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Chapter 7 – The Conquest of Bengal

In the foregoing chapter the summary of affairs on the east coast has been carried up to the date of Suffren’s expedition in order to present an unbroken view of our relations with the French in India. It is now necessary to go back some years in order to take up the narrative of events in Bengal.

The rise and territorial expansion of the English power may be conveniently divided into two periods, which slightly overlap each other, but on the whole mark two distinct and consecutive stages in the construction of our dominion. The first is the period when the contest lay among the European nations, who began by competing for commercial advantages and ended by fighting for political superiority on the Indian littoral. The commercial competition was going on throughout the whole of the seventeenth century; but the struggle with the French, which laid the foundation of English dominion in India, lasted less than twenty years, for it began in 1745 and was virtually decided in 1763.

The second period, upon which we are now about

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Shah Sutlaj Mosque at Multan in Sind

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to enter, is that during which England was contending with the native Indian powers, not for commercial preponderance or for strips of territory and spheres of influence along the seaboard, but for supremacy over all India. Reckoning the beginning of this contest from 1756, when Clive and Admiral Watson sailed from _Madras to recover Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal, it may be taken to have been substantially determined in fifty years; although for another fifty years the expansion of British territory went on by great strides, with long halts intervening, until the natural limits of India were attained by the conquest of Sind and the Panjab.

The first thing that must strike the ordinary observer, on looking back over the hundred years from 1757 to 1857, during which the acquisition of our Indian. dominion was accomplished, is the magnitude of the exploit; the next is the remarkable ease with which it was achieved. At the present moment, when, from their small island in the West, the English survey the immense Eastern empire that has grown up out of their petty trading settlements on the Indian seaboard, they are apt to be struck with wonder and a kind of dismay at the prospering of their own handiwork.

The thing is, as has been said, so unprecedented in history, and particularly it is so entirely unfamiliar to modern political ideas – we have become so unaccustomed in the Western world to build up empires in the high Roman fashion – that even those who have studied the beginnings of our Indian dominion are inclined to

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treat the outcome and climax as something passing man’s understanding. The magnificent possessions of Great Britain are commonly regarded as a man might look at a great prize he had drawn by luck in a lottery; they are supposed to have been won by incalculable chance. It is surmised that we stumbled forward blindfold on our way to dominion without any expectation that it would lead us to that end; we are assumed to have discovered an empire accidentally and to have obeyed the determination of events with no more foreknowledge than a rolling stone.

But it may fairly be argued that this view, which embodies the general impression on this subject, can be controverted by known facts. The idea that India might easily be conquered and governed, with a very small force, by a race superior in warlike capacity or in civilization, was no novelty at all. In the first place the thing had actually once been done. The Emperor Babar, who invaded India from Central Asia in the sixteenth century, has left us his authentic memoirs; it is a book of great historical interest, and nothing more amusing has ever been written by an Asiatic. He says: “When I invaded the country for the fifth time, overthrew Sultan Ibrahim, and subdued the empire of Hindustan, my servants, the merchants and their servants, and the followers of all friends that were in camp along with me were numbered, and they amounted to twelve thousand men. I placed my foot,” he writes, “in the stirrup of resolution and my hands on the reins of confidence in God, and I marched against

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A Sikh Warrior

the possessions of the throne of Delhi and the dominions of Hindustan, whose army was said to amount to one hundred thousand foot, with more than one thousand elephants. The Most High God,” he adds, “did not suffer the hardships that I had undergone to be thrown away, but defeated my formidable enemy and made me conqueror of this noble country.”

This was done in 1526; Babar’s victory at Panipat gave him the mastery of all Northern India and founded the Moghul Empire. He had really accomplished the enterprise with smaller means and resources than those possessed by the English when they had fixed themselves securely in Bengal with a base on the sea; and they. great host which he routed at Panipat at the beginning of his campaign was a far more formidable army than the English ever encountered in India until they met the Sikhs, at the end of a century’s fighting. Now, what had been done before could be done again, and was indeed likely to be done again, for the whole country was quite incapable of resisting foreign invasion. So, when at the opening of the eighteenth century the Moghul Empire was evidently declining toward a fall, and people were speculating upon what might come after it, we find floating in the minds of

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cool observers the idea that the next conquest of India might possibly be made by Europeans.

