21
Colonial Governance, British Politics
and the East India Company
Amar Farooqui
I
n the decades following the battle of Palashi (Plassey), almost
uninterrupted territorial conquest by the East India Company
was accompanied by the setting up of a mechanism to govern the
empire in a manner that would most suitably serve the interests of the
shareholders of the company. By the end of the century, this mechanism
also had to accommodate the interests of other sections of the ruling
class of Britain. Although the company was eventually compelled to
completely relinquish its hold over the Indian empire in 1858, there was
a steady onslaught in Britain against its privileged position right from
the time that it acquired control over Bengal. The British parliament
was the main arena of this contest. At the same time, this tussle was not
merely a matter that concerned elites in the metropolis. Politics in Britain
over the question of the Indian empire was constantly shaped by the
complex realities of politics in India, and the problems of dealing with
Indian elites. This essay is an attempt to examine some of the linkages
between the company’s strategies of state building, debates in Britain
about governing India, and responses of indigenous elites, by revisiting
key moments in the early history of the establishment of British rule
in eastern India.
Before we go further, reference may be made to the view put forth
by Peter Marshall that the company’s expansionist moves in the latter
half of the eighteenth century were not guided from London but were
prompted by its men stationed in India. In other words, it implies that
the acquisition of empire was not the result of a pre-planned scheme
Colonial Governance, British Politics  559
worked out by the directors of the company.1 A cruder version of this
argument, often stated in colonial writings, is that empire was acquired
accidentally or ‘in a fit of absence of mind’.2 Certainly, it would be
naïve to assume that Clive, or for that matter any other servant of the
company, set out for India with a readymade blueprint for founding an
empire or that the directors of the company had actually prepared such a
blueprint. It would be equally naïve, nonetheless, to suggest that Clive’s
actions had little to do with empire making. In the words of Partha
Chatterjee, ‘it is necessary to remind ourselves that when considering
larger processes such as the rise of modern empires, it is foolish to
expect to identify world-historical intentions in the careers of individual
politicians or generals’ and that ‘we should not expect to read intentions
of empire directly out of Clive’s letters . . . or the resolutions of the East
India Company directors in London’.3 Ultimately, the servants of the
company in India were serving the interests of shareholders residing in
Britain. These shareholders were, by the mid-eighteenth century, part of
the ruling class of the metropolis and hence of the empire.
Between 1757 and 1765, the company had increased its control
over the revenues of Bengal, and to a large extent those of Bihar (most
of Orissa was under the Bhonsles of Nagpur till the first decade of
the nineteenth century). As is well known, in 1765, the company was
appointed to manage the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa by
the Mughal emperor. It is significant that the arrangement had to be
formalized through a royal farman. The farman was conditional: the
company undertook to ensure that twenty-six lakh rupees would be
regularly transmitted to the imperial treasury out of the annual revenues
of the eastern provinces. This sum represented tribute or peshkash to
the emperor, an acknowledgement of his de jure sovereignty over the
territories that had come under the company’s authority after Palashi. We
shall return to the question of sovereignty in the final section of this essay.
Over the next decade, the company experimented with various
methods for exercising its authority effectively. A rather complicated
arrangement was put in place from 1765 onwards. Whereas the company
held charge of the revenue establishment, all other aspects of the
administration were supposedly the responsibility of the nawab (the
subadar of Bengal). This was the origin of the infamous ‘dual’ system
of government whereby the functions of the diwani (revenue and related
matters) was directly the company’s concern, while the nizamat (law and
order, defence, justice, and residual matters) was to be looked after by
the nawab. In practice, there was no clear-cut distinction. By the end of
560 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
the 1760s, the nawab had no troops left, except for ceremonial purposes,
so that defence and even maintenance of internal law and order had to
be undertaken by the company. In so far as the judicial machinery was
concerned, most civil matters (excluding disputes which were in the
area of personal law) were under the diwani. Criminal justice, though
under the jurisdiction of the nizamat, too began to be monitored by
European officials from the mid-seventies. Thus, the nizamat’s tasks
were progressively curtailed.
The two wings of the state apparatus, nizamat and diwani, were
unified in the person of Saiyid Muhammad Reza Khan. In 1765, Reza
Khan was appointed naib nazim or deputy to Nawab Najm-ud-daula,
the successor of Mir Jafar. Reza Khan was a nominee of the company,
more specifically of Clive.4 He was for a few years the deputy diwan
(without the title being conferred on him), till major changes introduced
in the revenue collection system in the early 1770s made the office
redundant. Further, by the mid-1770s, Reza Khan fell out of favour.
Abdul Majed Khan in his detailed study of the political career of Reza
Khan has convincingly demonstrated that his marginalization was the
result of intense factional feuds among the company’s senior officials
in India combined with intrigues by its directors in London.5 Many of
these disputes were over the question of how the company’s territories
were to be governed; others had their origin in personal animosities some
of which were linked to sharing the loot of Bengal. Interestingly, Reza
Khan’s services were not entirely dispensed with till as late as 1790–1
when the office of the naib nazim was formally abolished. The naib
continued to perform a few judicial functions beyond the 1770s. Reza
Khan ‘worked almost to the end upon cases which had been awaiting
his decision’ at the time when these functions were taken out of his
hands.6 He passed away in October 1791. The story of Reza Khan,
largely forgotten in textbooks, is worth noting as it tells us something
about the processes by which colonial rule was established in Bengal.
What needs to be underlined is that there might have been some
hope among sections of the indigenous elite of eastern India even in the
late 1760s and early 1770s that all was not lost and that some elements
of the pre-Baksar regime could be salvaged to reconstitute the state
in a manner that would allow the pre-colonial ruling class to exercise
limited power despite the ascendancy of the British. To label all toplevel Indian functionaries of the state after 1765 as outright collaborators
would be inappropriate. It took the company several years to replace
these functionaries with its own personnel. True, the company did try to
Colonial Governance, British Politics  561
regulate appointments for senior positions, but was not always successful.
The complicated administrative system introduced following the
acquisition of diwani, and the presence in it of officials who had served
under Alivardi Khan (d. 1756) or his successor Siraj-ud-daula, left some
room for manoeuvre till almost the mid-1770s. The marginalization by
1775 of Reza Khan, the most important Indian administrator of the state,
marked the end of the relevance of nawabi elements in the government.
We need to examine political trends in Britain which had a bearing on
the configuration of power in eastern India for a better understanding
of the processes that led to the monopolization of power in the Indian
empire by the British ruling class by the beginning of the nineteenth
century. This is what colonial rule was all about.
