The Impeachment of Warren Hastings
At noon on 13 February 1788, while Ghulam Qadir was preparing for his assault on Delhi, in London huge crowds had gathered outside Parliament to witness the members of the House of Lords process into Westminster Hall to impeach Warren Hastings.
Tickets for the few seats reserved for spectators changed hands for as much as £50,* and even then so many people wished to attend that, as one of the managers of the impeachment noted, the audience ‘will have to mob it at the door till nine, when the doors open, and then there will be a rush as there is at the pit of the Playhouse when Garrick plays King Lear … The ladies are dressed and in the Palace Yard by six [in the morning], and they sit from nine to twelve, before the business begins … Some people, and I believe, even ladies, have slept at the coffeehouses adjoining Westminster Hall, that they may be sure of getting in the door in time.’1
In addition to the 170 lords, there were bewigged and ermined judges, black-robed lawyers for both sides, and 200 members of the House of Commons. The Queen, ‘dressed in fawn-coloured satin, her head dress plain, with a very slender sprinkling of diamonds’, took her place in the Royal Box, along with her son and two of her daughters, the Duchess of Gloucester, and other attendants, among them the Dukes of Cumberland, Gloucester and York. The Prince of Wales was there with Charles James Fox. Among those who queued for admission were the great society actress and courtesan Sarah Siddons, the painter Joshua Reynolds, the diarist Fanny Burney and the historian Edward Gibbon.
For all the theatre of the occasion – indeed one of the prosecutors was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan – this was not just the greatest political spectacle in the age of George III, it was the nearest the British ever got to putting the Company’s Indian Empire on trial. They did so with one of their greatest orators at the helm – the Anglo-Irish Whig statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke, supported by his no less eloquent and much more radical rival, Charles James Fox.
Warren Hastings stood accused of nothing less than the rape of India – or as Burke put it in his opening speech, ‘with injustice and treachery against the faith of nations’:
With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration … With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country … with a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious, exercise of his powers … in overturning the ancient establishments of the country … With cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name … Crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men – in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper – in short, nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, a heart blackened to the very blackest, a heart corrupted, gangrened to the core … We have brought before you the head, the Captain General of Iniquity – one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.2
Hastings, Burke explained, was, quite simply, a criminal: ‘He is a robber. He steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he extorts.’ He was ‘a professor, a doctor upon the subject’ of crime.3 Worse was to come. Hastings, said Burke, was also ‘a rat’, ‘a weasel’, ‘a keeper of a pig stye, wallowing in corruption’. ‘Like a wild beast, he groans in corners over the dead and dying.’4
Every bit as bad as the man was the institution he represented. Because it was a Company, a corporation, that was governing Bengal, there were, believed Burke, none of the usual checks and balances which could make national government just and legitimate: ‘The East India Company in India is not the British nation,’ he declaimed. ‘When the Tartars entered China and into Hindoostan, when all the Goths and Vandals entered Europe, when the Normans came into England, they did so as a Nation.’
The Company in India does not exist as a Nation. Nobody can go there that does not go in its service … They are a Nation of Placemen. They are a Republic, a Commonwealth, without a people … The consequence of which is that there are no people to control, to watch, to balance against the power of office …
Out of this has issued a species of abuse, at the head of which Mr Hastings has put himself against the authority of the East India Company at home and every authority in the Country … He has corrupted his hands and sullied his government with bribes. He has used oppression and tyranny in place of legal government; and instead of endeavouring to find honest, honourable and adequate rewards for the persons who served the public, he has left them to prey upon it without the slightest degree of control.5
Burke then paused for effect, before launching into his thunderous climax:
I impeach, therefore, Warren Hastings, Esquire, of High Crimes and Misdemeanours. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonoured. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste. I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation and condition of life.6
Burke’s opening speech alone took four days. In it he alleged widespread use of torture by the Company in its ruthless search for plunder, and he accused Hastings of ‘geographical morality … as if when you have crossed the equatorial line all the virtues die’. Natural law, he said, meant that justice and human rights were universal: ‘the laws of morality,’ he declared, ‘are the same everywhere, and there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in England which would not be an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and the world over.’7
Company rule, he continued, had done nothing for India, except to asset-strip it: ‘Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost to India for ever. Every other conqueror … has left some monument behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our domination, by anything better than an ouran-outang or the tiger … [The Company appears] more like an army going to pillage the people under the pretence of commerce than anything else … [Their business is] more like robbery than trade.’8 Now, he argued, it was the duty of those gathered in judgement to ensure that corporations, like individuals, must be held accountable to Parliament.
When Burke began to describe the violation of Bengali virgins and their mothers by the Company’s tax collectors – ‘they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies’ – several women in the audience fainted. According to Macaulay, ‘the ladies in the galleries, unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence, were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling bottles were handed around; hysterical sobs and screams were heard; and Mrs Sheridan was carried out in a fit.’9
Sheridan himself then took over, further outlining the prosecution case and holding forth for four more days. He too took a prolonged tilt at Hastings’ alleged moral darkness which he compared to ‘the writhing obliquity of the serpent … shuffling, ambiguous, dark, insidious’. As for his employers, the Company, they combined ‘the meanness of a pedlar and the profligacy of pirates … wielding a truncheon in one hand, and picking a pocket with the other’.10
His speech was widely regarded as one of the greatest feats of oratory of his day. Even the Speaker was rendered speechless. At the end of his impassioned performance, Sheridan whispered, ‘My lords, I have done’, and swooned backwards, landing in Burke’s arms. ‘The whole house – the members, peers, strangers – involuntarily joined in a tumult of applause … There were few dry eyes in the assembly.’11 Gibbon, alarmed at his friend’s condition, went around the following day to check if Sheridan was all right: ‘He is perfectly well,’ he noted in his diary. ‘A good actor.’12
Some of the Prosecution’s charges and insights – such as the idea of universal human or ‘natural’ rights – were important, even profound.13 Much of the rest was terrifically entertaining and scandalous. The only problem was that, thanks to the machinations of the ever-vindictive Philip Francis, Parliament had impeached the wrong man.
