Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (66 page)

None of this is altogether surprising if some allowance is made for the simple fact that Hastings was no more prescient than other mortals. If he had a model for Bengal it was inspired not by dreams of British empire but by what he took to be the traditions of Moghul empire. Outlining his proposed reforms to the Chairman of the Company he stressed that they included ‘not one which the original constitution of the Mogul Empire
hath not before established…and rendered familiar to the people’. He would ‘found the authority of the British government in Bengal on its [Bengal’s] ancient laws’. India was, had been, ‘a great nation’; its people were ‘not in a savage state’ and they had little to gain from the imposition of ‘a superior wisdom from outside’. India should be administered by Indians and in accordance with Indian custom although, in Bengal at least, a British supremacy consisting of the Governor and Council in Calcutta should replace that of the Moghul Nawab and his court in Murshidabad.

In thus disclaiming any idea of direct British rule, Hastings stood shoulder to shoulder with Vansittart, Clive, and just about every other servant of the Company. But unlike Clive and Vansittart, Hastings had little influence or support outside the Company. He was a complete Company man with all that that implies in the way of personal ambition, resourcefulness, impatience of London’s control, and an adventurer’s eye for opportunity. His impeachment he would rightly see as ‘less my trial than that of the East India Company and [thinking presumably of his accusers] of the British nation’. But by then, old and embittered, he too was a political irrelevance, just like the Company.

This identity between the servant and his honourable masters had been marked throughout his career. Entering the Company as a £5 per annum writer in 1750, he had known a Bengal which was still under the able Nawab Aliverdi Khan and a Calcutta which was just one of the province’s several beleaguered European trading posts. When, six years later, Siraj-ud-Daula stormed Calcutta, Hastings had typically been checking piece goods on the ‘factory’ floor of one of the Company’s outlying
aurungs
(depots). He thus escaped the débacle of the evacuation and the Black Hole and, though briefly arrested, managed to operate as an informant at the Nawab’s capital. Later, after Clive and Watson had wreaked their revenge, he continued his unspectacular rise through the Company’s civilian ranks. As one of Henry Vansittart’s councillors he became closely identified with the ill-fated policy of installing Mir Kasim as a more effective alternative to Clive’s Mir Jafar and of curtailing the damage caused by the abuse of
dastak.
From such schemes he also profited and when he resigned, for the first time, in 1765 he had amassed £30,000. By the standards of the day this was an unremarkable fortune which justified neither his critics’ talk of rapacity nor his supporters’ claims of incorruptibility.

Reinstatement came in 1769 as a reward for his impressive defence of
the Company delivered before the first of Parliament’s Select Committees of Enquiry. With the support of that Company diehard, Lawrence Sulivan, henceforth his indefatigable ally in Leadenhall Street, Hastings was sent to Madras as Second-in-Council. There he invested in the Madras Association which had succeeded to Jourdain, Sulivan and de Souza’s virtual monopoly of the trade with Aceh. Officially he was also Export Warehousekeeper and in this role he busied himself with reforming the system of ordering and collecting the annual investment in piece goods. Once again he was knee deep in cottons when disaster struck. This time it was the loss of the
Aurora
and of the three-man commission which sailed in her. Experience, ability and authority all told in the appointment of Hastings to the governorship of Bengal where he was to ‘stand forth as diwan’, to effect ‘the complete reformation’ that had been expected from the ill-fated Commissioners, and to end Bengal’s crippling drain on the Company’s finances. Interpreting these vague instructions as a
carte blanche
Hastings arrived in Bengal in 1772 determined to return the government to its ‘first principles’.

