Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (25 page)

Yet, even as the siege was at its height, Sir Josiah Child in London remained confident that it was the mighty Aurangzeb who would have to capitulate. ‘The subjects of the Mogull’, he opined, ‘cannot bear a war with the English for twelve months together without starving and dying by thousands for want of our trade.’ To the merchants and officials of the port cities, and to the producers in the hinterland, overseas trade
was
important. But it scarcely impinged on the Court or on the bulk of the population. As one historian puts it, ‘to Aurangzeb the Company was still a mere flea on the back of his imperial elephant’.

When the Emperor deigned to receive the two peace envoys from Bombay he treated them not as representatives of a sovereign power but as errant subjects. With their hands bound they ‘were obliged to prostrate’ (‘after a new mode for ambassadors’, sneers Hamilton) while the Emperor delivered a severe reprimand. They then ‘made a confession of their faults and desired pardon’ adding a plea for the withdrawal of the Sidi’s forces and the restitution of their cancelled trading rights. Graciously Aurangzeb obliged but only on the most humiliating terms. The Company must pay an indemnity of 150,000 rupees, must restore all plundered goods and ships, and must ‘behave themselves for the future no more in such a shameful manner’. Their case against the interloper Boucher (Petit had died) must be proved in court, Sir John Child ‘who did the disgrace’ must be ‘turned out and expelled’, and henceforth the Company ‘must proceed according to my will and pleasure, and be not forgetful of the same’. They were surely the hardest terms the Company would ever have to swallow.

John Child evidently felt so. He died, ‘a shrewd career move’, during the course of the negotiations. Either he was terrified that any terms that ‘would suit with the honour of his Masters’ would be unacceptable to the Emperor, or he was heartbroken by ‘their grating articles’. His successor would be obliged to make Surat once again his headquarters. Although the Company’s credit there had taken a severe blow, the Moghul authorities insisted that the Company’s senior representative remain amongst them as a guarantee of good behaviour. Meanwhile Bombay was left to moulder. Of ‘seven or eight hundred English’ before the war ‘not above 60 were left by the sword and the [subsequent] plague’. The plantations were devastated and houses destroyed. ‘Bombay’, writes Hamilton, ‘that was one of the pleasantest places in India was brought to be one of the most dismal deserts.’

In the many histories of Britain’s involvement with India the Moghul War of 1688-90 receives little attention. Ill advised and worse prosecuted, it spawned no heroes yet fell short of sublime tragedy. Indecision induced adversity; adversity ended in ignominy. Its only saving grace, it would seem, was its irrelevance. Such inglorious and eminently forgettable incidents doubtless account for that typically dismissive attitude towards the Company which presents its history as opening in a blaze of
exploratory endeavour in the early 1600s after which nothing happens until Clive’s exploits in the 1750s.

Only one generalist historian, admittedly writing solely about the Company, perceives some significance in this precedent for an armed assault on India’s sovereign power. ‘If only’, he writes, ‘Sir Josiah could have had his way and his brother
[sic]
Sir John had lived!’ Then, we are told, ‘they might easily have made themselves masters [of India?]’. The book in which this surprising statement appears was written in the twentieth century. Moreover its author fashionably disclaims any ‘intermediary perversion due to national prejudice or to an avowed admiration for the Old Company.’

The temptation to discern in the history of the Honourable Company events and personalities which presage the Raj is understandable but not necessarily helpful. It may even be misleading. For instance, in or about the year 1690 it fell to Job Charnock, an old and respected servant of the East India Company, to found the future city of Calcutta. That much is certain. But since Calcutta would soon come to epitomize British power in India, around both Charnock and the circumstances of his foundation myths and legends accrued as around no other event in the Company’s history in India in the seventeenth century.

These fabrications took predictable forms. Thus native accounts of the affair emphasize the liberality of native rulers. One has it that the site was magnanimously granted to the Company by the emperor Aurangzeb in gratitude for provisions furnished from Madras to his troops in the south of India; another that Charnock himself won ‘the King’s favour by routing some rebellious subjects and pledging undying loyalty to the Emperor’s (or Nawab’s) person.