The keynote had indeed been struck earlier by Bernier, a French physician at the court of Aurangzib toward the close of the seventeenth century, who writes in his book that M. de Conde or M. de Turenne with twenty thousand men could conquer all India; and who in his letter to Colbert lays particular stress first on the riches, secondly on the weakness, of Bengal. But in 1746, one Colonel James Mill, who had been in India twenty years, submitted to the Austrian emperor a scheme for conquering Bengal as a very feasible and profitable undertaking. “The whole country of Hindustan,” he says, “or empire of the Great Moghul, is, and ever has been, in a state so feeble and defenceless that it is almost a miracle that no prince of Europe, with a maritime power at command, has not as yet thought of making such acquisitions there as at one stroke would put him and his subjects in possession of infinite wealth. ... The policy of the Moghul is bad, his military worse, and as to a maritime power to command and protect his coasts, he has none at all. ... The province of Bengal is at present under the dominion of a rebel subject of the Moghul, whose annual revenue amounts to about two millions. But Bengal, though not to be reduced by the power of the Moghul, is equally indefensible with the rest of Hindustan on the side of the ocean, and consequently may be forced out of the rebel’s hand with all its wealth, which is incredibly vast.”

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If we bear in mind how little could have been accurately known of India as a whole by an Englishman in 1746, we must give Colonel Mill credit for much sagacity and insight into the essential facts of the situation. He discerns the central points; he places his finger upon the elementary causes of India’s permanent weakness, her political instability within, and her seacoast exposed and undefended externally. Within ten or twelve years the English had carried out Colonel Mill’s scheme; and it will be shown hereafter that when Bengal had been taken, the further expansion of British dominion was quite clearly foreseen. By those on the spot it was treated not as accidental, but as inevitable.

In the year 1716, the English, whose trading factories had long been settled in Bengal, obtained from the Moghul emperor an important farman, or imperial order, permitting them to import and export goods upon payment of a fixed tribute, and protecting them from the heavy and arbitrary taxes laid on them at the caprice of the Nawabs. Bengal was a province under a governor whose ordinary title was the Nawab Nazim, who held office during the pleasure of the emperor, and who was frequently changed, so long as the empire was in its vigour, lest he should become too strong for the central authority. But as the power of the emperor declined, the independence of the Nawabs increased in this distant province, until in the eighteenth century, when Maratha insurrections and the irruptions from Central Asia multiplied the distractions of the state,

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the Bengal governors paid little obedience and less revenue to Delhi.

Under Murshid Kuli Khan, a man of considerable ability, the governorship became hereditary in the usual fashion; but in 1742 his grandson was overthrown and slain by Ali Vardi Khan, an Afghan adventurer who raised himself from a very humble post to be deputy-governor of Behar, and who won for himself by the sword the rulership of Bengal. During the fourteen years of his strong administration, the foreign merchants had no great reason to complain; for although he levied large subsidies from the English, French, and Dutch factories, he gave them protection and enforced good order, suppressing all quarrels and tolerating no encroachments. On his death, in 1756, he was succeeded by his adopted son, known in English histories as Siraj-ad-daulah, – although the accurate spelling is said to be Chiragh-ad-daulah, – a young man whose savage and suspicious temper was controlled by no experience or natural capacity for rulership, and who had long been jealous of the English, whom he suspected of having corresponded with a possible rival against him for the succession.

