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Chapter 10 – Administrative Organization

1770–1773

We have now reached the threshold of that important period in the political history of British India which is covered by the long government of Warren Hastings, from 1772 to 1785. It was in this period that the contest for supremacy between the English and the military powers of India began in earnest, that the attention of Parliament became fixed upon Indian affairs, and that the organization of English government in India was for the first time seriously attempted.

When Lord Clive left in 1767, the Company had become the real rulers of Bengal; but although their position was still dissembled under the cloak of a nominal Nawabship, the disguise was worn almost thread-bare. In Calcutta and Madras, the Presidency Councils were exercising some direct authority beyond the town limits, and very large indirect power, as commanders of the troops and collectors of the revenue, throughout Bengal and the Karnatic. Yet in Bengal, although the whole public income was paid to the Company, they were under strict orders from London to

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A native Indian Prince and his court, with two Europeans

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abstain from all open interference with the rest of the administration. They disbursed to a Deputy Nawab (for the Nawab himself was now a mere pensioner) the costs of establishments; and they left the whole executive and judicial government nominally in his hands. Verelst, who succeeded Clive at Calcutta, writes that the President and Council “are repeatedly and peremptorily forbidden to avow any public authority in our names over the native officers, and enjoined to retain our primitive characters of merchants with the most scrupulous delicacy.”

The consequences were but too evidently exemplified in the decline of commerce and cultivation, the diminution of specie, and the general distress; for the native officers were uncontrolled, while the Company received an immense revenue without possessing the means of protecting the people who paid it. Against such a system Verelst protested generously; and a futile attempt to mitigate its evils was made by appointing a few English servants of the Company to supervise the native agency.

It was not, however, until 1773 that the executive and judicial administration of the country was placed on a regular, though imperfect, footing by parliamentary ordinance. Up to this time, Anglo-Indian annals have recorded the vicissitudes of a contest, first, between commercial companies; next, between maritime nations; latterly between one powerful Company, representing the successful nation, and the native Indian princes. This latest stage of the contest was in reality

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no more than a part of the general disorderly conflict prevailing all over India, in which the weak fragmentary states that had at first been manufactured out of the provinces of the dismembered empire were now being trampled in their turn under the feet of hardier rulerships. The work of the English had hitherto been mainly destructive, because the exigencies of self-defence compelled them to strike down their antagonists. But the era now opening will introduce their first essays at reconstruction, for in Bengal the English had by this time cleared for themselves a good political building site, and the chronicle of interminable straggling wars is henceforward to be varied by attempts at administrative organization.

In England, although state interference with private enterprise had never been a popular duty, a conviction was growing up that it had become necessary to place the doings of the East India Company under national control. The British people had at this time reached a very high degree of settled civilization under institutions that secured to them almost complete civil and religious liberty. They found themselves involuntarily responsible for a country plunged into violent disorder, where no species of government except illimitable personal despotism, usually of foreigners, had been known for many centuries. Into this country they had to import, from a great distance, the principles of civilized polity; so that their first experiment at regulating the affairs of Bengal may be regarded as the beginning of a vast constitutional innovation that has since been

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extended, with many mistakes and some mishaps, but in the end with remarkable success, throughout the whole of India.

It was the astonishing acquisition of so rich a province as Bengal, and the discreditable sight of a few commercial agents handling the wealth of a kingdom, that roused the attention of the British Parliament and enforced the necessity of looking into the condition of affairs in India. In 1765, Lord Clive had estimated the whole gross revenue of Bengal, from all sources, at four millions sterling, and the net income of the Company, after payment of all expenses, at £1,650,000. Having become the possessors of so magnificent a property, the Court of Directors were raising their dividend; their stock went up to 267; their shareholders divided 12½ per cent. in 1767; and their servants brought home large fortunes to be employed in buying country-seats and parliamentary boroughs. Alderman Beckford expressed in the House of Commons his hope that the rich acquisitions of the Company in the East would be made a means of relieving the people of England from some of their burdens. Nor was the British government backward in acting upon the hint, since the system of granting renewals of the Company’s charter for short periods afforded excellent opportunities of making fresh terms in proportion to the market price of the concession.

In 1766, upon an intimation from the Prime Minister that the affairs of the East India Company would probably occupy the attention of Parliament during the

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approaching session, there ensued a long bargaining discussion between the government and the Company, which produced a law binding the Company for a term of years to pay £400,000 annually to the Crown, “in respect of the territorial acquisition and revenue lately obtained by them in the East Indies.” From a subsequent inquiry in 1773, it appeared that the Company’s annual expenses had increased since the year 1765 from £700,000 to the enormous sum of £1,700,000. It also appeared that from 1765 the British government had received by the net customs duties, the indemnity upon tea, and the yearly payment of £400,000, little less than two millions annually from the Company; so that the British nation took heavy blackmail upon the Company’s gains, however they may have been gotten.

