The Company sepoys formed into two bodies and fanned out across the town. One group made for the city walls. There they raised their scaling ladders and shinned silently up onto the wall-walks. Quickly and noiselessly they took all the bastions, bayoneting the small parties of sleeping guards that lay draped over their weapons in each chhatri-covered turret.
The second party, under Ellis, headed with the artillery down the main street of the Patna bazaar. After a mile or so they began encountering musket fire, intermittent at first, then heavier, from the rooftops and gatehouses of the havelis. But they pressed swiftly on, and just before sunrise blew the fort gates and stormed into the old Mughal fort: ‘As they entered the fortress, they fell on the soldiers, half of them asleep, some awake in their improvised sniper-holes,’ wrote the historian Mohammad Ali Khan Ansari. ‘They killed many, though a few crawled to safety in corners.’
The sepoys then opened the west gate of the citadel and let in the remainder of their forces who were waiting outside. Again they divided into two columns and advanced along the road to the Diwan quarter and its market. The city governor was in the citadel, and as soon as he realised the disaster that was unfolding, rushed with his troops to confront the English, and met them near the bazaar. Here there were heavy casualties on both sides.
In the first moments, one of the Governor’s commanders bravely pressed forward and was wounded by a fierce volley of grape shot. The rest of the troops, seeing this, stampeded and fled. The Governor had no choice but to escape by the Eastern Gate, hoping to reach Mir Qasim in Monghyr and bring him news of the coup. His wounded commander meanwhile managed to reach the [Mughal] Chihil Sutun palace [within the fort] and bar the gate behind him, to sit it out and wait for another day on which to fight.
The English now had the city in their hands. Their army scum – dark, low-caste sepoys from Telengana – set about plundering goods from shops, dispersing across the city, pillaging the homes of innocent citizens.1
Finding all opposition at an end except from the citadel, which was now entirely surrounded, Ellis gave his men leave to sack the city thoroughly, ‘which turned their courage into avarice, and every one of them thought of nothing but skulking off with whatever they could get’.2 The Company factors meanwhile headed back to the factory for breakfast. ‘Everybody was quite fatigued,’ commented Surgeon Anderson, ‘having marched through thick blood.’3
Unknown to the Company factors, however, just three miles beyond Patna, the fleeing Governor ran into a large body of reinforcements, consisting of four platoons of Mir Qasim’s New Army. These the Nawab had sent from Monghyr by forced marches under General Markar, one of his senior Armenian commanders, as soon he was alerted by his spies to the preparations for the imminent coup. ‘They marched as fast as they could,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘and taking their route by the waterside they reached the city’s Eastern gate, which they prepared to assault directly.’
The English, without being dismayed, opened the gate. They placed two cannon upon the bridge that crossed the fosse, and ranging themselves in a line, prepared to receive the enemy. But one of Markar’s men, who had out-marched his commander, put himself at the head of his men and attacked the English with a discharge of rockets and a volley of musketry. He instantly broke the Company line. The English fell back towards their factory, disheartened by their loss. The Governor, animated by this success, exhorted his commanders to pursue them hotly. On hearing of the disaster, the other Company troops who were yet stationed on the towers and ramparts, were confounded, lost their usual courage, and fled on all sides. Victory was declared for Mir Qasim, and the ramparts and towers were cleared and recovered.4
The Company troops were soon heavily outnumbered, their discipline broken and their factory surrounded and besieged. As the factory was overlooked by the city walls, it was quickly found to be indefensible. Ellis soon abandoned the position and led his men out through the water gate and ‘so managed to embark in a series of barges with around three platoons of their troops, and sailed westward towards the border with Avadh’, hoping to escape into neutral territory.
But they did not get far. When they reached Chhapra, their boats were attacked by the faujdar of Saran. Shortly afterwards, [Mir Qasim’s German commander] Sumru [Walter Reinhardt] also caught up with them, having arrived by forced marches from his encampment at Buxar, along with a few thousand of his sepoys. Surrounded and outnumbered, they had no option but to throw down their arms. All were taken prisoner. Sumru brought the shackled English prisoners to the prison within Monghyr Fort. Mir Qasim then wrote to all his officials and military personnel that every Englishman, wherever found, must be arrested at once.5
By the end of the week, of the 5,000 EIC troops in Bihar, 3,000 had been killed, arrested or gone over and joined Mir Qasim’s army. Among the dead was the envoy sent by the Calcutta Council, James Amyatt. He had safely reached as far as Murshidabad, when he was attacked in his boat and killed while resisting arrest by the local military governor. ‘In spite of his pleas, begging to be sent alive to Mir Qasim to suffer whatever he should decree, at a signal he and his companions were cut to pieces and killed.’6
An outraged Mir Qasim wrote to Calcutta complaining that Ellis, ‘like a night robber, assaulted the Qila of Patna, robbed and plundered the bazaar and all the merchants and inhabitants, ravaging and slaying from morning to the afternoon … You gentlemen must answer for the injury which the Company’s affairs have suffered; and since you have cruelly and unjustly ravaged the city and destroyed its people, and plundered to the value of hundreds of thousands of rupees, it becomes the justice of the Company to make reparation for the poor, as was formerly done for Calcutta [after its sack by Siraj ud-Daula].’7
But it was far too late for that. There was now no going back. Across Bihar and Bengal, the provincial Mughal elite rose as one behind Nawab Mir Qasim in a last desperate bid to protect their collapsing world from the alien and exploitative rule of a foreign trading company. Whether Mir Qasim realised it or not, all-out war was now unavoidable.
A week later, on 4 July 1763, the Council in Calcutta formally declared war on Mir Qasim. As a measure of their cynicism, they voted to put back on the throne his elderly father-in-law, the former Nawab, Mir Jafar. The latter had used his retirement to become a fully fledged opium addict and was now even more befuddled than before. As careless with the state finances as ever, the old Nawab promised to reimburse the Company up to Rs5 million* for the expense of fighting his ambitious son-in-law.
Mir Jafar was carried back to his erstwhile capital by the large Company expeditionary force which left Calcutta three weeks later. It marched out on 28 July, at the muggy height of the Bengali monsoon heat. It consisted of about 850 Europeans and 1,500 sepoys. ‘The English, caught more-or-less unprepared, forced their French Prisoners-of-War to serve in the army commanded by Major Adams,’ wrote Jean-Baptiste Gentil. ‘This officer wasted no time in marching to Murshidabad, which [on 9 July] he subjugated after a battle with the military commander of the place at Katwa, near Plassey. The Major arrived outside Rajmahal at the height of the rains, and his army suffered greatly. But he captured the Nawab’s artillery and munitions, as well as the food supplies of his camp, and then quickly stormed Rajmahal.’8
Making war against the Nawab they had personally installed only five years earlier was not only a political embarrassment for the Company; it was a financial disaster: ‘The Company was sinking under the burden of war,’ wrote Luke Scrafton, ‘and was obliged to borrow great sums of money from their servants at eight per cent interest, and even with that assistance were obliged to send their ships half-loaded to Europe [as they did not have spare bullion to buy the Indian goods to send to London].’9 But militarily, the campaign against Mir Qasim was a slow but steady success.
It was quickly becoming clear that Mir Qasim’s New Army was still not sufficiently well armed or trained to take on the Company’s veteran sepoys. The Company was certainly taking much higher casualties than it had done when facing old-fashioned Mughal cavalry armies, but each time the two infantry armies closed it was Mir Qasim’s troops who eventually fled. The Company victory at Katwa, where Major Adams ambushed and killed one of Mir Jafar’s bravest generals, Mohammad Taki, was followed by a second at Gheria three weeks later: ‘After a fierce, heroically courageous struggle, the forces of Mir Qasim Khan were again broken and scattered,’ wrote Mohammad Ali Khan Ansari, ‘and the breeze of victory fluttered in the flags of the Company.’
The defeated troops flew as fast as they could, on the wings of haste, falling back into Bihar, to the fortified hilltop Udhua Nullah. Here Mir Qasim Khan, foreseeing such a day, had prepared a strong defensive emplacement. In this remote fortress the torrent flows fast down from the mountains into the Ganges and is very deep; both its banks are wild and thickly forested; there are no roads other than that which goes over the only bridge. This was built by Mir Qasim, who also dug a deep moat, and built above it a strong defensive wall rivalling that of Alexander, connected to the mountains; facing that is a long lake stretching from the mountain to near the Ganges. Mir Qasim had an earthen bridge built across the moat. There was also a road on top of the walls, winding and turning like the curls of a bride’s hair, which gave the only access. For this reason, Mir Qasim placed great reliance on the impregnability of Udhua Nullah and was convinced that the English would never take it, or if so, only after a long struggle. But Fortune had turned her face away from him.10
It was here that the remaining 20,000 troops of Mir Qasim’s New Army made their last stand. During the first month of the siege, Major Adams’ heavy guns made no impression on the fortifications. But lulled into complacency by their spectacular defences, Mir Qasim’s generals let their guard down. As Ghulam Hussain Khan put it, ‘They trusted so much to the natural strength of that post, and to the impracticability of the enemy forcing the passage, that they became negligent in their duty; for most of the officers that had any money made it a practice on the beginning of the night to gorge themselves with wine, and to pass the remainder of it in looking at the performance of dancing women, or in taking them to their beds.’11
Only one of Mir Qasim’s generals made any effort to harass their besiegers at the bottom of the hill. This was an energetic and intelligent young Persian cavalry commander who had recently arrived in India from Isfahan. His name was Mirza Najaf Khan, a name that would be long celebrated in Mughal histories. Najaf Khan found local guides and got them to lead a group of his men through the marshes at the base of the hill. ‘They left quietly and forded the outflow of the lake. Then at dawn, he made a sudden rush on the English encampment, where the elderly Nawab Mir Jafar was in his tents. They attacked so vigorously that the ranks of his troops were shaken as if by an earthquake.’12
Unfortunately for Mir Qasim’s defenders, one of the guides was captured, and a week later, on 4 September, he led Major Adams’ troops up the same hidden path, through the swampy morass, to the back of the Mughal entrenchments: ‘The English managed to find out the route by which Mirza Najaf Khan had arrived to make his surprise dawn attack, and now used the same route themselves,’ wrote Ansari. ‘They sent one of their platoons of tall young men to carry out this mission.’