The East India Company’s all-powerful ‘court of directors’, with
their headquarters at Leadenhall Street in London, controlled and
supervised the entire range of the company’s operations in Asia, down
to the most minute detail. The court of directors comprised twenty-four
members who were elected by the ‘court of proprietors’. In the eighteenth
century (till the early 1770s), shareholders with minimum £500 stock
were entitled to vote in the court of proprietors (or, general court of
proprietors).7 Between the 1760s and the end of the century, more than
half the shareholders lived in and around London. Further, ‘the Company
was held firmly in the hands of an emerging gentlemanly capitalist
elite’.8 Interestingly, till the middle of the eighteenth century, nearly
one-third of the company’s shares were held by women. The proportion
of women shareholders began to decline after the 1760s; nearly 10 per
cent of the votes still continued to be held by them. Whereas women
attended meetings of the general court in fairly large numbers, it appears
that they did not participate in the deliberations.
The court of directors was ultimately answerable to the court of
proprietors whose main concern was that the company should remain
a profitable venture so that shareholders could earn large dividends.
Day-to-day functioning of the company was conducted through
various committees of the court of directors (e.g., standing committees
for warehousing, buying, shipping, etc.). The company’s successes,
especially in the century between 1660 and 1760, have been attributed
by some scholars largely to its efficient management practices which
allowed it to function like a modern joint-stock concern.9 It responded
quite promptly to market requirements; had access to extensive
information which it could utilize appropriately for decision-making;
and was able to maintain a considerable degree of discipline among its
562 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
employees. Such an understanding ignores the political and military
role of the company in the pre-1760 period. Of course, giant modern
corporations invariably seek to augment their power by political means
that are often inseparable from economic or market-place operations. As
a matter of fact, as Nick Robins has shown, present-day multinationals
have much in common with the East India Company. He has highlighted
the predatory character of both. A better understanding of the history of
the East India Company as a corporate entity has much contemporary
relevance. To quote Robins,
It remains an oddity that although companies are among the most powerful
institutions of the modern age, our histories still focus on actions of states and
individuals, on politics and culture, rather than on corporations, their executives
and their impacts. If we are to fully understand our corporate present, then we
must understand our corporate past—and this means grappling with the legacy
of . . . [the East India] Company.10
In any case, despite continuities, the company’s internal structure
underwent changes after 1760 as its activities were no longer confined
merely, or even primarily, to trade. For instance, many of its by-laws
were modified in the early 1770s to streamline the handling of its vastly
expanded remit. The number of its employees in London increased
(though not substantially) and their workload multiplied; separate sets
of clerks now handled files relating to commercial and imperial matters,
respectively; and skills of the managerial staff, trained to deal with
commercial business, had to be applied to the governance of an empire
about which most did not have much knowledge. H.V. Bowen, who has
produced perhaps the most exhaustive study on the subject, is of the
view that the post-1760 organization of the company was qualitatively
different from that of the preceding hundred years as it now had to
govern an empire.11 Among other things, it had to rely on the resources
of the British state which meant greater involvement in national politics
and incorporation into the imperial machinery of the metropolis. Bowen
underlines the relationship between the company, empire and the
dominant position that Britain acquired in the world economy by the
end of the eighteenth century: ‘It is undeniable . . . that the East India
Company played an important part in tying together the City of London,
the state, and the empire in a series of entangling relationships that
enabled resources to be mobilised at home and abroad, thereby helping
to facilitate the emergence of Britain as the greatest financial, imperial,
industrial, and military power on the world stage.’12
Colonial Governance, British Politics  563
The emergence of the company as a major territorial power also
resulted in intense factional conflicts among senior executives for control
over the company’s central establishment. These reached a high point
in the late 1760s when a bitter feud broke out between the group led
by Clive and that headed by Laurence Sulivan, a prominent director of
the company. Sulivan (1713–86) had served in India in the first half of
the eighteenth century. He was elected to the court of directors several
times between 1757 and 1785, and was chairman on four occasions.
From the early sixties, the court of directors had been divided into two
mutually hostile groups, the ‘Bombay squad’ led by Sulivan (Sulivan
had been posted in the Bombay Presidency), and the ‘Bengal squad’
comprising wealthy officials who had become prosperous through
plunder in the wake of Palashi. Clive, though he himself was not a
member of the court, became the leader of the ‘Bengal squad’.13 He
indirectly controlled a large number of votes in the general court.
The dispute became really acrimonious by the late 1760s and early
1770s, culminating in public denunciation of Clive and parliamentary
proceedings against him. These developments cast their shadow
on distant Bengal, so closely was the company’s government in
eastern India tied to affairs at home. Often the situation in England tends
to be ignored in discussions of post-Palashi Bengal. The marginalization
of Muhammad Reza Khan was in many ways the outcome of the
struggle between the Clive and Sulivan factions. Several other senior
Indian officials in the Bengal government too were caught in the crossfire
and at least one of them, Nandakumar Ray (Nuncomar; Nundcomar),
had to part with his life. The Nandakumar and Reza Khan issues were
intertwined, and in turn closely linked to what was happening at the
company’s headquarters in London. In a cynical move, the court of
directors had enjoined its officials in Bengal to use Nandakumar against
Reza Khan, in order to destroy the latter’s influence. The Nandakumar
episode belongs to the era of Warren Hastings and we shall return
to it later.
The East India Company’s activities in India became the subject of
parliamentary scrutiny in Britain from the 1760s onwards. This was a
consequence of the public articulation of a critique of its monopoly as
well as of the private fortunes amassed by its servants. The social and
political implications for Britain of the ‘new money’ brought back by
corrupt officials such as Clive were major issues in this critique. Such
officials came to be labelled by contemporaries pejoratively as ‘nabobs’
(literally, the anglicized form of ‘nawab’). These nabobs had ostentatious
564 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
lifestyles reflecting, in the eyes of contemporaries, the vulgar tastes of
social upstarts. They built expensive houses, usually of flashy and bizarre
architectural design. One of the better known of these, ‘Sezincote’ in
Gloucestershire, was the residence of Charles Cockerell who had served
in India and returned with a large fortune. The building (it was actually
constructed at the beginning of the nineteenth century) is designed like a
pleasure pavilion, with chhatris at its four corners, topped by a bulbous
dome, and is set in a ‘Mughal’ garden. Such structures must have caused
envy as well as resentment. The loud display of ‘new’ money by nabobs
was not appreciated either by the old aristocracy or the less affluent
sections of society.
A more serious issue was the potential that the nabobs had for
undermining democratic institutions. Advocates of electoral reform
attacked the blatant manner in which they used their wealth to purchase
access to parliament. The 1760s and 1770s witnessed a wave of bourgeois
radicalism of which the activist and parliamentarian John Wilkes
(1725–97) was the most forceful exponent. Wilkes’s campaigns have
to be placed against the backdrop of the shift which occurred in British
politics following the accession of George III (r. 1760–1820). George
III was ultra-reactionary in his political temperament. For nearly fifty
years prior to George III’s accession, parliament had been dominated
by the Whigs. Under the new king, their influence was reduced thus
strengthening the reactionary political tendencies represented by the
Tories. George III played an important role in this process. It should
be borne in mind that in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the
British monarch still had considerable powers for intervening directly
in matters of state, obviously at the cost of parliamentary privilege.14
On the other hand, there was a growing realization that parliament itself
was unrepresentative. We should also not lose sight of the fact that these
were the years in which the ground was being prepared in France for
the Revolution.
