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  Others were more fortunate. Daud Khan Ruhela, another Afghan and the alleged son of a slave, made himself the master of a cluster of villages in the region north-east of the old imperial capital, Agra. It was an area where Akbar the Great had encouraged Afghan settlement in the sixteenth century, no doubt with an eye to swelling the numbers of his Muslim subjects. Daud Khan proceeded in what was becoming the classic manner for ambitious freebooters: he first hired himself and his brigands to another man on the make, a local zamindar, and then picked up property and helped himself to imperial revenues. Playing a double game with the Raja of Kumaun, he came unstuck, was captured and tortured to death in 1720. It was onwards and upwards for his adopted heir, Ali Muhammad Khan, who showed a remarkable virtuosity in switching alliances and, as his estates and prestige grew, meddling in the intrigues of the imperial court. When he died in 1748 he was the dominant figure in the constellation of petty Ruhela states which had emerged over the past thirty years and now stretched from the foothills of the Himalayas southwards across the Ganges valley to a line between Delhi and Agra. Princes deferred to him; the Raja of Garwhal paid him 160,000 rupees (£21,600) a year in protection money, and he was deeply engaged in the factional strife at court.6

  One of Ali Muhammad Khan’s greatest opportunities had come in 1739–40, when a Persian army under Nadir Shah invaded India, defeated the Emperor Muhammad at the battle of Karnaul and then occupied Delhi. The city was thoroughly plundered, its inhabitants massacred and, in a gesture which combined cupidity with political symbolism, the Peacock Throne was carried off to Persia. While Delhi was in chaos, Ali Muhammad Khan engrossed a handful of parganas (imperial tax districts). Like every other predator on the loose in India, his motive in acquiring imperial revenues was a mixture of greed and political acumen. By encroaching on imperial rights, India’s new masters transformed themselves into the heirs of the emperor.

  By the mid-eighteenth century the self-made heirs of the Timurid emperors had changed the political map of India. New polities had appeared: the large states of Mysore, Hyderabad, Awadh (Oudh), Bengal and the Maratha principalities of Deccan. There was also a body of looser political units formed by the Ruhelas, the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Rajputs of Rajasthan. The masters of both the larger and smaller states behaved as independent rulers and presented themselves to their subjects as the legitimate successors of the Mughals. These ‘lesser Mughals’ upheld all the administrative codes and practices of traditional imperial government, particularly and for obvious reasons those concerned with the imposition of taxes.

  And yet, curiously, India’s arriviste princes continued to treat the emperor’s person with customary respect and reverence long after his real power had evaporated. Even after 1784, when he became the virtual prisoner of the Maratha prince, Mahadji Scindia, his captor insisted that he was merely a ‘servant’ of the emperor. Although little more than ornaments, the Timurid emperors were still the sole source of legitimate political authority within India. They had none themselves, but they could be induced to bestow it on others, which was why nobody wished to get rid of them.

  Mughal traditions and culture set the tone in all the new states. Ali Muhammad Khan was the patron of poets and musicians. Like the emperors, he generously endowed mosques and had a mausoleum built in his capital, Aonla (south-west of Bareilly), which is still an object of veneration.7 Murshid Quli Khan, Nawab (governor) of Bengal, who delicately balanced his duties as a Mughal agent in the province with establishing himself as its effective ruler, followed imperial custom by renaming its capital, Murshidabad. It was embellished, at his expense, with a splendid, five-domed mosque. Hindu princes also imitated Mughal munificence by founding temples and building palaces in the Mughal style with audience halls, private apartments and elaborate gardens. Former Mughal artisans and artists were employed in all these enterprises; humble men, like great ones, had to follow where advantage led them.

