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