Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (70 page)

Macartney’s drastic action may have been prompted by panic. Stuart had been one of the leading lights in the earlier conspiracy against Lord Pigot and could conceivably try it again. Macartney certainly detected the same conjunction of a disgruntled military and an incensed Nawab (Mohammed Ali) who was as usual eagerly encouraged by his sinister coterie of creditors. Indeed it was Macartney’s highly provocative treatment of the Nawab which constituted his bone of bitterest contention with Hastings. For the duration of the war Hastings himself had proposed that the Nawab must sign a large part of his revenues over to the Company. This did not go down well with the Nawab’s creditors and it is just possible that they won Hastings round to their way of thinking. (They commanded an influential following in both Westminster and Leadenhall Street; Hastings sorely needed any support he could get; even Pitt and Dundas would eventually find it expedient to capitulate to the ‘Arcot Interest’.) Whatever the reason, Hastings soon found Macartney’s treatment of such an old ally as Mohammed Ali unnecessarily harsh and tantamount to a usurpation of his rights. When Macartney refused to back off, Hastings again recommended his suspension and was again frustrated by his Council. Clearly Macartney’s influential connections were no secret in Bengal; neither was the fact that Hastings’s recall was being demanded by Parliament; and neither were Macartney’s expectations of himself being appointed the new Governor-General.

The Mangalore treaty, which also completely ignored Mohammed Ali’s rights, was the final straw. ‘You act criminally towards your country’, Hastings had told Macartney in a résumé of the latter’s transgressions. Yet again he moved for suspension and yet again the Council refused to oblige. Worse still, even Leadenhall Street seemed to be taking Macartney’s side. With Parliament, the Court of Directors, his own Council, and the subordinate Presidencies all ranged against the Governor-General, with age catching up on him and with ill-health, or arrogance, upsetting his judgement, it was time to go. A sizeable fortune, estimated at £175,000 and culled from a variety of sources both legitimate and suspect, awaited him at home – or at least it should have done had it not been for his habitual ‘generosity, carelessness, and
extravagance’. Mrs Hastings, his beloved Marian, was already in England; and he had promised to follow her within the year. He waited only for news of his successor – or at any rate confirmation that it would not be Macartney.

And yet there was still just a chance that he might stay. Fox’s India Bill, which would have dissolved the Company and which Hastings had characterized as ‘impudence and profligacy unequalled’, had been defeated. Now young Pitt’s star was in the ascendant and it was just possible that the great-grandson of Governor Pitt would reassert the Company’s rights and at long last give to its Governor-General the full and undisputed authority necessary to conduct its Indian affairs. In the event, of course, Pitt’s India Bill did no such thing. On learning its terms, Hastings threw in the towel. To John Scot, his agent in London and an ex-officer of the Company, he wrote that ‘an Act more injurious to his [Scot’s] fellow-servants, to my character and authority, to the Company…and to the national honour could not have been devised…’ It was an ‘unequivocal demonstration that my resignation of the service is expected’. He immediately obliged, sailing from Calcutta in February 1785.

There remains just his impeachment in the House of Lords – more theatre than politics, it was both a personal tragedy and a public farce which ran for nine years longer than it should have –plus the rather more intriguing question of why Hastings took so long to relinquish office. If there was ever a moment when the Company in India might have withheld its allegiance to the Directorate it must surely have been in 1784-5. Political extinction in the shape of Dundas’s, Fox’s, and finally Pitt’s bills stared it in the face. The defiant example of the American colonies was fresh to the mind and indeed largely responsible for focusing so much parliamentary attention on India. Moreover, in Hastings India had a Governor-General who, provoked beyond reason, just might have fancied his chances. Cornwallis, who would succeed him two years later, conceded that he was ‘beloved by the people’ and even Macaulay, his fiercest critic, would credit him with ‘a popularity such as…no other governor has been able to attain’. His ability was also unquestioned. The loyalty of the Nawabs of Oudh and the Carnatic was founded on his personal friendship. The Nizam and Scindia were firmly attached to the British interest. Only Tipu remained to give trouble and Tipu could have been tamed with a renegotiated Mangalore.

But whether a unilateral declaration of independence was ever seriously
entertained we shall never know. History is constructed from what men did and what they wrote. What they thought and said in private – especially if of a treasonable nature – is seldom apparent. One can only conjecture.

It seems clear enough, though, that Hastings was not the only one who felt bitter. In letters quoted in Professor Furber’s biography of Dundas, George Smith, a member of the Bengal Council, refers to a ‘furore of petitioning’ against Pitt’s bill in both Calcutta and Madras. Disaffection was rife among the King’s officers who resented Macartney’s conduct towards Stuart, among the Company’s officers who resented the increasing numbers and privileges of the King’s officers, and among the Company’s civilians who took exception to the censures included in Pitt’s bill and to its provisions against profiteering. But Smith’s advice to Dundas was to make no concessions. It was concessions that had encouraged the American colonists to fight. Better just to stand firm until ‘chimerical ideas of Independence…droop and drop, for our [i.e. Indian] condition is very different indeed from that of the Irish and Americans’.

And what of Hastings? ‘He might have attempted, and successfully, a dismemberment of this country from the British Empire’; but, as Smith added, he was too loyal, too faithful to the Honourable Company. ‘I owe to my ever honourable employers the service of my life’, Hastings wrote. ‘My conscience…prompts me to declare that no man ever served them with a zeal superior to my own, or perhaps equal to it.’

Spanning the period of the transfer of power in London, Hastings’s Governor-Generalship may be seen both as a culmination of the Company’s rule and as the inauguration of the Raj. It was like the end pillar of India House’s new classical colonnade which, depending on your viewpoint, could be seen as terminating the building’s somewhat chaotic side elevation or as beginning its grandiose frontal façade. Although drawing heavily on past precedents, both Indian and British, Hastings seems to have been more than conscious of the changing British role in India; and to this change he made another vital contribution.

It was something to do with his perception of India. Although most eighteenth-century Englishmen in India affected oriental customs to the extent of smoking a hookah and taking lower or half-caste women to bed, they viewed the subcontinent with an understandable detachment, albeit tinged with avarice and anxiety. The social whirl of Calcutta and the civic pride of Madras are reminiscent of the starched table-linen and frantic gaiety of a cruise liner. Outside, in the dusty
mofussil
and further ‘upcountry’, India’s political disarray surged around them. They followed its progress for the opportunities it offered. But looking ever to the revenue receipts, the trade investment, and above all their own perquisites, they felt no sense of identity with their Indian surroundings, let alone with the subcontinent as a whole.

It was different with Hastings. Perhaps because he was there so long, perhaps because he had mastered Urdu and Bengali, or perhaps just because he liked the place, Hastings saw beyond the immediate and often sordid political and commercial realities to an Indian totality that was both geographical and historical. Admiration for this vast and noble
entity fired his curiosity. Like many who have followed him, he longed to comprehend India’s profusion and diversity, to fathom its antiquity, and to explore its extent.

Thanks to Hastings’s patronage, in the face of the usual obstruction from his Council, Charles Wilkins, the first Englishman to master Sanskrit, published a translation of the
Bhagavad-gita,
the devotional core of the
Mahabbarata.
Hastings wrote his celebrated introduction to it during those last anxious months in India. The
Gita,
he declared, evinced ‘a sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled’ and a theology to which even a dedicated Christian could not take exception. This and other masterpieces from an age predating civilization in Europe would, he predicted, ‘survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance’. In encouraging Hindu scholarship (and in founding a Muslim college in Calcutta) Hastings declared his policy to be that of ‘reconciling the people of England to the natives of Hindustan’. Such notions had no precedent among the Company’s servants. Hastings may be credited with having established the idea of a lasting and responsible British participation in India’s history and of having made India a respectable subject for statecraft and dominion.

Also under his patronage Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal which quickly became the great clearing-house for oriental scholarship. Jones, a Supreme Court judge and polymathic genius who shunned British society in favour of his Brahmin tutors, defined the Society’s field of enquiry as all-embracing. It was to investigate India’s geography, history, grammar, rhetoric, agriculture, industry, science, music, architecture, poetry, medicine, plus ‘whatever is rare in the stupendous fabric of nature’. ‘If now it be asked what are the intended objects of our enquiries within these spacious limits, we answer Man and Nature, whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other.’