  III

  One of the most ominous features of the power struggles which accompanied the collapse of Mughal power was the willingness of contestants to enlist external help. In the early 1740s the warring princes of Karnataka sought and gained military assistance from the British East India Company and the French Compagnie des Indes and paid for it by assignments of land and taxation. The four invasions of northern India by the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali (1748, 1749, 1751 and 1757–61) revealed a variety of collaborators who were willing either to remain neutral or provide him with fighting men, whichever best suited their private interests. During the final incursion, Safdar Jang, the Nawab of Awadh, offered the Afghans lukewarm support,while Najib-ud Daula, an Afghan and former imperial commander, supplied them with Ruhela troops. He did so partly to further his own ambitions and partly because he knew the Ruhelas could only overcome their enemies, the Marathas, with Afghan backing. They did so at the decisive battle of Panipat in January 1761, which opened the way for Najib to secure the position of regent for the Afghan-nominated, puppet emperor Shah Alam II. It might be added that before the battle the Maratha peshwa (prince), Balaji Baji Rao, had attempted a deal with the East India Company, offering land in exchange for batteries of artillery and European-trained gunners.8

  Although adding to India’s chronic instability and the sum total of its people’s suffering, the Afghan and Persian invasions were no more than smash-and-grab raids. Neither Nadir Shah nor Ahmad Shah Abdali had the inclination to supplant the Timurids, although the Afghans temporarily occupied the Punjab. Their interventions did, however, swell the numbers of professional cavalrymen who sold themselves to the highest bidder or, when unemployed, lived off the peasantry. In some cases, these parasites followed the example of those who hired them, and hoisted themselves up in the world to become zamindars. Armies were also a burden on those who could not survive without them, and participants in India’s civil wars were often driven to borrow heavily from bankers to finance their campaigns. The peshwa, Balaji Baji Rao, faced mutinies by unpaid soldiers and once complained of his creditors, ‘I am falling at their feet, till I have rubbed the skin from my forehead.’ His successor borrowed fifteen million rupees (over £2 million) between 1740 and 1760, on which he was forced to pay interest of between 12 and 18 per cent.9 The spiral of debt helped make war self-perpetuating, for it compelled princes to seek new sources of income through conquest and plundering raids. Maratha princes ‘invited’ into Rajasthan by local magnates in the 1730s, ostensibly to settle local disputes, used the opportunity to levy a form of protection money.

  The Indian economy as a whole did not suffer unduly from the upheavals which accompanied the disintegration of Mughal power. Agricultural production proved resilient; warfare was localised and never continuous; and, mercifully, the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed no large-scale famines. There is evidence of growth, such as the colonisation of new lands, although the population was increasing slowly. Nonetheless, chronic disruption occurred in the regions adjacent to Delhi, which suffered more than elsewhere because they were transformed into a cockpit in which, at different times, Persian, Mughal, Jat, Ruhela and Maratha forces did battle. The city’s population fell, as did that of Agra, and elsewhere fragile economic structures were damaged by marauders. Maratha raiders burned mulberry bushes in the Birghum district, damaging the local silk industry.10

  Localised anarchy hindered the exchange of goods. Throughout this period the British, French and Dutch trading companies grumbled about the losses they suffered from an upsurge in brigandage and coastal piracy. The East India Company’s embassy to the Emperor Furrukhsiyar, with its cumbersome baggage train containing sumptuous bribes for him and his courtiers, needed a 450-strong escort in 1714. This would have been a reasonable precaution at any time, but it was insufficient to deter bandits between Patna and Benares (Varanasi), who had to be bought off with various gifts, including horse pistols and magnifying glasses.11 There were complaints, too, about princes asserting their new independence, like the ‘impertinent and troublesom
e rajahs’ who imposed levies on goods passing down the Ganges.12