These ‘first principles’, though supposedly derived from Moghul precedent, have a familiar ring. The Nawab’s residual administration, overlaid by a proliferation of Company agents and revenue officials, meant that Bengal was being hopelessly over-governed and over-mulcted. Whether to encourage what would now be called a free market economy or whether to reduce the amount of revenue lost in the process of collection, a retraction of both the Nawab’s and the Company’s agents plus a degree of centralization was vital. Accordingly the Nawab’s deputies in Bengal and Bihar were dismissed and sent for trial; his system of civil and criminal courts was taken over and reformed with special emphasis being placed on the study and codification of Hindu and Muslim law; and his Treasury, now administered by a board of Company servants, was removed from Murshidabad to closer supervision in Calcutta. In a re-enactment of the arrangement reached with Mir Kasim, all inland customs posts were also withdrawn and all
dastak
abolished in favour of a small flat rate duty. This last supposedly ended the privileged position of Company servants and free merchants
vis-à-vis
other European and Indian merchants. Certain items, though, notably salt and opium, were made a Company monopoly which, while affording the Company a new source of revenue, also gave to those to whom such monopolies were farmed ample opportunities of enrichment.

Similar opportunities continued to be exploited in the revenue
collection which was also thrown open to competitive tendering. Unlike Clive, Hastings did not rant about ‘Augean stables’ and in fact he consistently resisted pressures from home to organize an inquisition into past malpractices. Servants of a merchant company were, he felt, ‘not exempted from the frailties and wants of humanity’ and were entitled to something more in the way of remuneration than their still measly salaries. Where possible salaries were increased by setting aside a small percentage of the Company’s net receipts to be divided among the relevant functionaries. Where this was not possible, particularly amongst the lower ranks of Company servants, there was a tacit understanding that as of old a man might look to his own interests.

Nevertheless Hastings’s flurry of legal reforms and commercial prohibitions did serve to curtail and contain the worst forms of extortion. If the flood of complaints scarcely abated this was in part due to the fact that there now existed channels for their expression and prospects of their redress. Given the right regulatory framework, the most rapacious of servants could be held in check and the most oppressed of peasants could take heart. Ideally Hastings would have liked to recall to Calcutta all those Englishmen who, under the guise of revenue supervisors and free merchants, were currently operating their own lucrative little cartels in the provinces. He would replace them with Indian supervisors who alone stood some chance of understanding the conflicting rights of the innumerable functionaries engaged in assessing, recording, collecting and enforcing the revenue. The directors also favoured such a recall, yet such were their individual commitments in support of their various protégés in Bengal that all Hastings was able to achieve was a clipping of the supervisors’ wings by the establishment of provincial revenue boards. That and a change of name. Henceforth the district supervisor became the district collector, or rather the District Collector.

Part administrator, part magistrate, part tax man, and part development officer, the District Collector was destined to join those many-armed gods in the Hindu pantheon and to become a feature of the Indian landscape. For those with a starry-eyed regard for the Indian Civil Service, British India begins with the D.C., and Hastings was therefore ‘wrong’ to interfere with such an office.

He was fighting against the genius of the country [writes Philip Woodruff]. The way India wants to be governed, the way she feels
to be naturally right, is not by centralized rules but by personal decisions, on the platform beneath the pipal tree in the village, on the threshing floor of polished mud, on the balks between the rice fields.

Hastings might have gone along with this. His centralizing measures were designed to rein in government, not to extend it, and his objection was not to the collector as such but to his necessarily being of British birth. But even supposing Hastings lacked the I.C.S. man’s insight into India’s preferred method of government (he would surely have despised the paternalism that it implied) it must be doubtful whether he would have accorded a high priority to rural consensus when, in the aftermath of the 1770 famine, the threshing floor was choked with weeds and the rice fields rapidly reverting to jungle. The plight of the country moved Hastings and his collectors alike. From this period dates the first firm evidence of British administrators – or rather, Company servants – evincing a genuine concern for the lot of the peasant. It was somewhat ironical that at Hastings’s impeachment, Burke would seize this high moral ground to discomfit the accused and disparage his whole administration.

Hastings appeared to go even further with the novel suggestion that any government of India should enjoy the approbation of the people, a notion which furnished the later Raj with another good reason for co-opting him as a founding father. But at the time his priority was simply to restore Bengal to prosperity, thereby winning that approbation and at the same time boosting the Company’s much reduced revenue receipts. What was good for Bengal must also be good for the Company, he argued. But events proved him wrong and while the Company’s receipts did improve, the incomes of the Bengali peasantry did not. Like everyone else, Hastings had over-estimated the province’s wealth and so over-assessed the possible revenue. That Bengal had the potential for immense wealth he made no doubt; and he opined that whoever commanded it might one day acquire the dominion of all India – ‘an event which I may not mention without adding’, he added, ‘that it is what I never wish to see’.

Yet – and in this lies his real claim as architect of British India – Hastings did, reluctantly though with undeniable satisfaction, preside over events that did more to further such a dominion than even Clive’s adventures.

Responding to the voluminous documentation generated by Parliament’s attempts to recall and impeach him, historians of British India have usually dwelt at length on Hastings’s supposed crimes. Happily these transgressions need scarcely detain a student of the Company. A mischievous little campaign against the Afghan Rohillas, a blatant piece of extortion in respect of Benares, some broken pledges and ferocious vendettas, a hint of bribery, a judicial murder – even if proved these transgressions were neither exceptionally heinous nor, spread over thirteen years, cumulatively damning. More and worse had been perpetrated in Bengal during each of the preceding decades.

Similarly the remorseless opposition with which Hastings had to contend – from his Council, from the Courts, from the other Presidencies and from London – was nothing new. His frustration, heightened by a naturally imperious temperament and voiced with martyred eloquence, has won him a deal of sympathy. And in so far as his opponents, most notably Philip Francis and the other Councillors wished on him by the Regulating Act, enjoyed Parliamentary sanction, his authority was distinctly more vulnerable than had been that of, say, Clive. On the other hand the knowledge that Sulivan and an influential section of opinion in India House were sympathetic to his plight encouraged a volubility of complaint and defiance not heard since William Hedges had chafed at the opposition of the cantankerous Charnock. That Presidents/Governors were still invariably opposed and often outvoted by their Councils is well illustrated by contemporary events at Madras. There, like Hastings, one governor fought a duel while another was deposed by his Council. The latter was Pigot, governor of Madras during the Seven Years War, and now back with an unpopular mandate that led not only to his deposition but to his arrest and death. Hastings, who had managed to reverse his own Council’s attempt at superseding him, showed no sympathy for the unfortunate Pigot and in fact supported his opponents.

Much, of course, depends on one’s perspective. From the standpoint of nineteenth-century British India the idea of a governor-general being defied by anyone was quite monstrous. So was that of a governor-general stooping to personal vengeance against an Indian courtier (Nand Kumar), or emptying a duelling pistol into one of his Councillors (Philip Francis), or buying off the husband of his prospective bride (Marian Imhoff who became Mrs Hastings in 1777). But from the Company’s eighteenth-century standpoint such conduct was not at all unusual.
Conversely the tramp of British troops across the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent and the capture of supposedly impregnable strongholds a thousand miles from Bengal, though unremarkable to anyone acquainted with Wellesley’s campaigns in the early 1800s, made a profound impression in the 1780s when only Hastings dared to anticipate, and dread, a British India that stretched from Calcutta to Bombay and Madras.

It goes without saying that Hastings, a good Company civilian, disowned the idea of military conquest. When in 1772 the Emperor Shah Alam II accepted overtures from the resurgent Marathas to help him recover his patrimony, and when he then proposed to transfer to them the two districts (Allahabad and Kora) granted him by Clive and garrisoned for him ever since by the Company, Hastings saw merely a good opportunity to disengage from ‘a remote connection’ and reduce Bengal’s deficit. Accordingly he stopped the Company’s payments of 2.6 million rupees per year (made to the Emperor by way of tribute for the
diwani),
and restored the two districts to the Nawab of Oudh for 5 million rupees. ‘Shocking, horrible and outrageous’ would be Burke’s verdict on this ‘breach of faith’ with the Moghul. Hastings contended that the Emperor had broken faith first by entering into an alliance with the Marathas.