Such enlightened sentiments accorded exactly with Hastings’s own and are echoed in the wide-ranging briefs drawn up by him for his two most important initiatives outside India. Both were prompted by fortuitous circumstance; and both had specific commercial and political objectives. But by endowing them with a wider significance Hastings persuaded himself that they were not purely speculative. They were to serve the cause of science and scholarship and they were to promote the idea of British Bengal as an established and honourable Asian polity. The first of these intitiatives also anticipated by nearly a century British
India’s obsession with its Himalayan and central Asian frontier; and the second revived the dreams of Saris, Floris, Catchpole, and latterly Dalrymple for an entrepôt through which the China trade could if necessary be rerouted away from Cantonese mandarins.

In the 1770s Tibet, Bengal’s northern neighbour, fairly merited its invariable epithets of ‘unknown’ and ‘inaccessible’. No Briton had yet so much as penetrated the Himalayas. But as ‘Button’ or ‘Botton’, Bhutan had occasionally scored a mention in the Company’s records and was often confused with Tibet itself. This was understandable. Tibet exercised a somewhat vague and fluctuating authority over many of the Himalayan states and it was thus on behalf of Bhutan that a Tibetan mission made its unexpected appearance in Calcutta in 1774. The Bhutanese had recently been worsted by four companies of sepoys sent to repel one of their habitual incursions into northern Bengal; their own territory was now threatened by way of reprisal; so the Grand Lama of Tashilunpo in Tibet was writing to Calcutta to plead negotiations and save the wayward Bhutanese.

Hastings responded enthusiastically. Tibet, known to be uncommonly cold, might be the long-sought market for English woollens. Additionally, its trade with India, which traditionally passed through Nepal, had recently been interrupted. And still more to the point, Lhasa was known to be somehow subject to Peking and might therefore represent a back door into the Chinese Empire. Could this be a channel for re-presenting the grievances of the Canton factors? The commercial possibilities were enormous. But George Bogle, the Scot who was immediately dispatched to explore them, was also to investigate the manners, morals, customs, politics, etc of the Tibetans – and not simply for what Sir Clement Markham calls rather snidely ‘the personal satisfaction of Warren Hastings’.

Bogle, a Company servant, is described as ‘a gentleman of distinguished ability and remarkable equanimity of temper’. The ‘distinguished ability’ would be somewhat wasted on the Tibetans for although his overtures were welcomed by the Tashi (or Panchen) Lama, only the authorities in Lhasa could conclude an agreement and they, jealous of the Tashi Lama and much under Chinese influence, refused Bogle permission to approach the capital. But that ‘remarkable equanimity of temper’ stood him in excellent stead. Neither the prevarication of the Bhutanese nor the gradients of the eastern Himalayas could ruffle the beaming Bogle; the Tashi Lama became a close and revered friend; and Bogle’s six months in Tibet he reckoned the happiest of his life. Like many
subsequent travellers he was completely seduced by the Tibetans. ‘Farewell, ye honest and simple people,’ he wrote on his departure; ‘may ye long enjoy that happiness which is denied to more polished nations, and while they are engaged in the endless pursuit of avarice and ambition, defended by your barren mountains, may ye continue to live in peace and contentment, and know no wants but those of nature.’ These were odd sentiments for an ambitious servant of a decidedly avaricious Company, odder still for a man supposedly engineering the commercial and political penetration of the country.

Making the most of his contacts, Bogle had compiled a dossier on Tibet’s export trade in such exotica as gold dust, musk, and shawl wool, and he foresaw great possibilities for Indian exports. Henceforth the encouragement of trans-Himalayan trade would be regarded as a British responsibility; more important, its interruption would be seen as a blow to British interests. Bogle hoped that in time the British would be able to participate in it directly and in this connection he expected much from the representations which the Tashi Lama promised to make during his forthcoming visit to Peking. Unfortunately the Lama died in Peking and Bogle himself died a few months later. Two follow-up missions from Bengal failed to gain access to Tibet, although trade with Bhutan was put on a regular footing. Then in 1782 word arrived from Tashilunpo that the Lama’s new incarnation had been discovered. Metempsychosis had its advantages. Naturally Hastings must congratulate his old friend who now, as an eighteen-month-old baby, was embarking on his seventh term of office. Accordingly Captain Samuel Turner, a cousin of Hastings, was sent back to Tibet with a brief almost identical to Bogle’s.