  With valuable trade at stake, Europeans naturally attempted to keep track of India’s power struggles. It was not easy; one East India Company agent in Madras admitted that it was impossible to follow exactly the serpentine manoeuvres of the princes of Karnataka in the 1730s. And yet from what he and others could discover, they were able to identify the key to success in the hurly-burly of Indian politics. It was a perpetually full purse, for experience showed that the individual Indian soldier would only follow a prince with well-primed coffers and when unpaid he would happily switch sides, even in the middle of a battle.13 Once the British and French companies had taken the plunge and intervened actively in the local wars, their officers quickly realised how profitable it could be to play kingmaker. News of rich pickings travelled fast. Writing from the Cape and en route for Madras, Alexander Campbell told his parents in April 1748 that he had every chance of ‘making a fortune . . . in a few years’. He dreamed of staying in India as an officer in the Company’s new army, to ‘try my luck’.14

  This young Scot had expectations in common with those Indians of similar temper who had been trying their luck in various ways for the past forty years. One who came out well from the political free-for-all was the ruler of the small hilltop town of Mandawa, in the rolling countryside of Rajasthan. He may well have been a superior sort of Rajput zamindar and he certainly possessed considerable self-esteem, for he built himself a fortified palace which, in design, if not scale, resembles those of greater princes.

  Around the palace are clustered the houses of his officials – in all likelihood their master gave them Mughal titles such as diwan (treasurer). The exterior walls and courtyards of their houses are decorated with brightly coloured and lively murals which, one assumes, reflect something of the pretensions of their overlord. In them he rides on richly caparisoned camels and elephants to make war or hunt. His soldiers also appear: the cavalry armed with lances are probably Maratha or Afghan mercenaries; the infantrymen carry tulwars (curved swords) and matchlocks and wear red jackets. For this reason, the local guides mistakenly identify them as East India Company sepoys. The error is understandable: from the later years of the eighteenth century onwards some Indian rulers dressed their soldiers in red jackets in the belief that this colour possessed talismanic powers, which would make those who wore it fight as well as the Company’s troops. This change in military fashion was more than a princely foible; it was a mark of a new and momentous shift in the balance of power within India.

  2

  A Glorious Prospect:

  Robert Clive’s Wars,

  1740 – 55

  I

  The life of Robert Clive might easily have been the plot for a picaresque novel by, say, Defoe or Smollett. The scapegrace youth leaves England to make his fortune in India and in the process gets into all sorts of scrapes. He extricates himself by displaying hitherto dormant energy, courage and an ability to turn every situation to his advantage. Clive’s would not have been a moral tale, and eighteenth-century readers would have been hard pressed to discover any virtues within his character beyond patriotism, and this was offset by guile, ruthlessness and rapacity. In sum, he was temperamentally well suited to play a decisive role in Indian politics during the years of Mughal decline.

  Clive was nineteen when he disembarked at Fort St George, Madras, in June 1744. He was a writer, a junior tally clerk, and, like many of his colleagues, came from a minor gentry background. He had been, not unusually for one of his birth, a harum-scarum schoolboy, but he had some preparation for his future career at a business school in Hemel Hempstead. As a younger son, he had to make his own way in the world, and clerking for the East India Company was an honourable occupation in which he could, if lucky, make himself a man of independent means. Whether he did or not, his family was relieved of the burden of supporting him, although it had to find two men willing to pledge £500 for his good behaviour and further sums for his voyage out and kit. The bill for a junior officer’s clothing and household utensils came to just under £140 in 1781.1

  Mettlesome, short-tempered and prone to depression, Clive was not happy pushing a pen, but his urge to help himself and his family was sufficiently strong to enable him to overcome his boredom and periodic fits of gloom. The boy who, allegedly, had clambered up the steeple of Market Drayton church and defied the world sitting astride a weathercock, resolved to steel himself to his humdrum duties and make the best of things. If he escaped the rigours of the climate and the local microbes, and large numbers of aspirants did not, Clive stood a good chance of returning home with enough capital to live as a gentleman. This was what Sir Archibald Forbes had in mind when he wrote a Polonius-like instruction to his son, who joined the Company at the same time as Clive. The youth was to show: ‘Fortitude . . . courage and Resolution to encounter Danger, perform all duties to God and man and bear with pain and trouble.’ If he conducted himself in this manner, a ‘Glorious prospect’ lay ahead of him.2 The lure of India was therefore one of enrichment, but as matters stood in the early 1740s, this could only come as a result of making money from trade. First, the Company’s employee undertook what was in effect a five-year apprenticeship as a writer, and then moved up the ladder to become successively a factor, a junior merchant, a senior merchant, a councillor and, finally, a governor. Salaries were not high, but men holding senior posts were free to trade on their own account.

