Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (68 page)

It was also exceedingly timely. For without waiting for these reinforcements, the Bombay army had crossed to the mainland, begun crawling up the Ghats, and fallen an easy prey to a combined Maratha force headed by the redoubtable Scindia. Although incompetently commanded and pathetically inadequate for the task in hand, the real problem for the Bombay force had been logistical. Baggage trains that could lumber across the plains at ten miles a day could scarcely manage two miles a day on the steep gradients and amongst the deep defiles of the Ghats. The expedition had practically ground to a standstill before it sighted the Maratha troops. It then abandoned its guns and turned tail before a shot had been fired only to find that in retreat it was just as slow and even more vulnerable. Harassed and then surrounded by the Maratha horse, it had finally chosen to capitulate rather than fight.

The resulting Wargaum (Wadgaon) Convention, signed on the spot in January 1779, was admitted even by its crestfallen British signatories to be ‘humiliatingin the highest degree’. Raghoba was to be surrendered, the advancing Bengal force was to be sent back, even Salsette was to be given up. There was implicit mention of British guilt, and two British hostages were handed over by way of guarantee for its implementation. Not since Bombay’s other capitulation nearly a century earlier to Aurangzeb had an Indian power forced such humiliating terms on the
Company. Hastings was profoundly mortified. This time he repudiated the agreement openly and, though it meant all-out war against the whole Maratha confederacy plus an abrupt end to his financial retrenching, he determined ‘to efface the infamy which our national character has sustained’.

Happily the Bengal contingent under Colonel Thomas Goddard, after protracted negotiations with the Bhonslas in what is now Madhya Pradesh, had crossed the watershed and was entering Maharashtra. On receiving news of the Wargaum fiasco Goddard, instead of turning back, forced the pace still harder and at last saluted the Indian Ocean at Surat having covered the final 300 miles in nineteen days. The march ‘through regions unknown in England and untraced on our maps’ was a personal triumph both for Hastings, who had authorized it against fierce opposition from his Council, and for Goddard who was now promoted to general and appointed Commander-in-Chief.

Thus removed from the ambit of Bombay’s faint-hearted counsels, Goddard attempted to dictate new terms to Poona. The negotiations dragged on throughout 1779 to no purpose. Both sides used the lull for a diplomatic offensive, with the Marathas pursuing a triple alliance with the Nizam and Hyder Ali – of which more later – while the British explored Maratha dissensions. By January 1780 the Gaikwar of Baroda had come over and Goddard moved north into Gujarat. Retracing Keating’s footsteps he took Dabhoi, rolled back the Poona forces and successfully stormed Ahmadabad.

Meanwhile Hastings had dispatched a second Bengal detachment under Captain William Popham to make common cause with one of Scindia’s disaffected neighbours in the country south of Agra. This modest diversionary tactic had the most unexpected results. With no guns and only 2000 men, nearly all sepoys, Popham invaded Scindia’s territory, took the fort of Lahar, and then moved presumptuously against Gwalior, the capital. A new front had been opened. Hastings urgently ordered more troops to reinforce Popham. It was over this order that Philip Francis broke his recent compact with the Governor-General not to interfere with the conduct of the war. Hastings accused him of bad faith; Francis issued his challenge. Thus it was that just before dawn on 17 August, in the midst of one of the Company’s most critical wars – and to the intense surprise of a small crowd of curious Indian villagers – the Governor-General and his leading councillor stood back to back, took fourteen paces, and emptied their pistols in one another’s direction.
Francis fell. Although only wounded he accepted defeat and soon after sailed from Calcutta to seek revenge in England.

A week later the news from Popham at Gwalior should have made Hastings’s cup of joy overflow. Gwalior, a classic table-top fortress elevated several hundred feet above the surrounding plain, and with its scarps of sheer rock crowned by battlements, was probably the strongest natural fortress in all India. It appeared impregnable; yet such was its strategic importance astride the main roads leading south from Delhi and Agra that no government claiming dominion over both the north and the peninsula had ever been able to ignore it. Hastings acknowledged that it was ‘the key to Hindustan’; but having no territorial ambition, he seems never to have entertained designs on it. News, therefore, that Popham and his men, without artillery but evidently with plenty of rope, had somehow scaled its cliffs, surprised its garrison, and were now in proud possession of the place caused a sensation. Comparisons were drawn with Wolfe at Quebec; Hastings likened its psychological impact to Plassey. Now at last the Marathas would surely listen to peace overtures.