In the middle of the darkest night, they negotiated the outflow of the Lake with water up to their chins, carrying their muskets and powder bags aloft. In this way they reached the defensive emplacement, where they put up their ladders and scaled the walls. The defenders, relying on the difficulty of crossing the waters of the nullah and the lake, heedless of their enemies, were fast asleep on their pallets. The English fired and fell on them, killing and wounding many.
In the darkness, Company troops had crowded below in front of the gateway, and as soon as it was forced open, they entered in one rush, and made a slaughter such as on the Day of Judgement, with the cries of the damned rising all around! Many – those who awoke and were not slaughtered in their sleep – in their panic ran to escape over the monsoon-swollen river, and were drowned in the icy, rushing torrent. That night, nearly fifteen thousand men met their end. One hundred cannon were captured.
Najaf Khan managed somehow to escape from the clutches of the English and headed for the mountains; but many more were drowned or shot while crossing the river. One group, led by Sumru, also managed to re-join, after much falling and stumbling, what remained of Mir Qasim’s army in Monghyr. The English sounded the victory drums and raised their battle-standard in the conquered camp. This battle came to an end at one and a half hours after day-break.13
Mir Qasim was not in the fort that night; he had just left for Monghyr and so lived to fight another day. But he never entirely recovered from the loss of Udhua Nullah. ‘He seemed broke in two; he betrayed every mark of grief and affliction, and passed the whole day in the utmost despondency … He threw himself onto his bed, tossing in a torment of grief, and ceased taking advice from Gurgin Khan.’14 With few other options, he fell back on Patna, taking his prisoners with him.
Mir Qasim now became obsessed with the idea that he had been betrayed and that his own commanders were working against him. ‘He had already tended to vicious cruelty,’ wrote Ansari, ‘but now, as the star of his good fortune faded, and cracks appeared in his governance, he pushed ever further down the path of brutality.’
Worried and depressed by the succession of defeats, he decided to send his treasures and jewels, as well as his favourite wife, to the great fort at Rohtas, in the company of a few trusted retainers. He let loose all the other women of his harem, simply expelling them onto the streets. These two notorious defeats, and the shocking expulsion of the womenfolk made some of his attendants turn the gaze of their obedience away. But as Mir Qasim’s vicious cruelty left no-one any room for independent judgement in words or actions, his authority remained as before. Every day, he allowed more suspicions to crowd into his mind, and finally, gave the order for all his many prisoners to be killed.15
In his enveloping paranoia, Mir Qasim first ordered the assassination of Gurgin Khan, the Wolf, his most loyal Armenian commander. To this act of extreme folly and self-harm, Jean-Baptiste Gentil was an eyewitness. ‘On the march to Patna,’ he wrote, ‘the enemies of Mir Qasim persuaded him that he was being betrayed by his minister, Gurgin Khan, who they said had been influenced by his brother, who was held by the English in their camp. The Nawab swore to destroy his faithful minister, calumnied as a traitor. Gurgin Khan was fully aware of these odious schemes.’ Gentil writes, ‘I always had my tent pitched next to that of the minister and we took our meals together.’
One day when he was late coming for dinner, I was sitting in front of the various dishes sent from the Nawab’s kitchen and started to eat from these: the minister entered and stopped me, saying ‘What are you doing? Don’t you know these could be poisoned? How careless of you, when you know all the calumnies being spread about me and my brother – I have many enemies, take care!’ He immediately ordered these dishes to be cleared away, and had others brought to table which had been prepared by less suspect hands.
Half way between Monghyr and Patna an attempt was made to assassinate him. By chance I had had my bed set up in front of his tent because of the heat, so the assassins thought their plot discovered and postponed till the next day, which was a marching day. The minister arrived later than usual because of the bad roads, and called for dinner to be served immediately. As he was crossing the encampment of his cavalry, he was accosted, in the midst of the horses by a Mughal cavalryman who complained of being short of money and that food-stuffs had become un-affordably expensive, even though he had just received his salary.
Gurgin Khan was angered by the man’s request for more money, and called out for one of his attendants and the horseman withdrew. I was overcome with heat, and as the minister was now talking of other matters, I left him to find somewhere cooler. I had barely gone thirty steps, when I heard the attendants who had stayed with the minister calling out for help: I turned, and saw the horseman slashing at Gurgin Khan with his sword.
His attendants were unarmed and dressed in light muslin robes, as was the minister: it was already too late to come to his help, as he had received 3 blows quick as lightning: the first severed half his neck, the second slashed through his shoulder-bone, the third gouged his kidneys. The assassin struck him again in the face as he fell to the ground, after tripping on the long horse-tethers while he sought to run to his tent, fifty paces away. As he was wearing only thin light muslin, the sword cut right through. The horseman disappeared as soon as he had struck him.
I ran up and helped to ease the minister onto his palanquin and ordered the bearers to carry him into his tent, where he gestured to be given something to drink: we gave him water, which ran out of the wound in his neck. Seeing me beside him, Gurgin Khan looked fixedly at me, and struck his thigh 3 times, as if to signal that he had fallen victim to calumny, and that I should take care for my own safety.16
After that, it was the turn of Raja Ram Narain, the former Governor of Patna, who had fought so bravely against Shah Alam. Raja Ram Narain was a Kayasth, from a Hindu community who served the Mughals as administrators, and who often used to send their children for a Persianate madrasa education. Ram Narain had grown up loving Persian poetry and had been one of the students of Shaikh Muhammad Ali Hazin of Isfahan, arguably the greatest Persian poet of the eighteenth century, who moved as an exile to Benares. Realising that his execution was imminent, Ram Narain wrote a last series of couplets, in the style of his ustad (poetic master). These verses of sadness and resignation were once famous in the region:
Enough! My life flickers away, a solitary candle,
Flames from its head, waxy tears flow down its skirts
Your flirtatious beauty, my dark days, all will pass,
A king’s dawn, a pauper’s evening, all will pass
The garden visitor, the laughing rosebud, both are fleeting
Grief and joy, all will pass.17
Shortly after composing these last verses, Raja Ram Narain was shot by Sumru, still shackled in his prison cell, on the orders of Mir Qasim.
The Jagat Seths were next. When Ellis and his companions were arrested, Mir Qasim had carefully examined the private papers of the English which had been captured at the factory. Among these was found a letter from Jagat Seth Mahtab Rai and his cousin Maharaj Swaroop Chand to Ellis, encouraging him to attack the Nawab, and offering to pay the costs of the military campaign. These two brothers had been moved from their house at Murshidabad and rehoused by order of the Nawab in a large haveli in Monghyr, adjoining a magnificent garden, where they were indulged with every luxury. ‘The brothers were immensely rich,’ wrote Gentil, ‘beyond the dreams of avarice, and were by far the richest bankers in the whole of Hindustan.’
They had provincial governors of Bengal appointed or dismissed with each transfer of money to Delhi. They were accustomed to have everything and everyone yield beneath the weight of their gold; and so they entered into cabals with Ellis, Amyatt and others, as they had done so many times before. But this time they were found out.
Once the Nawab had seen the correspondence, he had them arrested and put in chains. But it was only after the assassination of Gurgin Khan and Ram Narain that Mir Qasim determined to make the Jagat Seth brothers suffer their punishment. I arrived at court at nightfall, and found the Nawab alone with his officer of pleas, who was just presenting a petition in the name of these two unfortunates. They begged to be pardoned, and offered four crores [40 million] of rupees* if he were prepared to grant them their lives and liberty.
At these words, Mir Qasim turned to me and exclaimed: ‘Do you hear what this man is suggesting? On behalf of the two brothers? Four crores! If my commanders heard that, they’d run off to set them free, and would without hesitation give me up to them!’