Earlier in his career, Burke had defended Robert Clive against parliamentary enquiry, and so helped exonerate someone who genuinely was a ruthlessly unprincipled plunderer. Now he directed his skills of oratory against Warren Hastings, a man who, by virtue of his position, was certainly the symbol of an entire system of mercantile oppression in India, but who had personally done much to begin the process of regulating and reforming the Company, and who had probably done more than any other Company official to rein in the worst excesses of its rule.
The impeachment had been Philip Francis’s final revenge on the man who had shot him during their duel and whom he had continued to hate with an obsessional passion. As soon as he recovered from his duelling wound in October 1780, Francis had given in his resignation and caught ship to London. There he used his new Indian wealth to buy a parliamentary seat and begin lobbying to bring Hastings down.
In February 1782, he found a sympathetic ear in Edmund Burke, then a rising Whig star. Burke had never been to India, but part of his family had been ruined by unwise speculation in East India stock. Together Burke and Francis worked on a series of Select Committee reports exposing the Company’s misdeeds in India. Before he met Francis, Burke had described himself as ‘a great admirer’ of Hastings’ talents.14 Francis quickly worked his dark magic to change that. By April 1782, he had drawn up a portentous list of twenty-two charges against Hastings which Burke then brought to the House.15 In May 1787, after five years of obsessive campaigning to blacken Hastings’ name and reputation, Burke and Francis persuaded Parliament that there was enough evidence to impeach him. On the 21st, the recently returned Hastings was taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-Arms, who passed him on to Black Rod. He was then made to kneel at the bar of the Lords, bow his head and hear the charges against him.
Hastings was certainly no angel; and the EIC under his rule was as extractive as ever. After Francis’s departure, Hastings began to take a more old-fashioned, pseudo-monarchical and even despotic idea of his powers, something Burke particularly disliked.16 Moreover, during the military crisis of the early 1780s, in the aftermath of victories by the armies of Tipu and the Marathas, when it looked as if the Company might easily be driven out of India, Hastings had been forced to raise money quickly to fight the war and to save Madras and Calcutta. He chose to raise it by pressuring the Company’s princely allies to contribute, and he used some extremely dubious means to gather the sums he needed. These included bullying the Nawab of Lucknow, Asaf ud-Daula, forcefully to strip the wealth of his purdah-bound aunts, the Begums of Avadh. He also personally used strong-arm tactics on Chait Singh, the Raja of Benares, an intervention that caused a local uprising and nearly cost Hastings his life. There were other dubious decisions, too. In particular, Hastings had failed to intervene with a pardon to save the life of Nandakumar, a former Diwan of the Nawab of Bengal, who had faked evidence of Hastings’ corruption which he handed to Philip Francis. Nandakumar had then been sentenced to death for forgery by Hastings’ old Westminster schoolfriend, the Calcutta Chief Justice, Sir Elijah Impey. This opened Hastings up to charges of failing to prevent what Burke and Francis viewed as the convenient ‘judicial murder’ of a whistleblower.
All of these were potentially grave charges. But Hastings was nevertheless by far the most responsible and sympathetic of all the officials the Company had yet sent to India. From his early twenties, his letters had been full of outrage at the unprincipled way Company officials were exploiting India and mistreating Indians. He had many close Indian friends and regarded himself as an honourable champion of justice for the people of Bengal. He had railed and campaigned against those who were plundering the country and wrecking the Bengali economy and he did his best to set it on a more prosperous and sustainable path. He took concrete measures to make sure there was no repetition of the terrible famine of 1770, including building the great Gola in Patna, which survives to this day. His successor said that in Bengal he was by far the most popular of all the British officials in India, ‘positively beloved of the people’.17
Nor did he even look the part: far from being an ostentatious and loud-mouthed new-rich ‘Nabob’, Hastings was a dignified, intellectual and somewhat austere figure. Standing gaunt at the bar in his plain black frock coat, white stockings and grey hair, he looked more Puritan minister about to give a sermon than some paunchy plunderer: nearly six feet tall, he weighed less than eight stone: ‘of spare habit, very bald, with a countenance placid and thoughtful, but when animated, full of intelligence.’
As a result of Francis’s influence, the Articles of Impeachment were full of demonstrable fantasies and distortions, which traded on the ignorance of the audience about the issues and personalities involved. They were also badly drafted and lacked the necessary legal detail. Many of the more entertaining speeches were little better than ad hominem rants, mixing falsified history and unproved innuendo. Hastings did not begin his career as ‘as a fraudulent bullock contractor’. Chait Singh of Benares was not, as alleged, ‘a sovereign prince’. Hastings had not been the one declaring war on the Marathas. He had never given orders ‘to extirpate the Rohillas’. The Begum of Avadh’s eunuchs were never scourged.18 It took Hastings’ defence many weeks even to begin correcting the multiple errors of basic facts which the prosecution had laid out.
If anything, the Impeachment demonstrated above all the sheer ignorance of the British about the subcontinent they had been looting so comprehensively, and profitably, for thirty years. Indeed, some of the charges were almost comically confused: the illiterate and piratical Rohilla Afghan warlord Hafiz Rehmat Khan, for example, was conflated by Burke with the fourteenth-century mystical Persian love poet Hafez, who had been dead in his grave for 400 years by the time of the Impeachment.19
Few were surprised when, after seven years, on 23 April 1795, Hastings was ultimately cleared of all charges. But it scarred the final decades of his life, leading to what he described as ‘years of depression & persecution … Besides crimes of the most atrocious lies which were alleged against me, I was loaded by all the managers in succession, through the whole course of their pleadings in the trial, with language of the foulest abuse, aggravated by coarse and vulgar epithets, of which there had never been any examples in the jurisprudence of this or any other country.’20
The trial, however misconceived and misdirected, did have one useful outcome: to demonstrate that the Company’s many misdeeds were answerable to Parliament, and it helped publicise the corruption, violence and venality of the EIC, so setting the stage for further governmental oversight, regulation and control. This was a process which had already begun with the 1773 Regulating Act and had been further enhanced by Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which made the Company’s political and military transactions subject to government supervision. It eventually culminated in the outright nationalisation of the Company seventy years later in 1858, but by 1784 the writing was already on the wall. In that year Alexander Dalrymple, the Company’s now retired hydrographer, put it with utmost clarity and confidence: ‘The East India Company must be considered in two lights’, he wrote, ‘as commercial and political; but the two are inseparable: and if the politics are not made subservient to the commerce, the destruction of the Company must ensue.’21
Amid all the spectacle of Hastings’ trial, it made sense that the man sent out to replace him was chosen by Parliament specifically for his incorruptibility. General Lord Charles Cornwallis had recently surrendered the thirteen American Colonies of the British Empire over to George Washington, who had immediately declared it a free and independent nation.
