BUSINESS AND POLITICS: THE LAY OF THE LAND

‘And that we keep an Extraordinary lookout…’

The eighteenth century, when the nawabs of Bengal and John Company came into their own, was a time of considerable political churn, strategies, and tactical moves in the subcontinent.

It all played out with the Mughal empire in fracture.

As with many empires, at one time it seemed inconceivable that the Mughals could ever decline even though the complex dynamics of a complex subcontinent has always made rule implicitly vulnerable to hubris. The empire was established by the Turkic warlord Zahir-ud-din Muhammad ‘Babur’ in 1526, after defeating the Afghan-origin Lodi dynast of Delhi and holding off a serious challenge a year later from Rajputs led by Maharana Sangram Singh of Mewar. Babur’s son and successor Humayun assumed the throne in 1530, but had a rocky run from 1540. He experienced a fifteen-year exile after being defeated and displaced by Sur rulers of Afghan origin. The first of that dynasty was Sher Shah Suri, whose impact on administration and communication was no less than that of any Mughal. Among other things, he refurbished and extended the ancient route between eastern India and Afghanistan, what came to be called the Grand Trunk Road in British colonial times. Few gave the Mughals, who traced direct lines from Genghis Khan and Timur (or Tamerlane) a chance until Humayun reclaimed his throne in 1555 from a crumbling Sur empire, for a short-lived second reign that lasted a year.

His son Akbar oversaw a period of great expansion of the empire, and when the reins of empire passed to his son Jahangir in 1605, the Mughals were firmly established in form and function, with a definite imperial framework and cultural imprimatur. His son Shah Jahan, whose legacy as the builder of Taj Mahal often overshadows his legacy of empire, followed in 1628. The reins eventually passed to his son Aurangzeb in 1658 after a bitter fratricidal war of sucession. The irony is that, while the Mughal empire under Aurangzeb witnessed its greatest reach, from Afghanistan in the northwest to Bengal in the east, and nearly all of peninsular India to the south, there was already the birth of great resistance, such as from the Marathas—as we shall soon see.

The meltdown was spectacular. There would be six Mughal emperors between 1707, the year Aurangzeb died, and the accession of Muhammad Shah in 1719. Cracks in the empire had already begun to show during Aurangzeb’s forty-nine-year reign but they began to widen after his death.

Aurangzeb’s son, Azam Shah, ruled for a year before being killed in battle by his half-brother, who assumed the throne as Bahadur Shah—Bahadur Shah I—in 1707. His reign lasted just shy of four years before Jahandar Shah, his son, took the throne for less than a year after deafeating his brother Azim-us-Shan in a war of succession. In 1713, Farrukhsiyar, Azim-us-Shan’s son, who would grant the Company an all-important farman, became emperor for six years after defeating Jahandar Shah, widely regarded as a debauch, in battle. Farrukhsiyar granted the embassy led by John Surman what the Company had pursued through the reign of several Mughal emperors: a farman, royal grant, that, besides a slew of other privileges and guarantees, permitted the Company the right to trade in the subah of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa without any duties. This duty-free privilege, which came at the relative bargain of 3,000 rupees a year, would be used and misused—a fact acknowledged by the Company’s own records. And, several decades later, light a fuse for young Siraj-ud-daulah.

In the seven months between February and September 1719, from the time Farrukhsiyar was deposed to the time Muhammad Shah was declared emperor, two emperors, Rafi ud-Darajat and Rafi-ud-Daulah (also known as Shah Jahan II), had come and gone.

It would be all downhill from there for the dynasty. The later Mughals ‘…sauntered away life in secluded places,’ we read the disdainful yet generally apt reference in Raj-proponent Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays, ‘chewing bang [or bhang, cannabis], fondling concubines, and listening to buffoons’.