This yearly payment represented, in fact, the tribute or royalty levied by the state upon the great territorial revenues recently acquired by Clive’s victories. But with the possession of these revenues had come a change in the Company’s commercial system, for in 1767 began the practice of making what were called investments, that is, of employing a large portion of the surplus public revenue collected from the province in buying goods, raw produce and manufactures, for exportation to Europe. It followed, as Burke said, that whereas in other countries revenue arises out of commerce, in Bengal the whole foreign maritime trade, of which the Company had a monopoly, was fed by the revenue. The consequence of this steady drain upon the production of the country soon began to be felt.

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The Fort of Chengalpat

Moreover, after Clive’s departure from India in 1767, the withdrawal of his resolute, clear-headed dictatorship was immediately felt throughout all departments of the administration; official discipline again became relaxed; the finances suffered a relapse into extravagance and malversation; and the agents of government still meddled in private trade. The Madras

Presidency drifted into that ruinous war with Hyder Ali which has already been described, and in 1770 a terrible famine had desolated Bengal.

Tinder the system of annual elections to the directorship, the Company at home were demoralized by party contests and violent internal dissensions. Yet notwithstanding all these concurrent evils and mishaps, no serious inquiry was taken up in Parliament until the Company declared themselves to be not only unable to continue the annual tribute of £400,000, but also so overloaded with debt as to need a large loan from the

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English treasury. Instead of taking tribute or borrowing at easy rates, the British government was actually asked to lend money. Here was a scandalous confession of insolvency which naturally placed the misdoings of the Company before Lord North’s minis-try in a very different and much stronger light, arrested their earnest attention, and convinced them of the immediate necessity of radical reform.

The general circumstances of the time, also, were bringing about changes and amendments. Lord Clive said truly that the affairs of the East Indies were, in fact, partaking of the general confusion then spreading over the immense transmarine possessions of Great Britain, which had been acquired so recently and rap-idly that there had been no time to set them in order. The English people had yet to discover the nature of their responsibility for the tutelage of subject or alien races, and for the proper management of countries differing so widely in origin, character, and situation as North American colonies and Indian provinces. They had as yet no experience in the difficult art of ruling distant and diverse populations on so broad a scale. Nor could the whole range of modern history furnish them with any useful precedent, seeing that all previous experiments in the government of dependencies may be pronounced, by a very moderate standard of ethics and efficiency, to have failed.

The comparatively long interval of peace in Europe, so far as England was concerned, that followed the termination of the Seven Years’ war in 1763, gave leisure

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and opportunity for looking into the state of our outlying property. The nation began to take stock of the vast accession to its estate beyond sea which had been won by its naval and military successes; and the novel sense of duty toward India was undoubtedly stimulated by a general feeling that a trading association had no business with the revenues of a great kingdom.

The urgency of the case and certain symptoms of rising popular indignation combined to press the government into active interference with the Company, whose financial embarrassments left them in no position to resist an inquiry ordered by the House of Commons, or to dispute the right of the nation to deal as it chose with their territorial acquisitions. They tried hard, then and afterwards, to shelter themselves from Parliamentary interposition under the shadow of the nominal sovereignty of the Delhi emperor, from whom they pretended to hold their land. In maintaining this doctrine they acted upon the advice of Lord Clive, who, although he accepted the Diwani in 1765 because the assumption of some kind of legitimate authority over Bengal was unavoidable, nevertheless still affirmed that for the Company to declare themselves politically independent was very far from expedient. Consequently, the law courts and the police were still in charge of native officers, superintended to some little extent by the Company’s agents, but under separate judicial and executive departments which the Company did not undertake to administer.

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But the essence of executive government is to be one and indivisible, so that the machine will not run unless all the driving power centres ultimately under one prime mover, whether it be an autocratic prince or a democratic assembly. In Bengal, the outcome of this divided responsibility after Clive’s departure was masterless confusion. The magistracy, the police, and the revenue officers, being diverse bodies working upon different systems, with conflicting interests, and under no common head, vied with each other in mismanagement; there were no positive laws and there was very little justice in the country.