Cornwallis’s mission was now to make sure that the same never happened in India.
On arrival in Calcutta in August 1786, Cornwallis inherited a far more flourishing Bengal than the famine-wrecked dustbowl which had greeted Hastings fourteen years earlier.
This was at least partly the result of the reforms Hastings had brought in. Calcutta itself had turned into a boomtown with a population of around 400,000, more than double that at the time of Plassey. Now known as the City of Palaces or the St Petersburg of the East to its British inhabitants, and the Paradise of Nations, Zannat-al-Bilad to the old Mughal aristocracy, the Company’s bridgehead in Bengal was unquestionably the richest, largest and most elegant colonial city in the East: ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture,’ wrote the newly arrived William Hunter, ‘and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is.’22
The city was prosperous and fast growing. All it lacked was proper planning regulations: ‘It is not without astonishment and some irritation that a stranger looks at the city of Calcutta,’ wrote the Comte de Modave. ‘It would have been so easy to turn it into one of the most beautiful cities in the world, by just following a regular planned layout; one cannot fathom why the English failed to take advantage of such a fine location, allowing everyone the freedom to build in the most bizarre taste, with the most outlandish planning. With the exception of two or three properly aligned streets, the rest is a labyrinth of winding narrow lanes. An effect, it is said, of British liberty, as if such liberty were incompatible with good order and symmetry.’23
Nor was it just the British who did well out of this new boom or who lived extravagantly: Bengali merchant and money-lending dynasties also flourished. The Mullick family, for example, had rambling baroque palaces strewn around the city and used to travel around Calcutta in an ornate carriage drawn by two zebras. But the boom reached down to benefit more humble Bengali labourers, too: by the end of the 1780s, their wages had risen by around 50 per cent in a decade.24
The finances of Bengal were in fact in a healthier state than they had been since the time of the Aliverdi Khan in the 1740s and 1750s: by the end of the decade, Cornwallis was able to report back to London that revenues exceeded expenditure by £2 million. After meeting deficits elsewhere, this left £1.3 million for the ‘investment’ to purchase export goods, which Cornwallis estimated would sell in London for £2.4 million.*25 After a period on the edge, the Company was now back in business and making a healthy profit. Part of these profits came from the successful introduction of new cash crops like sugar, opium and indigo, but much was simply due to the natural fecundity of Bengal, which always produced large surpluses of rice each year. The same Bengali agricultural revenues which had once sustained the Mughal Empire now sustained the Company Raj.26
It was not just agriculture and land revenues which had turned around. Trade was flourishing, too. Since the low point of the Company’s near bankruptcy in 1772, exports from Bengal had grown fivefold and now exceeded Rs15 million, or around £5 million. There was every sign that this looked likely to continue.27 Fine Bengali textiles – especially cotton piece goods, muslins and fine silks – were selling well, to the tune of Rs28 million* annually, as was Malwa opium and Gujarati cotton; but the biggest success story was tea from China.28 By 1795, tea sales had doubled in less than a decade to 20 million pounds (9,000 tons); one former director of the EIC wrote that it was as if tea had become ‘the food of the whole people of Great Britain’.29 The only thing holding back further growth was the question of supply: ‘the demand for Bengal goods exceed double the quantity that can be procured,’ Cornwallis reported back to London.
As a result, the shortages of bullion which had paralysed the Bengal economy in the 1770s were now long forgotten: the Calcutta mint was now striking Rs2.5 million** of coins each year.30 In every way, the Company holdings in eastern India – the Three Provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa – were now effectively the richest of all the regional post-Mughal successor states dotted around South Asia, with resources many times greater than any of their rivals.
All this meant that the Company state was able to keep building its army and apportion over £3 million annually to military expenditure, a sum no other South Asian power could possibly match.31 From 2,900 sepoys in 1757 after Plassey, the Bengal army had grown to around 50,000 men by the arrival of Cornwallis.32 The Company also had the pick of the best candidates in the military labour market since it paid its sepoys significantly more, and more regularly, than anyone else: Bengal army sepoys classed as ‘gentlemen troopers’ earned around Rs300 a year, while their equivalents in Mysore earned annually only Rs192 (four times the Rs48 Tipu paid an ordinary soldier); those in Avadh earned annually as little as Rs80.*33 As Burton Stein nicely put it: ‘The colonial conquest of India was as much bought as fought.’34
These sepoys were in turn supported by a sophisticated war machine, run out of the armouries of Fort William and the arms factories of Dumdum. When in 1787 the Hyderabadi minister Mir Alam spent several months in Calcutta he was amazed at the scale of the Company’s Calcutta military establishments. He was particularly impressed by the arsenals he saw in Fort William: ‘Three hundred thousand muskets hung up in good order and easy to collect, ammunitions factories hard at work, and two to three thousand cannons in place with five to six thousand more in reserve and ready for use.’35 Forty years earlier, in 1750, the Company had been a trading corporation with a small security force and a few crumbling forts; by 1790 it had effectively transformed its Indian holdings into a tightly run fiscal-military state guarded by the most powerful army in Asia.
