The Anarchy

Title: The Anarchy – The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9781526618504

Pages: 522

 

The eighteenth century was a critical period of transition in Indian history. The Mughal Empire began disintegrating immediately after the death of Aurangzeb. Or in other words, it can also be said that the pace of disintegration accelerated after fate removed Aurangzeb from the throne. A combination of weak and incompetent princes, dissension in the provinces, power struggles among princes and external threats destabilized the House of Timur day by day. It lost the reins completely after Nadir Shah’s invasion in 1739. Shah looted the entire wealth of the Mughals and carried away the treasure to Persia. The financially wrecked empire than had to deal with the English East India Company (EIC) which was growing from strength to strength in Bengal. The Hindus were also making resurgence in the form of Marathas and Jats. The Mughal emperor was literally at the protection of the Maratha confederacy. This book covers the period of five decades from 1756 – on the brink of Plassey – to 1803 when the British defeated the Marathas and took over as the Mughal emperor’s protectors. The contention between the British, French, Mughals and their vassals like the Bengal Nawab, Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan and also the Marathas created a condition of anarchy in the subcontinent. William Dalrymple makes an excellent survey of the country in that period in this book. This is the latest volume from him. The book attempts to answer how a business corporation based in London managed to replace the mighty Mughal Empire as masters of India.

 

Dalrymple presents a prescient review of the operations of EIC and how the U-turn in the flow of money between India and England occurred after the company started poking its nose in regional battles with Mughal vassals. By the 1750s, the items handled by the company were tea, saltpeter, silk and cotton cloth. It had to exchange silver coins to purchase goods in India. £6 million (£630 million in current values) had been sent out in the first half of eighteenth century, but very little silver bullion was dispatched after Plassey. Bengal was the sink into which foreign bullion disappeared before 1757. But after this crucial year, Bengal became a treasure trove from which vast amounts of wealth were drained without any prospect of return. A large portion of the money ended up in the hands of company officials illegally. A good proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pockets. The entire contents of the Bengal treasury were loaded into a hundred boats and transferred to company’s strongholds. India was being robbed in plain daylight. This required a strong military force to keep peace and order among the contenders. By the time EIC captured Delhi, the company had trained up a private security force of 200,000 sepoys which was double the size of the regular British army. It marshalled more fire power than any nation-state in Asia.

 

Dalrymple then makes a unique observation that the conquest of India was not the end-result of an imperialist masterplan but rather the unexpected side-effects of manipulations in regional politics for power. Readers get stunned at this straight formulation of a new theory, but the author makes a convincing argument of the case. Siraj ud-Daula, whom the English defeated at Plassey, was a cruel despot who rough-treated his own nobles and Jagat Seth, the most powerful banking house of Bengal. Mir Jaffar, Siraj’s paymaster, turned against him with the help of Jagat Seth and encouragement from EIC. This was something quite new in Indian history. This was an instance of a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade. This was not part of any imperial strategy. In fact, the EIC men were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks. Seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for their country, they dived headlong into the conspiracies. The Battle of Plassey was fought with only 800 Europeans and 2200 South Indian sepoys. After the Queen’s oversight was mandated by regulations, the company had to wage many battles which eventually bankrupted them.

 

The Battle of Plassey was a turning point in Indian history as the beginning of the end of Mughal colonialism and rise of British colonialism. This was the moment when the traders associated with a for-profit trading company engaged in administration of the land. Clive had intended only to establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a friendlier Nawab than Siraj ud-Daula. But what they had in fact done was permanently to undermine the authority of Nawabs, bringing chaos to the most peaceful and profitable parts of the country. The Nawabs hoisted by the company soon turned against them and engaged in battle at Buxar. The nominal Mughal emperor Shah Alam also participated in the battle with his troops. The Mughals were convincingly defeated and they forfeited to the company the right to collect taxes (diwani) in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The emperor signed off economic management of the three richest provinces to EIC, taking Rs. 2.6 million in his pocket annually. The only condition he set to the company was to ‘govern the provinces agreeably to the rules of Mohammed and the law of the empire’. This concession enabled the company to soar high to conquer the entire land.

 

The book then takes a detour to examine the rising opposition in England to the company’s way of operations in India. Immediately after the company received the diwani, Bengal went through a gruesome famine lasting several years. Millions perished, but the company made an increase in tax collection. By 1771, word was spreading about company’s inhumanity in Bengal. The number of dead and dying was simply too vast to hide. The immense wealth flaunted by returned company officials – called nabobs – also caused resentment. Strident demands arose for the Crown to take over Bengal as a government colony so ending the asset-stripping of the province by a for-profit company. In 1772, several banks in England and the continent went bankrupt and the EIC came on the brink of loan default. Having a sizeable income of Britain channeled in through the remittances of the company, it was simply too big to be allowed to go down under. In return for a loan of £1.4 million as a bailout package, the company agreed for parliamentary control through the Regulating Act of 1773. Henceforth, parliament took upon itself the right to appoint the company’s governor general in India and to oversee its operations. The 1773 Act did little to muzzle the worst excesses but it created a precedent. It marked the beginning of a steady process of state interference that would ultimately end in outright nationalization in 1858.