‘Don’t move!’ he added to his officer of pleas, and immediately called for Sumru. The German assassin arrived and the Nawab repeated to him the Jagat Seths’ offer, ordering him to kill them both forthwith. At the same time, he forbade all present to leave his tent until Sumru came back to announce that the execution had been carried out. He said he had shot them, still in their chains, with his pistol.18
In his crazed despair, on 29 August Mir Qasim wrote one last time to Warren Hastings asking for permission ‘to return to his home and hearth with a view to proceeding finally on a pilgrimage to the holy shrines [in other words, to be allowed to retire from office and go on the Haj to Mecca]’.19
Hastings was sympathetic to the situation which had driven his protégé to such savagery, but he also realised it was much too late to save him from his own actions: he had now waded too deep in blood. ‘The hoarded resentment of all the injuries which he had sustained,’ wrote Hastings, ‘was now aggravated by his natural timidity and the prospect of an almost inevitable ruin, [which] from this time took entire possession of his mind and drove from thence every principle, till it satiated itself with the blood of every person within reach who had either contributed to his misfortunes or, by connection with his enemies, become the objects of his revenge.’20
When Mir Qasim realised that even his former friend was unable to save him, he played his last remaining trump card. He wrote to Major Adams, questioning the legitimacy of the EIC actions and making one final threat: ‘For these three months you have been laying waste to the King’s country with your forces,’ he wrote. ‘What authority do you have? But if you are resolved on your own authority to proceed in this business, know for a certainty that I will cut off the heads of Mr Ellis and the rest of your chiefs and send them to you.’21
Just before he took Monghyr on 6 October, Adams sent a brief response to the ultimatum: ‘If one hair on the heads of the prisoners is hurt,’ he wrote, ‘you can have no title to mercy from the English, and you may depend on the utmost form of their resentment, and that they will pursue you to the utmost extremity of the earth. And should we, unfortunately, not lay hold of you, the vengeance of the Almighty cannot fail to overtake you, if you perpetrate so horrid an act as the murder of the gentlemen in your custody.’22
The evening that Adams’ reply reached Mir Qasim, Gentil was called by the Nawab to the tented hall of audience he had pitched in the Patna fort. ‘I found the Nawab alone,’ he wrote later. ‘He had me sit on a small bolster next to his throne and said’:
‘I wrote warning Major Adams that if he went beyond Rajmahal, I would have all the English prisoners now in my power killed, and I made a solemn oath on the Quran to that effect. He took no notice of my threats, as he has now taken Monghyr and passed beyond it. Surely I must act on my oath? If they take me prisoner, they will surely treat me in the same way. Well, I’ll strike first! What do you advise? Don’t you think like me?’
Dumbfounded by his suggestion, I did not reply, believing that my silence would more eloquently signify the abhorrence I felt, than any well-reasoned arguments. But Mir Qasim insisted I give him my honest opinion on the matter, so I replied: ‘I must tell you that acting on such an oath would be a crime, in the eyes of all nations: a pointless crime, one that would rule out any possibility of peace. If you had killed these Englishmen in the course of a military action, no one would protest – these are the risks run by any fighter in combat. But to murder prisoners, men who are not your enemies in the sense that they cannot do you any harm, who have laid down their arms on the assurance of safety of life and limb given by your officers in your name – that would be a horrible atrocity, unparalleled in the annals of India. Not only should you not harm them in any way, rather you should protect and succour them in all their needs. Besides, you should not vent your hatred of their nation on them, as they might be of use to you!’
‘But,’ replied the Nawab, ‘if I fell into the hands of the English, they would not spare me, they’d have me killed.’
‘Never!’ I replied. ‘Don’t believe such a thing: rather they would treat you as they did your father-in-law when they replaced him with you: if they removed you as governor of Bengal, they would grant you the means to live according to your rank.’
‘And how could they be of use to me?’ the prince asked.
‘By choosing two of the most highly respected among them,’ I replied, ‘and sending them to negotiate peace: I guarantee they would do their utmost to secure terms, and that, having given you their word of honour, they would come back to you to report on negotiations.’
Sumru arrived at that moment and saluted the prince from a distance, then went to take his place; Mir Qasim called him to sit beside him and dismissed me, saying in an irritable tone that my presence would not be required at his council.
I had barely emerged from the Nawab’s tent, when Sumru too rose, saluted the Nawab and went to prepare the massacre of the English. A French sergeant of sepoys named Chateau refused to carry out Sumru’s orders to kill the English, saying, ‘Though, as a Frenchman, I may be an enemy of the English, I am not their executioner: I will have nothing to do with this atrocity!’ Sumru had the man put under guard, and went himself to carry out the barbaric orders of his master.23
It was seven o’clock in the evening when Sumru and his platoon of armed sepoys arrived at the haveli where the British prisoners were being kept. He first called out Ellis and his deputy Lushington ‘who, being acquainted that he had private business with them, went to him, and were instantly cut down’.24 Sumru then posted his soldiers on the terraces overlooking the central courtyard of the prisoners’ lodgings, where they were just finishing their dinner on a long table in the open air. According to the Comte de Modave, who later quizzed Sumru personally about what happened, the assassin claimed that, with a view to saving as many as he could, he ‘shouted out several times that if there were any French, Italian, German or Portuguese among them they could leave. But the prisoners did not realise the significance of the question, and as they were eating their supper, shouted back cheerily that they were all English.’25
As soon as the dinner was over, and the plates had been cleared away and the servants had withdrawn, Sumru told his troops to take aim. Then he ordered them to begin firing. He had the marksmen bring them down with musket shots, then descended to finish off with their bayonets those who had run to escape; one man who had hidden in the lavatory trench was executed three days later: ‘It is said that the English prisoners, while they had life, did not lose their spirits, but rather fought off their executioners, even with wine-bottles and stones’, their knives and forks having been taken from them after dinner.26 Their ‘cut up and mangled’ corpses were then thrown into a well in the courtyard. Wherever else there were Company servants imprisoned, they were also killed; only a very few, like the popular Scottish surgeon and aesthete Dr William Fullarton came out alive, thanks to the personal intervention of his old friend the historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, with whom he used to discuss their shared loved of Mughal miniatures.
Forty-five Company servants perished in what came to be known by the British as the Patna Massacre. In addition to this number, though rarely referred to in British histories, were 200 of their sepoys who were killed because they refused to join Mir Qasim’s ranks, and who were being kept in various places under guard by the local military chiefs.27
The next morning, Mir Qasim struck his tents and headed for the Karmanasa, the border with Avadh. With him he took all that he could retrieve of his wealth and all his remaining troops: some 30,000 of his battered fighters and 100 million rupees,* carried on 300 treasure elephants, with more hidden inside purdah carriages – ‘numbers of covered coaches and chairs, which passed for containing some favourite ladies, but which, in reality, contained nothing but bags of white cloth, full of gold coin, as well as jewels of high value’.28 He had with him, as Gentil put it, ‘all the accumulated wealth of Bengal, which he had extracted from the landholders, who had themselves been pillaging this rich province since time immemorial’.29
Mir Qasim had earlier sent messages ahead to Shuja ud-Daula, the Nawab of Avadh, and to Shah Alam, who was still staying with him as his guest, proposing a grand Mughal alliance against the Company. Now, as Mir Qasim’s army neared the border, messengers arrived responding positively to the overture, bringing a copy of the Quran ‘on some blank leaves of which glorious book were written that Prince’s promise of safe conduct, under his own hand and seal’.30
Mir Qasim was delighted. On the march he had taken Gentil aside and told him he no longer trusted any of his own men, and now badly needed new allies. ‘While resting in the shade on the march, this Prince told me: “You see all these people? All my troops? The commanders abuse me, because I’m retreating and not leading them against the English – but they’re all traitors! If I led them into battle, they wouldn’t fight, they’d betray me to the enemy! I know them: they’re unprincipled cowards, I can put no trust in them! And now they have too much money: I’ve had them paid all I owe them, since leaving Patna – 25 million rupees.”’*31
Only one man spoke out against the proposed alliance – the young Persian cavalry officer, Mirza Najaf Khan, who was the only one of Mir Qasim’s commanders to have acquitted himself with honour on the campaign. He pointed out that Shuja ud-Daula had a reputation for treachery, and that he had over the years double-crossed almost everyone he had entered into alliance with: ‘Never,’ he said, ‘put yourself in that prince’s power. Retire to the fortress of Rohtas with your family and treasure, and leave the management of the war to me.’32
But Mir Qasim chose to ignore the warnings and replied that the waters of Rohtas had never suited him. Instead, on 19 November, he forded the Karmanasa, and crossed into Avadh.