  The East India Company was one of those enterprises which floated on what Defoe had called the ‘unbounded Ocean of Business’, a sea which encompassed the whole globe. Britain lay at the hub of a thriving, expanding and highly complex system of international trade. ‘Our ships are laden with the Harvest of every Climate,’ wrote Joseph Addison in 1711. ‘Our Tables are stored with Spices, and Oils, and wines: Our Rooms are filled with Pyramids of China, and adorned with the workmanship of Japan: Our morning’s Draught comes to us from the remotest Corner of the Earth: We repair our Bodies by the Drugs of America, and repose ourselves under Indian canopies.’3 The scope and benefits of British commerce were advertised, appropriately, on the tomb of Sir William Baker, a London merchant, who died in 1770 and was buried among the fashionable in Bath abbey. Above the confident inscription ‘Orbis Terrarum Felicitas’ is a carved panel on which the symbolic figure of London, an elegant female classically draped and crowned with a battlemented tiara, receives the tribute of America and Asia. The first, a naked boy, offers a beaver, from whose skins hats and fortunes were made. Asia is represented by a tur-banned Indian who steps over an elephant’s tusk and leads a camel laden with panniers.

  The contents of the camel’s pack may well have been Indian textiles, the bales of cottons, calicoes, muslins and chintzes which young Clive marked up in his ledger. His employers paid their shareholders with the profits from cargoes of these fabrics, pepper, indigo and spices, which were unloaded at the East India Company’s Poplar dock, and, in many cases, reexported to the Continent and North America. Since the late seventeenth century, when the Company had opened up direct trade with Canton, it had added fine chinaware, silks and tea to its imports. The British taste for the latter proved insatiable and, by 1744, annual sales of china tea were worth £348,000. Chinese and Indian products were bought for silver, which had been earned by Britain’s trade with Europe and the New World.

  The Company traded in a fiercely competitive world. ‘Our trade,’ Defoe had written in 1727, ‘is the Envy of the World, and they are conspiring to break in upon it, either to anticipate it, or block it out.’ Not only was the prosperity of the nation at stake, but the stability of its ordered society. ‘The poor would eat us up’ if Britain’s international trade collapsed.4 Defoe was defending the current economic dogma, mercantilism, which laid down that the world’s trade was finite and that, in consequence, the commercial powers would find themselves in perpetual conflict over raw materials and markets. Monopolies in both were the sole basis for national prosperity.
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  II

  No one country had a monopoly on India’s trade. The principal competitors for its business were the British and French companies, with the overstretched Dutch in third place and slipping. The Portuguese, who had opened up Indian commerce in the early 1500s, were out of the race, and two newcomers, the Danish and Ostend companies, were soon exhausted. By contrast, the East India Company had kept up a steady pace since its foundation at the very end of Elizabeth I’s reign. It had acquired trading bases at Madras in 1639, Bombay in 1664 (as part of the dowry presented by Catherine of Braganza to Charles II) and Calcutta in 1696.

  As its interests grew, the East India Company’s profits spiralled. In 1701 an anonymous pamphleteer claimed that: ‘The cheapest things are ever bought in India. . . . Manufacture may be had there for two Pence [1p], as in England for a shilling [6p].’5 Even with transport costs and customs duties, there was a wide margin for profit, especially on imported textiles. As a result, in 1718 English weavers complained that: