Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (69 page)

Polilur stands apart from other battles in the Company’s history. The carnage is explained by the fact that there was no possibility of retreat but what rankled even more was the shame of knowing that it could so easily have been avoided. Munro could actually hear the battle going on. But so unreliable were his spies and informants, so hopeless his maps, and so cumbersome his forces that he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, could not locate the battlefield, and anyway was too encumbered to reach it. To make matters worse, his precipitate retreat to Madras involved further heavy casualties and resulted in the jettisoning of all his baggage and most of his guns. It is not an exaggeration to say that Polilur meant the virtual annihilation of the Madras army.

From Mysore’s point of view it was, of course, a glorious victory and in Tipu’s summer palace a series of magnificent murals was painted to commemorate the event. There they were duly noted by General Baird when nineteen years later he led the final assault on Srirangapatnam that ended the Mysore Wars; he recognized them because he was one of those who had been wounded at Polilur and then incarcerated at Srirangapatnam for four years.

British historians have naturally tended to play down the significance of such a total defeat but, taken along with Wargaum, it may be seen as evidence that India’s native armies were no longer easy prey. Many of the Mysore troops had been trained by British officers in the service of
Mohammed Ali or by French officers under Chanda Sahib and the Nizam; the words of command were given in English; native cavalry, instead of making fruitless charges against the British guns, were now cleverly deployed to outflank them. At Wargaum, the British forces had been under a joint command that included General John Carnac who had fought in the war against Mir Kasim. Sir Hector Munro, the dupe of Polilur, was also Sir Hector Munro, the victor of Baksar; and his successor in Madras, Sir Eyre Coote, had been the man responsible for goading Clive into action at Plassey and for hounding the French in the Carnatic during the Seven Years War. Nor were their troops in any way inferior. In Madras the proportion of King’s regiments, mostly Highlanders, to Company regiments was higher than ever. The fact was that reputations easily won in previous decades were now proving hard to sustain against the new generation of opponents. Even Goddard, the hero of the hour in Bombay, only narrowly avoided his own Wargaum when, at the end of the year, he too was bundled back down the Western Ghats after another abortive march on Poona.

News of Polilur reached Hastings in Calcutta a month after Gwalior and the duel with Francis. Although Bengal’s finances and its military resources were already at breaking point, he recognized that only ‘the most instant, powerful, and hazardous exertions’ could possibly save Madras and so prevent the French from snatching this golden opportunity to re-establish themselves in the peninsula. Requisitioning ships and stopping all investment in trade goods, he despatched by sea Coote, the most inspirational commander in India, along with 4000 troops and 1.5 million rupees. At the same time Colonel Thomas Pearse, his second in the recent duel with Francis and a close friend, was ordered to emulate Goddard’s feat and march overland from Bengal to Madras with a force of 5000. Meanwhile the Maratha war would have to take second place. Goddard was ordered to explore the possibility of an armistice with Poona while Hastings doubled his efforts to ensure the neutrality of the Bhonslas on Bengal’s border. Soon after, he began to put out feelers to a Scindia much impressed by the loss of Gwalior and subsequent reverses.

‘Bullocks, money, and faithful spies are the sinews of war in this country’, wrote Captain Innes Munro who seems to have fought in every engagement of the Second Mysore War and later published an account of it that makes happy reading compared to Orme’s wordy narrative of the earlier Carnatic wars. A dearth of all three had been responsible for Polilur plus, perhaps, the lack of a cipher which had resulted in Sir
Hector Munro (no immediate relation) and Colonel Baillie corresponding, as and when they could locate one another, in Gaelic. Coote brought money, and his enormous reputation improved the chances of securing reliable intelligence. But the problem of bullocks would remain unsolved in this Mysore war and the next. It was not till Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, assembled the largest cattle drove in history – over a quarter of a million bullocks – that the problem looked to be solved and the British at last advanced to that triumph of Baird’s at Srirangapatnam.

