William Dalrymple has done it again. After reading his The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, I had thought that this must be his zenith in the oeuvre of popular writing of history. Not so – his Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan was as excitingly written.
Dalrymple has returned with his most ambitious tome yet, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and The Pillage of an Empire. Ambitious on account of its historical scale and scope, the book is 557 pages in length, and deals with most of India – starting with the setting up of the East India Company in 1600 and ending in 1833 when the British Parliament severely limited the Company’s charter, by when all of India that really mattered had been won by the Company.
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and The Pillage of an Empire
William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019
To give a flavour of its principal characters, the book has Robert Clive, Siraj-ud-Daula, Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim, Shah Alam, Ghulam Qadir Khan the Rohilla, Shuja ud-Daula, Philip Francis, Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke, Haidar Ali, Tipu Sultan, the brothers Wellesley (Richard the governor general and Arthur, later the Duke of Wellington as an army commander), the Maratha chieftains… the list goes on. With such characters, The Anarchy spans a huge geography: Madras, Mysore, the Maratha territories, Bengal, Bihar, Benaras, Lucknow, Allahabad and Delhi.
Given this scale and scope, it is difficult to review the book in its entirety. Let me, therefore, describe one large chunk — Dalrymple’s narrative of Warren Hastings (1732-1818), the Governor General of Bengal from 1773 to 1785.
Bitter battles
During his first stint in India (1750-64), Hastings demonstrated his proclivity for hard work, governance, his learning and love for Bengali, Sanskrit and Persian, his concern for the native administration, and his resentment of the trading abuses that were being carried out by the Company’s servants.
According to him, exploitation by the Company’s agents after the Battle of Plassey (1757) were so “scandalous” that he could “no longer put up with them without injury to my own character… I am tired of complaining to people who are strangers to justice, remorse or shame”.
Unfortunately, the Calcutta council rejected Hastings’ proposals and he was fiercely criticised by other members, many of whom had profited from private trade. Disappointed in the Company’s self-seeking ways, Hastings resigned and left for England in 1764.
Having overspent his savings in London and run up huge debts, Hastings needed to return to India to recoup his finances. After securing a senior post in Madras, he sailed in 1769 and, en route, had a rollicking affair with Marian, the Baroness von Imhoff, who he subsequently married in 1777.
Thanks to massive debts that the Company had piled to finance its campaigns in Madras and Bengal, the British parliament had to intervene in 1773 with a bail out which came with greater parliamentary oversight. One such was to insist that the job of Governor General go to Hastings, then a 41-year old India veteran. With a caveat that there would be three government appointed councillors along with a fourth already in Calcutta to oversee the Governor General’s work on behalf of the parliament.
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One of the three councillors who stepped ashore in Calcutta was Philip Francis – a brilliant character consumed by sarcasm, malice and bile. In Dalrymple’s words, “Francis had arrived in India already convinced that Hastings was the source of all the evils and corruption of Bengal”.
Led by Francis, the three parliament-appointed councillors opposed virtually any move that Hastings proposed as the Governor General. Dalrymple writes that “from the day of his arrival in Calcutta [Francis] worked hard to bring Hastings down, to block all his initiatives and to reverse all the work that he had done”.
For six years, this bitter feud continued. Finally, on August 14, 1780, Hastings penned a public minute denouncing Francis as a liar and braggart. The following day, Francis challenged Hastings to a duel.
At 5.30 am on August 17 on the western edge of Belvedere in Calcutta – Hasting’s house, and now the National Library of India – the duellists arrived with their seconds. Francis’ first attempt failed as the pistol’s hammer snapped; a replacement was brought; his second attempt also failed as the gunpowder was damp.
Finally, both fired. Francis missed. Hastings struck, and the ball went through below Francis’ shoulder. It was an inconsequential wound. Francis recovered to soon return to England and continue troubling Hastings from there.