In 1763, Wilkes, who was then a member of parliament, was arrested
for publishing an article against the king. This became an occasion for
highlighting the issue of civil liberties and the extent to which they
were vulnerable to arbitrary actions of the state. Wilkes’s position was
vindicated when the manner of his detention was declared unlawful by a
court. He was then relentlessly persecuted by other means, forcing him
to seek refuge in France. Upon his return in 1768, he stood for election
to parliament and won. He was however convicted for having authored
the article mentioned earlier, and on other related charges, leading to
Colonial Governance, British Politics  565
his being incarcerated. This led to popular protests on a massive scale,
especially in London where the agitators were fired upon resulting in
several deaths (St. George’s Fields Massacre, May 1768). When he
was later expelled from parliament, he contested again. Though he was
successful, his opponent was declared the winner. The common people
of London rallied to his support, and eventually Wilkes was allowed to
sit in parliament. In other words, the public mood was strongly in favour
of greater democratization. The nabobs and the pro-company lobby in
parliament were seen as threatening this process so that the demand for
investigating the affairs of the company gathered momentum towards
the end of the sixties.
A parliamentary enquiry committee estimated that in the eight years
between Palashi and Baksar (this was the Clive era), nearly £2 million
had been appropriated by the company’s servants in India in the form of
so-called ‘presents’ from indigenous elites in Bengal. In the aftermath
of Palashi, ‘it had become generally recognized throughout England
that India had been pillaged by a growing succession of increasingly
unscrupulous nabobs’.15 In 1772, parliament initiated an enquiry into
Clive’s activities in India. Two committees were constituted for the
purpose: a select parliamentary committee with thirty-one members
and a secret parliamentary committee comprising thirteen members.
Although Clive was eventually exonerated and even thanked for the
services he had rendered to Britain, the massive loot indulged in by the
company’s servants was exposed during the course of the enquiry.16 The
remarkably detailed reports compiled by these committees documented
the rapaciousness with which the company and its servants had plundered
the resources of its Indian territories since 1757. The company’s
opponents now had sufficient evidence for launching a wide-ranging
offensive against it. Edmund Burke emerged in the late eighteenth
century as the foremost critic of the company’s wrongdoing in India. He
played a leading role in the trial of Warren Hastings, which commenced
with charges against him being presented to the House of Commons in
1786, commencement of impeachment proceedings in 1788 and ended
with his acquittal in 1795.
Hastings began his tenure as governor of Bengal (Fort William)
on 13 April 1772. Within a few days of his assuming charge, the naib,
Muhammad Reza Khan, was arrested. This was done on the instructions
of the court of directors. Hastings had the solid backing of the Sulivan
group which, as we have noted, was strongly opposed to Clive against
whom a parliamentary enquiry was in progress. This was just when,
566 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
in 1772, the company had directly taken over the diwani rather than
operating through Indian deputies. It has been suggested that the action
against Reza Khan was intended to publicly disgrace him so that the
company’s decision to ‘stand forth as Dewan’ (as the instructions of the
court of directors put it, implying that hitherto it had preferred to remain
hidden from the public view) could be justified. Simultaneously, Hastings
had been asked by the directors to exploit the ill-will that Nandakumar
bore towards Reza Khan:
We . . . cannot forbear recommending to you to avail yourself of the intelligence
which Nundcomar may be able to give respecting the Naib’s [Reza Khan’s]
administration; and while the envy, which Nundcomar is supposed to bear
this minister may prompt him to a ready communication of all proceedings
which have come to his knowledge, we are persuaded that no scrupulous part
of the Naib’s conduct can have escaped the watchful eye of his jealous and
penetrating rival.17
Nandakumar was one of the principal Indian officials in the
company’s regime, serving in several important positions after 1757.
On the eve of Palashi, he had been the faujdar of Hugli. He had close
links with the family of Mir Jafar, and by the late 1760s had become the
focal point of opposition to Reza Khan in the nawab’s establishment.
Hastings disliked him intensely, the reasons for which are not entirely
clear; Clive and his adherents had a good rapport with him. Incidentally,
the head of the powerful Jagat Seth financial concern was Nandakumar’s
son-in-law. Hastings was not particularly enthusiastic about prosecuting
Reza Khan or encouraging Nandakumar in this matter. Reza Khan was
acquitted in 1774, which reinforced the animosity between Hastings
and Nandakumar with tragic consequences for the latter. What has
gone largely unnoticed is that the well-known trial and judicial murder
of Nandakumar at the instance of Hastings was a continuation of the
proceedings against Reza Khan. Pursuing the clues provided by Majed
Khan in his study of Muhammad Reza Khan, one can see that the two
became victims of the company’s efforts to consolidate its position in
eastern India and their fates became interlinked because both were part
of the transitional regime set up by the company for ruling over Bengal.
Ironically, as Majed Khan observes, while ‘Nandkumar was quite ready
to help deprive Reza Khan of the Nizamat powers . . . he was no more
ready than the Khan to see Mughal sovereignty pass to the Company
[emphasis added]’.18 Nandakumar’s quarrel with Hastings was not a
personal matter, and cannot be comprehended if viewed in isolation.
Colonial Governance, British Politics  567
It is by removing the episode from its historical context that much of
colonial historiography has obfuscated its details.
The adverse impact that the so-called ‘dual government’ had on the
rural economy of eastern India was becoming apparent to the company’s
directors by 1770 as reports began filtering in of the immense hardship
caused by a famine in the previous year. Yet they had completely ignored
these reports. By the following year, the situation was even more serious.
According to Majed Khan, it was in this situation that the directors
began looking around for a scapegoat. Levelling charges against Reza
Khan suited their purpose well since he was the most visible face of
the government. The company could escape responsibility by throwing
the blame on Reza Khan. It was not just that he was accused of having
mismanaged things, but he was personally implicated for allegedly
aggravating famine conditions by hoarding foodgrains. He was formally
accused of having monopolized foodgrains during the famine. This
charge was untrue as was established during the enquiry. But it was
initially sufficient to damage Reza Khan’s reputation, making it easier
for the company to marginalize him.
As for Nandakumar, he had become a liability for some of the
company’s officials. His disclosures about the shady deals made by
Hastings threatened to undermine the latter’s position at a time when he
was engaged in a conflict with some of his senior colleagues in India.
In March 1775 (exactly one year after the acquittal of Reza Khan),19
Nandakumar accused Hastings of having taken large sums of money
from the widow of Mir Jafar as a bribe for giving her control over the
nawab’s household. Hastings had to admit that he had taken the money
although he refused to accept that this amounted to a corrupt practice.