Moreover, the three Presidencies made wars and alliances independently of each other; the Company’s standing army in Bengal amounted to over eleven thousand men; and the increased civil and military establishments involved expenditure that encroached greatly upon the funds for commercial investment. Fortunately, this dilapidation of the Honourable Company’s revenue produced a fall of their stock, which brought home to them a conviction that they were on the downward path to some distressing predicament. They applied for financial assistance to the Ministers, who referred the Company to Parliament, and in January, 1772, the king’s speech gave notice of an intention to look into their affairs. The result was the appointment of two Select Committees “to inquire into the state, nature, and condition of the Company, and of British affairs in the East Indies.”

It is true that Parliament had hitherto been much

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A mountain road at Mahableshwar, in the Bombay Presidency

more disposed to pass abstract resolutions than to affirm sovereign rights and to act upon them in India.

When, in 1762, the French negotiators for peace demanded the restitution of districts that had been taken from them during the war, the English representatives met the claim by demurring to “any right of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive

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property of a body corporate.” And subsequently Burke, not being hostile to the Company at the time, described their possessions as “held in virtue of grants from the Delhi emperor, in the nature of offices and jurisdictions dependent on his crown; a very anomalous species of power and property quite unknown to the ancient constitution of England.” The East India Company, he observed, had usually dealt in a spirit of equal negotiation with the government for the renewal of their charter; until the Minister (Lord North) set up the Crown’s claim to their possessions with the original idea of extracting money to pay off the’ civil list debts, and Parliament asserted a judicial right to inquire into the question of title in order to alarm the Company.

Burke’s view, then, was that the terrors of Parliamentary inquiry were hung over the Company mainly with the object of levying contributions for the Exchequer’s benefit. There was much truth in this; and it was partly as a set-off against those contributions that the Company was licensed to export duty-free to North America the tea which the intractable colonists flung into Boston harbour. But Lord North, who now ruled both Houses with an overwhelming majority, was adverse to the Company; the Committees brought up condemnatory reports; and the Commons passed resolutions declaring that all acquisitions made under the influence of a military force, or by treaty with foreign princes, belonged of right to the state. A motion was made arraigning Clive’s proceedings in Bengal as dishonourable

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and detrimental to the nation. Clive de-fended himself vigorously, laying about him on all sides; and the motion was rejected, without division, in favour of a resolution “that Robert Lord Clive did render great and meritorious services to his country.” His death in the following year (November, 1774) closed the career of this high-spirited, courageous, indefatigable man, to whom above all others the English are indebted for the foundation of their empire in India. Never before or since has an Irish peerage been the cheap reward of such invaluable service to the nation. His daring and his sagacity, his singular talent for politics and his genius for war, produced in Lord Clive a rare combination of masculine qualities exactly fitted to the circumstances of his time in India.

Of the two Acts that were eventually passed in 1773, one enabled the Ministers to lend the Company £1,400,- 000 to discharge their obligations; the other changed the constitution of the Company and gave a Parliamentary title to their administration in India. To these matters, to the re-arrangement of the governing body at home and to the reform of the system abroad, the scope of Lord North’s Regulating Act was carefully confined. The territorial acquisitions and revenues were still to be retained by the Company for the term of their charter; and the -uncertain ground of sovereign prerogative was evaded by founding the enactment upon “the eminent dominion of Parliament over every British subject in every concern.” The Courts of the Directors and Proprietors in London were re-constituted

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Simla, the summer seat of the British Government

upon a more oligarchic model by raising the money qualifications and reducing the numbers. In India, the Governor-General and Council were established for Bengal (the first appointments to be made by Parliament) with a general authority over the three Presidencies, under a rule whereby a majority of votes in the Council determined all disputed questions. And

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a supreme Court of Justice, having a very ill-defined jurisdiction, was set up side by side with the Governor-Generalship in Calcutta.

It is easy now to perceive that this ill-constructed governing machinery, which stands toward our latest systems in the same relation as does the earliest traction engine to the present locomotive, contravened some primary principles of administrative mechanics. When it becomes necessary to organize a new regime in an Asiatic country acquired from a native ruler by cession or conquest, the first thing needful is to fix the chief local authority, arming him with ample though well-defined powers, to be used in general subordination to the central government.

What these powers should be depends upon the circumstances of the case, upon the character of the people, the state of their society, and often upon the distance of the new province from headquarters. The executive and judicial departments may be quite separate, or they may be more or less under the same superior control; in any case, the jurisdictions and the laws or rules applicable to the community are plainly marked out and promulgated. In all cases, due provision is made for empowering one chief governing person to decide at once, and on his own responsibility, in emergencies.