So when, in 1791, war once again loomed with Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Cornwallis’s armies could now draw on unprecedented manpower, weaponry and military materiel. There was good reason for the Company generals to be confident: if war with Tipu was unavoidable they would now have a good opportunity of avenging their abject defeat at Pollilur twelve years earlier.
In 1783, Haidar Ali of Mysore had died of a suppurating tumour ‘the size of a dinner plate’ on his back. His son Tipu moved quickly to take over his father’s throne.
The Governor of Madras called Tipu ‘the youthful and spirited heir of Haidar, without the odium of his father’s vices or his tyranny’.36 According to one British observer, Tipu, now thirty-three, was ‘about 5ft 7ins in height, uncommonly well-made, except in the neck, which was short, his leg, ankle and foot beautifully proportioned, his arms large and muscular, with the appearance of great strength, but his hands rather too fine and delicate for a soldier … He was remarkably fair for a Mussulman in India, thin, delicately made, with an interesting, mild countenance, of which large animated black eyes were the most conspicuous feature.’37
On his deathbed, Haidar had written to Tipu with advice to his son on the art of good government. He warned him that the Company would attempt to exploit any weakness in the succession: ‘The greatest obstacle you have to conquer is the jealousy of the Europeans,’ he wrote. ‘The English are today all-powerful in India. It is necessary to weaken them by war.’
He suggested that Tipu’s best chance of doing this lay in dividing and ruling: ‘The resources of Hindustan do not suffice to expel the English from the lands they have invaded. Put the nations of Europe one against the other. It is by the aid of the French that you could conquer the British armies, which are better trained than those of India. The Europeans have surer tactics; always use against them their own weapons.’
He then bade his son farewell and good luck: ‘If God had allowed me a longer career, you need only have enjoyed the success of my enterprises.’
But I leave you for achieving them rich provinces, a population of twelve million souls, troops, treasures and immense resources. I need not awaken your courage. I have seen you often fight by my side, and you shall be the inheritor of my glory. Remember above all that valour can elevate us to the throne, but it does not suffice to keep it. While we may seize a crown owing to the timidity of the people, it can escape us if we do not make haste to entrust it to their love.38
Tipu was already one of the most feared and admired military commanders in India: able and brave, methodical and hard-working, he was above all innovative, determined to acquire the arsenal of European skills and knowledge, and to find ways to use them against his enemies. Tipu had already proved his capacity to do this on the battlefield, defeating the Company not only at Pollilur but also twice more since then: in 1782, he had annihilated another British army under Colonel John Braithwaite just outside Tanjore and then, a year later, immediately before his accession, ambushed and destroyed a third Company column on the banks of the Coleroon River. The surprise was that within a few years Tipu showed that he was just as imaginative in peace as he had been in war.
Tipu began to import industrial technology through French engineers and experimented with harnessing water power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today. He introduced irrigation and built dams so that even his British enemies had to admit that his kingdom was ‘well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities [including Bangalore] newly founded and commerce extended’.
More remarkably still, he created what amounted to a state trading company with its own ships and factories. Regulations issued to Tipu’s ‘commercial department’ survive, providing details of a state trade in valuable commodities such as sandalwood, silk, spices, coconut, rice, sulphur, and elephants imported into and exported from Srirangapatnam. Trade centres were established in thirty places in Mysore and other places on the western coast as far north as Kutch, as well as in Pondicherry and Hyderabad. Officials were encouraged to recruit suitably trained assistants to run such markets, and each was to be placed under oath according to their religion. Capital for trade was to be provided from the revenue collected by state officials and provision was made for accepting deposits of private persons as investments in the state trade with fixed returns. Other factories were established at Muscat and dotted across the Persian Gulf. Tipu even asked his ambassadors to Ottoman Istanbul to secure for him the ijara – farm – of Basra so that, like the Europeans, he could establish an overseas settlement which would be a base for his vessels.39
Keeping in mind his father’s advice to win the love of his subjects, Tipu went out of his way to woo and protect the Hindus of his own dominions. From the beginning of his reign he had loaded the temples of his realm with presents, honours and land. Few of his chancery records survive, but from the temple archives of the region we know, for example, that in 1784 he gave a land grant to one Venkatachala Sastri and a group of Brahmins, begging them ‘to pray for the length of his life and prosperity’. A year later he sent the temple complex of Melkote twelve elephants and a kettledrum, while also sending a Sanskrit verse recording his grant of lands ‘to the temples and Brahmins on the banks of the Tungabhadra’. So it continued at the rate of at least three or four major endowments or gifts of money, bells, pensions, villages, jewels or ‘padshah lingams’ per year, for the rest of his reign, mostly in return for requests for prayers, pujas ‘for the success of the King’s armies’ or temple processions.40
But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most generous patronage, as a stash of correspondence discovered within the temple in the 1950s bears witness. Tipu put on record his horror at the damage done to the temple by a Maratha Pindari raiding party during a Maratha invasion of Mysore: ‘People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds,’ wrote Tipu. ‘Those who commit evil deeds smiling, will reap the consequences weeping. Treachery to gurus will undoubtedly result in the destruction of the line of descent.’41
Sending a large sum of cash and a consignment of grain ‘for the consecration of the goddess Sarada’, and to ‘feed one thousand Brahmins’, Tipu asked the Swami ‘please to pray for the increase of our prosperity and the destruction of our enemies’. Shortly after this, he sent another note, along with a present of an elephant, writing that ‘wrong-doers to gurus and our country will soon perish by the grace of God! Those who took away elephants, horses, palanquins and other things from your monastery will surely be punished by God. Cloth for the Goddess has been sent. Please consecrate the Goddess, and pray for our welfare and the destruction of our foes.’42
This was not just a matter of statecraft. Tipu, despite being a devout Muslim and viewing himself as a champion of Islam, thoroughly embraced the syncretic culture of his time and believed strongly in the power of Hindu gods. In his dreams, which he diligently recorded every morning in a dream book, Tipu encountered not only long-dead Sufi saints, but also Hindu gods and goddesses: in one dream sequence, there are references to him finding himself in a ruined temple with idols whose eyes moved: one talked to him and as a result Tipu ordered the temple rebuilt.43 It is recorded that Tipu made all his troops, Hindu and Muslim, take ritual baths in holy rivers ‘by the advice of his [Brahmin] augurs’ in order to wash away cowardice and make them superior in battle to the Marathas. Tipu also strongly believed in the supernatural powers of holy men, both Hindu and Muslim. As he wrote in 1793 to the Swami of Sringeri: ‘You are the Jagatguru, the preceptor of the world … in whatever country holy personages like you may reside, that country will prosper with good showers and crops.’44
The British consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian, but he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual, with a library containing some 2,000 volumes in several languages, mainly on law, theology and the secular sciences, as well as amassing a large collection of modern scientific instruments including thermometers and barometers.45 When in the course of a raid on the outskirts of Madras, Tipu’s troops captured some scholarly volumes on Indian botany, Tipu had the books rebound and added to his library. The culture of innovation Tipu fostered in Mysore stands record to a man very different from that imagined by Calcutta: a modernising technocrat who, as Christopher Bayly nicely put it, attempted to fight ‘European mercantilist power with its own weapons: state monopoly and an aggressive ideology of expansion’. His imported French military technology was if anything more advanced than that of the Company; he failed only because the resources of the Company were now larger, and expanding significantly faster, than those of Mysore.