This decay of imperial authority, what Irfan Habib calls ‘internal decay’, had set in during the later years of Aurangzeb’s reign, and was ‘increasingly shaken by a number of uprisings (of Jats, Sikhs, Satnamis and, above all, the Marathas)…the strength or success of which has been attributed partly to agrarian causes, as peasant distress and resurgence of the zamindar class’. Among other things, Habib notes, the centralized imperial network ‘collapsed’. The uprising produced new ‘states’, like the Maratha dominions, the Jat ‘kingdom’ and Sikh ‘chieftaincies’.

By the 1730s, the successor states of the Mughals were in control of nearly all of central, peninsular, and northern India, breaking away on account of ‘internal revolts in Oudh [Awadh], Mysore and elsewhere,’ as Piers Brendon puts it in his The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. These were in a state of flux with some of these battling each other to gain or retain territory and influence. The Marathas controlled a vast band from Gujarat to Orissa, in a west-to-east run of chieftains: the Gaikwads, Peshwas, Scindias, Holkars, and Bhonsles. Hyderabad, to the southeast of the Deccan plateau, was its own behemoth. The rest of the south was carved up between the Northern Circars, the Carnatic, the kingdom of Mysore, and Travancore which was outside the Mughal pale. Bihar was controlled by the autonomous Bengal province, with the third element, Orissa (hence the title: subahdar or governor of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa), increasingly under Maratha attack. Northern India was carved up among the Rajput states, Kashmir, the Jats to the south of Delhi, the Rohilla kingdom of the Pathans to the east of Delhi. Awadh, further east, brought up the border with Bihar.

Brendon writes:

Foreign invaders also took their toll. Delhi was sacked by the Persians in 1739 [led by Nadir Shah] and by the Afghans in 1756 [led by Ahmad Shah Abdali, also known as Ahmad Shah Durrani, who had been part of Nadir Shah’s foray] the former carrying off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-noor Diamond (‘Mountain of Light’) as well as booty worth a billion rupees, the latter carrying out rape and massacre on an inconceivable scale.

Nadir Shah encouraged rape and massacre on a vast scale too, but perhaps for the British, the Koh-i-Noor, which is now part of Britain’s crown jewels, remains of some import.

The British East India Company, which is discussed in some detail in the next chapter, warily watched the developments from the time of Aurangzeb’s fading reign. ‘Considering the great Confusions and Troubles that may arise in Bengal during the Inter Regnum, Agreed that we Order all our Officers of this Garrison to be constantly in a Readiness…’ goes a resolution by the Calcutta Council from those years. ‘And that Ammunition be put into the proper places, that are for that purpose on all Bastions, And that we keep an Extraordinary lookout, And that the Gunner mount the Mortars, And some great Guns be placed on the Curtains [walls of Fort William in Calcutta], Also that the Buxie [at this time, an European civil officer in charge of payments] lay in good Store of all sorts of grain and Provisions.’

The Council felt they would then be adequately defensible against marauders especially with troops at hand. ‘As for the soldiers we have now about 200 besides Officers, amongst which are about 140 stout Europeans, which with the Company’s Servants and Freemen of this Place And the Gunroome Crew, We think will on any Occasion be sufficient to Defend this Garrison.’ That sense of security would prevail until the 1750s.

Of the subcontinental tearaways, the Marathas were arguably the most potent force, taking on the Mughals during the early years of Aurangzeb’s reign, when the rot within the empire hadn’t yet reached its tipping point. Led by Shivaji, the Marathas deeply embarrassed Aurangzeb. As Keay puts it, ‘Shivaji’s “dignity” was now eclipsing that of the empire.’

‘Breaking out of the hills in 1664 [Aurangzeb had by then been emperor for six years] Shivaji personally led his forces north into Gujarat and headed for the great port of Surat,’ Keay observes in India. There they ran riot for forty days. ‘Only the well-defended English “factory” (a fortified warehouse-cum-counting house-cum-hostel) was spared.’ It was an example of an off-again-on-again détente between Maratha forces and the Company that would be evident even in the days Robert Clive marched towards Plassey.

The Marathas had a key advantage, as several historians and chroniclers have noted. Keay writes that Shivaji’s forces, spearheaded by excellent cavalry moved speedily and with minimal logistics. ‘… Maratha horse, could travel light and live off the countryside, and was thus infinitely more elusive and wide-ranging than its heavy Mughal counterpart…’

Although Shivaji and the Marathas did suffer significant reverses, during the reign of Aurangzeb, the Marathas came to control a swathe of the Deccan along the Western Ghats, from roughly north of Pune to the south, extending to Raigarh, Satara, and Vijayadurg, and just shy of Portuguese-controlled Goa. Another patch they ruled lay west of Madras, roughly an oval from a little to the north of Vellore to a little south of Jinji. They raided territories nearly at will. Within four decades of Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, they had galloped across much of central and eastern India, holding territories to ransom or simply taking over.

The Marathas were of great importance in the context of Bengal. Following a claim of raising revenue—the chauth, or one-fourth of total revenue—in several Mughal provinces as granted during the reign of Mughal emperor Rafi ud-Darajat in the chaotic days of 1719, they would disrupt Bengal, ransack its villages and towns for a decade till 1751 until Alivardi Khan signed a treaty and agreed to pay chauth. Alivardi was also compelled at that time to finally cede control of Orissa, a territory he had repeatedly fought to retain, to the Marathas, thereby retaining the title of subahdar of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa only in name. (It appears that several of Bengal’s generals didn’t want to be at risk from the Marathas either. Company Consultations in Calcutta on 29 May 1749 note that Mir Jafar—who once fled a battle against the Marathas—and Rai Durlabh, both future Plassey generals for Siraj, were not keen to be appointed governors of Orissa: ‘News of the Nabob [Alivardi] arriving at Cuttack, the Mahrattas fled, the Nabob offered the Nabobship to Dalobram and M. Jaffier, who both refused. The Mahrattas are expected to return next year…’)

The Bargi, or Bōrgi, as they were known in Bengal weakened the region’s economy, bled its treasury—as well as the population, by several hundreds of thousands—and turned its rulers paranoid. There is a folk rhyme still recalled in parts of Bengal, sometimes as a chilling lullaby. The first words vary in rendition but generally it goes like this:

Khōkā ghumālō pārā jurālō, Bōrgi élō déshé,Bulbuli-té dhān khéyéchhé, khājnā débō kishé?

As the child sleeps and the neighbourhood quietens, the Bōrgi have arrived,

The songbird has eaten the paddy, how will I now pay the tax?

The Company wasn’t happy either, even though it would repeatedly deal with the Marathas to both safeguard its interests and diminish that of its opponents. That the Company and the British remained wary of the Marathas is evidenced most tellingly by the ‘Mahratta Ditch’ which marked the northern and eastern boundaries of the relative cocoon of Calcutta in pre-Plassey days, excavated as a defence against the raiders whom few seemed to be able to counter. (In Bagbazar in north Kolkata there is to this day a Maratha Ditch Lane.) To the west, the Hugli formed a riverine barrier, to the south lay more excavations as an extension of the ditch, and habitations of locals—as we shall see such concentrations bore the brunt of any battle. The land beyond, as the Reverend James Long tells us in Selections from Unpublished Records of Government (1748-1767), was called ‘the continent’. It is scarcely credible when compared to the teeming, heaving metropolis that Calcutta—Kolkata—is today, or the thriving Company capital it had become by the mid-nineteenth century when Records was published, to consider a time ‘when there was no Chowringi, and its plain was a tiger jungle…’

Indeed, among the first times we learn of Plassey—as Placy—in Company records, is in February 1748 when, on the 25th of that month, the Bengal Public Consultations presided over by the President in Council noted a letter written by the Council at Qasimbazar, the European trading hub to the south of Murshidabad along the Hugli– Bhagirathi, six days earlier. In it an ‘Ensign English’ is berated for not waiting at ‘Placy’ in the face of a Maratha incursion, which would have permitted the sending of ammunition and reinforcements to guard the Company’s goods in transit—and the Marathas could have been scared away by approaching forces of the nawab.

Ensign English paid a price for it. As Long adds in an explanation to the records of March 1748:

In a letter to Kasimbazar the Council stigmatise the conduct of Ensign English as cowardly for allowing the Mahrattas to seize the Kasimbazar fleet and plunder the goods of which he was in charge; he was subsequently imprisoned, tried by Court Martial and cashiered.

There were several recorded effects of Maratha harassment. Company Consultations at Fort William on 9 December 1751 note:

A letter from Kassimbazar states The dearness of raw silk and silk piece goods for some years past, they find, is owing to the Mahrattas constantly entering Bengal, plundering and burning the people’s houses, and destroying the chief Aurangs [in Bengali, ārong, places of manufacture and storage—depots; also, market] from whence the workmen have fled to distant parts, and not to any malpractice in the gentlemen there.

A similar message was despatched to the Court of Directors in London in January 1752.

Other despatches and consultations mention the inability of Company factors to purchase any ‘ready money goods’ from weavers in Orissa as the Maratha raids ensured the ‘greatest part of them have been obliged to abscond’. The Marathas didn’t leave anything, even a wrecked Company sloop. The ship and its crew were plundered.

Although the Marathas were the most worrisome, there were other irritants for European traders, ranging from wayward Pathan mercenaries to government officials who worked to extract what they could from merchants of all nations.

Company Consultations in March 1748 note, ‘The Gentlemen at Patna write that the Pattans [Pathans] had plundered the Dutch Factory at Futtua of white cloth and other goods to the amount of 65,000 Rupees.’ Local officials managed to bring some order in the town, and reopen shops and houses, but the country ‘round about’ was in ‘the utmost confusion’. From April that year there is a record of ‘English’ consignments being harassed, in this case, by the zamindar of Palta—now a suburb of Barrackpore, north of Calcutta—who ignored even the order of the faujdar, a military officer, of the prosperous trading settlement of Hugli, upriver from Calcutta: ‘The Zemindar near Pulta having stopped several boats with English Dusticks and taken money from them and disregarding the Phousdars of Houghley’s orders to clear them.’

Not that the benevolence of the commander of Hugli, who also acted as landlord on the behalf of the nawab of Bengal, was altruistic. He was part of a wheel lubricated by what the Chinese term fragrant grease. In May 1748, the Consultations observed: ‘The Hugly Phausdar demanding the usual annual present due in November last amounting to Current Rupees two thousand seven hundred and fifty (2,750)—Agreed that the President do pay the same out of the cash.’ Hugli’s faujdar was pushing his luck several years later. The Consultations for 30 April 1753 record the agreement ‘that the President do pay the same out of the cash’ the demands for ‘ground rent’ for four months from January that year, as made by the ‘the Hooghly Phousdar’ for ‘Sootaloota’ [Sutanuti] at 325 rupees and ‘Govindpore’ [Gobindapur] in Calcutta at 33 rupees’. Although the Company had formally leased the areas the faujdar had still to be kept on their side.

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Bengal was drawn into the general churn even as European trading companies competing for the riches of India settled in for what they hoped was the long haul, jostling for every advantage from the Mughal emperor and local governors and rulers as well as over each other. Part of the churn is evident from the shifting of Bengal’s administrative bases during the later Mughal empire.

The initial base was Rajmahal, which we shall revisit later in the narrative—it played a colourful part in the Plassey endgame. It is today a small town by the widening Ganga in the borderlands of Bengal and Jharkhand, not far from the Farakka Barrage that now dams the river before it flows into Bangladesh. In 1610, Islam Khan, the Mughal viceroy of Bengal, shifted the capital from Rajmahal, at the time also known as Akbarnagar (after the third Mughal emperor) to Dhaka. It was then known as Jahangirnagar, after Jahangir, one of Akbar’s sons who became emperor after him.

The translator of Ghulam Husain Salim’s Riyazu-s-Salatin (The Garden of Kings), Maulavi Abdus Salam, explains this transfer. It occurred primarily on account of the Mughal—and Muslim— dominions having by then moved considerably eastward. ‘Rajmahal ceased to occupy a central position,’ he writes. There were other factors, such as Magh or Mog raiders from Arakan pushing into Bengal, besides direct control of the Chittagong region by the Arakan kings (they controlled Chittagong for more than a hundred years until the 1660s). ‘To effectually guard against the latter, a powerful fleet was constructed and maintained at Dacca,’ Abdus Salam explains, and on the nearby river Padma, or Poddā in Bengali which, at that point in its journey to the Bay, includes the main streams of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra; and the Meghna, further to the southeast. Besides, Salam notes, ‘colonies of Musalman feudal barons…were planted throughout Eastern Bengal, especially at places of strategic importance, in order to hold in check all disloyal Afghan elements, and to prevent their intriguing with the Magh raiders’.

Dhaka remained the capital of Bengal through this time for nearly a hundred years except for about sixteen years, when the Mughal prince Shah Shuja shifted the viceregal capital back to Rajmahal. Shah Shuja, a son of Shah Jahan, the emperor who followed after Jahangir, was governor for two decades until 1659. That year he tried to take on his brother, the newly-minted Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, in a battle at Khajuha, in present-day Uttar Pradesh. He lost and had to retreat all the way back to Dhaka and subsequently to the Mughal-enemy territory of Arakan, where he would be executed on a charge of conspiring against the local ruler.

Soon after there arrived in Bengal another colourful character, the governor Mirza Abu Talib, better known by his title Shaista (or Shayesta) Khan, during the early years of his nephew Aurangzeb’s rule, when the empire and its governor flexed their muscles in the east. In some ways it could be termed a relatively calm posting for the fierce Shaista, who had a taste of Maratha nerve a year before his posting to Bengal in 1664. Shivaji and a band of his soldiers disguised as a groom’s party had ambushed Shaista in Pune, then under Mughal control, and confronted him in a palace where it is believed Shivaji spent a part of his childhood. Shaista had three fingers sliced off as he made his escape. (Shivaji devotees celebrated the 350th anniversary of that episode in 2013.)

Except for a gap of nine years when he was posted to the Deccan, Shaista Khan was governor of Bengal until 1688. During his tenure the Portuguese were ejected from their stronghold in Hugli, and the Arakanese from Chittagong. This playboy subahdar was Clive-like in his taste for wealth and ostentation; the man also leveraged trade monopolies for his own gain even as he aided his emperor, Aurangzeb. At one point he even chased Company traders from their base in Hugli after the Company declared hostilities against Shaista and, by extension, the Mughal empire, after a dispute over customs duties.

There’s a back story. During the last six years of Shaista’s governorship the trade of the Company was ‘seriously hampered,’ writes the British-Indian civil servant Lewis Sydney Stewart O’Malley in Murshidabad, by ‘heavy imposts’ levied by him. Several Indian historians write of disputes over customs duties. It blew up in 1686, writes O’Malley, ‘when the Company’s cargo boats were held up under an embargo and its sale of silver prohibited. Job Charnock [the Company chief in Qasimbazar] was ordered to pay Rs 43,000 in settlement of a claim made by some native merchants, and, according to [the military historian and Company chronicler Robert] Orme, was scourged by the Nawab’s orders’. The Qasimbazar factory was besieged by Shaista’s troops, in particular to prevent Charnock escaping, but in April 1686 he managed to slip through the ‘cordon’ (much as his successor William Watts would, seventy years later, to escape Siraj’s cordon), and made it downriver to the settlement at Hugli. ‘After this, the Cossimbazar factory, in common with the other English factories in Bengal, was condemned to confiscation by Shaista Khan,’ writes O’Malley.

Besides being run out of Hugli, a naval blockade and bombardment of Chittagong in retaliation, to expel the Mughals who were believed to be weak at this port settlement on the northeastern arc of the Bay of Bengal, and establish a fortified trading post there, went disastrously. A truce, in great part effected by harassing Mughal shipping and ports elsewhere along the Indian coast, and the Mughals’ need for trade and seaborne transportation finally settled matters around, and after, Shaista’s departure from Bengal.

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We’ll take a closer look at the looming British threat to the various rulers of the subcontinent, and Bengal in particular a little later. Here it is enough to say that the British had begun to push their boundaries right from the time of Thomas Roe, ambassador from the Court of St James to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir from 1615 to 1618. Being the ambassador didn’t prevent him from harassing Mughal shipping to the benefit of the Company and Crown to override the dictum ‘…“Let this be received as a rule, that if you will profit, seek it at sea and in quiett trade,”’ as Keay notes. ‘…Roe’s idea of “quiett trade” included a gratuitous attack on Mughal shipping once every four years—as he explained, “we must chasten these people”…’ But he did suggest, and Company directors agreed with him, observes Keay, of the need to generally avoid conflict, and not burden British inroads into India with ‘garrisons and wars’. It was a question of economics ‘as a guarantee of favourable trading conditions an imperial farman looked to provide the perfect, because inexpensive, alternative.’

Of course, it didn’t quite turn out that way. Fortifications had followed factories. Company and Crown would be cemented in the subcontinent on account of skirmishes and wars. Roe’s exhortations would appear tame when compared to that of Gerald Aungier, who became President at Surat and Governor of Bombay in 1669. We read in Sukumar Bhattacharya’s The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal: From 1704 to 1740 that Aungier wrote a ‘lengthy’ despatch to the directors in London in 1677, recommending ‘a severe and vigorous [policy to ensure the stability of the trade]’. Aungier, who appears to have had the mien of a musketeer rather than a merchant, added: ‘Justice and necessity of your estate now require that in violent distempers, violent cures are only successful; that the times now require you to manage your general commerce with your sword in your hands.’ A diet of Aungier with a supplement of Roe would become the preferred Company way.

The episode with Shaista Khan would be only the first of several run-ins the Company would have with the nawabs of Bengal that, of course, peaked with Plassey. The opposite is as significant: Friction between Company and the governors of Bengal had existed several decades before Alivardi and Siraj sat on the masnad. Grandfather and grandson hardly set the precedent, whatever apologia for Clive & Co. may claim. It dilutes the exclusivity of the storyline of Siraj-harassed-the-Company, a major paper trigger for Plassey.

It is also interesting to note that, even as the Company in Bengal attempted to move on from its ill-advised and outright belligerence against Shaista to a relatively more pacific route under subsequent subahdars, it would plan to take defensive precautions in its bases, in particular Fort William in Calcutta. This was not to pre-empt hostilities with the French, the danger that would consume them in the 1740s and, again, in the later years of Alivardi’s reign and the ultimate flashpoint during that of Siraj, but against general chaos in the country that became evident several decades earlier.

The Company would return to the north soon after the end of Shaista’s governorship in 1688, and establish its famous base in Calcutta. But for some years, everyone of consequence in Bengal would have to contend with Shaista, who even spawned a common phrase in Bengali for defeating someone, or dominating a situation: shāyéstā korā.

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After Shaista’s departure from Bengal to Delhi during the latter half of Aurangzeb’s reign, the churning resumed in Bengal, the political equations now also irrevocably tied to trade equations and ambitions of transnational companies. They would soon encounter the next significant governor of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan.

Like much of Bengal, the British too learnt that the nawabs of Bengal, beginning with Murshid Quli, had begun to chart their own course as increasingly autonomous rulers. From the time Murshid Quli was minted as subahdar of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar in 1717 (the same year the Company implemented its free-trade farman that was granted in the last days of 1716) he began what would be for the next several decades a breaking away from Delhi’s command and control structure. The authority of the Mughal emperors and their empire would remain on paper but it was largely worth whatever the viceroy-nawabs of Bengal, like their colleagues in the Deccan, determined it would be.

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