Nandakumar knew far too many dark secrets; he could be dangerous
as an enemy and had to be eliminated. It was suddenly discovered that
a case had been pending against him for several years. This related to
a charge of forgery. The case was now speeded up. He was tried by the
supreme court of Calcutta, though it is not certain that the court had
jurisdiction over Indians. Nandakumar was found guilty and condemned
to death. He was executed in August 1775. The trial and hurried
execution of Nandakumar at this juncture, when he was attempting to
expose the transgressions of Hastings, could have been no coincidence.
Most colonial historians have found the episode embarrassing. In the
late nineteenth century, the leading colonial ideologue and jurist, James
Stephen, still found it worthwhile to present a brazen defence, couched
in legalese, of Hastings’s actions in his The Story of Nuncomar and the
568 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey.20 Elijah Impey (1732–1809), it may be
mentioned, was the first chief justice of the supreme court of Calcutta. He
presided over the bench that conducted the trial of Nandakumar in 1775
in which he played a proactive role. Impey’s intervention is supposed to
have been responsible for the decision to execute Nandakumar. Stephen’s
book was one among many that were produced in this period to present
a whitewashed version of the history of the early phase of British rule in
India in which Clive and Hastings were especially glorified as founders
of the empire. The fairly well-known damaging opinion of Burke and of
many of his contemporaries about these colonial administrators was an
embarrassment for the generation of Stephen. After all, Burke was held in
high esteem as a political thinker and champion of (‘restrained’) liberty.
His writings were read widely. The light these shed on the ignominious
beginnings of empire prompted colonial ideologues in the post-1857
period to rush to the defence of Clive, Hastings, et al.
Along with Hastings, Impey too had been taken to task by Burke
for the many improprieties he had committed while posted in Calcutta.
Parliament initiated an enquiry into his tenure as chief justice, a few
years before the Hastings trial. The Impey and Hastings proceedings
were conducted separately (they overlapped to some extent), although
the Nandakumar scandal was common to both. The second volume
of Stephen’s The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir
Elijah Impey is a crass justification of Impey’s conduct in the trial of
Nandakumar. In 1789, during the course of the Hastings trial, Burke
dwelt at length on the judicial ‘murder’ of Nandakumar.21 Gilbert
Elliot (later Earl of Minto; governor-general, 1807–1813), an associate
of Burke, took the lead in the parliamentary proceedings against
Impey. Following a lengthy debate on the question in May 1788, the
impeachment motion against Impey was defeated: 55 in favour, 73
against. Significantly, Elliot, while initiating the discussion, declared in
the context of English legal provisions that were invoked for convicting
Nandakumar, that ‘the king of England had no jurisdiction whatever over
India, Calcutta or Bengal; and that if he had, he had no right to extend
the authority of British laws over the persons, properties, and lives of
the natives of India’.22
Already then, by the late 1770s, Hastings was being talked about
in England as an example of the worst excesses of the company. The
campaign against him carried forward the larger political agendas of
the parliamentary enquiry relating to Clive, agendas that had to be
temporarily shelved due to the setback of Clive’s exoneration. The
Colonial Governance, British Politics  569
most serious charges against Hastings pertained to the criminal offences
committed by him against the raja of Banaras and two prominent women
of the family of the ruler of Awadh. Both incidents had their origin in
the subsidiary treaty inflicted upon Awadh and the huge financial burden
this entailed.
The details of the Banaras episode are fairly well known, and may
be briefly summarized. In the latter half of the eighteenth century,
Banaras had emerged as an autonomous petty-chieftainship which
included some of the eastern districts of present-day Uttar Pradesh as
well as Mirzapur and Jaunpur. The chiefs of Banaras acknowledged
the nominal overlordship of the subadar (nawab) of Awadh, but were
virtually independent. Upon the accession of Asaf-ud-daula as the ruler of
Awadh in 1775, the company had prevailed upon him to transfer to it his
authority over Banaras, although the raja continued to govern the region.
The company had already forced Awadh to accept a subsidiary ‘alliance’
in 1773, and the transfer of Banaras was linked to the appropriation of
resources ostensibly for the maintenance of the company’s contingents
stationed in Awadh. The company imposed an annual tribute amounting
to over twenty lakh rupees on Banaras as part of the 1775 arrangement.
This was a sum that the raja was clearly not in a position to pay.
Further, over the next five years, Hastings continuously demanded more
money, on behalf of the company, from the incumbent raja, Chait Singh
(1770–81). Finding it impossible to withstand such unrelenting pressure,
Chait Singh agreed to give a bribe of two lakh rupees to Hastings so
that he might be left in peace. The bribe was accepted, but this did not
put an end to the company’s bullying. Eventually, Chait Singh resolved
to resist. In the resulting showdown, Hastings entered Banaras with an
armed force (1781) and placed the raja under detention. A clash ensued
in which several of the company’s soldiers, including Europeans, were
killed by armed retainers of the raja. At the end of a brief military
campaign, the British re-established control over the Banaras region.
Chait Singh was divested of his title. Mahip Narayan Singh, a nephew
of Chait Singh, who happened to be a minor, was acknowledged as the
new raja of Banaras and the tribute due from the state was enhanced to
forty lakh rupees.23
The extortion of money from the mother and grandmother of Asafud-daula, the ‘begams of Oudh’, was another unsavoury incident in
which Hastings was implicated. In 1781, Asaf-ud-daula resorted to
seizing some of the private treasure belonging to the two women in
order to comply with the company’s persistent demands for payments to
570 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
meet the costs of the subsidiary force. A large part of the wealth in the
possession of the begams had been inherited from Shuja-ud-daula, Asafud-daula’s predecessor. Asaf-ud-daula was encouraged by Hastings to
confiscate the entire bequest. When the nawab showed a little reluctance
in using force against his mother and grandmother, the governor-general
ordered troops to be sent to Faizabad (where the begams resided) for
the purpose of seizing the treasure. The violent means employed by
the troops, including torture of employees of the two women, over a
period of several months, caused an uproar in England when news of
these happenings leaked out. As the campaign against Hastings gathered
momentum this, along with the Chait Singh episode, became a major
political issue. In 1786, the conduct of the governor-general in the two
affairs was denounced in parliament, paving the way for impeachment
proceedings to be initiated against him.
Edmund Burke’s famous speech at the beginning of the trial of
Hastings (1788), even while focussing on Hastings’s tenure, in fact
highlighted the systematic plunder carried out by the company’s servants
in Bengal as well as in other parts of the Indian empire since Palashi.
Hastings, Burke’s main target, was accused of having ‘wasted the
country, ruined the landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt
their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons,
and destroyed the honor of the whole female race of that country’.24
Nevertheless, the speech was an indictment not of empire per se but of
the manner in which the empire was being managed. Here too it was not
the East India Company but the company’s servants—servants such as
Hastings—in their individual capacity who came in for condemnation.
