the forces of the Nawab’, reported the French soldier of fortune Jean-Baptiste Gentil. ‘After that, there could be no doubt about the outcome. The general and the courtiers all took to their heels, taking with them the greater part of the Mughal army. Monsieur Law de Lauriston, who was in charge of the royal artillery, in spite of his bravery, military skill and all his efforts, could do nothing to stop them, and the French officer was taken prisoner.’⁵¹

Ghulam Hussain Khan gives a moving account of Law’s brave last stand and his determination, having seen the Emperor deserted by all, and betrayed even by his commander-in-chief, to battle to the death: ‘M. Law, with a small force, and the few pieces of artillery that he could muster, bravely fought the English, and for some time he managed to withstand their immense numerical superiority. The handful of troops that followed M. Law, discouraged by the flight of the Emperor and tired of the wandering life they had hitherto led in his service, turned about and fled. M. Law, finding himself abandoned and alone, resolved not to turn his back; he bestrode one of the guns, and remained firm in that posture, waiting for the moment of death.’⁵²

Moved by Law’s bravery, the Company commander, John Carnac, dismounted, and without taking a guard, but bringing his most senior staff officers, walked over on foot, and pulling their ‘hats from their heads, they swept the air with them, as if to make him a salaam’, pleading with Law to surrender: ‘You have done everything that can be expected from a brave man, and your name shall undoubtedly be transmitted to posterity by the pen of history,’ he begged. ‘Now loosen your sword from your loins, come amongst us, and abandon all thoughts of contending with the English.’

Law answered that if they would ‘accept this surrendering himself just as he was, he had no objections; but that as to surrendering himself with the disgrace of his being without a sword, it was a shame he would never submit to; and that they must take his life if they were not satisfied with the condition. The English commanders, admiring his firmness, consented to his surrendering himself in the manner he wished to; after which the Major shook hands with him, in their European manner, and every sentiment of enmity was instantly dismissed from both sides.’⁵³

Later, in the Company camp, the historian was appalled by the boorishness of Mir Jafar’s Murshidabad soldiers who began to taunt the captured Law, asking ‘where is the Bibi [Mistress] Law now?’

Carnac was furious at the impropriety of the remark: ‘This man,’ he said, ‘had fought bravely, and deserves the attention of all brave men; the impertinences which you have been offering him may be customary amongst your friends and your nation, but cannot be suffered in ours, for whom it is a standing rule never to offer injury to a vanquished foe.’ The man whom had taunted Law, checked by this reprimand, held his tongue and did not answer a word. He went away much abashed, and although he was a commander of importance … No one spoke to him any more, or made a show of standing up at his departure.

The incident caused Ghulam Hussain Khan to pay a rare compliment to the British, a nation he regarded as having wrecked his motherland:

This reprimand did much honour to the English; and it must be acknowledged, to the honour of these strangers, that their conduct in war and battle is worthy of admiration, just as, on the other hand, nothing is more becoming than their behaviour to an enemy, whether in the heat of action, or in the pride of success and victory.⁵⁴

On 2 July 1761, Miran, the ‘abominable’, murderous, debauchee son of Mir Jafar, was killed – allegedly by a chance sudden strike of lightning while returning from the campaign against Shah Alam. According to John Caillaud, who was present in the camp, ‘the young nabob, was lying asleep in his tent at midnight. Though singular in itself, yet no very extraordinary circumstances attended the event. He was struck dead in the middle of a violent storm, by a flash of lightning. The fire pierced through the top of the tent, struck upon his left breast, and he perished in the flame.’⁵⁵

The event, however, occurred on precisely the anniversary of Miran’s mass murder of the harem of Siraj ud-Daula and from the beginning there were rumours that his death was the result of divine intervention – or, alternatively, that it was not an accident at all, and that Miran had been murdered. The most probable candidate was said to be a bereaved concubine who had lost a sister to Miran’s murderous tendencies, and who was then said to have covered up her revenge by setting fire to the tent.⁵⁶

Many rejoiced at the death of this bloodthirsty and amoral prince; but for his father, Mir Jafar, it was the last straw. As the Company demanded prompt payment of all his debts, and as his subjects and troopers revolted against him, the old man had relied more and more on the grit and resolution of his son. Without him, Mir Jafar went to pieces. ‘He had at no time been in his right senses,’ commented Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘but he now lost the little reason that remained to him. The affairs of the army, as well as the government being entirely abandoned to chance, fell into a confusion not to be described.’⁵⁷

But Mir Jafar had a son-in-law, Mir Qasim, as different a man as could be imagined from his chaotic and uneducated father-in-law. Of noble Persian extraction, though born on his father’s estates near Patna, Mir Qasim was small in frame, with little military experience, but young, capable, intelligent and, above all, determined.⁵⁸

Warren Hastings was the first to spot his unusual qualities; he was also the first to make clear to Calcutta the urgent need to bring in a new administration to Murshidabad if Bengal was to remain governable. Mir Qasim’s ‘education has been suitable to his noble birth,’ he wrote, ‘and there are few accomplishments held requisite for those of highest Rank which he does not possess in an eminent degree. He has given many proofs of his integrity, a capacity for business, and a strict adherence to his Engagements. He is generally respected by the Jamadars [officers] & Persons of Distinction in this Province, and I have seen Letters addressed to him from the Principal Zamindars of Bihar, filled with expressions of the highest respect for this character, and their earnest desire to be under his Government.’⁵⁹

Mir Qasim was duly sent down to Calcutta to meet the new Governor, Henry Vansittart. During the interview he came up with a sophisticated scheme both to solve the Company’s financial problems and to repay the Murshidabad debt, by ceding to the Company Burdwan, Midnapur and Chittagong – sufficient territories to pay for the upkeep of both armies. Vansittart was impressed, and decided to back a coup, or second revolution, to put Mir Qasim on the throne in place of his father-in-law. A series of large bribes, including a cash payment of £50,000 to Vansittart personally, and £150,000^* to be distributed among his council, cemented the deal.⁶⁰

Meanwhile, on 10 July 1761, matters came to a head in Murshidabad, giving the Company both the excuse and the perfect cover for their second coup: ‘The army, demanding their pay which had come into arrears for some years, finally mutinied in a body’, recorded the Riyazu-s-salatin. ‘The mutineers surrounded the palace, pulling their officers from their horses and palanquins, climbing the palace walls and throwing masonry down on palace servants. Then they besieged the Nawab in his Chihil Sutun palace, and cut off supplies of food and water.’

Mir Qasim, in concert with Jagat Seth, conspired with the English chiefs … brought Mir Jafar out from the Fort, placed him in a boat, and sent him down to Calcutta [as if to rescue him and saying it was for his own safety]. At the same time, Mir Qasim entered the fort, mounted the musnud [throne] and issued proclamations of peace and security in his own name.⁶¹

Mir Jafar was given an escort, led by the ubiquitous Major Caillaud, ‘to protect his person from the insults of the people, and he was permitted to take with him women, jewels, treasure and whatever else he thought proper’.⁶² As he was rowed downstream, finally realising that he had been not so much rescued as deposed, a baffled Mir Jafar begged to be allowed to appeal to his patron, Clive: ‘The English placed me on the musnud,’ he said. ‘You may depose me if you please. You have thought proper to break your engagements. I will not break with mine. I desire you will either send me to Sabut Jung [Clive], for he will do me justice, or let me go to Mecca.’⁶³

But the elderly, failing former Nawab, now of no further use to the Company, was allowed neither of his preferred options. Instead he was given a modest townhouse in north Calcutta, and an equally modest pension, and for several months was kept under strict house arrest. The second revolution engineered by the Company, this time against their own puppet, turned out to be even smoother than the first, and completely bloodless.

But the man they had just put in charge of Bengal would prove to be less easy to bully than Mir Jafar. As the Tarikh-i Muzaffari succinctly put it, ‘Mir Qasim quickly succeeded in achieving a degree of independence from the English that is now hard to imagine.’⁶⁴

Even Warren Hastings, who greatly admired Mir Qasim’s abilities, was surprised by the speed with which he turned matters around.

The new Nawab first quickly dispersed the mutinous sepoys of Murshidabad by paying them from his own treasury. He then applied himself to sorting out finances and surprised everyone with his administrative skills: ‘Mir Qasim Khan was very skilled in extracting information and in analysing written reports and accounts,’ wrote the historian Mohammad Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat. ‘He embarked immediately on the project of bringing the land of Bengal back into some sort of order.’

He called in the state accountants and tax-gatherers, examining their accounts closely to find out any peculation committed by functionaries of the previous regime. He had Raja Ram Narain [the Governor of Patna, who had helped defeat Shah Alam] brought in for questioning and demanded to see the revenue accounts for Bihar. Any sums claimed to have been made as payments for army salaries were inspected by his tax-gatherers, whom he sent to check the actual numbers of soldiers present, and to correct the record accordingly. After this, Raja Ram Narain, accused on several counts, was imprisoned. Some 15 lakhs rupees^* of the Raja’s personal wealth was confiscated, together with his jewels.⁶⁵

At first, Mir Qasim struggled to pay the money he owed the British, despite these seizures. He increased taxes to almost double what they had been under Aliverdi Khan, successfully raising Rs30 million^** annually – twice the Rs18 million gathered by the regime before Plassey.⁶⁶ Meanwhile, the new Nawab began to develop a coherent strategy to deal with the British: he decided more or less to abandon lower Bengal to the Company, but worked to keep their influence at a minimum elsewhere. He also established a highly centralised military state, which he sustained by seizing the property and treasure from any officials he suspected of corruption: ‘he pursued with vexations anyone suspected of harbouring wealth and any who held even the slightest enmity towards himself, immediately taking over their hidden riches. In this manner, gold flowed in plenty into the treasury of Mir Qasim Khan.’⁶⁷

In accordance with his restructuring plan, Mir Qasim decided to leave his uncle in charge of Murshidabad, which he thought too vulnerable to interference from Calcutta, and to rule instead from Bihar, as far as possible from the Company’s headquarters. He first moved to Patna, occupying the fort apartments vacated by the now imprisoned Raja Ram Narain. Here he briefly set up court, until the hostility and interference of the Company’s aggressive Chief Factor there, William Ellis, prompted him to move a little downstream to the old Mughal fortress of Monghyr where he could not be spied on by the Company.

At Monghyr he continued to reform the finances. He ordered the Jagat Seths to join him, marched them over from Murshidabad under guard and confined them to the fort. There he forced them to pay off both the Nawab’s outstanding obligations to the Company and the arrears of the Murshidabad troops.

The better to enforce his will, and also, implicitly, to protect him from the Company, he then reformed his army. The 90,000 troops Mir Qasim was supposed to possess on paper turned out to muster less than half that in reality. Incompetent and corrupt generals were dismissed and he began recruiting new troops, forming a fresh force of 16,000 crack Mughal horse and three battalion of European-style sepoys, amounting to around 25,000 infantry.

To drill them in the new European manner he next appointed two Christian mercenaries. The first was Walter Reinhardt, nicknamed Sumru or Sombre, a gloomy and coldly emotionless Alsatian German soldier of fortune. He had been born to a poor farmer with a smallholding on the Moselle in the Lower Palatinate of the Rhine, and had risen to become a mounted cuirassier guard in the French army where he had fought with bravery at the Battle of Ittingen. Finding himself in Holland, he had caught a ship to India on a whim, where, according to one of his colleagues, the Comte de Modave, he soon took ‘on the habits and indeed the prejudices of this country to such a degree that even the Mughals believe he was born in Hindustan. He speaks nearly all the local languages, but can neither read nor write. Nevertheless, through his staff, he keeps up an extensive correspondence.’⁶⁸

Mir Qasim’s second Christian commander was Khoja Gregory, an Isfahani Armenian to whom Mir Qasim gave the title Gurghin Khan, or the Wolf. Ghulam Hussain Khan met him and thought him a remarkable man: ‘above ordinary size, strongly built, with a very fair complexion, an aquiline nose and large black eyes, full of fire’.⁶⁹ The job of both men was to train up Mir Qasim’s forces so that they could equal those of the Company. They also started armaments factories to provide their master with high-quality modern muskets and cannon. Soon Mir Qasim ‘was amassing and manufacturing as many guns and flint muskets as he could, with every necessary for war’.⁷⁰

