Revision as of 20:23, 8 June 2021

Bengal

The East India Company as the lesser evil

Manimugdha S Sharma, Oct 25, 2019: The Times of India

In his just published The Anarchy, historian and writer William Dalrymple tries to explain how a London-based corporation replaced the Mughal Empire in just 47 years, from 1756 to 1803. Manimugdha S Sharma gets him to elaborate on some key moments:

Why have depredations carried out by the Company been forgotten and only those of the British Raj remembered?

It was known in the 18th century that this was a trading company run by a bunch of London merchants, taking help from the British government infrequently. It’s important to understand that this was a case of massive corporate incompetence, corruption, exploitation, asset stripping, plundering and looting. It doesn’t absolve anyone but makes it more sinister and more relevant to our own times. What really surprised me in a positive manner while researching this period was the amount of resistance to the Company and its plunder seen in the British press of the time, especially after the famine of 1770. Horace Walpole wrote in his diary that we have outdone the Spanish and the Portuguese, for they at least had the excuse of faith, we have done it entirely for profit.

Before the Battle of Plassey, Bengal was the richest Mughal province. Then, it had the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. How did it happen?

Bengal, despite the decline of the Mughals in the 1700s, remained largely immune to the anarchy. There were periods of very severe Maratha incursions in the 1740s but those were very quickly seen off by Nawab Alivardi Khan. The period also saw the growth of the textile industry in Bengal, which turned Bengal into the workshop of the world. What Manchester would be in the 19th century, Bengal was in the 18th century. This happened initially with European assistance as the various European trading companies became the instruments to diffuse Mughal textiles around Europe and as far as Mexico where there was a massive de-industrialisation due to the import of Indian textiles.

The famine is a controversial matter. Rajat Datta of JNU has done a village by village analysis of it and is tending towards the view that it wasn’t largely the responsibility of the East India Company. It was primarily due to ecological changes. I have argued that whether or not the Company was responsible for it, its incompetent response to the famine made it much more deadly, and its tax collection just added to the misery of the people.

When it comes to Siraj ud-Daula, often there’s a traitor vs patriot narrative. What’s your reading?

India’s nationalist historians have wanted him to be a hero, and he did resist the Company.

But all contemporary accounts, not just the British, portray him as sort of an Uday Hussein [Saddam Hussein’s eldest son] figure. Ghulam Hussain Khan, who was deeply critical of the British, wrote probably the rudest account of Siraj, portraying him as a serial bisexual rapist who used to sink pleasure boats in the Ganges just to watch people drown. One wonders why Bengali historians have absolved him of all this.

We miss out the key figure of Jagat Seth. Seth pays an amount equivalent to one year’s revenue of Bengal to the Company to effect a regime change. Clearly, a lot of people saw the Company as the lesser evil. It has failed to reach popular consciousness that the Marwaris, the Hindu bankers, and later the Bhadraloks chose to support the Company. Later on, the Permanent Settlement broke up the big Mughal estates and parcelled them out to people who could afford them. So you had the rise of the North Calcutta gentry – families like Maliks, Debs and Tagores who became land owners. They all became part of the Company system. The nationalist narrative misses all this.

What are your thoughts about the view the Englishman wasn’t the problem, the Muslim ruler was?

That response is not completely ahistorical. The Seths, Maliks, Debs and Tagores made a choice. The British realised this and in the 19th century did their best to write histories to stress emphatically that the natives were saved from all that by the British.

What do you think was the Company’s or the larger British attitude towards Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan?

It was very positive for Haidar Ali initially. The French and British admired Haidar Ali and Tipu, especially the younger Tipu, the victor at Polilur (1780). The British were taken aback by this disciplined Indian army that got the better of them and they had no clue that there was such an army. So Hector Munro, this famous British general and the victor of Buxar, fled and was hooted on the streets of Madras.

You’ve described the loot, rape and plunder of Srirangapattanam by Company forces after the defeat of Tipu.

This was a brutal period. It was no different from what the Marathas were doing in Bengal. It’s the reason why I call my book The Anarchy. It was an extremely violent period and I am glad I wasn’t a peasant living through this.