The trial of Hastings, which was an important component of what
Tillman Nechtman calls the ‘nabob controversy’, became an occasion for
examining the state of affairs in the company’s Indian empire essentially
from the perspective of contemporary politics in Britain: the nabob
controversy was
a broad public conversation about the shape of Britain’s involvement in
India, an involvement that was changing in the late eighteenth century and
that was coming to occupy more and more public attention as a result. This
was a conversation not about the limited few; it was a conversation about the
Company writ large and the tens of thousands who worked for the Company
at every level of British society.25
By the beginning of the 1770s, a consensus had emerged in British
politics that parliament ought to exercise some measure of control over
the company’s Indian possessions. It may be mentioned here that this
Colonial Governance, British Politics  571
was a time when imperial policies began to be seriously questioned
against the backdrop of problems that Britain was facing in keeping its
American colonies under control. It is no coincidence that the ‘Boston
Tea Party’, the prelude to the War of American Independence, occurred in
the same year as the enactment of the first major piece of legislation for
the ‘better Management of the Affairs of the East India Company’—the
Regulating Act of 1773.
The 1773 Act had several anomalies that were sought to be rectified
through a subsequent legislative measure, enacted in 1784. For instance,
the numerical composition of the new council (four members in addition
to the governor-general) constituted under the 1773 Act rendered the
governor-general vulnerable in case three of the members combined to
oppose him. This is precisely what had happened. Of the four newly
appointed members, three—Philip Francis, George Monson and John
Clavering—regularly voted against Hastings on virtually every major
issue. This was a reflection of serious differences over policies to be
pursued by the company for preserving and extending its authority.
Francis was the leader of the anti-Hastings faction in the council.
Opposition by the Francis group made it difficult for the governor-general
to function, at least till 1776 when Monson died. Luckily for Hastings,
Clavering died the following year, and Francis departed for England in
1780 after being wounded in a duel with Hastings. In England, Francis
joined the campaign against Hastings, publishing several pamphlets
(anonymously) to expose him. He became a member of parliament in
1784 and actively assisted with the trial against Hastings. Among the
issues on which Francis had a sharp difference of opinion with Hastings
in the Fort William council, an important one was that of land revenue
policy. Francis proposed a scheme for a permanent settlement, which
was to eventually provide the inspiration for the Permanent Settlement
introduced under Charles Cornwallis. In this context, it might be
worthwhile to quote Ranajit Guha who examined in detail the intellectual
contribution of Francis to the theoretical principles underlying the
Permanent Settlement:
To contemporaries Francis’s reputation was slightly higher than that of Warren
Hastings: but later historians reversed the scales. During the greater part of his
[Francis’s] career he was involved in issues of English politics which had very
little to do with India; yet the manuals preserve only the memory of his Indian
intrigues. The records of the period contain much evidence of his powerful
and original ideas relating to the economy of Bengal; in the standard histories,
however, his influence on Cornwallis’s land laws is either not mentioned at
all or passed over with only an incidental bow. How could this happen? The
572 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
answer is that Francis has been the victim of second thoughts about Warren
Hastings. All the luminous adjectives applied to Hastings’s Indian record are
in fact a nineteenth-century invention.26
The new legislation relating to India, which came to be known
as Pitt’s India Act of 1784, was passed immediately after the general
election of 1784 in which William Pitt (Pitt the Younger) and his Tory
party won a large majority in the House of Commons. Pitt was to
remain prime minister for the next two decades. The election had been
necessitated by the dissolution of the house, which in turn was the
outcome of serious disagreements over, among other issues, the manner
in which the Indian empire was to be governed. There was already an
ongoing campaign for the recall of Hastings from India. Further, Britain
had lost its American colonies by now, resulting in widespread criticism
of colonial policies.
British reverses in the War of American Independence, especially
the military debacle at Yorktown in October 1781 in which troops led
by Charles Cornwallis were routed and had to surrender, led to a serious
political crisis. The Tory ministry of Frederick North (1732–92) which
had been in office for twelve years, since 1770, had to resign on the
American question when it was defeated in a vote on a no-confidence
motion in parliament (1782). In March 1782, North was succeeded by
Charles Rockingham as prime minister who set in motion the process
culminating in peace with America (1783). Rockingham was the leader
of the more radical section of the Whigs, which included Burke. He had
briefly been prime minister in 1765–6 (Burke was the private secretary of
Rockingham during his first tenure as prime minister, and later emerged
as a prominent ideologue of the Rockinghamites). Throughout the period
that North was in power, Rockingham and his adherents had consistently
criticized the policies of the Tory government. North had the backing
of George III; the Rockingham Whigs opposed royal interference
in politics.
Rockingham passed away in July 1782. His death led to further
complications. A new Whig ministry was formed under William
Shelburne despite the objections of George III. Nevertheless, some of
the leading Rockingham Whigs such as Charles Fox were not prepared
to accept the leadership of Shelburne. In a dramatic political swing,
Fox joined hands with North whom he and his colleagues had opposed
all the while that North had been prime minister (1770–82). The Fox–
North coalition ministry (April–December 1783) was formally headed
Colonial Governance, British Politics  573
by William Bentinck, Duke of Portland (father of William Bentinck;
governor-general, 1828–35). George III detested Fox, not the least
because there was a ‘whiff of republicanism’ about him. In his biography
of George III, Jeremy Black observes that the republicanism of Fox and
his political colleagues ‘put them outside the general run of politicians
angling for power, for republicanism had scant support among the
political élite’.27
In the latter half of 1783, the Whig-led coalition government had
introduced a bill that was intended to place the company’s territories in
India directly under the British government. Burke had played a major
role in drafting the bill. In his speech on the bill, Burke stated that ‘it
was intended to form the Magna Charta of Hindostan’. Although the
House of Commons passed the bill, it was defeated in the House of
Lords, leading to the dismissal of the ministry. George III used his
influence to have the bill rejected since its provisions were seen as an
attack on private property and the special privileges of the company. The
company’s possessions and the profits of its shareholders were considered
sacrosanct. The East India Company deployed the wealth of its officials
and shareholders, derived from the plunder of India, to mobilize opinion
against the bill. These funds also ensured Pitt’s enormous success in
the election of 1784.28 Parliament had been dissolved in March 1784
and Pitt’s victory in the general elections that followed was seen more
as a vote in favour of the George III. The India bill of the previous
government was discarded and a new bill (which became the India
Act) was drafted. Pitt, barely twenty-four years old at this time, would
obviously have been guided by experienced ‘India hands’ while finalizing
the proposals relating to India.
The most important feature of the 1784 Act, as any standard
textbook would tell us, was the introduction of a permanent mechanism
for monitoring, on behalf of parliament, the administration of the
Indian empire. A body consisting of six members, who were designated
as ‘commissioners for the affairs of India’, was constituted for the
purpose. This body, generally known as the ‘board of control’, became
the main instrument till 1858 for parliamentary supervision over
the Indian empire. The board of control included two high-ranking
cabinet ministers.
Whereas Burke did not succeed in having Hastings convicted, the
high profile trial that dragged on for nearly a decade kept the company’s
affairs in the limelight. There was growing opposition by this time to
its monopoly over the commerce with India and China. Private traders
574 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
were keen to share in the profits of this commerce and resented their
exclusion. The company’s interests were at variance with those of the
Lancashire manufacturers. Towards the end of the eighteenth century,
the company was increasingly focusing on the import of Chinese tea
and silk. The Indian empire was vital for procuring these commodities.
The so-called ‘trade triangle’ devised by the company involved the
supply of opium and raw cotton from India to China. Lancashire cotton
textiles obviously had no place in this scheme of things. Of course by
now the company’s earnings were no longer confined to its commercial
profits. It had access to the resources of its territories in India. What is
more, the greatly enlarged scope of the company’s activities—political,
administrative, military, commercial, technical—necessitated the
cooperation of several sections of British society. By the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the Indian empire was no longer the concern of
just a handful of merchant capitalists. With ‘free trade’ becoming the
dominant economic doctrine in Britain, it was even more difficult for
the government to resist demands for the termination of the company’s
monopoly.
The company nevertheless fiercely contested the proposal to
abolish its Indian monopoly when its charter came up for renewal in
1813. It mobilized many of its senior functionaries living in retirement
in England—the aged Warren Hastings for example—to oppose the
proposal. It also tried to enlist public support for its cause by deviously
arguing that unrestricted access to India would lead to large-scale
emigration eventually resulting in European settlers demanding
independence from the mother country as had happened in the case of
the American colonies. The Indian empire would thus be lost to Britain.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, there was a debate over
the desirability of encouraging European settlement in India. Though
the company was strongly against this idea, there were some, including
a few of its own leading officials, who thought it would help in the
dissemination of the achievements of Western civilization.29 We should
bear in mind that British subjects required the company’s permission to
reside in India. This permission was not easily granted. And even when
it was, they could not own land in the company’s Indian territories.
Parliament was, on the other hand, unconvinced of the company’s
arguments and the Charter Act of 1813 put an end to its monopoly
over India. Though the company attempted to make adjustments
in its pattern of trade with India, it was unable to compete with the
large number of private traders who now entered the Indian market to
sell English cotton goods. Stocks of goods imported by the company
Colonial Governance, British Politics  575
from India piled up in its warehouses in London and could not be
sold. The China trade, over which the company continued to retain
its monopoly for another two decades, became the mainstay of its
commercial business.
After 1757, the company had to establish its position as a lawful
authority in relation to its subjects in the Indian subcontinent. This
required it to adapt itself to, and manipulate, pre-colonial constitutional
arrangements whereby its governance could be legitimized. British rule
could be made acceptable on a long-term basis only if the company was
perceived to be the rightful ruler of its Indian territories rather than as
a commercial enterprise.30 This problem was solved by making use of
the traditional structure of governance and loyalty that had evolved by
the mid-eighteenth century. The Mughal emperor occupied a central
place in this structure. He was regarded as the legitimate sovereign of
the bulk of the territories in the subcontinent that had constituted the
Mughal Empire. Yet rulers of many of the ‘successor’ regional kingdoms
such as Hyderabad were completely independent: the legal fiction was
that the emperor had delegated to them the authority to govern their
respective states.31 This arrangement was usually formalized through
a Mughal farman and/or the presentation of nazr (token tribute) to the
emperor and the conferment by him of khilat (robe of honour). The
offering of nazr signified recognition of the overlordship of the emperor;
the conferment of khilat indicated the acceptance of the token tribute.
There was a highly evolved ritual that made visible and announced this
relationship in symbolic terms. As the company’s territories extended to
what had been the core areas of the Mughal Empire, it became necessary
for the company to fit itself into the existing framework and thereby
seek legitimacy for its rule.32 The company reluctantly recognized the
de jure authority of the Mughals and strictly adhered to the rituals of the
Mughal darbar till at least the late 1840s. On the other hand, it always
maintained an ambiguous position on the question of sovereignty. The
issue of sovereignty was resolved after the revolt when the British
monarch was declared to be the legitimate ruler of the Indian empire
in 1858, and the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah II was exiled to
Rangoon. Although from c.1800 onwards, Britain asserted in terms of
international law that it had sovereign rights over the company’s Indian
territories, these were claims made essentially with respect to Western
imperialist powers. It should not be assumed that such declarations
were necessarily accepted in India or that they altered the actual status
of sovereignty.
One might recapitulate here some of the significant developments of
576 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which have a bearing
on this question. It was during the last three decades of the eighteenth
century that the Mughal emperor eventually ceased to have any real
power. From 1784 onwards, Shah Alam (r. 1759–1806) was under the
‘protection’ of the Sindias who administered Delhi and the surrounding
region on behalf of the emperor. The formal ceremony whereby Mahadji
Sindia was delegated authority was conducted with traditional solemnity
in which the protocol of the Mughal court was scrupulously observed.33
In 1803, British forces led by Gerard Lake captured Delhi after
defeating Sindia troops at the Battle of Pat­parganj.34 Percival Spear
points out that Shah Alam
was the nominal suzerain of both the contending parties, for the British held
Bengal by the grant of the Diwani in 1765, and Sindia was his Vakil-i-Mutlaq
or imperial Regent. One of the declared objec­tives of Lord Wellesley [the
governor-general] was to seize Delhi and the Jumna Doab, and ‘the possession
of the nominal authority of the Mughul’. . . . Officially, of course he [Shah
Alam] sided with his Regent and treated the Company as a rebellious vassal.35
The emperor’s direct authority was henceforth confined to the Red
Fort and to members of the royal family (several hundred members of
the royal family resided in the Fort). Actual administrative control over
Delhi and the surrounding areas passed into the hands of the British
resident. The resident also exercised some indirect control over what
went on inside the Fort.36
One would like to emphasize that respect was shown for the
emperor’s majesty right up to 1857. British offi­cials strictly adhered
to court etiquette. They had to dismount at some distance from the
Diwan-i-Am of the Red Fort and approach the interior on foot; only
high officials (mainly the resident) had access to the emperor; entry to
the Diwan-i-Khas was a special privilege and was strict­ly by invitation;
there were appropriate forms of greeting when approaching the emperor;
and letters addressed to him had to be written in the appropriate formal
style. When one of the residents posted in Delhi, Francis Hawkins
(1829–31), was discourteous to the Shah Alam’s successor, Akbar
Shah (r. 1806–37), he was prompt­ly recalled.37 While admonishing
Hawkins for his conduct, Fort William declared that he had ‘been
wanting in the proper observance of the established forms of etiquette
to which all natives of Rank attach much importance and which are
peculiarly due from the British representative towards the Royal Family
at Dehlie . . .’.38
Colonial Governance, British Politics  577
Besides, nazr was presented to the emperor on behalf of the company
on important occasions. The offering of nazr signified that the company’s
officials acknowledged the overlordship of the Mughal emperor. Nazr on
behalf of the governor-general was presented on several formal occasions
every year (the governor-general’s nazr amounted to 101 gold mohurs
on each occasion).39 The governor-general’s nazr was discontinued in
the early 1820s. Nevertheless, other officials, including the resident,
continued to present nazr down to 1844. When the company’s officials
in India decided to stop the offering of nazr in 1844, the decision was
over-ruled by the court of directors in London, though this was never
conveyed to the emperor. He was reluctantly compensated by being paid
the monetary equivalent of the resident’s nazr as part of his income,
which emptied the payment of all symbolic significance.40
From the point of view of the Mughals, the company was governing
the empire on behalf of the emperor. As for the East India Company, it
would appear that it preferred ambiguity on the question of sovereignty.