The new Nawab also set up a formidable new intelligence network, with three head spies, each with hundreds of informers under them. Before long, all three of his intelligence chiefs had been executed for their suspected intrigues. Mir Qasim’s rule was quickly proving as chilling as it was effective. ‘So suspicious a government soon interrupted all social intercourse,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, who was terrified of the new Nawab. ‘He was ever prone to the confiscation of properties, confinement of persons, and the effusion of blood … People accustomed to a certain set of acquaintances and visits, now found themselves under the necessity of living quietly at home.’⁷¹

Yet the historian still greatly admired the Nawab’s extraordinary administrative skills: ‘He had some admirable qualities,’ he admitted,

that balanced his bad ones. In unravelling the intricacies of the affairs of Government, and especially in the knotty mysteries of finance; in establishing regular payments for his troops, and for his household; in honouring and rewarding men of merit, and men of learning; in conducting his expenditure, exactly between the extremities of parsimony and prodigality; and in knowing intuitively where he must spend freely, and where with moderation – in all these qualifications he was an incomparable man indeed; and the most extraordinary Prince of his age.⁷²

But beyond the efficiency a darker side to the rule of the new Nawab began to emerge. Many men began to disappear. Rich landowners and bureaucrats were summoned to Monghyr, imprisoned, tortured and stripped of their wealth, whether they were guilty of corruption or not: ‘Many were executed on a mere suspicion,’ wrote Ansari. ‘These killings instilled such fear in the hearts of people, that they dared not speak out against him or his policies, and no-one felt safe in their own home.’⁷³

After the Battle of Helsa in early January 1761, the Mughal Emperor found himself in the unexpected position of being on the run from the mercenary troops of a once humble trading company.

The redcoats tracked him relentlessly. On 24 January, Major John Carnac wrote to Calcutta telling his masters, ‘We have kept following the prince ever since the action, and press so closely upon him that sometimes we find the fires of his camp still burning … His army must be totally dispersed … and he reduced so low as to be more an object of pity than fear.’⁷⁴

Yet it was only now, after the Company had defeated Shah Alam, and his army had largely dissolved, that the British began to understand the moral power still wielded by the Emperor. Shah Alam had lost everything – even his personal baggage, writing table and calligraphy case, which had fallen from his howdah when his elephant charged off the battlefield – and he could now offer his followers almost nothing of any practical value. And yet they continued to revere him: ‘It is inconceivable how the name of the king merely should prepossess all minds so strongly in his favour,’ wrote Carnac. ‘Yet so it is that even in his present distressed condition he is held by both Musselmans and Gentoos [Muslims and Hindus] in a kind of adoration.’

Carnac was as skilled a politician as he was a soldier, and noted, perceptively: ‘We may hereafter have it in our power to employ this prepossession to our advantage; in the meantime the axe is laid to the root of the troubles which have so long infested this province.’⁷⁵

In the aftermath of his defeat, Shah Alam had also had time to revaluate his position with regard to the Company and realised that both sides had much to offer each other. After all, he had no wish to rule Bengal directly. Ever since the time Akbar made his former Rajput enemy Raja Jai Singh the commander of his army, the Mughals had always had the happy knack of turning their former enemies into useful allies. Perhaps now, Shah Alam seems to have wondered, he could use the British in the same way Akbar used the Rajputs to effect his ends? In the eyes of most Indians the Company lacked any legal right to rule. It was in Shah Alam’s power to grant them the legitimacy they needed. Maybe an alliance could be formed, and British arms could carry him back to Delhi, remove the usurper, Imad ul-Mulk, and restore him to his rightful throne?

On 29 January an emissary from the Emperor arrived in Carnac’s camp, with proposals for a settlement. Ambassadors passed backwards and forwards, messages were sent to Calcutta, and eventually, on 3 February, a meeting was arranged in a mango grove near Gaya. Ghulam Hussain Khan was there, as his father had volunteered to act as Shah Alam’s intermediary with the British: ‘The Emperor was advancing with his troops in battle array towards the English camp, when, about midday, the Major made his appearance with his officers.’

Pulling off his hat, and putting it under his arm, he advanced in that posture, marching on foot close to the Emperor’s elephant; but the monarch commanded him to be mounted. Carnac got on horseback, and taking his station alone, he preceded the Emperor’s elephant by about an arrow’s shot. My father, on his elephant, followed the Emperor at a small distance, both men leading the imperial troops, all armed and ready.

At the spot where the troops were to encamp, the Emperor, at Major Carnac’s request, entered a tent pitched in a garden surrounded by a grove, where were conducted the usual [welcome] ceremonies of paan, ittar and rose-water, while dancing girls and musicians provided entertainment for the evening.⁷⁶

The next day the two armies set off together to Patna. Few from the Company had ever seen a Mughal Emperor, and as news spread of Shah Alam’s approach the entire British community in Bihar turned out to see him, joining the throngs lining the streets to catch a glimpse. It was a scene rich with irony: the victors excitedly going out of their way to honour the somewhat surprised vanquished, a man who had spent much of the previous year trying his best to expel them from India. Even the interpreter on this occasion was Archibald Swinton, the man who had chased Shah Alam’s elephant from the battlefield at Helsa, and who had then appropriated the Emperor’s personal baggage.⁷⁷

Yet both parties recognised that this was a situation which benefited everyone, and played their part in the charade: ‘The English were busy turning their factory into an Imperial hall of audience,’ noted Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘arranging a couple of those [long] tables where they take their meals, into a Hindostany throne.’

[Before long,] the hall, being spread and hung with rich stuffs, assumed a very splendid appearance … The English assembled in great numbers. These, on hearing the Emperor’s being on his march, set out on foot with the Major at their head, and after meeting the Monarch, they continued to march on foot, along with his moving throne. The Emperor, having alighted at the gate of the factory, got into the hall, and took his seat on his throne. The English were standing to the right and left of it. The Major made a profound bow and took his seat.⁷⁸

The only person displeased with this turn of events was the newly installed Nawab, Mir Qasim. He feared, with good reason, that now the Company had the Emperor in their clutches, the usefulness of a tame Nawab was diminished, and that the Company might ask to have themselves appointed in his stead. Mir Qasim was right to be anxious on this score: this was indeed an option the Council in Calcutta had weighed up, but decided not to pursue for the time being.⁷⁹

So it was that Mir Qasim finally met his Emperor, the Refuge of the World, sitting on a makeshift throne, within an East India Company opium factory. After some courtly haggling behind the scenes, a deal had been fixed. Mir Qasim duly bowed three times, offering the Emperor his obedience, and made a formal nazar [offering] of 1,001 gold coins, ‘and a number of trays covered with precious and curious stuffs for apparel, to which he added a quantity of jewels and other costly articles. The Emperor accepted his homage, and honoured him with a chaplet of pearls, and an aigrette of jewels, adorned with black eagle’s feathers.’

In Mughal court language this amounted to a formal investiture, confirming Mir Qasim in the Subadhari [governorship] of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, so ratifying and legalising the Company’s two successive revolutions. In return, Mir Qasim announced he would resume Bengal’s annual payments to the Mughal Emperor, promising an enormous annual tribute of 2.5 million rupees, which then equated to around £325,000. Meanwhile, the English settled on the Emperor a daily allowance of Rs1,800.^*80

Both sides had reason to be happy with the unexpected way events had been resolved. Shah Alam in particular found himself richer than he had ever been, with a steady flow of income that he could only have dreamed of a few weeks earlier. Only in one thing was he disappointed: Shah Alam wanted his useful new ally, the Company, to send a regiment of sepoys immediately, to install him back on his throne in Delhi. Many in the army, and even some in Calcutta, were attracted by the idea of a Delhi expedition; but given the turbulence of the capital, which was currently hosting yet another unwanted visit from the bloodthirsty Afghan monarch, Ahmad Shah Durrani, Vansittart in the end decided to put off any decision about reinstalling the Shah, ‘until after the rains’.⁸¹

Three months later, seeing that he was making no progress with his plan to return home to the Red Fort, an impatient Shah Alam announced his departure. His next port of call, he said, would be Avadh. There he hoped the rich and powerful Nawab Shuja ud-Daula would be more pliable.

Mir Qasim was delighted to get rid of the Emperor, and to hasten his departure paid him up front, and in cash, half the promised annual tribute. Nor did the East India Company have any reason to detain the Emperor, having now extracted from him all they needed. On receiving formal letters of submission from all the principal warlords in north India, on 5 June 1761 Shah Alam finally left, heading west towards the border with Avadh.⁸²

Major Carnac escorted him to the banks of the Karmanasa with full military honours. The Emperor crossed back into Avadh on 21 June, where he was greeted by Nawab Shuja ud-Daula, whom he formally appointed Vizier of the Mughal Empire. But Shuja, like the British, warned the Emperor about returning to Delhi while the Afghans were still occupying the city. According to the French mercenary Jean-Baptiste Gentil, who was by then working for Shuja: ‘The Vizier warned the Emperor about Durrani true intentions.’

These were to utterly destroy the Timurid royal house, once he had all the Timurid Princes in his power – the only one still at liberty being Shah Alam himself. Durrani’s plan was to conquer Hindustan, and a Mughal Prince could only be an irritant and a nuisance to that ambition: it was therefore of capital importance, both for the Emperor himself and for Hindustan, that he should not hand himself over to his enemy. Shah Alam appreciated Shuja ud-Daula’s good counsel, and politely declined Durrani’s invitation to Delhi.⁸³

Meanwhile, Bengal was left under the increasingly uneasy joint rule of Mir Qasim and the Company.

Over the next two years, 1761–2, relations between the two rival governments of Bengal became openly hostile. The cause of the steady deterioration was the violent and rapacious way private Company traders increasingly abused their privileges to penetrate the Bengali economy and undermine Mir Qasim’s rule.

These private traders regularly arrested and ill-treated the Nawab’s officers, making it almost impossible for him to rule. The Nawab, in turn, became increasingly paranoid that William Ellis, the Chief Factor of the English factory in Patna, was actively fomenting a rebellion against him. Ellis had lost a leg at the siege of Calcutta in 1756 and his subsequent hatred for all things Indian made him take a perverse, almost sadistic, pleasure in disregarding Mir Qasim’s sovereignty and doing all he could to overrule his nominal independence.

Henry Vansittart believed that Mir Qasim was a man much more sinned against than sinning, and in this he was seconded by his closest ally on the Council, Warren Hastings. Hastings had been fast-promoted to be Vansittart’s deputy after making a success of his time as Resident in Murshidabad; he was now being talked about as a possible future Governor. Anxious to make joint Mughal–Company rule a success in Bengal, Hastings had been the first to spot Mir Qasim’s capacity for business and now was quick to defend his protégé. ‘I never met a man with more candour or moderation than the Nabob,’ he wrote. ‘Was there but half the disposition shown on our side which he bears to peace, no subject of difference could ever rise between us … He has been exposed to daily affronts such as a spirit superior to a worm when trodden on could not have brooked … The world sees the Nabob’s authority publicly insulted, his officers imprisoned, and sepoys sent against his forts.’⁸⁴ He added: ‘If our people instead of erecting themselves into lords and oppressors of the country, confine themselves to an honest and fair trade, they will everywhere be courted and respected.’⁸⁵

Then, in early February 1762, Ellis took it upon himself to arrest and imprison in the English factory a senior Armenian official of Mir Qasim’s, Khoja Antoon. Mir Qasim wrote to Ellis complaining that ‘my servants are subjected to such insults, my writing can be of no use. How much my authority is weakened by such proceedings I cannot describe.’ After this Mir Qasim vowed not to correspond any further with Ellis.⁸⁶

Thereafter, week after week, in long and increasingly desperate Persian letters, Mir Qasim poured out his heart to Vansittart in Calcutta, but the young Governor was no Clive, and seemed unable to enforce his will on his colleagues, particularly those under Ellis in the Patna factory. Ellis and his men, wrote Mir Qasim in May 1762, ‘have decided to disrupt my rule. They insult and humiliate my people, and from the frontiers of Hindustan up to Calcutta, they denigrate and insult me.’