Tipu did, however, have some severe flaws which left him vulnerable to his enemies. For Tipu was prone, even by the standards of the time, to use unnecessary violence against his adversaries and those he defeated, creating many embittered enemies where conciliation would have been equally possible and much wiser. Rebels had their arms, legs, ears and noses cut off before being hanged. He routinely circumcised and brutally converted to Islam captive enemy combatants and internal rebels, both Hindu and Christians, Indian and British. More often than not he destroyed the temples and churches of those he conquered. He did this on a particularly horrific scale on his various campaigns in Malabar, Mangalore and Coorg. Huge numbers of people were forced to migrate from their homes: 60,000 Christians from the southern Carnatic to Mysore in one year alone.46 Christian Portuguese missionaries wrote that ‘he tied naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces’.
Allied to this often counter-productive aggression and megalomania was a fatal lack of diplomatic skills. When Cornwallis reached Calcutta in September 1786, Tipu was already at war with both the Maratha Peshwa and the Nizam of Hyderabad, both of whom had been allies of his father. Unlike Haidar, who joined the Triple Alliance coalition against the British, Tipu’s aggressive attacks on his neighbours so alarmed both Marathas and Hyderabadis that, when courted by Cornwallis, they agreed to form a new Triple Alliance. This time the alliance would be with the Company, and it was aimed against Tipu’s Mysore.
As if he had not made enough enemies, Tipu then decided to break off relations with Shah Alam, so becoming the first Indian ruler formally to disown even a nominal sovereignty to the Mughal Emperor. He ordered that the Friday sermon, the khutbah, should be read in his own name not that of the Emperor, observing that ‘as to those idiots who introduce the name of Shah Alam into the khutbah, they act through ignorance, since the real condition of the so-called Emperor is this: that he is actually enslaved and a mere cypher, being the servant of Scindia at the monthly wages of Rs15,000.* Such being the case, to pronounce the name of a dependant of the infidels while reciting the sacred khutbah is a manifest sin.’47
Then, in December 1789, Tipu opened a new front. He had already conquered northern Malabar as far as Cochin; now he decided to bring to obedience the Raja of Travancore to its south. The Raja had protected himself with some remarkable fortifications known as the Travancore Lines: a forty-mile rampart flanked by a sixteen-foot ditch and topped by an impenetrable bamboo hedge. He had also signed a mutual defence pact with the Company.
So when, at daybreak on 29 December 1789, Tipu brought up his heavy artillery and blew a wide gap in the Travancore defences, sending in his crack Tiger Sepoys to massacre the unsuspecting Raja’s troops, he suddenly found himself at war not only with the Marathas, the Hyderabadis and the people of Travancore – but also, yet again, with his oldest and bitterest enemy, the East India Company.
The Third Anglo-Mysore War began, as had the previous two, with Tipu marching with unprecedented speed and violence into the Carnatic. He reached Trichinopoly in early December 1790, where he effortlessly outmanoeuvred a lumbering Company army. He then fell on the coast between Madras and Pondicherry, where his cavalry burned and devastated the undefended towns and villages. The great temple town of Tiruvannamalai was bloodily sacked in mid-January.
The Company had no ability to match the speed of Tipu’s marches. One officer, Major James Rennell, recorded that the Mysore troops used to ‘make three marches for one of ours … The rapidity of Tippoo’s marches was such that no army appointed like ours could ever bring it to action in the open country.’48 This was partly because every Company officer travelled with at least six servants, a complete set of camp furniture, ‘his stock of linens (at least 24 suits); some dozens of wine, brandy and gin; tea, sugar and biscuits; a hamper of live poultry and his milch goat’.49 Tipu’s troops had few such encumbrances.
But Cornwallis had no intention of allowing Tipu to run rings around him. He was also determined to redeem his military reputation, tarnished by his surrender to George Washington at Yorktown five years earlier. So he decided to lead the counter-attack in person: ‘We have lost time and our adversary has gained reputation, which are the two most valuable things in war,’ wrote Cornwallis. ‘I have no other part to take but to go myself … and see whether I can do better.’50
In early February 1791, the portly figure of Marquess Cornwallis could be seen mounting his charger and trotting out of Madras at the head of an army of 19,000 sepoys. By 21 March he had climbed the Eastern Ghats and reached the plateau beyond without encountering opposition. He then seized by assault Tipu’s second-largest city, Bangalore. Here he was joined by his Hyderabadi ally, Mir Alam, who brought with him 18,000 Mughal cavalry.