They did no such thing; and any euphoria that Hastings allowed himself was extremely short-lived. For, within a month, Popham’s triumph, indeed the whole Maratha war, was overshadowed by a disaster of the first magnitude. Madras, hitherto unaffected by the war and in fact able to supply Bombay with troops, had contrived its own Wargaum – only rather worse. Its entire army had been virtually annihilated.

Since the end of the Seven Years War Madras had ceased to loom large in the Company’s thinking. Compared to Bengal, its political and commercial consequence had declined while its strategic importance was only really relevant at a time of war with France. Then proximity to Pondicherry and command of the sea lanes in the Bay of Bengal could be crucial to Calcutta’s security. Otherwise it was something of a liability, dependent on Bengal for provisions but somewhat careless of Bengal’s ever delicate relations with its neighbours. Although happy to remind Calcutta that it was the Madras army and the Madras government in the person of Robert Clive who had made Bengal what it was, ‘the gentlemen of the Coast’, instead of king-making and government, had remained true to their vocation – namely, making money.

Private trade with Aceh, Manila and Canton played its part but a new
and surer source of wealth had been discovered nearer home in the ever obliging person of Mohammed Ali. Now known as the Nawab Walajah, Mohammed Ali continued to rule the Carnatic without, like Mir Jafar and Mir Kasim, incurring the Company’s displeasure. This he managed by cheerfully accepting his role as a British puppet, gratefully incurring the considerable cost of maintaining Company troops, and happily dividing his entourage, which included eight European doctors, between no fewer than twenty sumptuous Madras residences. Of course, it was expensive and his indebtedness to the Company, heavy enough after the French wars, grew ever heavier. Here was a Nawab from whom six-figure ‘presents’ were not to be expected.

On the other hand, here was a Nawab whose rule was underwritten by the Company and whose financial embarrassment had a certain attraction to the investor. Loans to the Nawab were gilt-edged; it was like buying government stock except that the rates of interest (twenty to twenty-five per cent) were infinitely higher. So ‘the gentlemen of The Coast’ invested secretly but heavily, and the Nawab borrowed discreetly but excessively. Each benefited. The revenues of the Carnatic found their way into English pockets without all the hassle and recrimination that went with Bengal-style peculation; and the Nawab, with his political masters also his financial dependants, enjoyed an improbable degree of security and even indulgence.

To what extent the Nawab actually influenced policy must remain a matter of conjecture. Intrigue and rumour successfully concealed the full extent of both his financial and political connections. But his creditors certainly included more than one president of Madras plus a succession of councillors, while his political agents were active not only in the courts of India but also in that of St James. In 1770, much to the fury of the directors whose then plight made them especially sensitive to any government moves behind their backs, the Nawab received and greatly impressed Sir John Lindsay who, as well as commanding a visiting squadron of the Royal Navy, was accredited as a royal plenipotentiary to investigate the Nawab’s grievances against the Company.

Soon after, the Nawab secured Madras’s support for an unprovoked invasion and annexation of neighbouring Tanjore; its revenues were deemed a necessary security for yet more loans. In 1775 Pigot was reappointed to Madras specifically to rectify this abuse of power and oversee the restoration of Tanjore to its rightful Raja. But the Nawab and his creditors (the so-called ‘Arcot Interest’) were not to be deprived
of their gains so easily. Pigot was arrested by a majority of his own councillors and promptly died in captivity; some said it was from hard usage, others from ‘exposing himself to the sun while gardening’. The facts remain obscure in spite of subsequent convictions; but there can be no doubting the Nawab’s complicity. (This tangled affair is also notable for the brief reappearance of Henry Brooke, once of Negrais and Manila, who was one of the leading conspirators, and of Alexander Dalrymple, who had returned to Madras to lend support to Pigot, his erstwhile patron in the Balambangan project. Suspended from the Council at the time of Pigot’s arrest, Dalrymple returned to London with another noble cause to publicize.)

Unlike Tanjore, the Nawab’s other neighbours – Hyder Ali in Mysore and the Nizam in Hyderabad – posed more of a threat than a temptation. As the Nawab had impressed on Lindsay, the ideal guarantee of his own security and that of his Madras allies-cum-creditors would have been a counterbalancing alliance with the Marathas against Mysore and Hyderabad. But the problem here was Bombay whose difficulties with the Marathas commended a rather similar counterbalancing alliance but with Hyder Ali and the Nizam. In short, the diplomatic requirements of Madras and those of Bombay were directly opposed. Thus when Hyder Ali successfully overran the coastal principalities of what is now Kerala, Bombay applauded while Madras winced.