 

The plundering mindset of both the Mughals and the British is evident in their sharing of spoils from Bengal treasury while the province was reeling under the worst famine and famished people were dying in hundreds on the wayside. Stretching the comparison a bit longer, it can be concluded that the Mughals and EIC feasted on the carcass of Bengal. While EIC increased its remittances to London during the famine, Emperor Shah Alam anxiously demanded the company to pay him the tribute from Bengal as he was in extreme demand of money. But don’t be misled by the urgency of the request! This was not to pay for any famine relief, but only to satisfy the demands of his court musicians and dancing girls. The author also portrays the extreme helplessness of the emperor. His forces had earlier defeated Rohilla chief Zabita Khan and sacked his Pathargarh fort. Shah Alam took his son Ghulam Qadir to Delhi and used him as a catamite. After a few years, Ghulam Qadir attacked Delhi while the Maratha protection force was engaged in an internal conflict among them. Qadir extracted his revenge from the royal family by raping the royal princesses, forcing the princes to perform dances in women’s costume and finally gouging Shah Alam’s eyes out with his own hands. The Marathas under Mahadji Scindia chased Qadir and retaliated by severing his head before inflicting all the punishments he gave to Shah Alam, who was the nominal overlord of the Marathas.

 

As is usual among left-liberal writers, Dalrymple strives hard to portray Tipu Sultan as a benevolent and impartial ruler who treated all religions equal. The attempt is quite clumsy and unconvincing though. He accuses the British to have consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian, but he was in truth a connoisseur and intellectual with a library containing 2000 books (p.321). Tipu was also in the habit of sending offerings to Sringeri Mutt. Will these mitigate his atrocious conduct described by the author on the same page? Tipu Sultan had a cruel bend of mind and was in the habit of cutting off arms, legs, ears and noses of prisoners before hanging them. He routinely circumcised captive enemy combatants and brutally converted them to Islam. He destroyed temples and churches of those he conquered. Another of his favourite pastime went like this: he tied naked Hindu and Christian prisoners to the legs of elephants and made the animals to run in opposite directions till the bodies of the victims are torn to pieces. The modern ISIS has also replicated this kind of punishment, probably stimulated by the deeds of their ‘illustrious’ predecessor. The only difference is that they used SUVs rather than elephants. One has to change with the times, isn’t it?

 

The East India Company sucked the life blood of India for a century before it was dismantled after the 1857 war of independence. But if you look at it from a modern management expert’s viewpoint, it was the ultimate model of commercial efficiency. After a century of incorporation, it still had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. The firm managed military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of south Asia while operating from a modest office building in London. But what played out in the end was the supreme act of corporate violence in history. Dalrymple plays up the usual liberal trope of the enlightened Mughals in treating their subjects without consideration of the religion they belong to. We see a conscious selection of passages which favour the narrative of ‘magnanimous Mughals’. Not content with stopping there, he goes a step further and includes passages depicting the barbarity of Marathas. We read about Shah Alam’s poems praising Hindu gods on the one hand and the Marathas destroying temples in Bengal on the other. A notable feature of the book is the special care it devotes to estimate the present money value of the amounts mentioned in historical records. Seeing these figures Indians would surely get heartburn at the vast amount of wealth plundered out of India by the British, Persians, Afghans and Mughals. Quite expectedly, Dalrymple’s style of writing is a delight to readers.

 

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

 

India, Bharat and Pakistan

Title: India, Bharat and Pakistan – The Constitutional Journey of a Sandwiched Civilisation

Author: J. Sai Deepak

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9789354353017

Pages: 616

 