The new Nawab had just been proclaimed, when letters reached Calcutta from England informing the president that, as war with France was expected, he should put his settlement into a state of defence; whereupon he began to strengthen the fortifications. But the right to fortify their places had not been conceded to the English in Bengal; and the Nawab, to whom some

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The government house and treasury, Calcutta, from the old course

offence had previously been given by the abrupt dismissal of a messenger, sternly ordered them to desist at once. The English president, Drake, not understanding his danger, answered by explaining that the fortifications were against the French, who had disregarded the neutrality of the Moghul’s dominions in the last war by taking Madras, and who might attack Calcutta this time.

This reply Siraj-ad-daulah took to mean that his protection and sovereign authority were very lightly regarded by the foreigners. In great indignation he seized the factory of Kasimbazar, near his capital, and marched upon Calcutta with a large army. The English defended themselves for a time; but the town. was open; the governor and many of the English fled in ships down the river; and the rest surrendered on promise of honourable treatment. Nevertheless, those whom the Nawab captured with the fort were thrown into a kind of prison-room called the Black Hole, from which, after one night’s dreadful suffering,

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The Black Hole of Calcutta

The Black Hole of Calcutta is the name given to a room in the garrison in which 136 captive British soldiers were incarcerated by Nawab Siraj ad-Daulah when he took the fortress, June 20, 1756. The cell was only twenty feet square and had but two small windows, so that it became almost impossible to live in the stifling air. The next morning all but 23 of the men were found dead after a night of agonizing suffering.

on the eve of June 21, 1756, only twenty-three out of one hundred and forty-six emerged alive.

As soon as the news of this dismal catastrophe reached Madras, the president lost no time in despatching the fleet, commanded by Admiral Watson, to Bengal, with troops under Colonel Clive. The force was calculated to be sufficient not only for retaking Calcutta, but also for reducing Hugli, expelling the French from Chandarnagar, and even for attacking the Nawab’s capital at Murshidabad; and Clive set out, as he wrote, “with the full intention of settling the Company’s estate in those parts in a better and more lasting condition than ever.” He had less reason, he added, to apprehend a check from the Nawab’s army than from the country and the climate. Nor indeed does it appear that any serious misgivings as to the result of the expedition troubled the government at Madras, where they were only anxious to get the business done in Bengal before the French armament under Lally should arrive on the Coromandel coast.

Clive lost no time in driving the enemy’s garrison out of Calcutta and Hugli. The Nawab marched down to encounter him with a very large force, which, after some parleying, was attacked by the English close to Calcutta. The engagement was indecisive, but the Nawab was so far daunted as to sign a treaty restoring to the Company their possessions in Bengal, and promising compensation for losses. This truce, however, was broken very soon. There were strong reasons why the English should return speedily to Madras, but as France

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and England were now at open war, it was dangerous to depart while the French held their fortified station of Chandarnagar, within a few miles of Calcutta. So Watson and Clive carried the place by assault; but the Nawab, who had at first acquiesced, at the last moment withdrew his consent to the attack, and was secretly inviting Bussy to march from Haidarabad to his relief. There could be no reasonable doubt that Siraj-ad-daulah would renew hostilities on the first opportunity, while, on the other hand, Lally’s expedition must soon reach the eastern coast, and the Madras government was urgently pressing for the return of the troops.

The English in Bengal thus found themselves in a perilous dilemma, since the troops could not return to Madras until Calcutta had been in some way placed beyond danger from the Nawab. When, therefore, overtures were received from certain disaffected chiefs of the Nawab’s court, Clive entered into a compact to dethrone Siraj-ad-daulah, and to set up in his stead Mir Jafir, one of the principal conspirators. He then marched up the country against the Nawab, whom he found entrenched at Plassey with about fifteen thousand cavalry, thirty thousand foot, and forty pieces of cannon.