In 1773, on the other hand, the chief executive authority at Calcutta was vested in a majority of the Council, the Governor-General having only a casting vote, so that in a government where promptitude and

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Victoria Station, Bombay

unity of action were all-important, every order was arguable, and where opinions differed, no measure passed without violent controversy. Moreover, -the boundaries between the executive and judicial powers were also left to be discovered’ by incessant conflict, producing a kind of border warfare in which each party made encroachments and reprisals. In the midst of all this turmoil, the sovereign power remained ambiguous and formally in abeyance, and Parliament, the only umpire acknowledged by both sides, was at the distance of a six months’ voyage.

Thus the main obstacles to the smooth working of the new constitution were, first, the entire dependence of the Governor-General on the votes of his Council; secondly, the conflict of jurisdictions; and lastly, the want of a supreme legislative authority, nearer than England, to arbitrate in these quarrels and to mark off the proper sphere of the executive and judicial departments. The Governor-General could make no laws that the judges condescended to notice. On the other hand, the judges claimed, upon one ground or another, a general power of entertaining complaints against the acts of the executive government and its officers, and of issuing orders tending to reduce the administration to the status of a subaltern agency, whose proceedings might be reviewed by the judges at their discretion.

The capital question of sovereignty stood open to be explained theoretically according to the interests or contentions of either side. It might be colourably

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argued, on the part of the Company, that they held the country by grants from the Delhi emperor and treaties with native princes, whereby the jurisdiction of the judges appointed by the King of England was greatly restricted and, as it were, cut off at the base. Or it might be maintained that all the possessions of the Company fell naturally to the Crown, whence it followed that the writs of the Supreme Court ran wherever the Company exercised public authority, that the judges at Calcutta could control the native courts, and that the procedure of Westminster Hall was applicable to every Bengali landholder. For since jurisdiction was given by the statute over all servants of the Company, it was held by the Court that the whole body of land-owners in Bengal, who collected the land revenue and paid over the state’s share to the Company, might fall within their purview. At any rate, if any one demurred to the jurisdiction, he was held bound to appear to plead his objection before the judges, although the cost and trouble of answering a summons to Calcutta might be ruinous to a native at a distance in the interior districts and totally ignorant of these technicalities.

With a prolix and costly procedure, with strange unintelligible powers resembling the attributes of some mysterious divinity, the Supreme Court was soon regarded by the natives as an engine of outlandish oppression rather than as a bulwark against executive tyranny. “So far,” says Burke’s Report, “as your Committee have been able to discover, the Court has been generally terrible to the natives, and has distracted the government

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of the country without substantially reforming one of its abuses.”

In this atmosphere of doubt concerning the country’s ownership and its title-deeds, and concerning the limits of the two great administrative provinces, complications, acrimonious controversy, and even collisions necessarily ensued. The Council and the Court were ranged in two hostile camps set over against each other on the borderland of debatable jurisdictions. The Company’s officers claimed illimitable authority over the people of Bengal in revenue matters; the judges affirmed the duty of protecting the people from fiscal injustice; and very fair arguments might be found for either contention. The judges were quite as much bent on asserting their own power as on protecting the natives of India, while to the Council any sort of control or check upon their fiscal operations was highly inconvenient. The truth is that, outside Calcutta, there were no laws at all at that period, and that the Company had no regular authority and very little inclination to make any.

Out of these causes and complications arose the celebrated disputes between Warren Hastings and his Council, which kept the Governor-General and his councillors at bitter feud with each other, except when they united in a quarrel with the Supreme Court of Judicature. These matters fall within the scope of this narrative only so far as they illustrate an early stage in the experimental process of adjusting English institutions to the conditions of an Asiatic dependency; for

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Katkari natives on the Western Ghats

it is otherwise superfluous to tell over again an oft-repeated story.

The system of administration set up by the Act of 1773 embodied the first attempt at giving some definite and recognizable form to the vague and arbitrary rulership that had devolved upon the Company. From that date forward, this outline of Anglo-Indian government was gradually filled in. The administrative centre was now at any rate distinctly located at Calcutta with the Governor-General as its acknowledged head, invested with the chief control of the foreign relations of the three Presidencies, and deriving his authority from a statute of the English Parliament. Thus far the

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foundation had been laid on broad and permanent lines; but the work of interior organization was scarcely begun, and it remained for Warren Hastings to per-severe in building up the fabric of administration under the stress of discord in Council, political complications, foreign wars, and every kind of financial embarrassment.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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