Shuja ud-Daula, son of the great Mughal Vizier Safdar Jung and his successor as Nawab of Avadh, was a giant of a man. Nearly seven feet tall, with oiled moustaches that projected from his face like a pair of outstretched eagle’s wings, he was a man of immense physical strength. By 1763, he was past his prime, but still reputedly strong enough to cut off the head of a buffalo with a single swing of his sword, or lift up two of his officers, one in each hand. One hostile Maratha source described him as ‘no ordinary man. He is a demon by nature … who, if he puts his foot on the hind leg of an elephant and seizes its tail, that elephant cannot get away.33* Jean Law described him as ‘the handsomest person I have seen in India. He towers over Imad ul-Mulk by his figure, and I believe also in qualities of the heart and temperament. He is occupied in nothing except pleasure, hunting and the most violent exercises.’34
Shuja was a man’s man: impulsive and forthright, he had the capacity – notably rare in eighteenth-century India – to inspire loyalty in his followers. His most obvious vices were his overweening ambition, his haughty self-importance and his inflated opinion of his own abilities. This was something that immediately struck the urbane intellectual Ghulam Hussain Khan, who regarded him as a slight liability, every bit as foolish as he was bold. Shuja, he wrote, ‘was equally proud and ignorant’:
He had conceived as high an opinion of his own power, as he had an indifferent one of what his enemies could perform; and he thought himself more than equal to the task of conquering all the three provinces [of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa]. Indeed he had a numerous army with plenty of artillery, great and small, and all the necessary requisites for war; but no real knowledge about the means of availing himself of so much power … Yet he fancied himself a compound of all excellence … [and believed] that asking advice would detract from his own dignity, even if the advisor were an Aristotle …
He was so full of himself, and so proud to have fought by the side of Ahmad Shah Durrani, whom he had taken for his model, that when anyone proposed any advice upon the mode of carrying on the war, he used to cut him short with, ‘do not trouble yourself about that; just fight as I bid you!’35
Shuja had been delighted with Mir Qasim’s suggestion of a grand Mughal alliance against the Company, and had no doubt at all that if he, the exiled Nawab of Bengal and the Emperor Shah Alam were to unite their forces, resources and authority they could, as he told startled peace envoys from the Company shortly afterwards, easily ‘reconquer Bengal and expel the English, and – whenever the English come to court as humble petitioners – His Majesty may choose to assign them a suitable outpost from where they may trade. Otherwise my sword will answer your proposals.’36
His guest, the Emperor Shah Alam, was less certain. The Company had formally sworn him fealty, and so in his eyes was now an imperial ally, just as Mir Qasim and Shuja were. According to Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, the Emperor was extremely anxious about the consequences of Shuja’s ambitions and told him flatly that ‘he had previously seen English fighting methods when he was in Bengal, so he now firmly tried to put a stop to the Nawab Vizier’s plans, saying’:
‘A fire that has died down should never be stirred into flame. The rulers of Bengal who have fallen out with the English have had a rough time of it. Whoever has dared attack them has not escaped from the rage of their infantry. If 50,000 Hindustani cavalry should face one thousand of their modern sepoy infantry in battle, it is impossible for them to save even their own lives! So, it would be wiser to proceed cautiously in our dealings with these people, and send letters to intimidate them into accepting our peace-proposals. Besides their respect and devotion to our royal person has already been tried and tested, and they will most certainly follow our royal orders.’
The Nawab Vizier had other ideas and countered ‘The English have not yet seen the prowess and skill of our heroic commanders – a mere slap from our royal horsemen will wipe out these people!’ His Majesty, remembering the loyal service of the English, felt inclined to favour them, but lacking a decisive independence of mind, he could see no other choice than that of following his host, the Nawab Vizier.37
Shah Alam and Shuja were on campaign at the opposite end of Avadh, near Orchha in Bundelkhand, when news arrived that the defeated Mir Qasim had crossed the Karmanasa from Bihar. So it was not until the following February, 1764, that Mir Qasim reached his new host and the three Mughal armies finally came together.
‘On hearing that the Nawab Vizier [Shuja] was coming to greet him, His Highness of Bengal [Mir Qasim] had tall scarlet tents erected, in which he placed the two Nawabi thrones.’
The cavalry and infantry lined the road for six miles, the officers dressed in their finest scarlet broadcloth jackets and sparkling new flintlocks. The Nawab Vizier descended from his elephant and was greeted by His Highness at the entrance with all pomp and ceremony. They exchanged greetings, and holding hands, mounted the thrones together. His Highness of Bengal sent to His Majesty 21 trays of precious robes and jewels, as well as elephants majestic as mountains. The Nawab Vizier was impressed by the opulence with which Mir Qasim was travelling, and, with all the desire of his enormous appetites, dreamed of extracting from the English huge sums of gold and all the riches of Bengal. He talked gently to his guest and commiserated with his loss, promising help and seconding his demand for the English to return his confiscated provinces. Then Mir Qasim and Shuja ud-Daula went to wait on His Majesty the Emperor, and, sitting on one elephant, like a conjunction of two auspicious constellations, processed into the royal camp.38
Over the weeks that followed, the Mughal leaders finessed their plans, while continuing to levy tribute from the courts of Bundelkhand, and raising money for a final joint effort to expel the Company from Bengal. By early March, they were heading eastward again, their numbers swollen by a regiment of French prisoners-of-war who, under the leadership of a Breton soldier of fortune, René Madec, had taken the opportunity to mutiny against the British officers who had press-ganged them, most unwillingly, into Company service. The combined armies ‘moved by slow stages, covering the land like ants or locusts’. But it was only on 17 March, when the armies encamped together outside Benares, near the place where Shuja had ordered a bridge of boats thrown across the Ganges, that the full scale of the force became apparent.
Observers estimated that an unprecedented host, over 150,000-strong, had now gathered from across the Mughal Empire. On one side there were the remnants of Mir Qasim’s New Army under the leadership of Sumru, whose reputation for cold-blooded ruthlessness had been greatly enhanced by the Patna Massacre. Next to these, ranged along the riverbank, were the magnificent scarlet tents of Shah Alam’s Turani Mughal cavalry. Shuja’s forces were even more diverse. There were contingents of Persian Qizilbash cavalry in their red felt hats, and 3,000 pigeon-coated and long-booted Afghan Rohillas, who had once fought with Ahmad Shah Durrani; they were mounted on both horse and camels, and armed with large-bore armour-piercing swivel guns. Then there was Madec’s regiment of French deserters, still, somewhat ironically, dressed in the uniform of the Company. But perhaps Shuja’s most feared crack troops were a large force of 6,000 dreadlocked Hindu Naga sadhus, who fought mainly on foot with clubs, swords and arrows, ash-painted but entirely naked, under their own much-feared Gossain leaders, the brothers Anupgiri and Umraogiri.39
The colossal scale of the combined armies bolstered the confidence of the leaders, as did the news of unrest and further mutinies among the Company forces on the other side of the river. Shuja, convinced that a great victory was imminent, wrote to Calcutta as the vizier of the Emperor, with an ultimatum to the EIC. In his letter he cast the Company as ungrateful aliens – unruly and disobedient rebels against the legitimate Mughal order who had usurped ‘different parts of the royal dominions … Hand over all the territory in your possession,’ he demanded, ‘and cease to interfere with the government of the country. Revert to your proper place [as humble merchants] and confine yourselves to your original profession of trade – or else take the consequences of war.’40
But for all that Shuja wrote in Shah Alam’s name, the Emperor himself, who had faced the full force of the Company war machine before, remained unconvinced about the expedition. He was not alone. In early April, Shuja took the Emperor and Mir Qasim to meet the most celebrated poet of the age, Shaikh Muhammad Ali Hazin, in Benares, where he had settled after surviving two of the great disasters of his age: first, the terrible sacking of Isfahan by the Afghans in 1722, and then that of Delhi by Nader Shah in 1739. He was now an old man of seventy-two and revered by all.
When the poet-saint asked Shuja the purpose of his visit, the Nawab Vizier boomed: ‘I have firmly decided to make war on the infidel Christians and with God’s help will sweep them out of Hindustan!’
Shuja expected to be congratulated by the poet. But the grey-bearded Shaikh merely smiled and said ‘With untrained troops like yours, who mostly haven’t learned how to un-sheath their swords or handle a shield properly, who have never seen the face of war close-up on a modern battlefield, where human bodies scatter and shatter and fall with their livers blown out, you intend to confront the most experienced and disciplined army this country has ever seen? You ask my advice? I tell you it is a shameful folly, and it is hopeless to expect victory. The Firangis are past-masters at strategy … only if unity and discipline entirely collapses among them will you ever have any chance of victory.’
This good advice was not at all to the liking of the Nawab Vizier, but he refrained from contradicting the aged scholar-Sufi out of respect. When they rose to leave, the Shaikh sighed and said ‘May God help this camel caravan, whose leaders have no idea of what is bad or good for them!’41
Within a week, by 26 March, the whole army had crossed the Ganges by the bridge of boats and was now heading in the direction of the much-contested city of Patna: ‘The army proved so very numerous that as far as the eye could see it covered the country and plains, like an inundation, and moved like the billows of the sea,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan. ‘It was not an army but a whole city in motion, and you could have found in it whatever could be had in former times in Shahjahanabad itself, whilst that fair city was the capital and eye of all Hindustan.’42
As the massive Mughal army advanced eastwards, Major John Carnac, the Company’s warden of the border with Avadh, abandoned his heavy baggage and retreated as fast as he could towards Patna without contesting the crossing of the Karmanasa or offering the slightest resistance. He had only 19,000 troops – the largest army the Company had yet fielded, but one that was dwarfed by the huge host of 150,000 who were now heading fast towards him. He now had less than a fortnight to prepare dykes, entrenchments and state-of-the-art modern artillery defences against his would-be besiegers.43
Carnac had faced a wave of mutinies among his exhausted sepoys; but as they closed in on Patna, the cracks within the Mughal forces became apparent, too. Fights broke out between the naked Naga sadhus and the Pathans, with entire platoons coming close to bloodshed. Meanwhile, rumours began to spread among the commanders that Shah Alam was in secret communication with the Company: ‘His Majesty was utterly opposed to fighting the English,’ wrote Ansari, ‘so throughout these campaigns he took no part in deliberations or planning, and during the battles stood by to observe his warring vassals from a distance.’44
‘There was so little order and discipline amongst these troops,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘and so little were the men accustomed to command, that in the very middle of the camp, they fought, killed and murdered each other, and went out a-plundering and a-marauding without the least scruple or the least control. No one would inquire into these matters; and those ungovernable men scrupled not to strip and kill the people of their own army if they chanced to lag behind their main, or to be found in some lonely spot. They behaved exactly like a troupe of highwaymen … carrying away every head of cattle they could discover.’45 ‘The plundering troops were so destructive that within a radius of ten miles they left no trace of prosperity, habitation or cultivation,’ added Ansari. ‘The common people were reduced to desperation.’46
The combined Mughal army finally arrived in front of the walls of Patna on 3 May 1764. At Shuja’s insistence, they went straight into battle. His most experienced advisers ‘begged the Nawab Vizier to oversee the battle from a distance, near His Majesty the Emperor, seated on his tall elephant from where he could be seen, like the beneficent, magnificent sun. Seeing him brave and calm overseeing the battle would encourage his troops to stay steady and not to lose heart.’