The engagement began with some cannonading, in which a battery managed by Frenchmen gave much annoyance to the English. Early in the afternoon the Nawab fled from the field, and as his army began to fall back, an advance was made against the battery, which alone remained in position. So soon as the

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French had been dislodged and some rising ground occupied that commanded the interior of the enemy’s fortified camp, Clive delivered his assault at one angle; whereupon the Nawab’s whole army dispersed in a general rout, leaving on the field its camp equipage, its artillery, and about five hundred men. Clive’s despatch reports the loss on his side to have been twenty-two killed and fifty wounded. Next morning, Mir Jafir, who had merely hovered about the flanks of the engagement with a large body of cavalry, paid a visit to Clive, was saluted as Nawab, and hastened to occupy the capital, Murshidabad, where soon after he put Siraj-ad-Daulah to death.

The whole province quietly submitted to the new ruler; the emperor’s government at Delhi, which was occupied just then by Ahmad Shah with an Afghan army, was totally incapable of interference; so that by this sudden and violent revolution English ascendency at once became established in Bengal.

The rout of Plassey – for it can hardly be called a battle – is in itself chiefly remarkable as the first important occasion upon which the East India Company’s troops were openly arrayed, not as auxiliaries, but as principals, against a considerable native army commanded in person by the ruler of a great province. It stands, in fact, first on the long list of regular actions that have been fought between the English in India and the chiefs or military leaders of the country. The event supplies, therefore, a very striking illustration of the radical weakness of those native governments

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Indian Mohammedan Helmet

and armies to whom the English found themselves opposed in the middle of the eighteenth century. This inherent feebleness of the Hindus, and their inability to govern or defend their possessions, obviously explains why the English, who could do both, so rapidly made room for themselves in a country which, though rich and populous, was, in a practical sense, masterless.

It must also be remembered that Bengal and the other provinces bordering on the sea in which the English won these facile triumphs were far more defenceless than the inland country, partly through the dilapidation of the central power, partly because the people of those tracts are naturally less warlike than elsewhere, and partly by the accident that they just then were very ill governed.

The army of the later Moghul emperors had always been bad; yet until Aurangzib died it was quite strong enough to repulse any small expeditionary force descending upon the coast. Nor could such a stroke as Clive’s at Plassey have been attempted with impunity if Bengal had happened to possess a vigorous and capable viceroy; for a few years later our first campaigns against Hyder Ali in the south and the Marathas in the west showed us that under competent

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leadership the superior numbers of an Indian army might make it a very dangerous antagonist.

We have to understand, then, that our earliest victories were over troops that were little better than a rabble of hired soldiers, without coherence or loyalty. An Indian army of that period was usually an agglomeration of mercenaries collected by the captains of companies who supplied men to any one able to pay for them, having enlisted them at random out of the swarm of roving freelances and swordsmen, chiefly Asiatic foreigners, by whom all India was infested. These bands had no better stomach for serious fighting than the condottieri of Italy in the sixteenth century; the close fire of European musketry was more than they had bargained for; and artillery, properly served, they could not face at all. Their leaders, moreover, changed sides without scruple, if it seemed to their advantage, and were constantly plotting either to betray or supplant their employers.

It is not surprising, therefore, if troops of this kind were such exceedingly perilous weapons in timid or maladroit hands that the prince, governor, or usurper who had retained their services often went into action with a very uncomfortable distrust of his best regiments. In the eighteenth century, most of the revolted provinces of the empire had been appropriated by successful captains of these mercenaries, among whom the best fighting men were the Afghans. Their most celebrated leader was Ahmad Shah Abdali, a mighty warrior of the Afghan nation, and the only great Asiatic

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soldier who appeared in India during the eighteenth century.

But no sooner had the European appeared upon the Indian arena, than the men of this new immigration were discovered to be distinctly superior to all Asiatic foreigners in the art of war, and far beyond them in those qualities of united, persistent, and scientific action by which a compact and civilized force must always prevail in the long run over incoherent and uninstructed opponents. Against the French or the English the dissolute and rickety Nawabs of Bengal and the Karnatic could take into the field only a crowd, of mutinous soldiery, who often dispersed at the first shock and followed their leader in tumultuous flight. The natural and speedy result was that the military classes of the Indian population very soon began to transfer their services to the standard of leaders who always paid and usually won; who were invariably to be seen in the front line of battle, and who did the hardest fighting with a corps d’élite of their own countrymen1.