By May the combined force was ready and began the advance deep into Tipu’s territory; but it was here that their problems began. Tipu had laid waste to the fields and villages on Cornwallis’s line of march, so supplies of food were low and by the time they neared Tipu’s island capital, Srirangapatnam, 10,000 Company transport bullocks had died; those that remained were so close to starvation they could hardly pull their loads. The dearth of carriage bullocks meant rank-and-file Europeans, sepoys and camp followers had to carry heavy ordnance for the artillery train on their backs. To add to Cornwallis’s problems, sickness had broken out in the army and the monsoon arrived early, spoiling a large proportion of his rice rations and soaking his ailing troops. Low-caste followers were forced to survive on the decaying flesh of dead bullocks. Before long, smallpox was raging throughout the Company lines.51 On 24 May, after a brief skirmish with Tipu, Cornwallis ordered his battering train and heavy guns to be destroyed and a muddy withdrawal to Bangalore to begin.
The retreating army had only marched for half a day when, near the temple town of Melkote, a troop of horses 2,000-strong appeared on the road in front of them. The alarm was raised and the first shots had been fired before it was realised that the cavalry were not Tipu’s, but belonged to the Company’s new Maratha allies. A much larger force came up soon after and was found to be carrying ample supplies for both Cornwallis’s bullocks and his men.
After weeks of growing austerity and deprivation, the Company soldiers could hardly believe the profusion of goods available in the Maratha bazaar: ‘English broadcloths, Birmingham pen-knives, the richest Kashmiri shawls, rare and costly jewellery together with oxen, sheep, poultry and all that the most flourishing towns could furnish.’52 Famished sepoys and camp followers hurried into the Maratha camp to buy food at inflated prices. British officers bought up all the carriage bullocks they could and pressed them into service.53 Together, the three allied armies marched back to Bangalore to sit out the rains and make preparations for a fresh attack when the monsoon subsided and the rivers had ebbed.
After two months of resting, feasting and military parades with their Maratha and Hyderabadi allies, Cornwallis sent his men off to begin besieging Tipu’s mountain fortresses that guarded the remaining passes through the ghats. They started with those commanding the Nandi Hills, overlooking Bangalore, and the fearsome fort of Savandurga, perched on a near-vertical peak and believed to be one of the most impregnable fortresses in the Deccan. By New Year, Cornwallis had secured the safety of his supply routes and made sure that there would be no repetition of May’s logistical failures.
Finally, on 26 January 1792, the three armies marched out of Bangalore for a second attempt to corner the Tiger of Mysore in his lair. Cornwallis now had 22,000 sepoys, plus 12,000 Marathas and a slightly larger number of Hyderabadis.54
Tipu had a larger army than this – more than 50,000 sepoys and cavalry troopers – but he was too careful a general to risk open battle against such a formidable force. Instead he stayed within the magnificent fortifications of Srirangapatnam which had been designed for him by French engineers on the latest scientific principles, following Sébastian de Vauban’s research into artillery-resistant fortification designs, as adapted by the Marquis de Montalembert in his book La Fortification Perpendiculaire. These provided the most up-to-date defences that the eighteenth century could offer, and took into account the newly increased firepower of cannon, bombs and mines, as well as the latest developments in tactics for storming and laying siege to forts.55 Penetrating these defences was the challenge now facing Cornwallis’s army.
Late on 5 February 1792, the three armies arrived in front of the formidable walls of Srirangapatnam island for the second time. Without waiting for Tipu to make the first move, and without telling his allies of his plans, Cornwallis launched an immediate attack, taking advantage of the moonless night. He concentrated his initial fire on Tipu’s fortified encampment on the high ground opposite the island which overlooked and guarded the bridges and fords over the Kaveri. Tipu, who had thought Cornwallis would wait until his entire force had assembled, was taken completely by surprise. He led a brave resistance for two hours, but by midnight had retreated onto the island and into the walls of his citadel.
Once Tipu had abandoned the encampment, and the fords were left unguarded, Cornwallis unleashed a second column towards the fortress at the eastern end of the island. By daybreak, the beautiful Lal Bagh, the Red Garden, was in Cornwallis’s hands. James Kirkpatrick, who was in the second column, had gazed across the river and seen Tipu’s magnificent Mughal-style garden palace, ‘Lall Baug, in all its glory’, the day before: ‘Alas!’ he wrote to his father, ‘it fell sacrifice to the emergencies of war.’ The palace was made a hospital for the wounded and the beautiful garden ‘toppled to supply materials for the siege. Whole avenues of tall and majestic cypresses were in an instant laid low, nor was the orange, apple, sandal tree or even the fragrant bowers of rose and jasmine spared in this indiscriminate ruin. You might have seen in our batteries fascines of rose bushes, bound with jasmine and picketed with pickets of sandal wood. The very pioneers themselves became scented …’56
Even the ‘alarming mortality’ among the European troops and the ‘infectious exhalations from millions of putrid carcases that cover the whole surface of the earth for twenty miles around the capital’, he wrote, could not blind him to the astonishing loveliness of the city he was engaged in besieging: ‘The palaces and gardens both upon the island and without the city as far exceed the palace and gardens at Bangalore in extent, taste and magnificence, as they are said to fall short of the principal ones within the city.’57
The following day, Tipu made a series of ineffectual counter-attacks, but, as the hopelessness of his position became apparent, more and more of his troops deserted and he was forced to send a message to Cornwallis, through some captured Company officers, suggesting peace negotiations. Cornwallis accepted, but his terms were severe: Tipu must surrender half his kingdom, and pay an indemnity of 30 million rupees,* release all his prisoners of war, and give his two eldest sons as hostages to guarantee full payment. The borderlands next to the Marathas were to be handed over to the Peshwa; those next to Hyderabad to the Nizam; and the Company was to receive his territories in the Eastern Ghats as well as those in Coorg and spice-rich Malabar.
The treaty was finally signed, and the two young princes – Abdul Khaliq, who was eight, and Muizuddin, aged five – handed over to Cornwallis on 18 March 1792. The boys were taken off by elephant to Madras, which they appeared in general to like, though they clearly did not enjoy being made to sit through entire performances of Handel’s Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus.58 Having created a sensation in Madras society with their dignity, intelligence and politeness, they were sent back two years later when Tipu delivered the final tranche of his indemnity payment.
All this was a crushing blow to Tipu. Over the course of the war he had already lost 70 forts and 800 guns, and sustained 49,340 casualties. Now he stood to lose one entire half of the kingdom he had inherited from his father. But even as negotiations over the peace treaty were wrangling on, it was clear that Tipu was unbowed even by his defeat.
Around this time he reached out to Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad: ‘Know you not the custom of the English?’ he wrote. ‘Wherever they fix their talons they contrive little by little to work themselves into the whole management of affairs.’ One night just before the treaty was signed, according to Maratha sources, Tipu appeared secretly in the Maratha camp, and asked to be taken to the tent of the ‘lordly old Brahmin’ general, Haripant Phadke: ‘You must realise I am not at all your enemy,’ he said. ‘Your real enemy is the Englishman, and it is he of whom you must beware.’59
In many ways 1792 was the major turning point for the East India Company in India: before this, the Company was often on the defensive and always insecure. After this year, the Company appeared increasingly dominant. Up to this point, too, the EIC was still, in terms of land, a relatively small Indian power, controlling only 388,500 out of 4.17 million square kilometres – about 9.3 per cent of the Indian land mass, almost all in the north and east.60 But with the great chunks of land it had just seized from Tipu in the south, the Company Raj was now on its way to becoming a major territorial, as well as a military and economic, power.
The reforms Cornwallis initiated on his return to Calcutta further consolidated this position. In America, Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers. Cornwallis was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America. By this period one in three British men in India were cohabiting with Indian women, and there were believed to be more than 11,000 Anglo-Indians in the three Presidency towns.61 Now Cornwallis brought in a whole raft of unembarrassedly racist legislation aimed at excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives, or bibis, from employment by the Company.
In 1786 an order had already been passed banning the Anglo-Indian orphans of British soldiers from qualifying for service in the Company army. In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no one with an Indian parent could be employed by the Civil, Military or Marine branches of the Company. A year later, this was extended to ‘officers of the Company ships’. In 1795, further legislation was issued, again explicitly disqualifying anyone not descended from European parents on both sides from serving in the Company’s armies except as ‘pipers, drummers, bandsmen and farriers’. Yet, like their British fathers, the Anglo-Indians were also banned from owning land. Thus excluded from all the most obvious sources of lucrative employment, the Anglo-Indians quickly found themselves at the beginning of a long slide down the social scale. This would continue until, a century later, the Anglo-Indians had been reduced to a community of minor clerks, postmen and train drivers.62
It was under Cornwallis, too, that many Indians – the last survivors of the old Murshidabad Mughal administrative service – were removed from senior positions in government, on the entirely spurious grounds that centuries of tyranny had bred ‘corruption’ in them.63 Increasingly, all non-Europeans began to be treated with disdain by the exclusively white officials at the Company headquarters of Fort William. Around this time, Warren Hastings’ Military Secretary, Major William Palmer, who was married to a Mughal princess, wrote expressing his dismay at the new etiquette regarding Indian dignitaries introduced to Calcutta by Cornwallis: ‘They are received,’ he wrote, ‘in the most cold and disgusting style, and I can assure you that they observe and feel it, and no doubt they will resent it whenever they can.’64
Cornwallis then set about making a series of land and taxation reforms guaranteeing a steady flow of revenue, particularly in time of war, as well as reinforcing the Company’s control of the land it had conquered. The Permanent Settlement, introduced in 1793, gave absolute rights to land to zamindar landowners, on the condition that they paid a sum of land tax which Company officials now fixed in perpetuity. So long as zamindars paid their revenues punctually, they had security over the land from which the revenue came. If they failed to pay up, the land would be sold to someone else.65
These reforms quickly produced a revolution in landholding in Company Bengal: many large old estates were split up, with former servants flocking to sale rooms to buy up their ex-masters’ holdings. In the ensuing decades, draconian tax assessments led to nearly 50 per cent of estates changing hands. Many old Mughal landowning families were ruined and forced to sell, a highly unequal agrarian society was produced and the peasant farmers found their lives harder than ever. But from the point of view of the Company, Cornwallis’s reforms were a huge success. Income from land revenues was both stabilised and enormously increased; taxes now arrived punctually and in full. Moreover, those who had bought land from the old zamindars were in many ways throwing in their lot with the new Company order. In this way, a new class of largely Hindu pro-British Bengali bankers and traders began to emerge as moneyed landowners to whom the Company could devolve local responsibility.
So even as the old Mughal aristocracy was losing high office, a new Hindu service gentry came to replace them at the top of the social ladder in Company-ruled Bengal. This group of emergent Bengali bhadralok (upper-middle classes) represented by families such as the Tagores, the Debs and the Mullicks, tightened their grip on mid-level public office in Calcutta, as well as their control of agrarian peasant production and the trade of the bazaars. They participated in the new cash crop trades to Calcutta – Dwarkanath Tagore, for example, making a fortune at this time in indigo – while continuing to lend the Company money, often for as much as 10–12 per cent interest. It was loans from this class which helped finance colonial armies and bought the muskets, cannon, horses, elephants, bullocks and paid the military salaries which allowed Company armies to wage and win their wars against other Indian states. The Company’s ever-growing Indian empire could not have been achieved without the political and economic support of regional power groups and local communities. The edifice of the East India Company was sustained by the delicate balance that the Company was able to maintain with merchants and mercenaries, its allied nawabs and rajas, and above all, its tame bankers.66
In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through the collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field. The biggest firms of the period – the houses of Lala Kashmiri Mal, Ramchand-Gopalchand Shahu and Gopaldas-Manohardas – many of them based in Patna and Benares, handled the largest military remittances, taking charge of drawing bills of exchange in Bombay or Surat or Mysore, as well as making large cash loans, all of which made possible the regular payment, maintenance, arming and provisioning of the Company’s troops. The Company in turn duly rewarded these invaluable services in 1782 when they announced that the house of Gopaldas would henceforth be the government’s banker in the place of the Jagat Seths. Support from the Company then enabled the house to break into western India from where they had previously been absent.67
As Rajat Kanta Ray put it, ‘With regard to the indigenous systems of commercial credit, the Company was better placed than the Indian powers by virtue of its reputation as an international capitalist corporation with a developed sense of the importance of paying its debts. It was known, moreover, to have the biggest revenue surplus available in the country to offer as collateral for large contract loans obtained from sahukaras [moneylenders].’68 The Company was perceived as the natural ally of Indian traders and financiers; the British, wrote Hari Charan Das, did not ‘interfere with the wealth of any rich men, bankers and merchants, and other people who reside in their cities, but on the contrary they are kind to those who are wealthy.’69
As the Jagat Seths had discovered forty years earlier, the East India Company spoke a language Indian financiers understood, and offered a higher degree of security to Indian capital than its rivals.70 In the end, it all came down to money. By the end of the century, Bengal was annually yielding a steady revenue surplus of Rs25 million at a time when Scindia struggled to net Rs1.2 million* from his territories in Malwa.71 No wonder that Scindia reflected anxiously that ‘without money it was impossible to assemble an army or prosecute a war’.72
Ultimately it was the East India Company, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back.73 Moreover, for all the rapacity of the Company, it was an increasingly easy decision for them to make. By 1792, there was little credible opposition. Tipu had just been defeated and had lost half his kingdom. For all his valour and determination, it would take a miracle for him ever again to muster sufficient resources to defeat the Company as he once did at Pollilur.