And this is the way your gentlemen behave: they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, injure and disgrace my servants with a resolution to expose my government to contempt and making it their business to expose me to scorn. Setting up their colours, and showing Company passes, they use their utmost endeavours to oppress the peasant farmers,^* merchants and other people of the country. They forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the merchants for a fourth part of their value; and by way of violence and oppression they oblige the farmers to give five rupees for goods that are worth but one.

The passes^† for searching the boats, which you formerly favoured me with, and which I sent to every chokey [check post], the Englishmen by no means regard, I cannot recount how many tortures they inflict upon my subjects and especially the poor people … And every one of these Company agents has such power, that he imprisons the local collector [the Nawab’s principal officer] and deprives him of all authority, whenever he pleases.

Near four or five hundred new [private English] factories have been established in my dominions. My officers in every district have desisted from the exercise of their functions; so that by means of these oppressions, and my being deprived of my [customs] duties, I suffer a yearly loss of nearly twenty-five lakh rupees.^* In that case how can I keep clear of debts? How can I provide for the payment of my army and my household? In this case, how can I perform my duties and how can I send the Emperor his due from Bengal?⁸⁷

In April, Vansittart sent Hastings upriver to Monghyr and Patna in an attempt to defuse the growing crisis and restore harmony. On the way, Hastings wrote a series of letters, at once waxing lyrical about the beauty of Bengal, and expressing his horror at the way the Company was responsible for raping and looting it. On arrival in Monghyr, where ducks clustered on the marshes amid ‘beautiful prospects’, he wrote with eloquence and feeling of ‘the oppression carried out under the sanction of the English name’ which he had observed in his travels. ‘This evil I am well assured is not confined to our dependants alone, but is practised all over the country by people assuming the habit of our sepoys or calling themselves our managers …’

A party of sepoys who were on the march before us, afforded sufficient proof of the rapacious and insolent spirit of those people when they are left to their own discretion. Many complaints against them were made to me on the road; and most of the petty towns and serais were deserted at our approach, and the shops shut up, from apprehensions of the same treatment from us … Every man who wears a hat, as soon as he gets free from Calcutta becomes a sovereign prince … Were I to suppose myself the Nabob I should be at a loss in what manner to protect my own subjects or servants from insult.⁸⁸

In particular, Hastings was critical of Ellis, whose behaviour, he believed, had been ‘so imprudent, and his disaffection to the Nabob so manifestly inveterate, that a proper representation of it could not fail to draw upon him the severest resentment of the Company’.⁸⁹

In October, Hastings went again to visit Mir Qasim at Monghyr, this time taking Governor Vansittart with him so that he could see what was happening with his own eyes. Both were appalled by what they witnessed and returned to Calcutta determined to end the abuses. But on arrival, the two young men failed to carry their fellow Council members with them. Instead, the majority decided to send one of their most aggressive members, Ellis’s friend James Amyatt, to make his own report, to put Mir Qasim in his place and to demand that all Company servants and managers should be entirely exempted from control by the Nawab’s government.

Hastings vigorously objected: ‘It is now proposed absolving every person in our service from the jurisdiction of the [Nawab’s] Government,’ he wrote. ‘It gives them a full licence of oppressing others … Such a system of government cannot fail to create in the minds of the wretched inhabitants an abhorrence of the English name and authority, and how would it be possible for the Nawab, whilst he hears the cries of his people, which he cannot redress, not to wish to free himself from an alliance which subjects himself to such indignities?’⁹⁰

As the urbane Gentil rightly noted, ‘The English would have avoided great misfortunes when they broke with the Nawab, had they but followed the wise counsel of Mr Hastings – but a few bankrupt and dissipated English councillors, who had got themselves into debt and were determined to rebuild their personal fortunes at whatever public cost, pursued their ambitions and caused a war.’⁹¹

In December 1762, just as Amyatt was about to leave Calcutta, Mir Qasim made a deft political move. After putting up with Ellis’s violence and aggression for two years, the Nawab finally concluded it was time to fight back and resist the encroachments of the Company. He decided to make a stand.

Realising his officials were only rarely successful in forcing armed Company outposts to pay the due taxes and customs duties, he abolished such duties altogether, across his realm, ‘declaring that so long as he failed to levy duties from the rich, he would hold back his hand from doing so in the case of the poor’.⁹² In this way he deprived the English of their unfair advantage over local traders, even if it meant enormous losses for him personally, and for the solvency of his government.