Similarly with the Nizam. To Hastings it was self-evident that while the Company was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Marathas, its alliance with the Nizam must at all costs be maintained. Yet Madras seemed to be going out of its way to antagonize Hyderabad, first by detaching (and then leasing to Mohammed Ali as a further security for loans) a chunk of the Northern Circars and then by interfering with the financial terms of the existing alliance. A possible explanation may be that, from past experience, Madras was far more concerned about the recently declared war (of American Independence) with France than it was about that with the Marathas. As soon as news of France’s entry into the war reached India, the Madras army had marched once again against Pondicherry and quickly reduced it (1778). The justification for interfering in Hyderabad was the presence there of a corps of French mercenaries. And similarly it was to eliminate the French outpost of Mahé that in 1779 an expedition from Madras infuriated Hyder Ali by barging into Kerala, which he now claimed as being under his protection.

Suddenly the danger of that unthinkable triple alliance between the
Marathas, Hyder Ali, and the Nizam looked a distinct possibility. Should the French also choose this moment to unleash one of their troop-carrying armadas into Indian waters, the Company must be done for. To Hastings, as to posterity, it beggared understanding that the subsidiary presidencies could have behaved so blindly, so selfishly, and so incompetently in this hour of crisis. What was the use of the Governor-General’s supervisory powers if they could be so blatantly flaunted?

Luckily, though, the French would arrive on the scene a year too late; and luckily Hastings, by repudiating Madras’s negotiations with the Nizam, was able to limit the damage done in Hyderabad. That left Mysore as the only power disposed to threaten Madras and so deflect Hastings from the war with the Marathas. It was well known that Hyder Ali held Mohammed Ali in profound contempt and regarded the Madras Council as perfidy incarnate. It was also well known that he was concerting his plans with the French and that his own army included both artillery and officers of French origin, including de Lally’s son. In the first Mysore War of 1767-9 he had easily out-marched the British forces and had successfully surprised Madras itself. (This was the action which precipitated the collapse of the Company’s stock in London and the dispatch of the three Commissioners in the ill-fated
Aurora.)
Undoubtedly Hyder Ali was the ablest commander of his day; and in his son, Tipu, he had a no less daring and charismatic lieutenant.

Nevertheless the Madras Councillors refused to take the Mysore threat seriously. Mohammed Ali warned them of Hyder’s intentions and so did their own agents. Yet as late as April 1780 the outgoing President of Fort St George was able to assure his countrymen that ‘there is the greatest prospect that this part of India will remain quiet’. Pondicherry had been taken, a Royal squadron under Sir Edward Hughes had arrived on The Coast, and a King’s regiment, the 73rd Highlanders, had just been disembarked at Madras. It would be madness for Hyder Ali to invade. Panic-mongers might urge a concentration of the Company’s forces, the requisitioning of stores and transport, the strengthening of outlying garrisons; but as Captain Munro of the Highlanders put it, ‘advice at this time was deemed an insult to judgement’.

Three months later, with the new President also pooh-poohing the idea of war, Hyder struck. In the space of a month he overran the entire Carnatic save for a few obstinate forts. The Nawab’s capital of Arcot was heavily invested and Hyder’s dreaded cavalry galloped past the paralysed British forces and entered the suburbs of Madras, ‘surrounding many of
the English gentlemen in their country houses, who narrowly escaped being taken’. The air blackened with smuts as the enemy scorched the earth in a wide arc round the city.

With the idea of relieving Arcot, the Madras army of some 4000 men under Sir Hector Munro eventually moved inland. At Conjeeveram (Kanchipuram) they halted to await the arrival of Colonel Baillie with a further 3000 men from the Northern Circars. By 6 September Baillie was within ten miles of the main army; but Tipu was opposing his progress, so Munro sent a detachment of 1000 to his aid. This combined force, now representing half Munro’s troops, was surrounded by Hyder’s entire army during the night of the 9th near a village called Polilur. Next day it was systematically destroyed in a savage encounter ‘such as cannot be paralleled since the English had possessions in India’. Sixty out of eighty-six British officers plus about 2000 British and Indian troops perished; about 1000 more were taken prisoner and eventually led away to Hyder’s capital of Srirangapatnam; there more died and still more would have preferred death, such were the privations they suffered.