Meanwhile, the great Maratha Confederacy, the power which controlled the most land and fielded the largest and most formidable armies, was slowly beginning to unravel. On 1 June 1793, at the Battle of Lakheri, after many years of open rivalry and increasingly strained relations, Tukoji Holkar was comprehensively defeated by Mahadji Scindia. When the result of the battle was reported to the blind Shah Alam in Delhi, he chuckled and commented, ‘the power of the Marathas will soon be destroyed’.74 He was right. In the next round of internecine bloodshed that followed, ‘the Maratha princes bore less resemblance to a confederacy than to a bag of ferrets’.75
It was no longer difficult to predict the future. By the 1790s the Comte de Modave, for one, had no doubt what lay in store for India. ‘I am convinced that the English will establish themselves in the Mughal empire only precariously and with much uncertainty,’ he wrote, ‘and they will no doubt, eventually, in due course of time, lose it.’
But they will certainly control it for long enough to extract prodigious amounts of money from it, which will enable them to maintain the role they have arrogated to themselves of being the principal, or rather the one and only, power, exclusive of all others, among the trading nations of Europe.
Who can stop them? In Hindustan, anarchy smothers the hope of anything good germinating or sprouting: the people live in want and misery, even though they have so many possibilities of living well. The English in Bengal are watching this curious situation attentively, hoping to profit by it, for their lust for gain is as voracious as their mania for conquest.
I have no doubt that these ever-recurring disturbances, which pin down all the armed forces of this empire, are welcomed by the English as a sure means of taking over the empire itself, bit by bit. It strikes me that their behaviour corresponds exactly to this long-term strategy as they carefully stoke the fires of civil discord, which they then offer to resolve, backing up such mediation with a show of military strength as soon as they well can.
This pattern of behaviour, from which they have not deviated for several years, has allowed them to seize control of many areas beyond the limits of Bengal, so much so that they will soon be masters of the Ganges from Allahabad to the Ocean. They play the game of advancing without ever being seen to make any step forward … In brief, they assiduously practise that old maxim followed by the Romans in their politics, that is, in the words of Tacitus, everywhere to keep in place [local hereditary] rulers, in order to use them as instruments to reduce the people to slavery.
The English Company stands alone, today, on this vast stage, preparing secretly and silently to extend immeasurably the major role they are playing here. All their schemes, their plans, their initiatives, all tend to this one great object. One by one, all the powers of India are being reduced by terror, intrigues, flattery, promises or threats. Every day the English Company takes a step closer to that goal. I have no doubt at all that, for some years now, the plan of invading Hindustan and taking over the trade of all the East Indies has been the object of their speculations and calculations, a profitable compensation for what they have lost in America. If you also consider the power of the English navy, the strength of their military establishments on the coast of India, you will realise that, given the means already in their hands, they need make only a small effort to achieve this grand and magnificent project.
When the moment comes to act, their plan, however vast and complex, will be fully formed, down to its last details, with all necessary preliminary information ready gathered: then their operations will be carried out with a rapidity and success which will astonish the whole of Europe.76
The Company, he believed, now looked unassailable. But he was overlooking one thing. There was in fact one force which could still stop the Company in its tracks. Modave’s own homeland, now in the grip of revolution and led by a heavily accented Corsican colonel named Napoleon Bonaparte, had just declared war against Britain on 1 February 1793. Four years later, in December 1797, Tipu despatched an embassy seeking Napoleon’s help against the Company. What the Sultan of Mysore did not know was that the army he needed was already being prepared in Toulon. By the time Tipu’s embassy arrived in Paris, in April 1798, Napoleon was waiting for an opportunity to sail his 194 ships, carrying 19,000 of his best men, out of Toulon, and across the Mediterranean to Egypt. Napoleon was quite clear as to his plans.
In a book about Turkish warfare he had scribbled in the margin before 1788 the words, ‘Through Egypt we shall invade India, we shall re-establish the old route through Suez and cause the route by the Cape of Good Hope to be abandoned.’ Nor did he anticipate many problems: ‘The touch of a French sword is all that is needed for the framework of mercantile grandeur to collapse.’77 From Cairo in 1798 he sent a letter to Tipu, answering the latter’s pleas for help and outlining his grand strategy:
You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible army, full of the desire of releasing and relieving you from the iron yoke of England. I eagerly embrace this opportunity of testifying to you the desire I have of being informed by you, by the way of Muscat and Mocha, as to your political situation. I wish you could send some sort of intelligent person to Suez or Cairo, possessing your confidence, with whom I may confer. May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!
Yours &c &c
Bonaparte9