But, flatly contradicting all this, the version favoured by British historians has Charnock at loggerheads with the Moghul and courageously defying imperial power. Hounded down the Ganges by vast native armies, the desperate little band of English merchants discover their destined haven at Calcutta only to be driven from it and forced back on to the river. They continue downstream with Charnock wielding his sword like a Sir Galahad to slice through steel chains strung across the current to prevent his escape. Eventually a desperate last stand is made on a pestilential island in the mouth of the river. Suffering appalling losses the English gallantly stand their ground and finally cow the enemy into
retreat by a ruse which greatly exaggerates their numbers. Peace negotiations thus find Charnock in a position of some strength. He is rewarded with the lease of Calcutta to which he triumphantly leads back his little band of heroes to start building the future metropolis.

In all these accounts there are nuggets of truth, each badly flawed by retrospective sentiment. For in reality the Calcutta episode reflects credit neither on Charnock’s ability nor his companions’ prowess, and neither on the Moghul’s liberality nor on the Company’s good sense. Calcutta, as one might surmise from the city of today, was born not out of courage or design but out of commercial greed and political mayhem. There are few highlights in the Calcutta saga and no heroes. It is not a pretty story.

First contacts with Bengal had been made from Masulipatnam by the Dutchman, Lucas Antheuniss, and his successor, William Methwold, in the 1620s. But it was during the English Civil War and the commercial chaos of the 1640s and 1650s (when Methwold, one of the first Company servants to hold office, was deputy-governor in London) that trade with ‘The Bay’ as opposed to ‘The Coast’ (Madras and Masulipatnam) began to prosper. Factories were established at Balasore and then inland at Hughli, Kasimbazar, Malda, Patna and Dhaka (Dacca). With the Restoration of the British monarchy the demand for Bengal’s saltpetre was supplemented by a growing appreciation of the area’s cheap raw silks and molasses. Ships were sent direct to the mouth of the Ganges and in 1681 the Company’s Bengal establishment was for the first time constituted as a separate Agency (or Presidency) independent of Madras and Bombay/ Surat. To direct its operations, discipline its factors and secure its trade, William Hedges, a director of the Company, sailed from London with a small escort and extensive powers. He arrived at the town of Hughli, where the Company had its main headquarters about twenty miles north of what was to be Calcutta, in 1682.

By virtue of an imperial grant dating back thirty years, the Company’s establishments in Bengal claimed exemption from customs duties in return for a lump sum paid direct to the Nawab, who was the Moghul’s regent, kinsman, and governor for what was the richest province in the whole empire. Negotiations as to the amount and frequency of such payments had to be reopened with each new Nawab; but the beauty of this system was that in principle it eliminated the far worse wrangles and delays that would result from dealing with the numerous and none too scrupulous officials to whom customs and excise collection was farmed.
In practice, of course, the Company was never free of local exactions; and as trade increased so did the need to lubricate all moving parts in what was necessarily a most cumbersome commercial machine. But in about 1680 the situation had been rendered intolerable by the imposition of a five per cent duty on imported bullion and a three and a half per cent duty on exports – in addition to the lump sum payment. The Nawab responsible was the recently reappointed and very able Shaista Khan and it was to demand redress that Hedges soon presented himself at Dhaka, the Nawab’s capital (and now that of Bangladesh).

Whatever the Company might think, though, and whatever Hedges might demand, the fact was that the Moghul emperor, through his provincial governors, was entitled to tax foreign traders as he saw fit. They had come as uninvited guests and they continued at his pleasure. Except in Bombay and Madras the Company had no territorial rights and even its commercial privileges had no validity beyond the reign of whoever had granted them.

But this is not to say that the English were merely tolerated. When Hedges duly played his last card and threatened to withdraw all the Company’s factors from Bengal, Shaista Khan was deeply and genuinely concerned. The days of Elizabeth and Akbar when European trade to India had been valued principally for its limited stock of novelties, trinkets and sporting dogs had long since passed. In the period 1681-5 the Company would export, mainly to Moghul India, a grand total of 240,000 kg of silver and nearly 7000 kg of gold. With Aurangzeb’s armies permanently locked in combat with either Afghans or Marathas, the demand for coin throughout the empire was unprecedented and to an important extent it was being met by the European trading companies. Additionally the manufacturing industries of Gujarat, the Tamil country and Bengal had come to depend on Europe’s insatiable demand for cottons and silks. And although on land the trading companies were militarily insignificant, at sea they retained that potential for nuisance which Henry Middleton had discovered and which John Child was to essay with a blast of ‘air from my bum’.