But Shuja, characteristically, would have none of it.
‘I am by far the most experienced in war,’ he said. ‘I cannot be kept standing still in one place, I must have the fleetest horse to reach, immediately, anywhere I am needed by my faithful troops!’ So he stationed himself and his crack troops at the front and centre, lining up his men in order. Then with his bravest troops he emerged from behind the cover of outlying buildings and slowly moved towards the English lines. A roar came up from the troops, and the dust from the charging horses’ hooves covered both earth and sky. The English lines appeared from a distance like a cloud of red and black, and bullets rained down on the Nawab Vizier’s troops like autumn leaves. They fell writhing and bloody in the dust, time after time, in great numbers.47
It was the Naga sadhus, ‘naked before and behind’, who bore the brunt of the fire. They were mown down in their hundreds, but high on their bhang (hash-ish), wave after wave kept running on towards the English entrenchments, regardless of the danger. Meanwhile, Mir Qasim and his troops kept their place to the rear, ‘standing far off behind the lines of Shuja’s troops, and merely observed the military action from a distance’.
The Nawab Vizier sent a message to Mir Qasim, saying: ‘I and your colleagues are in the heat of battle – at every moment, before my very eyes, my servants are offering up their lives like moths rushing to a candle-flame, while you do nothing but watch from a distance! Come and join the fight against the English, or if you’re incapable of doing that, at least send Sumru with his modern artillery!’ But his Bengali Highness appeared rooted to the spot and neither moved himself, nor sent Sumru to assist his ally.
As the day declined, the Gossains and Nagas continued their attack. Then it was the turn of the Rohillas who came to help them at the command of the Nawab Vizier. The battle was fierce, and English artillery fire blinding and terrifying. Skulls split and necks snapped, scattered over the blood-soaked battlefield, like a sward of wild red poppies and tulips. On every side there was deafening gunfire and flashing sword-blades, as if the hand of Fate were slapping the face of Time. But Major Carnac did not lose his nerve, and, like a Curse of Heaven, attacked those stony-hearted troops and left them writhing on the battlefield or despatched them to the Valley of Non-Existence.
The Nawab Vizier was wounded twice by bullets during this action, but paid no attention to his wounds. In the heat of the action, he sent another message, reviling His Bengali Highness, who replied: ‘Day has ended, it is time to go home to our tents! We can always resume tomorrow!’
Stranger even than this reply, was the wind: having blown all day westerly from behind Shuja’s troops, driving dust and straw into the eyes of the English force, it now suddenly veered and started blowing from the east, blinding the Nawab Vizier’s troops with thorns and rubbish, smoke and gunpowder from the battlefield. So it was that Shuja finally had the drums beaten and retired to have his wounds treated, and thought no more of fighting.48
The siege of Patna continued for another three weeks, through the intense heat of May. Surprised at the scale of the bloodshed and the savagery of the fighting they had just witnessed, both sides initially kept to their lines. If the battle had been inconclusive, so now was the siege.
Nevertheless, Shuja pressed the Company sepoys closely and put himself continually in danger, so much so that on one occasion, scouting a forward position with just two guards, he was recognised, chased and nearly captured by a Company patrol: ‘the Nawab Vizier could see himself falling prisoner into the clutches of his enemies, but, keeping his presence of mind, and tightly controlling the reins of his horse, he retreated at speed, till he had escaped this death-trap’.49 But for all Shuja’s bravery, Carnac’s men had had time to build elaborate and well-defended entrenchments, ‘that looked very much like a wall vomiting fire and flames’.50 All Shuja’s efforts achieved was to add to his sense of irritation and disgust at the lack of effort being made by his partners, especially Mir Qasim. This was not, he realised, the moment to take action against his guest; but he made note to do so when the occasion arose.
Of all Shuja’s allies, only the French adventurer René Madec really exerted himself: ‘I now found myself in a position to fight the English,’ wrote the Breton, ‘and to take revenge for all the wrongs they had done to me and to my fellow countrymen.’
We attacked their entrenchments with an energy they little expected, but they were so well fortified we were unable to storm them during the twenty days that our attacks lasted. The Nawab often exhorted me not to expose myself to such risks, but I followed only my zeal to destroy this nation which had destroyed mine. I strained every nerve to encompass their utter destruction, but was not supported by the others, so not everything on this campaign went according to my plans. At length, the approaching rains forced us to put off our operations till the next season’s campaign, and to look for winter quarters.51
On 14 June 1764, after three weeks of steady losses and no discernible gains, just as, unknown to Shuja’s Mughals, supplies were beginning to run out in the city and the battered and dispirited Carnac was actively considering surrender, Shuja suddenly tired of the siege and beat the kettledrums announcing withdrawal. He marched his troops westwards, through the first of the monsoon downpours, and settled on the banks of the Ganges at the fort of Buxar, close to the border with Avadh. Here he dug in, erected barracks and determined to continue with his invasion of Bengal when the campaign season began again in the autumn, after the festival of Dusshera. The exhausted Company defenders, aware of how narrowly they had been saved from an abject, starving surrender, declined to pursue Shuja’s forces.
But, rather than drilling his troops and actively preparing for the coming campaign, Shuja instead ‘sank again into a circle of entertainments, pleasures, and amusements, without once bestowing a thought on the necessary quantity of [cannon] balls, or their quality, or that of the powder; and without consulting anyone about the methods of fighting the enemy. He even declined listening to the requests of one of the officers of the artillery who wanted necessaries for their office. Upon all those subjects he was quite careless and inattentive, spending his time instead in playing at dice, in observing the flight of his pigeons, looking at performances of his dance women, and amusing himself with pastimes of all sorts.’52
Only in one way did he take decisive action – and that was not against his Company enemies, but instead against his ally Mir Qasim, on whose inactivity he now publicly blamed the failure of the assault on Patna. He called in Mir Qasim’s commander, Sumru, and, with promises of wealth and estates, won over the German assassin. He then ordered him to strip the assets of Mir Qasim: ‘Sumru and all his troops surrounded His Highness’s tent and forcibly removed his treasure-chests. Sumru’s soldiers then set up camp with the troops of the Nawab Vizier.’
These incidents prompted Mir Qasim to give utterance, rather foolishly during his public audience, to some very unflattering remarks about the Nawab Vizier, which were duly reported back by spies. The Nawab Vizier at once ordered his troops to go and arrest His Highness in his camp and bring him back under armed escort.
In the morning the Nawab Vizier’s army went to surround His Bengali Highness’s tents, loading up whatever they could find in the women’s quarters or store-houses. Mir Qasim now despaired, and turned fakir, seeking refuge in a pretended fit of madness. He put on a vermilion red shirt and a hat, left his throne and went to squat on a mat in the middle distance, surrounded by some of his friends, whose wits had also altogether left them, and who also wore bright parti-coloured fools’ costumes, dervish-style. The soldiers of the camp pointed at them and hooted in derision. Before long the officer led Mir Qasim out to mount the elephant that had been brought for him, while he himself sat at the back of the howdah. Jeering crowds accompanied them to the Nawab Vizier’s encampment, where His Bengali Highness was locked away in the prison appointed for him.53
In the space of a few months, Mir Qasim had transformed from being one of the richest and most powerful rulers in India to become Shuja’s shackled and penniless prisoner.
Four months later, on 22 October, to the beat of regimental drums, the red coats of the first battalions of Company sepoys could be seen marching along the banks of the Ganges, through a succession of mango groves, closing in on Buxar. Reinforcements of Company sepoys and a single King’s regiment had arrived fresh from Calcutta, commanded by one of the most effective British officers in India, a dashing, cool-headed but utterly ruthless 38-year-old Scottish Highlander named Major Hector Munro.
Jean-Baptiste Gentil, who was now in charge of Shuja’s infantry, rode straight over to the Nawab and urged immediate action: ‘I am well-acquainted with the English and their methods of warfare,’ he said. ‘You should not under-estimate them. Rather, wake up now, stop indulging in intoxicating pleasures, and get your troops ready!’