In the meanwhile, the once powerful Company that had won the Battle of Plassey in 1757, defeated Shuja ud-Daula’s and Mir Qasim’s troop in the Battle of Buxar in 1764, and forced the Mughal emperor Shah Alam to confer the Diwani (revenue collecting rights) of Bengal at Allahabad in 1765, started facing rivals in the south – from Mysore under Haidar Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan. Trained in the latest European techniques of cavalry, rapid fire and cannon placements, the Mysore army was a formidable force, with both Haidar and Tipu believing that “the supremacy of the English was a source of evil to all of God’s creatures”.
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In August 1780, 5,000 of the Company’s troops under Sir Hector Munro of Buxar fame marched out of Fort St. George in Madras to confront Haidar Ali. A second force of 2,800 sepoys plus newly arrived Highlanders under William Baillie was to join them. In early September, at a small village of Pollilur, Baillie faced the might of Tipu’s troops and artillery, soon joined by Haidar’s huge contingent. It was a massacre, “the severest blow that the English had ever suffered in India”.
Hastings realised this was more than just a military defeat. It may have been the augury of greater catastrophes. Over the next two years, therefore, he used his diplomatic skills as well as carrots-and-sticks to break the Triple Alliance between Haidar and Tipu, the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad, and to make one powerful Maratha chief, Mahadji Scindia, a British ally. The Company’s territories survived – but by a whisker.
When Hastings finally resigned in 1784 and returned to England, he faced his most serious crisis. Instigated by Philip Francis, and prosecuted by Edmund Burke, proceedings for his impeachment commenced on February 13, 1788 at a packed House of Lords. As Dalrymple writes, “It was the nearest that the British ever got to putting the Company’s Indian Empire on trial”.
Warren Hastings was accused of the rape of India – of extortion, “wanton, unjust and pernicious exercise of his powers”, of “cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name” and many other crimes by a man whose heart had “blackened to the very blackest, a heart corrupted, gangrened to the core” [Burke’s opening speech].
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After a long narration of Hasting’s alleged crimes, came Burke’ famous climax: “I impeach, therefore, Warren Hastings, Esquire, of High Crimes and Misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed… I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste”.
Despite such hyperbole, there was no substantive evidence, and the case came to nought after seven years. On April 23, 1795, Warren Hastings was cleared for all charges. But it scarred the 63-year old man and led to what he described as “years of depression and persecution… with language of the foulest abuse, aggravated by coarse and vulgar epithets”.
How does one evaluate Warren Hastings?
As Dalrymple writes, he “was certainly no angel; and the East India Company under his rule was as extractive as ever”. Towards the end of his tenure as Governor General, Hastings took to a more “pseudo-monarchical and even despotic idea of his powers”. When forced to quickly raise money to fight Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, he arm-twisted the Company’s princely allies to ‘contribute’.
William Dalrymple. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Equally, I agree with Dalrymple that Hastings was the most responsible and sympathetic of all officials that the Company had hitherto sent to India. From his first positing, Hastings railed against the way Company officials exploited the country and mistreated Indians. He took measures to ensure that the population would not suffer as it did during the Bengal famine of 1770, which included building the great grain Gola in Patna that survives till today.
Here was a man in the late 18th century, the leader of a conquering nation, who had a deep love for India its citizens. Fluent in Bengali, Urdu and court Persian, he also learnt more than rudimentary Sanskrit. Under his patronage the Asiatic Society was founded in 1784 — among whose early projects was the translation of the Bhagavad Gita, for which Hastings penned a marvellous introduction.
One might quibble about some historicity and emphasis, none of which takes away from the fact that The Anarchy is a good read. I would recommend it to any lay reader who wants to understand the lawlessness and chaos in India from the late 18th and the mid-19th century, and the machinations of various players as well as of the Company – which bankrupted itself as it annexed the land.
Omkar Goswami is an economist, economic historian and a director of several listed companies. He is the executive chairman of CERG Advisory.