All in all then an uneasy and unwritten reciprocity underlay relations between the Company and the Moghul authorities. Instead of fleas on the back of Aurangzeb’s imperial elephant, the European companies were more like egrets busily delousing the Moghul water-buffalo. They pecked and flapped about the imperial person knowing full well that their humble services, although mildly irritating, were both appreciated
and necessary. And of this symbiotic relationship neither party quite lost sight, either in the protracted negotiations undertaken by Hedges or in the hostilities which rapidly succeeded them.

In the event Hedges came away from the Nawab’s court at Dhaka well satisfied. In return for various sureties, Shaista Khan had agreed to petition the emperor for a renewal of the Company’s customs exemption and in the meantime to give the Company a period of grace. ‘I bless God,’ wrote Hedges in his diary, ‘for the great success I have had, beyond all men’s expectations.’ He reckoned to have saved his honourable masters £20,000 per annum and, once the
imperial farman
should arrive, he confidently predicted that its preferential terms would give the Company such a commercial edge over its competitors that it ‘shall never more be much troubled with interlopers’.

Supplementing Hedges’s diary with the visual cameos afforded by Moghul paintings of the period, there emerges a vivid impression of what was probably – with the Emperor himself forever in the field – the most refined court in India at the time. Hard bargaining was left to intercessors and intermediaries operating behind the latticed scenes. Meanwhile Hedges and the old Nawab observed the niceties of civilized intercourse, exchanging mutual flatteries and waiving minor points of etiquette (which the Englishman construed as a ‘greater kindness than he has ever shewn before to any Christian’). Hedges, as a one-time director of the Levant Company, had spent some years in Constantinople. He spoke Turkish and Arabic and he relished the courtly values of the Islamic world; brocade diplomacy was his speciality.

How very different was the coarse, vituperative and money-grubbing atmosphere which awaited him at the Company’s Kasimbazar establishment in west Bengal. Here merchants bickered over who should have the raw silk sweepings from the factory floor; with a commission on this and a backhander for that, scarce a man was not busily lining his own pocket. But the level of corruption was a direct reflection of the level of trade; the more silk passing through the warehouses, the more sweepings for feathering factors’ nests. Thus the man who presided over this turbulent mob, the indestructible Job Charnock, was both the most abrasive and yet the most effective of all the Company’s Indian factors.

Whereas Hedges’s considerable vanity was flattered by the company of Moghul courtiers, Charnock was at home with their Hindu agents and subjects. Smitten rather than outraged, he had once snatched a young Hindu girl from her husband’s funeral pyre and now lived contentedly
with the sari-ed maiden and her extended Indian family. His Christianity was suspect and he was certainly every bit as venal and cantankerous as the worst of his subordinates. But he had been in Bengal long enough to know its trade backwards. From the money-lending Seths or the tax-gathering Chands, as from the weavers and growers, he stood no nonsense. In his warehouses substantial cargoes were always ready for the next ship to call at ‘The Bay’ and over the years he had won the confidence of the directors back in London. In their book ‘good honest Job’ could do no wrong. True he perhaps lacked those finer points of breeding desirable in a President – and he had in fact been passed over in the promotion race, most recently by the appointment of Hedges – but that in no way prejudiced his standing with the directors and in particular with Sir Josiah Child whose long and influential career as a director of the Company had begun in 1677.

That Hedges would clash with Charnock and his companions was thus understandable. In fact by appointing outsiders to investigate and adjudicate in the affairs of its regular factors – while at the same time encouraging those same regular factors to report direct and in secret to London – the Company seemed positively to encourage an atmosphere of distrust and rancour. Within weeks of Hedges’s return from Dhaka, accusations and counter-accusations were passing up and down the river between Hedges at Hughli town and Charnock at Kasimbazar with the regularity of the dreaded tidal bore. Each in turn accused the other of peculation, nepotism, atheism, entertaining interlopers, fornicating with heathens and any other crime considered heinous enough to win censure from the Court of Committees in London. Tough-skinned and frankly contemptuous, Charnock had seen off Hedges’s predecessor and did not doubt that the new Agent would soon follow. But to the refined and unhappy Hedges these base insinuations were ‘insufferable’. ‘I can no more bear them than an honest virtuous woman can be questioned for her chastity’, he moaned. ‘It’s absolutely necessary that one of us two be replaced.’