The British sepoy army was recruited and gradually developed out of the immense floating mass of professional

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mercenaries (reckoned by good contemporary, authority at two millions) who roved about India in, those days. It is on record that any number of foot-soldiers might be enlisted, although they “deserted in shoals” when a very distant march was in prospect; and that the best cavalry of Hindustan (Afghans, Tartars, Persians, or Marathas) might be had in abundance at six weeks’ notice, “many of them,” as the East India Records state, “out of the very camp of the enemy.” The English commanders, however, seem to have relied for their infantry chiefly upon natives of India, who were probably more faithful to their salt, and more amenable to discipline, than the wilder folk of Central Asia. And for a hundred years the Indian sepoy well repaid the confidence placed in his courage and loyalty. With artillery served by men who stood fast to their guns, with a few red-coated English battalions, with a strong contingent of well-drilled native infantry and some excellent native light cavalry, the Company’s army presented a combination of war material that only wanted good handling to dispose of any opponent in Southern India.

The foregoing observations on the native armies of this period may help to explain the rapidity with which the English won their earliest battles against Indian adversaries and made their first conquests in the sea-board provinces, especially in Bengal. They had only to upset a few unstable rulers of foreign descent, whose title rested on dexterous usurpation; and to disperse by their trained battalions, European and native, great

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Shivary hills near Salem in southern India

bodies of hired troops who usually had no interest in the war beyond their pay. Between the Marathas, who were spreading over the country from the west, and the Afghans, who had broken in from the north, the inland country was being ruined by rapine and exactions; trade and cultivation had fallen low; and the position of the minor native powers

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was so unsteady through military weakness and financial embarrassments that any of them might be destroyed by the loss of one campaign or even a single battle.

But this course of easy victories on the outskirts of India did not last long; for we shall see that as the English penetrated further into the interior, their progress became very much slower, and was, indeed, arrested for a time. On the west coast, they were already confronted by rivals very different from an incapable Bengali Nawab – by the Marathas, whose power had considerable national character, some political stability, and formidable military organization. Under their great Peshwa, Balaji Bala Rao, they were now attaining the zenith of their predominance; they had conquered great territories; they were pushing forward into North India; they were supreme in the central regions; and while one army was dismembering the Nizam’s State, another was extorting heavy subsidies in the Karnatic and Mysore. Their operations had hitherto been very serviceable to the English, with whom they were at this time often in alliance, by weakening all the Mohammedan rulerships, and particularly by checking Bussy’s military domination at Haidarabad.

On the whole there is good ground for the opinion that if, at the time of the dissolution of the Moghul Empire, India had been left to herself, if the Europeans had not just then appeared in the field, the whole of Southern and Central India would have fallen under

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the Maratha dominion. The correctness of this view is attested by a statement in a letter from the President and Council of Madras, who wrote under date of October, 1756: “We look on the Morattoes [Marathas] to be more than a match for the whole (Moghul) Empire, were no European force to interfere.” It was very fortunate for the English that they did not come into collision with such antagonists until their own strength had matured; since there can be no doubt that throughout the later stages of the tournament for the prize of ascendency between England and the native powers, the most dangerous challengers of the British were the Marathas.

Footnotes

1. The rank and file of this corps whose fighting qualities decided for us all our earlier battles, were drawn in those days from strange sources. General Smith, in his evidence before a Committee on the East India Recruiting Bill, told the House of Commons “that in 1769, when he left India, the European army in Bengal was in very good discipline, considering the sort of men who being chiefly raised about London were the riffraff of the people, chiefly boys under seventeen or old men above forty to sixty years old, and fitter on their arrival to fill the hospital than the ranks.” He added that the Sepoys were “almost too good.” – Parliamentary Debates, 1771, April.

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