The traditional accounts of India’s freedom struggle make us believe that Muslim League raised the demand of Pakistan with the Lahore Declaration in Mar 1940 and thereby creating the Two-Nation theory. It then grew so strong in the coming years as to receive acceptance even from Gandhi a few years later. As a result, the country was partitioned in 1947. This argument posits that the Two-Nation theory was a political idea put forward by the Muslim League, which was a political party. However, it was not difficult for discerning readers to shred this popular, comforting and infantile fiction to pieces with a little application of common sense. This book attributes the theory as a purely religious one having its origins in the minds of a few bigoted men after the disintegration of Mughal Empire by the middle of the eighteenth century. It is a fundamental principle in Islam that asks its followers to reside in a country where the Sharia law is in place. If it is not, they have two options. One is to fight their way to power by overthrowing the rulers through a holy war and make Sharia rule the land. But if the ruling agency is very powerful, this may not be possible and the believers are then exhorted to migrate to a country where Islamic law is in place. When Mughals ruled India in their prime, the entire land lay under the yoke of Sharia and offered the perfect abode of domicile for Muslims. With the decline of the Mughals, the Marathas, Jats, Sikhs and Rajputs assumed dominance in North India. Islamic revivalist movements came up in this period as a response to this loss of political power which grew into prominence under different guises in the coming centuries. Muslims were pacified under British ascendancy after 1857, but as soon as democratic reforms began to be implemented, they feared Hindu oppression owing to their superior numbers. As far as religious principles went, the British were at least People of the Book, while Hindus were ‘despised polytheists’. The Two-Nation theory thus originated from the reluctance of pious Muslims to live under Hindu rule which came into being in the eighteenth century. This book is the second in the trilogy on India’s constitutional development written by J. Sai Deepak and asserts that the Two-Nation theory cast its shadows on every political development such as the partition of Bengal, establishment of separate electorate for Muslims and the Khilafat Movement. The first volume was reviewed earlier in this blog.

 

What makes Sai Deepak stand out from the crowd of authors who had handled this subject earlier is his original thinking which found the real origins of the Two-Nation theory to the collapse of the most powerful Muslim empire in India – the Mughals. After its disintegration, the Islamic scholars sought solace in going back to the fundamentals of the religion and to revive it thereby. Shah Waliullah Dehlawi is the most prominent cleric of this period who propounded the bigoted tenets of Wahhabism which he encountered during his stay in Arabia. He exhorted the Muslims of the subcontinent not to integrate into society, since contact with Hindus would contaminate their Islamic purity. He urged them to see themselves as part of a global Ummah (religious community). He mandated them to follow the customs and mores of the Prophet. He was such a Sunni hardliner that he allowed Shias to celebrate their festivals in public but only with strict moderation. The Hindu infidels were not even permitted this somewhat shard of a privilege. Waliullah hated India, his homeland, so much that he invited the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Durrani to invade India to teach the infidels a lesson. In his letter, he detailed the strengths and weaknesses of Marathas and Jats. This was how the Two-Nation theory sprouted in India.

 

The author then lists out the religious movements that spread in all parts of the country like wildfire. The Faraizi Movement in Bengal founded by Haji Shariatullah in the 1820s was a violent organisation. Atrocities against Hindus spread in Bengal as its consequence, including destruction of temples and idols. Under Syed Ahmed Barelwi’s lead, Muslims in Bengal joined pan-Indian networks to fight common enemies such as the Sikh kingdom in Punjab. With Wahhabi influence, it became a practice in some Muslim families to earmark a portion of their earnings for contribution to jihad or to send their men to participate in it at least for a few months. Wahhabi thought was taken forward by other schools such as Ahl-i-Hadith, Deobandi, Barelwi, Nadwah and Aligarh movements.

 

Clubbing the Aligarh Movement with other hard-line religious associations may surprise some naïve souls. It is true that Aligarh was the only place where Islamic teaching was juxtaposed with modern Western learning, but the religious axis on which it turned was the same as the others. The combined effect of Syed Ahmed Khan and Jamal al-Din Afghani was the simultaneous growth of Muslim nationalism and pan-Islamism. Khan openly professed that Muslims are a separate nation in India and his reconciliation with pan-Islamism did not bode well for India. Liberal thinkers attribute all the blame for religious unrest in India to the ‘Divide-and-Rule’ policy of the British. Here, Deepak makes a sagacious observation. To blame the ‘Divide-and-Rule’ policy is to wistfully and willfully ignore uncomfortable and ‘unsecular’ facts. The British policy succeeded only because there were serious, pre-existing and irreconcilable religious, cultural, linguistic and civilizational fissures between the two communities. We were divided and they ruled.

 

The partition of Bengal was the definite moment in which the Muslim nation first asserted itself. This critical episode is given a fitting coverage in the book. The partition was more on religious lines than administrative convenience as the newly formed province of East Bengal and Assam was having a Muslim majority and became a centre of consolidation of Muslim interests and the point of convergence of Muslim organisations from across the country. Muslim associations in the new province celebrated Oct 16, 1905, the day on which the partition was officially declared, as a day of rejoicing. Congress and other Hindu organisations strongly opposed the measure and the agitation continued till it was partially withdrawn in 1911. However, Bengali Muslims stayed away from anti-partition protests and remained loyal to the British. Meanwhile, the British introduced reservation for Muslims in government jobs in the new province. Ulemas toured the province with incendiary speeches that led to widespread attacks on Hindus, especially women. This was a dress rehearsal for the ethnic pogrom against Hindus unleashed in 1946-47 in the same regions. When the partition was annulled, Bihar and Orissa was separated from the parent province. Now, the unity of Bengal was ensured, but the entire province then became one with a Muslim majority.

 

While the Bengal partition produced a physical shape of the Muslim nation, the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms outstretched its vicious tentacles with separate electorates for Muslims. This sordid chapter also finds prominent mention in the book. While all other minorities such as Christians, Parsees, Jews and others were treated as members of the general electorate, Muslims as a community was offered a separate electorate. In this manner, Muslim separatism was constitutionally cemented in the political psyche of India. Not content with that, Muslims were also given more seats than their population numbers warranted in view of the ‘historical and political superiority of Muslims’. The Congress, especially its moderate faction, had taken colonization as a time for beneficial political apprenticeship and wanted to present a united front to Britain to secure self-government. Naturally, they were willing to make critical concessions to Muslim demands to keep them along. The Muslim League realized this weakness early on and exploited it to the hilt. Deepak establishes that appeasement of the Muslim League was entrenched in Congress well before Gandhi took centre-stage. Jinnah assumed an amphibian role at this time by becoming a member of both Congress and the League and put his membership of the Congress to good use of Muslim community by softening the opposition within Congress to separate electorates for Muslims.

 

Another major contribution of the book is its categorical establishment that Gandhi was not the originator of Congress’ Muslim appeasement. It started right from that party’s birth in 1885 and went into overdrive after Muslim League’s formation in 1906. At least in one instance, it went far more than the League was willing to go – on the issue of the fate of the Turkish sultan who was also the caliph of Muslims who was defeated by Britain and its allies in the First World War. Gandhi’s rise as a national leader was significantly owed to the Khilafat Movement. His agitation against the Rowlatt Act too was made possible due to the support of the Khilafatists. This was the first time Muslims came out on the warpath after 1857, but unfortunately, it was for a cause not even remotely connected to India’s destiny. In fact, its pan-Islamic objectives threatened the national aspirations of India. Maulana Muhammad Ali declared that he will assist the Afghans if they invaded India. This open threat alienated a sizeable cross-section of Hindu supporters. Within no time, the Khilafat agitation changed track and turned into forced conversion and ethnic cleansing of Hindus, especially in Malabar in 1921. The horrifying fact was that the Khilafat leaders refused to condemn the brutal atrocities even after they were widely published by the Press. Maulana Hazrat Mohani, who was one of the founders of the Communist Party of India (CPI), informed in a meeting that ‘since the Moplahs suspected their Hindu neighbours of colluding with the government, they were justified in presenting the Quran to the Hindus. And if the Hindus became Musalmans to save themselves from death, it was a voluntary change of faith and not forcible conversion (p.469). This was how the Khilafat leaders actually justified the murder, rape and forced conversion while the Congress leaders continued to keep their eyes firmly shut.

 

Another idea this book conveys is the longevity of the fundamental Indic consciousness that animates the Indian communal being. Indic consciousness was able to produce society-based institutions and individuals who constantly and uncompromisingly advanced the Indic civilizational cause and space in the two waves of Middle Eastern and European colonialism. This ability preserved the Consciousness then but is now dulled and stifled under the third wave of colonization, namely, under the Nehruvian Marxist/post-colonial establishment which even refuses to acknowledge the Middle Eastern colonialism which ravaged the country perhaps much more detrimentally than the British.

 

This book is rather huge even though it covers only the period from 1905 to 1924. It is a worthy follower of the first book of the trilogy – India that is Bharat – in content, but rather less enjoyable due to the frequent and very long extracts from speeches, books, memorials and debates. At least a quarter of the book is filled with verbatim reproduction of speeches on 1909 reforms and the Khilafat. This is very tiring for the reader as the author seems to have taken a temporary leave of absence and left the readers to deal directly with the jargon and vocabulary of politicians who lived more than a century ago. The book consistently uses the terms Bharat/Bharatiya for India/Indian which proclaims its firm mooring to Indian, er, Bharatiya consciousness. The author also emphasizes the Hindu roots of Sikhs and how fanatical Muslims treated both as the same. The unseating of the Khalsa kingdom of Lahore was a sworn objective of Wahhabi extremists in the early half of the nineteenth century. This is especially valid as the Khalistanis are now hand in glove with the Wahhabis.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star