Frequently immobilized by this lack of transport and never able to move far from the coastal shipping which was their only alternative means of supply, Coote’s forces lumbered back and forth between Madras and Pondicherry for three years in a dreary repetition of previous Carnatic campaigns. In August 1781 the gallant Pearse, after a nine-month march ‘little short of that made by the ten thousand under Xenophon’, reached Madras. It was another dramatic pointer to the integration of the subcontinent. But in spite of this and later reinforcements, and in spite of several modest victories, the British proved incapable of pressing home their advantage against the mobile Mysoreans. Arcot fell, and most of the remaining forts were abandoned because of the difficulty of provisioning them.

Meanwhile, as in previous Carnatic wars, everything depended on the balance of power at sea. When Holland entered the war (of American Independence) as a French ally in 1781, Admiral Hughes duly battered into surrender the Dutch bases of Negapatnam and then Trinconomalee in Sri Lanka. A few months later the latter was recaptured by a large French squadron under Admiral Suffren who then in a long series of seldom decisive but always devastating engagements gradually got the better of Hughes. Coote’s sea-borne supplies were consequently interrupted and his manoeuvres further curtailed. An added distraction was that Suffren had landed 2000 French troops who promptly occupied Cuddalore and sat tight to await reinforcement. In the Madras roads a fleet of supply vessels was dashed to pieces by the inevitable typhoon; to the Presidency’s catalogue of problems was added that of famine.

In 1782, with Hughes obliged to retire to Bombay for refitting, Suffren briefly enjoyed complete supremacy on The Coast, raiding the Company’s settlements in the Circars and capturing supply vessels as far north as the mouth of the Hughli. Madras itself looked doomed until December brought better news; Hyder Ali had died – according to
Colonel Love, ‘of a carbuncle in the district now called North Arcot’ or, as the Madras Council reported, ‘of the violent discharge of a boil upon his back’.

Hastings was convinced that the tide was finally turning. In spite of destructive and unauthorized meddling by both Bombay and Madras, his diplomatic overtures to the Marathas were having effect. Any threat to Bengal had been removed by neutralizing subsidies to the Bhonslas while in the north Scindia had been converted from enemy number one to peacemaker and go-between in negotiations with Poona. The great confederacy was thus split and the resultant treaty of Salbai, worked out in 1782 though not ratified till later, came to be regarded by Hastings as one of his crowning achievements.

‘We want nothing from the Marathas except an alliance against Hyder’, he had written; and that, plus the retention of Salsette and a pledge from Poona not to admit the French, was all he got. Gwalior and Ahmadabad were surrendered; so were lesser acquisitions round Bombay like Bassein and Broach; no indemnity was involved. For four years of crippling expense and less than glorious campaigning, the compensation was minimal. In the crude terms used to evaluate advantage by Clive’s generation, Salbai looked like a climbdown and, by the next generation, like a stopgap. More recently its terms have been described as ‘humiliating’ (P. Nightingale).

But to Hastings it appeared otherwise; (and likewise to Luard in the
Cambridge History of India;
‘its importance cannot be over-estimated…[as] the turning point in the history of the English in India’). Allies like the Gaikwar had been rewarded, pledges in respect of Gwalior had been honoured, Scindia’s attachment to the British secured. Calcutta had substantiated its right to conduct the external affairs of the other settlements and to deal honourably and on terms of equality with India’s major power-broker. In the past local commanders and governors had too often sacrificed the Company’s broader interests for immediate financial or territorial gain. Such had been the cause of both the Maratha and Mysore wars, and it had to stop. Hastings rejected as impracticable the idea that the Company should forgo its political responsibilities and revert to a trading body, and as undesirable the idea that it must inevitably aspire to an all-Indian supremacy. Instead it should aim to exert, from behind its ring fence of subordinate states, a stabilizing and responsible influence as one among several of the subcontinent’s powers.

The keystones of Salbai were therefore a provision whereby both
signatories undertook to oblige their allies to observe the peace indefinitely and, following from that, a provision whereby the Marathas were to force Hyder Ali, their erstwhile ally, to withdraw from the Carnatic and likewise observe the peace thereafter. Here was the basis for a comprehensive and lasting settlement. It did indeed justify Hastings’s boast of ‘preserving India to Great Britain’ and should have been the Company’s noblest bequest to its successors in Whitehall. But Hastings was reckoning without his still obdurate colleagues on The Coast. If the treaty of Salbai foreshadowed a future in which the British were to play their part as an integrated and responsible polity, the treaty of Mangalore, which would end the Mysore War, resurrected the bad old days when it was each Presidency for itself and devil take the consequences.