Now that the English have not yet lined up in battle-order, now that the barges have not yet drawn up along the river to unload their weapons and military equipment, now that they are all busy putting up their tents – now is the moment to attack! God Almighty may allow us to defeat and disperse them now. If we wait till they’ve settled in, it will be difficult to get the upper hand!’ But the Nawab Vizier merely laughed and boasted, ‘You’d better leave the tactics and strategy of dealing with this lot to me, and to my judgement!’54
That night, Shuja sent his women and treasure back to his capital of Faizabad under guard, while his troops slept under arms, alert for the sort of night attack for which the Company was now feared. But no such attack materialised. Shuja’s original plan seems to have been to fight a defensive battle from behind the cover of his entrenchments, just as the Company had done before Patna. But during the course of that morning, seeing how far he outnumbered the Company troops, he changed his mind and decided to fight an offensive battle. ‘Munro had drawn up his troops in battle order at dawn,’ wrote Ansari, ‘and started firing his artillery, inflicting much damage on his enemies. This persuaded the Nawab Vizier to change his battle plan, counting it better to come out from behind the earthworks, and fight with his cavalry in the open.’55
So it was that Shuja ordered an advance out of his strong defensive position, to the surprise of Munro, who initially did not believe his runners’ reports: he could not understand why Shuja would throw away such an immense defensive advantage. Shortly afterwards, Madec’s heavy artillery opened up, and was answered by the lighter, more mobile and faster firing cannon of the Company: ‘The English and the French, like tigers or leopards, keenly started the struggle,’ noted Ansari, ‘with flashing swords and blazing guns.’56
By nine o’clock, the two armies were lined up facing each other, with a marsh between them, and the wide, flat expanse of the Ganges flanking the Mughal left wing. Shuja’s Naga and Afghan cavalry, who had been placed on the right of the Mughal line, opened the battle by swinging around the marsh, wheeling to Munro’s rear and attacking the back of the Company’s formation, where the Grenadiers were stationed.
Before long, the Company flank had broken and Shuja’s cavalry were through the Grenadiers and in among the reserves, slashing left and right: as Lieutenant Gabriel Harper wrote later: ‘I fancy had but one or two thousand of the enemy’s cavalry behaved as well as those that attacked the Grenadiers, we should have lost the day … The chance was more than once against us, and I am of the opinion the sepoys would not have been able to stand the cannonade five minutes longer than they did.’57 But once the Mughal cavalry had broken through, they carried on into the Company camp, where they put to flight the irregular cavalry guarding the baggage, the treasure and the ammunition. Then they promptly dismounted and began to loot. Thereafter they were lost to Shuja’s control and played no further part in the battle.
In the end it was, as ever, the superior discipline of the Company’s troops that won them the day. Munro liked to remind his troops that ‘regular discipline and strict obedience to orders is the only superiority that Europeans possess in this country’, and the events that day proved him right.58 Despite the loss of their baggage and ammunition, Munro’s sepoys grimly held their squares, even while suffering unprecedented casualties from the concentrated artillery fire aimed at them from Madec and Sumru’s heavy guns.
The first English prisoners now began to be brought bound before Shuja, who assumed he had already won the day. He ordered fanfares of victory to be sounded, whereupon several commanders left their posts to present their compliments. It was Gentil, who was with Shuja in the centre of the Mughal line, who saw with a sinking heart what happened next: ‘It seemed as if the English were completely beaten,’ he wrote. ‘They had lost their ammunition and food stores, as well as all their baggage and their treasury for military expenses.’
Munro, having recognised his own defeat, sent orders for the supply barges to approach the battlefield as soon as possible, as the English army had no option of retreat other than by river. But there was a long delay in carrying out these orders, and meanwhile the Mughal cavalry was busy pillaging the English camp, instead of harrying their enemy and giving the English no respite. Seeing this, Munro, having lost everything, made a desperate charge against the troops on our left wing.59
Realising his moment had come, Munro galloped down his line, braving the volleys of shot aimed at him by the Mughal guns, waving his hat and ordering a general advance. ‘By this bravura act of desperation,’ wrote Gentil, ‘Munro became master of the same battlefield which he believed he had been forced to abandon only a few moments earlier.’60 The Company sepoys ‘had already started to retreat,’ wrote Madec, ‘thinking they were lost. They would all have fled, had they had the means. But it was just because they did not have the means to escape that they plucked up their courage, and, seeing our left wing towards the Ganges under-staffed and unsupported, charged it with a reckless bravery that has few parallels.’61
Shuja, unable to believe the sudden change of fortune, held his ground, determined to rally his troops. ‘He imagined himself already holding the lovely figure of Victory in his embrace, and suddenly he saw himself, as if in a mirror, choking in the arms of that incubus, Defeat. He remained rooted to the spot, staring disbelievingly at this horrid and sudden transformation.’ As the Mughal lines dissolved around him, it was the Naga chieftain Anupgiri, though himself badly wounded in the thigh, who persuaded Shuja ud-Daula to escape: ‘This is not the moment for an unprofitable death!’ he said. ‘We will easily win and take revenge another day.’62 Resolving to live, Shuja cantered to the bridge of boats he had thrown across the river, while the naked Nagas fought a fierce rearguard action behind him. As soon as Shuja, Sumru and he had all crossed it, the Naga leader ordered it to be destroyed behind him.
This stopped the Company’s advance, but also doomed those of his troops who had failed to make it across – notably the brave Naga rearguard. They tried to wade across the mudflats, where they were picked off by the Company sepoys now lining the riverbanks. ‘Vast numbers were endeavouring to cross the deep, muddy river that flowed behind the camp,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘but they stuck in the mire and lost their lives to the artillery and succession of volleys which the Telingas [sepoys] were endlessly pouring on the flying enemy …’63
Now it was the turn of the Company troops to enrich themselves: ‘Everything belonging to the Vizier or his officers, such as tents, furniture, and other property fell prey to the victors,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan. ‘Numerous shops of bankers, full of silver and gold coin, and tents of merchants, replete with precious stuffs were rifled in an instant. Two hundred pieces of artillery were taken possession of, so that the English troops made an immense booty … God only knows the wealth which must have existed in that army! There were immense riches in that camp, such as might have vied with the very capital of Hindustan.’64
Buxar was a short and confused battle, but a bloody one: Company forces lost 850 killed, wounded or missing, of the 7,000 men they brought to the field – more than an eighth of their total; Mughal losses were many times higher, perhaps as many as 5,000 dead. For a long time the day’s outcome was uncertain. But for all this, it was still, ultimately, one of the most decisive battles in Indian history, even more so than the more famous Battle of Plassey seven years earlier.
The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company’s control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west. The Company, which had started off as an enterprise dominated by privateers and former Caribbean pirates, had already transformed itself once into a relatively respectable international trading corporation, with a share price so reliable its stock was regarded almost as a form of international currency. Now the Company was transformed a second time, not just as a vehicle of trade operating from a scattering of Indian coastal enclaves, but as the ruler of a rich and expansive territorial empire extending across South Asia.
For this, above all, was the moment this corporate trading organisation succeeded in laying the ground for its territorial conquest of India. A business enterprise had now emerged from its chrysalis, transformed into an autonomous imperial power, backed by a vast army, already larger than that of the British Crown, and was poised now to exercise administrative control over 20 million Indians. A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: ‘Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.’65 The result was what Adam Smith would call ‘a strange absurdity’ – a Company State.66
When, twenty years later, the tea merchant and traveller Thomas Twining stopped his boat trip up the Ganges to visit the now deserted site of the Battle of Buxar, he wrote in his diary that ‘here then may be said to terminate the extraordinary series of military achievements which brought the finest parts of Asia under the dominion of British merchants, who first appeared in the character of needy adventurers on the coasts of India. There are, perhaps, few events in history more remarkable than these transactions. Results so disproportionate to the means which produced them seem quite inexplicable.’67
Twining had a point. The Company had gambled everything – and won. The Mughal Empire now lay at its feet, comprehensively defeated, and the stage was set for the most extraordinary corporate takeover in history.68
In the days following the Company victory at Buxar, the three Mughal confederates that had joined forces suffered very different fates.
In the course of the headlong flight from Buxar, Mir Qasim was freed by Shuja from his imprisonment. But stripped of both his power and his fortune, and hunted by the unforgiving Company for his part in the Patna Massacre, this most capable of rulers never again found a place for himself in the kaleidoscope of eighteenth-century Mughal politics. He drifted across Hindustan and eventually died in poverty on a smallholding near Agra. At his funeral, his children were said to be unable to afford a winding sheet for their father.69
Shuja ud-Daula, characteristically, opted for the path of military resistance. As Munro’s Company battalions marched deeper into Avadh, he fought a string of mounted guerrilla raids against his pursuers, but was gradually pushed further and further into the margins, shedding his followers, while Major, now General Carnac appropriated Shuja’s Faizabad mansion as his personal residence. The Company finally cornered Shuja at the great fortress of Chunar, but he escaped as it was being stormed, to fight, and to lose, one last battle against the Company, at Kora, on 3 May 1765. Thereafter he spent several months on the run across his old dominions, before taking shelter among the Rohilla Afghans of the Doab.
In the end it was his urbane French soldier of fortune, Jean-Baptiste Gentil, who negotiated his surrender that July. Gentil pointed out to the Company that, under British protection, a defeated Shuja could be reinstalled to provide a useful buffer state between the rich lands of Bengal and the lawless anarchy of the contested lands around Delhi, which continued to pass, chaotically and bloodily, between rival Afghan and Maratha armies.
Assured of his life and liberty, Shuja eventually gave himself up. He arrived out of the blue in Munro’s camp, sitting in his outsized palanquin with an escort of only 200 horsemen.70 ‘It was about four o’clock in the afternoon,’ wrote Gentil, ‘and the general was still dining, and, as is the English custom, passing the port after the dessert. The cloud of dust raised by the horses of the Nawab-Vizier’s cavalry escort caused the alarm to be raised, the drums sounded, and everyone rushed to their post. But at that moment two runners arrived and announced the Nawab-Vizier’s arrival.’71
To his surprise Shuja found that ‘the English gentlemen took off their hats, and showed all marks of respect, according to the custom of their country and behaved with great affability. They stood before him, closing their hands together [i.e. clapping].’72 He was reinstated in a reduced version of his old kingdom, under the watchful eye of a British Resident and guarded by a regiment of Company sepoys, for whose presence he had to pay a huge subsidy, in addition to an immense war indemnity of Rs5 million.*73
The Emperor Shah Alam, meanwhile, did his best to patch up relations with the Company, with whom he had been in secret correspondence throughout the Buxar campaign. From his point of view, Buxar was a battle fought between three of his servants, all of whom had sworn fealty to the Mughal throne, and was therefore a conflict in which he must remain neutral. Throughout the battle, he remained in his tent, determined to show his disapproval of what he regarded as Shuja’s foolishly confrontational strategy.74
Shortly after Buxar, as Shuja and his army fled into Avadh to continue their fight, Shah Alam and his Mughal bodyguard lingered near the battlefield and sent out messengers to Munro seeking an accommodation. As had happened after his defeat at Helsa eighteen months earlier, Shah Alam played a deft hand, understanding that he was much more use to the Company as an ally than an enemy.
Shortly after the battle was over, and ‘as soon as the Nawab Vizier was seen fleeing along the other side of that river, the Emperor, who was thereby left at liberty, sent for the English, despatching robes of honour for Munro, Mir Jafar and Vansittart, and so opening negotiations. They, finding so fair a pretence for advancing their own affairs, doubled their pace and joined him in a few hours.’75
The Emperor wanted the Company to know that Shuja was not his friend, even threatening that if the vizier and the British were to come to terms, ‘I will go to Delhi, for I cannot think of returning again into the Hands of a Man who has used me so ill.’76 Munro, meanwhile, was well aware what a puppet Shah Alam could give to the Company’s expansionist ambitions in terms of a Mughal seal of legitimacy: ‘To avoid giving any umbrage or jealousy of our power to the King or nobles of the Empire,’ he wrote to Calcutta, ‘we will have everything done under the Sanction of his Authority, that We may appear as holding our Acquisitions from him, and acting in the War under his Authority.’77
Under Company protection, and personally escorted by his former adversary General Carnac, Shah Alam headed first to Benares, and hence to Allahabad, where the Company lodged him in the magnificent old Mughal fort built by his ancestor Akbar at the auspicious confluence of the Yamuna and the Ganges. There he awaited the arrival of the man whom the directors had despatched from London to Calcutta to clean up the mess created by the greed of their unruly servants, on the basis that the best gamekeeper is a former poacher.
This was the now newly ennobled and increasingly portly figure of Robert Clive, Baron Plassey.
News of the war against Mir Qasim and the fact that Bengal was once again ‘a scene of bloodshed and confusion’ had reached the Company London headquarters in Leadenhall Street in February 1764; tidings of the Patna Massacre followed soon after. There was talk of defeats, mounting military expenses and financial chaos, which in turn produced a panic among investors and a run on the stock market. The Company’s share price quickly fell 14 per cent.78 At a shareholder meeting, one anxious investor proposed Clive’s immediate return to Bengal as both Governor and Commander-in-Chief.79 The shareholders voted through the resolution unanimously.
Since he had arrived back in England, Clive had quickly succeeded in achieving two of his greatest ambitions: a seat in Parliament and a peerage, albeit an Irish one, which was then considered much less grand than one in England, which gave the holder a place in the Westminister House of Lords. He had bought land and collected estates, squabbled with the directors of the Company and quickly got bored: ‘We are not so happy in England as you imagine,’ he wrote to Carnac in May 1762. ‘Many of us envy your way of life in India.’80 So when he was offered the governorship of Bengal, with unprecedented powers to reform the government and settle Company control over great swathes of Asia, he did not hesitate. At sundown on 4 June 1764, he sailed out of Portsmouth on the Kent for his third posting in India. He left his wife and children at the quayside, and was accompanied instead by a French chef, a band of four musicians and twelve dozen chests of champagne.81
As ever, Clive’s sense of timing – or perhaps his luck – was uncanny. When the Kent docked at Madras in April 1765, news was immediately brought on board of Munro’s victory at Buxar, the occupation of Avadh and the death of the recently restored Mir Jafar. Aware of the positive effect this would have on the Company’s share price, Clive’s first action was to write secretly in cipher to his agent in London to mortgage all his property and to buy as many Company shares as possible.82 Next he wrote to the directors. As ruthless and incisive as ever, he realised how radically this news changed the entire political landscape: ‘We have at last arrived at that critical Conjuncture, which I have long foreseen,’ he wrote to the chairman of the EIC. ‘I mean that Conjuncture which renders it necessary for us to determine whether we can, or shall, take the whole [Mughal Empire] to ourselves.’
Mir Jafar is dead, and his natural son is a Minor. Shuja Dowla is beat out of his Dominions; we are in possession of them, and it is scarce a hyperbole to say that the whole Empire is in our hands … Can it be doubted that a large Army of Europeans would effectually preserve to us the Sovereignty, as I may call it, not only by keeping in awe the ambition of any Country Prince, but by rending us so truly formidable, that no French, Dutch or other Enemy could ever dare to molest us?
We must indeed become Nabobs ourselves in Fact if not in Name, and perhaps totally without disguise …We must go forward, for to retract is impossible … If riches and stability are the objects of the Company, then this is the method, the only method, we now have for attaining and securing them.83
The new Governor finally arrived back in Calcutta on 3 May 1765, exhausted from a voyage which had taken nearly a year. But he knew that before he could rest he must head straight up country to sort out the unstable and potentially explosive power vacuum in Hindustan which had remain unfilled and unresolved since Buxar. ‘Peace on a firm and lasting foundation must be established if possible,’ he wrote to Carnac. ‘And to attain that object, I conclude it will be necessary to march straight up to you at camp, not to continue long there, but to enter into some treaty with the King.’84 He turned quickly around, and left Calcutta for Allahabad on 25 June.
His first appointment was with Shuja ud-Daula. Clive appreciated the logic of the solution Gentil had first proposed: that rather than taking the whole of Avadh directly under Company administration, a much wiser course would be instead to reinstate a grateful Shuja as the Company’s puppet-dependant and milk him of his resources, while nominally taking him under protection.
On 2 August Clive met the penitent Shuja ud-Daula at Benares and told him of these plans. Shuja, who had only three months before faced total ruin, could not believe his luck, and made his personal gratitude and loyalty to Clive abundantly clear. Soon afterwards, a delighted Clive wrote to his Council that ‘if due sensibility of favours are received, an open confidence and many other valuable principles are to be found amongst Musalmans, Shuja Dowlah possesses them in a higher degree than we have elsewhere observed in the country.’85
Next Clive determined to add a final political flourish of his own. He decided that a small portion of Shuja’s former dominions around Allahabad and Kora would be turned over to support Shah Alam as an imperial demesne. Vague promises would be made about supporting the Emperor’s long-dreamed-of return to Delhi, while taking in return the offer of financially managing the three rich eastern provinces of the Emperor dominions – Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This was the granting of what in Mughal legalese was known as the Diwani – the office of economic management of Mughal provinces.
This not only gave a veneer of Mughal legitimacy for the Company’s conquests, it also potentially gave the EIC the right to tax 20 million people, and generate an estimated revenue of between £2 million and £3 million a year* – a massive windfall by eighteenth-century standards. Seizing the many riches of Bengal with its fertile paddy fields and rice surpluses, its industrious weavers and rich mineral resources, opened up huge opportunities for the Company and would generate the finance to continue building up the most powerful army in Asia. The vast revenues of Bengal, which had for so long powered the Mughal exchequer, could, Clive knew, make the Company as unassailable as the Mughals had once been – and provide the finance for perhaps, one day, conquering the rest of the country.