Shortly afterwards, on 11 March 1763, armed clashes began to break out between Mir Qasim’s men and those of the Company. There were scuffles in Dhaka and Jafarganj, where Mir Qasim’s representatives, backed now by his new army, began resisting the depredations of the Company managers, frequently facing off against their sepoy escorts; one of Mir Qasim’s officials went as far as issuing an order to execute anyone who claimed EIC protection. Two notorious Company managers were raided in their houses; both escaped through the back door, over the wall. At the same time, Mir Qasim’s men began stopping British boats across Bengal, blocking the passage of the goods of private Company traders and seizing their saltpetre, opium and betel nut. On one occasion, when some sepoys went to snatch back impounded boats, a scuffle escalated into volleys of shots, leaving several dead. There began to be talk of war.⁹³

Then on 23 May, just as Amyatt arrived in Monghyr, intending to force Mir Qasim to revoke his free trade order, a boat that had come with him was seized by Mir Qasim’s police as it landed at the ghats: ‘She proved to be laden with a quantity of goods,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘under which were found [hidden] five hundred fire-locks, destined for the Patna factory. These Gurgin Khan [the Wolf, Mir Qasim’s Armenian commander] wished to impound, whilst Mr Amyatt insisted on the boat being dismissed without being stopped or even being searched.’⁹⁴

The standoff continued for some time, and Mir Qasim considered seizing Amyatt. He told him that he had considered himself in a state of war with the Company, and that he saw Amyatt’s mission merely as a blind to cover other hostile moves. But ‘after a great deal of parley’ he ‘consented to allow the envoy to leave … Mr Amyatt, finding it useless to make any further stay, resolved to return [to Calcutta], and took his leave.’⁹⁵

This was the moment that Ellis decided to hatch a plan to seize Patna by force. He had long regarded Hastings and Vansittart as weak and supine in the face of what he called Mir Qasim’s ‘pretensions’. Now he decided to take matters into his own hands. But Mir Qasim’s intelligence service had managed to place spies with the Patna factory, and the Nawab soon came to hear some details of what Ellis was planning. His response was to write a last letter to his former patrons, Hastings and Vansittart: ‘Mr Ellis has proceeded to such lengths as to prepare ladders and platforms in order to take the fort at Patna; now you may take whatever measures you think best for the interest of the Company and your own.’⁹⁶ Then he sent the Wolf to mobilise his troops.

By this stage, Ellis had at his command 300 Europeans and 2,500 sepoys. On 23 June, the anniversary of Plassey, Surgeon Anderson of the Patna factory wrote in his diary, ‘The gentlemen of the factory learned that a strong detachment of [the Wolf’s] horse and sepoys were on the march to Patna, so that a war seemed inevitable. They thought it best to strike the first stroke, by possessing themselves of the city of Patna.’ The place where they planned their insurrection against Mughal rule was exactly the spot where they had offered their fealty to Shah Alam only eighteen months earlier.

All day on the 24th, frantic preparations were made: bamboo scaling ladders were roped together, arms were stacked and cleaned, powder and shot prepared. The cannon were attached to harness and the horses were made ready. Just after midnight, the sepoys and the Company’s own traders took their muskets and paraded, outside the main factory building, under arms.⁹⁷

At one o’clock on the morning of the 25th, the factory gates swung open and Ellis marched his sepoys out of the compound and began his assault on the sleeping city of Patna. The Company and the Mughals were once again at war.

* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £1,200,000 = £126 million; £200,000 = £21 million.

** £25,000 = £2,625,000; £43,000 = £4,515,000; £2,500 = £262,500.

* Though the fact that Gibbon was five years younger, born 1737 while Hastings was born 1732, sadly makes this story probably apocryphal.

* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £50,000 = over £5 million; £150,000 = almost £16 million.

* Almost £20 million today.

** £390 million today.

* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £325,000 = £34 million; Rs1,800 = £23,400.

* Ryot in the original text. I have substituted ‘farmer’ throughout.

† The word in the original text is dastak. I have substituted ‘pass’ throughout.

* £32.5 million today.