To the glad tidings of Hyder’s timely death in December 1782 had been added news of a highly successful incursion into Mysore territory by part of the Bombay army, now freed from its Maratha commitments and operating against the common enemy from the Malabar Coast. As with the Marathas at Gwalior, Mysore had thus been taken in the rear and Tipu was immediately obliged to withdraw troops from the Carnatic and hasten home to meet the new threat. This should have provided Madras with an opportunity to strike back. But so obsessed was the Madras Council with the French presence and so dismal were the relations between its civil and military authorities that no advantage was taken of the situation.

In a dazzling little campaign Tipu’s battle-hardened troops made short work of the Bombay army, leaving only the heavily invested port of Mangalore in British hands. Then Suffren put in a new appearance on the other side of the peninsula. Three thousand more French troops were landed at Cuddalore; worse still, their commanding officer turned out to be none other than the great de Bussy. Hughes and his squadron doggedly returned to the fray; Suffren for once scored a convincing victory. That left the Madras forces minus the redoubtable Coote, who had died earlier in the year, besieging a numerically superior force in Cuddalore with a resurgent Tipu in their rear and the all-powerful Suffren blockading the coast. Seldom can news of a European peace, which reached Madras in June, have been so welcome. It remained only to settle accounts with Tipu.

Hastings urged that any negotiations with Tipu must be conducted from a position of strength and must fit within the context of Salbai.
Madras, invoking London’s orders for an early settlement, ignored him. It dispatched its own emissaries to Mangalore – which place had just surrendered to the Mysore army – and they, under conditions bordering on duress, concluded a peace, in March 1784, which restored all conquered territory. Thus, like Salbai, Mangalore brought no territorial accessions and in this respect Hastings should have welcomed it. But it also took no account of the general settlement envisaged by Salbai and contained neither compensation for British losses nor safeguards for the return of all the British prisoners.

Tipu was clearly delighted with these terms and would have no compunction in renewing hostilities with both the Marathas and the Company. Conversely, the Company’s officers, who for four years had been chasing his shadow or languishing in his prisons, saw them as an abject betrayal. So did Hastings. It was not for such a peace-at-any-price with rascally Mysore that he had squared the Marathas and impoverished Bengal. Either Mangalore must be repudiated, he argued, or failing that its terms must be altered. In fact the treaty was ratified. As of old, Hastings was again at the mercy of a hostile Council and a dangerous new rival.

Lord George Macartney, President of Madras since 1781, although lacking the wit and venom of Philip Francis, more than made up for them with an unsullied reputation and dazzling connections. Unduly conscious of these credentials but knowing nothing whatsoever of India or the Company’s business, he was typical of the coming generation of proconsuls and, of course, the very antithesis of Hastings. The quarrel had begun with his meddling in the Maratha negotiations and then with the conduct of the Mysore war and, in particular, over the authority vested in Eyre Coote. Macartney had complained that Coote rode roughshod over the Madras establishment and treated him personally as no more than his ‘bullock-agent’. Coote had responded by accusing him of sabotaging the war effort and had urged Hastings to suspend him.

Nor did Coote’s death defuse the situation. General Stuart, his successor, proved even more contemptuous of civilians and was duly removed by Macartney for ‘premeditated, wilful, repeated, and systematic disobedience’. The ‘removal’ was precisely that. Stuart, who had equipped himself with a cork leg to replace one shot away by Hyder Ali, had to be carried bodily from his quarters and in the same manner bundled on board a ship for London ‘with 59 packages’. The incident had serious repercussions. Stuart held his commission from the King, not the Company. Macartney had clearly overstepped his authority in dismissing him,
and all the other King’s officers promptly declined orders in protest. Although a full-scale mutiny was narrowly avoided, Stuart continued to demand satisfaction of Macartney and eventually exacted it with a flesh wound inflicted on the duelling ground.