Negotiations between Shah Alam’s advisers and those of Clive began on 1 August. On the 9th, the Governor’s state barge docked at Allahabad fort, where Clive complained of being ‘tormented by bugs and flies’. Here, for the first time, he met the young Emperor whose ‘grave deportment bordered on sadness’.86
Though the main outlines of the deal had already been settled, negotiations continued for three more days, while Shah Alam held out for a larger payment from the Company. It was, for once, Clive who gave way: ‘I think 20 [lakh rupees, £26 million today] is more than sufficient [a pension for the Emperor],’ he wrote. ‘However, as we intend to make use of his Majesty in a very extra-ordinary manner for obtaining nothing less than a sanad [formal legal order] for all the revenues of the country, six lakhs of rupees will be scarce worth disobliging the king, if he should make a point of it.’87 The final terms were agreed on the evening of 11 August.
On the following morning, the 12th, the Emperor was enthroned on a silk-draped armchair, perilously perched upon Clive’s dining-room table. The ceremony, which took place inside Clive’s tent, did not last long. As Ghulam Hussain Khan puts it: ‘A business of such magnitude, as left neither pretence nor subterfuge, and which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors and able negotiators, as well as much parley and conference with the East India Company and the King of England, and much negotiation and contention with the ministers, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass or a beast of burden.’88
It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d’être, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment.
Even though the Company’s military power was now placed within a ritualised Mughal framework, the radical change on the ground brought about by what the Company referred to as the Treaty of Allahabad was immediately apparent. As the Riyazu-s-salatin noted shortly afterwards: ‘The English have now acquired dominion over the three subahs [provinces] and have appointed their own district officers, they make assessments and collections of revenue, administer justice, appoint and dismiss collectors and perform other functions of governance. The sway and authority of the English prevails … and their soldiers are quartering themselves everywhere in the dominions of the Nawab, ostensibly as his servants, but acquiring influence over all affairs. Heaven knows what will be the eventual upshot of this state of things.’89
In fact, the upshot was very quickly clear. Bengal was now plundered more thoroughly and brutally than ever before, and the youthful Bengal Nawab was left little more than a powerless, ritualised figurehead: ‘Nothing remains to him but the Name and the Shadow of Authority’ was how Clive put it.90 He and a succession of his descendants might survive for a time as nominal governors in their vast riverside palaces in Murshidabad, but it was the EIC that now openly ruled, and exploited, Bengal. Clive took great care to distance the EIC from the humdrum affairs of daily administration: even the existing methods of revenue collection were maintained, run out of Murshidabad offices that were still entirely staffed with Mughal officials. But frock-coated and periwigged British officials were now everywhere at the apex of the administrative pyramid, making all the decisions and taking all the revenues. A trading corporation had become both colonial proprietor and corporate state, legally free, for the first time, to do all the things that governments do: control the law, administer justice, assess taxes, mint coins, provide protection, impose punishments, make peace and wage war.
From now on, the land revenues of those portions of India under the Company corporate control were to be conceived simply as gross profits for the EIC which would, as Clive wrote, ‘defray all the expenses of the investment [the goods bought for export to London], furnish the whole of the China treasure [the money used to buy tea from China] and answer all the demands of all your other settlements in India, and still leave a considerable balance in your treasury besides’.
Up to now, gold bullion had represented 75 per cent of the EIC’s imports to Bengal, and was the source for much of the ‘prodigious ancient riches of the province’. But now the Company no longer had to ship anything from Britain in order to pay for the textiles, spices and saltpetre it wished to buy and export: Indian tax revenues were now being used to provide the finance for all such purchases. India would henceforth be treated as if it were a vast plantation to be milked and exploited, with all its profits shipped overseas to London.91
As a result, in the words of Richard Becher, the new Company Resident in Murshidabad, ‘the first Consideration seems to have been the raising of as large Sums from the Country as could be collected’ – in other words simply to secure as large a revenue as possible through land taxes, and then to transfer that surplus to London bank accounts.92
For Clive and his shareholders it was another triumph: ‘Fortune seems determined to accompany me to the last,’ Clive wrote to his friend and biographer, Robert Orme. ‘Every object, every sanguine wish is upon the point of being completely fulfilled, and I am arrived at the pinnacle of all that I covet, by affirming the Company shall, in spite of all the envy, malice, faction and resentment, acknowledge they are become the most opulent company in the world.’93 To Clive’s immense personal profit, the value of EIC stock climbed dramatically, nearly doubling in value in eight months.
But for the people of Bengal, the granting of the Diwani was an unmitigated catastrophe. The Nawab was no longer able to provide even a modicum of protection for his people: tax collectors and farmers of revenue plundered the peasantry to raise funds from the land, and no one felt in the least bit responsible for the wellbeing of the ordinary cultivator. Merchants and weavers were forced to work for the Company at far below market rates; they also seized by force textiles made for their French and Dutch rivals. Merchants who refused to sign papers agreeing to the Company’s harsh terms were caned or jailed or were publicly humiliated by being made to rub their noses on the ground.94 A few years later, in 1769, Becher recorded, ‘it must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company to the Diwani, the condition of the people of the country has been worse than it was before; yet I am afraid the fact is undoubted. This fine country, which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary government, is now verging towards ruin.’95 The economic indicators were all bad, he wrote, and growing daily worse: land revenues had been declining since the Diwani was handed over, coin was short and Bengal’s internal trade was shrinking.96
Ghulam Hussain Khan, by far the sharpest observer of his time, was quick to realise what this would mean on the ground. Firstly, it signified the effective extinction of his entire social class. The Mughal nobility, whose power had ultimately rested on their expertise as cavalrymen, were now effectively unemployed as the Company replaced them with infantrymen they recruited largely from rural Hindu Rajput and Brahmin backgrounds. Long before anyone else had thought through the full effects of this new corporate colonialism and its infantry warfare, Ghulam Hussain Khan was lamenting the fate of ‘the remaining stock of the ancient nobility … who in these hard times have not one single resource left under the canopy of the Hindostany heaven … Numbers therefore have already quitted their homes and countries, and numbers unwilling to leave their abodes, have made a covenant with hunger and distress, and ended their lives in poverty in the corner of their cottages.’
He estimated that these changes would throw between 40,000 and 50,000 troopers out of employment across Bengal and Bihar, besides dispersing ‘the thousands and thousands of merchants’ who followed ‘that numerous cavalry’. This is turn had an important economic and civilisational effect: ‘The even more numerous artisans whom the noblemen had always kept busy, sometimes in their own houses’ found their patrons no longer capable of sustaining them or their in-house kar-khanas. Alternative employment was hard to find, for ‘the English are now the rulers and masters of the country’ and ‘because their arts and callings are of no use to the English’, the artisans could only thieve or beg.
As these rulers have all their necessaries from their own country, it follows that the handycraftsmen and artificers of this land suffer constantly, live in distress, and find it difficult to procure a livelihood sufficient to support their lives. For as the English are now the rulers and masters of this country, as well as the only rich men in it, to whom can those poor people look up for offering up their productions of their art, so as to benefit from their expenses? It is only some artificers that can find livelihood with the English, such as carpenters, silversmiths, ironsmiths &c.97
Moreover, wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, the Company’s conquests represented an entirely different form of imperial exploitation from anything India had previously experienced. He articulated, long before any other Indian, both what being a subject colony entailed, and how different this strange and utterly alien form of corporate colonialism was to Mughal rule. ‘It was quickly observed that money had commenced to become scarce in Bengal,’ he wrote. Initially no one knew whether ‘this scarcity was owing to the oppressions and exactions committed by the rulers, or the stinginess of the public expenses, or lastly of the vast exportation of coin which is carried every year to the country of England.’ But it rapidly became clear that the drain of wealth was real. It soon became common ‘to see every year five or six Englishmen, or even more, who repair to their homes with large fortunes. Lakhs upon lakhs have therefore been drained from this country.’98
This, he wrote, was quite different from the system of the Mughals, who though also initially outsiders, determined ‘to settle forever [in India] and to fix the foot of permanency and residency in this country, with a mind of turning their conquest into a patrimony for themselves, and of making it their property and inheritance’:
These bent the whole strength of their genius in securing the happiness of their new subjects; nor did they ever abate from their effort, until they had intermarried with the natives, and got children and families from them, and had become naturalized. Their immediate successors having learned the language of the country, behaved to its inhabitants as brothers of one mother and one language … [Hindus and Muslims] have come to coalesce together into one whole, like milk and sugar that have received a simmering.99
In contrast, he wrote, the British felt nothing for the country, not even for their closest allies and servants. This was why those Indians who initially welcomed the British quickly changed their minds because ‘these new rulers pay no regard to the concerns of Hindustanis, and suffered them to be mercilessly plundered, fleeced, oppressed and tormented by those officers of their appointing’.
The English have a custom of coming for a number of years, and then of going away to pay a visit to their native country, without any of them shewing an inclination to fix themselves in this land. And as they join to that custom another one of theirs, which every one holds as a divine obligation: that of scraping together as much money as they can in this country, and carrying these immense sums to the Kingdom of England; so it should not be surprising that these two customs, blended together, should be ever undermining and ruining this country, and should become an eternal bar to it ever flourishing again.100
As Macaulay later put it, the Company looked on Bengal ‘merely as a Buccaneer would look on a galleon’.101 It took five years for the full effects of this regime of unregulated plunder to become apparent; but when it did so the results were unparalleled in their horror. The stage was now set for the great 1770 Bengal famine.