Categorically disowning the sovereign status of the Mughal emperor
would have implied acknowledgement in unequivocal terms of the
sovereignty of the British crown over the Indian empire. In effect, this
would have meant greater parliamentary intervention. The question
was decisively resolved only in 1858 when the crown directly assumed
charge of the Indian territories hitherto governed by the East India
Company, reducing simultaneously rulers of all princely states to the
status of subjects of the British crown. Even at this stage, the company
did not give up without a fight. Its position was forcefully articulated
by John Stuart Mill who was particularly critical of Henry Palmerston
for the abolition of company rule.41 Mill was strongly opposed to the
interference of parliament in Indian affairs, carrying forward some of
the arguments advanced by prominent company administrators of the
early nineteenth century such as Thomas Munro and John Malcolm.
As Lynn Zastoupil has shown in his study of John Stuart Mill’s ideas,
for these administrators, India could not be ruled through institutions
or conceptions that were products of British historical experience.
These were not appropriate for conditions in India. Rather, a system of
government that would be relevant to India would have to be based on
very different principles:42
The imperial experience suggested that informed sympathy was more vital
in some instances than select committees of enquiry for the maintenance of
good government. The example of British India indicated that professional
578 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
training in the culture and condition of a subject country could be more
valuable than expertise in the nuances of party politics or parliamentary
procedure.
Specialized knowledge of the Indian empire was thus essential for
governing the empire well, and this was knowledge that parliament did
not possess. Such knowledge could only be acquired through ‘prolonged
and intimate contact with the difficulties of ruling an area different in
many respects from Britain’.43
One would like to suggest that an influential section of colonial
ideologues who upheld the superiority of company rule were convinced
that the peculiar form of governance which had evolved in India had
to be shielded from excessive parliamentary scrutiny and control. This
could be achieved by distancing the British Indian government from
the crown by obfuscating the issue of sovereignty. It is true that the
Charter Act of 1813 had proclaimed the sovereignty of the British
crown over the company’s territorial possessions, and this had been
recognized by European powers in 1814 (Treaty of Paris). Nevertheless,
the matter was still unresolved in 1858 when Bahadur Shah Zafar was
put on ‘trial’. In an important essay published in 1922, F.W. Buckler
argued persuasively that ‘the source of the Company’s authority in
India lay, not in the Charters of the King of England, nor in the Acts of
the British Parliament, nor in the sword, but in the farmans of the
Mughal emperor’.44
Buckler’s views were largely ignored; Douglas Dewar and H.L.
Garrett published a critique rubbishing his argument, underlining the
powerlessness of the Mughal emperors of the early nineteenth century.45
Buckler’s understanding challenged the common sense in colonial
historiography of the post-Revolt period about the political role of
the last three Mughal emperors. It was embarrassing after 1857–8 to
recognize the relationship between the East India Company and the
emperor, wherein there was an acknowledgement of the sovereignty of
the Mughals. The history of that relationship was completely erased.
In his recent study of the colonial state and processes of legitimation,
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya observes that the ‘stout defence of the imperial
point of view’ by Dewar and Garrett ‘completely misses the point made
by Buckler that the point at issue is, who was the de jure sovereign,
there being no question about the situation of the “powerless House of
Timur” since 1803, nor about the superior coercive power exercised by
the East India Company’.46 It was in the interests of the company to
Colonial Governance, British Politics  579
keep its status in relation to the Mughal emperor on the one hand and
the British crown on the other ill-defined so that it could retain some
autonomy and prolong its existence as an entity that was distinct from
the British state.
Notes
1. See P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead (Eastern India 1740–
1828), 1987, The New Cambridge History of India, II.2; repr., paperback
edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 91.
2. J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures, 1883;
repr., facsimile edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 8.
3. Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice
of Power, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012, p. 33.
4. Muhammad Reza Khan belonged to an Iranian family which migrated to
India at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Reza Khan himself was
born in Shiraz. His father was a physician who moved to Murshidabad
where he was given a position at the court of Alivardi Khan. Subsequently,
he married into the family of Alivardi Khan. This made him a member
of the Bengal aristocracy, giving him access to political power. He seems
to have played an important role in behind-the-scenes manoeuvres in the
critical period preceding the company’s break with Mir Qasim. He aligned
himself with the British who, by the middle of the 1760s, had come to
recognize him ‘as a very important person in Bengal’. Abdul Majed Khan,
The Transition in Bengal, 1756–1775: A Study of Sayid Muhammad Reza
Khan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 31.
5. Khan, The Transition in Bengal, 1756–1775, pp. 297 ff.
6. Ibid., p. 1.
7. H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and
Imperial Britain, 1756–1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006, pp. 105 (fn. 65), 106.
8. Bowen, The Business of Empire, p. 116. The adjective ‘gentlemanly’ in
this context refers to a class that neither lived by its labour, nor generally
on income from land. In the words of Bowen:
some of the stockholders who bestowed gentlemanly status upon
themselves could equally be described in occupational terms as merchants,
financiers, or tradesmen. It is clear that for reasons of self-esteem a good
proportion of the male stockholders wished to distance themselves from
the world of work and thus, legitimately or otherwise, they identified with
the leisured élite or rentier class. They might therefore be considered to
have been archetypal ‘gentlemanly capitalists’.
Ibid., p. 104.
580 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
9. See K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of the East India Company,
1660–1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
10. Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East
India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, Hyderabad: Orient
Longman, 2006, p. 18.
11. See Bowen, The Business of Empire, p. 6. The classic study of Lucy
Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics,
Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952, is concerned primarily with the manner
in which the question of the company’s Indian empire impinged upon
contemporary British politics rather than with the internal organization of
the company, which is the focus of Bowen’s work. Chaudhuri, as is obvious
from the title of his book (see fn.9), focuses on the century preceding 1760.
12. Bowen, The Business of Empire, p. 28.
13. See George K. McGilvary, Guardian of the East India Company: The Life
of Laurence Sulivan, London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006, pp. 89, 95–6.
14. See Jeremy Black, George III: America’s Last King, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006, Chapter 3.
15. Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of
Imperial Britain, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the
Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 9.
16. Clive died in 1774, perhaps due to an overdose of opium which might
have been a case of suicide.
17. Cited in Khan, Transition in Bengal, 1756–1775, p. 302.
18. Ibid., p. 344.
19. Confirmation of the acquittal by the court of directors was intimated to
the Calcutta authorities in March 1775.
20. James Fitzjames Stephen, The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment
of Sir Elijah Impey, 2 vols., London: Macmillan, 1885.
21. See Stephen, The Story of Nuncomar, vol. I, p. 74, fn. 1.
22. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, vol. XXVII,
London: T.C. Hansard, 1816, p. 416.
23. In 1795, the company directly took over the administration of the area,
reducing the raja to a titular position.
24. Edmund Burke, ‘Speeches in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings’, The
Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 10, 1887; repr., New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 141.
25. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth Century
Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 14.
26. Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of
Permanent Settlement, 1963; repr., Delhi: Orient Longman, 1982, p. 61.
27. Black, George III, p. 261.
28. The role played by George III in ousting the Fox–North coalition, and in
mobilizing support for Pitt by overseeing the entire election campaign is
well documented. See Black, George III, pp. 262, 266.
Colonial Governance, British Politics  581
29. See Chatterjee, Black Hole of Empire, pp. 141 ff.
30. Within India, the company’s servants, whatever high positions they
might hold in the bureaucracy, were located in the firm’s rigid managerial
hierarchy of ‘writer’, ‘factor’, ‘junior merchant’ and ‘senior merchant’. The
company also engaged in extensive commercial activity till the beginning of
the nineteenth century so that a large number of its employees were actually
involved in buying and selling and/or import-export of commodities.
31. Even in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, rulers of various
princely states eagerly sought a token of recognition from the Mughal
emperor in order to formalize their investiture at the time of succession. To
cite just one example, the Sindia rulers continued with their long-standing
practice of applying to the emperor for legitimizing their authority—even
when the authority was underwritten by the company. In 1833, when Baiza
Bai, the widow of Daulat Rao Sindia, who had assumed the powers of
regent at Gwalior since 1827 on behalf of her adopted son Jankoji Rao, was
deposed in a coup, Jankoji took over the administration of the state with
the concurrence of the British. Nevertheless, he still thought it necessary
that he should get a khilat from the emperor, though he was eventually
dissuaded from taking this step by the company’s resident at the Sindia
court. Resident, Gwalior, to Government of India, 21 September 1833,
National Archives of India, Foreign Department Political Consultations
(FDP), 31 October 1833, no. 31.
32. See Gail Minault, ‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Robing and Sovereignty
in Late Mughal and Early British India’, in Robes of Honour: Khilat in
Pre-Colonial and Colonial India, ed. Stewart Gordon, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2003, pp. 126–39.
33. See W. Francklin, The History of the Reign of Shah-Aulum, the Present
Emperor of Hindostaun, 1798; repr., Lucknow: Pustak Kendra, 1973,
pp. 89–94. Francklin provides us with some details of the ceremonies
conducted at the darbar on this occasion:
In full Durbar, His Majesy invested him [Mahadji Sindia] with the office
of Ameer Al Omrah; and as an additional mark of favour, ordered a patent
to be made out for the Paishwah of the Poonah Durbar (under whose
authority Sindiah professed to act) constituting him [the peshwa] Vakeel
Mutluck, or Absolute Director General of the Affairs of the Empire, with
the Neabut [deputyship] of that office to Sindiah himself. On receiving
his honorary dress, the new minister presented offering of [sic] five lacks
of rupees, and retired from the presence.
Ibid., History of Shah-Aulum, p. 94. Also, see letter from Major James
Browne, to Warren Hastings, 1 December 1784, and Browne to Hastings,
5 December 1784, in K.D. Bhargava, ed., Browne Correspondence, Indian
Records Series, New Delhi: National Archives of India, 1960, pp. 226–7.
34. For a recent historical reappraisal of the Battle of Patparganj, see Randolf
H.G. Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Conquest of India:
582 œ a m a r fa r o o q u i
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
The Struggle for Control of the South Asian Military Economy, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 172–88.
Percival Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 1951; reprinted in The Delhi
Omnibus, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 32. In referring
to Mahadji Sindia as vakil-i-mutlaq, Spear probably relied on Jadunath
Sarkar’s version that was based on Marathi sources. According to Sarkar,
the peshwa was appointed deputy to the emperor, while Mahadji Sindia
was conferred the title vakil-i-mutlaq ‘without any reference to the
Peshwa’. Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, vol. III (1771–88),
3rd edn., Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons, 1964, pp. 207–8; Bhargava,
Browne Correspondence, p. 226, fn. 1. However, later references suggest
that the title vakil-i-mutlaq was indeed intended for the peshwa. See Fort
William to Court of Directors, 21 November 1790, in Syed Hasan Askari,
ed., Fort William-India House Correspondence, vol. XVI (1787–91),
Delhi: National Archives of India, 1976, p. 351; Fort William to Court
of Directors, 9 January 1796 and Court to Fort William, 4 October 1797,
in H. Heras, ed., Fort William-India House Correspondence, vol. XVIII
(1796–1800), Delhi: National Archives of India, 1974, pp. 104, 174; and
Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, vol. V (1789–1803), repr., New Delhi:
Orient Longman, 1992, p. 65.
Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, pp. 37–8 and chapter V.
Francis Hawkins was initially asked to take charge of the Delhi Residency
in 1829 in the wake of the crisis created by proceedings against the
incumbent resident, E. Colebrooke. For details of the Colebrooke case, and
the circumstances leading to Hawkins’s appointment, see Spear, Twilight
of the Mughuls, Chapter VIII.
Government of India to Francis Hawkins, 19 March 1830, FDP, 19 March
1830, no. 7. The complaints against Hawkins and his responses are set
out in considerable detail in Hawkins to Government of India, 1 February
1830, FDP, 19 March 1830, no. 6.
There were about seven occasions when nazr was presented at formal
darbars, the most prominent being the anniversary of the accession of the
emperor; the two Ids; Nauroz; Dussehra; and Basant. A strict hierarchy
was maintained in the amount of nazr that was presented—apart from the
101 gold mohurs on behalf of the governor-general, 51 gold mohurs were
presented on behalf of the commander-in-chief and 21 gold mohurs by
the resident (who further presented another 5 mohurs on being bestowed
a khilat).
Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, pp. 55–7.
Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994, p. 176.
Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India, p. 182.
Ibid., p. 183.
Colonial Governance, British Politics  583
44. F.W. Buckler, ‘The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny’, Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, vol. V, 1922, p. 74.
45. Douglas Dewar and H.L. Garrett, ‘A Reply to Mr. F.W. Buckler’s: The
Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 4th series, vol. VII, 1924, pp. 131–65.
46. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Colonial State: Theory and Practice, Delhi:
Primus Books, 2016, p. 72.