The Anarchy
THE ANARCHY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
In Xanadu: A Quest
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium
The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India
Begums, Thugs & White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857
(with Yuthika Sharma)
The Writer’s Eye
The Historian’s Eye
Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond
(with Anita Anand)
Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company 1770–1857
Contents
Maps
Dramatis Personae
Introduction
1. 1599
2. An Offer He Could Not Refuse
3. Sweeping With the Broom of Plunder
4. A Prince of Little Capacity
5. Bloodshed and Confusion
6. Racked by Famine
7. The Desolation of Delhi
8. The Impeachment of Warren Hastings
9. The Corpse of India
Epilogue
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
A Note on the Author
Plates Section
A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred million people.
Leo Tolstoy, letter to a Hindu, 14 December 1908
Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.
Edward, First Baron Thurlow (1731–1806), the Lord Chancellor during the impeachment of Warren Hastings
Maps
Dramatis Personae
1. THE BRITISH
Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive
1725–74
East India Company accountant who rose through his remarkable military talents to be Governor of Bengal. Thickset, laconic, but fiercely ambitious and unusually forceful, he proved to be a violent and ruthless but extremely capable leader of the Company and its military forces in India. He had a streetfighter’s eye for sizing up an opponent, a talent at seizing the opportunities presented by happenchance, a willingness to take great risks and a breathtaking, aggressive audacity. It was he who established the political and military supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and laid the foundations for British rule in India.
Warren Hastings
1732–1818
Scholar and linguist who was the first Governor of the Presidency of Fort William, the head of the Supreme Council of Bengal and the de facto first Governor General of India from 1773 to 1785. Plain-living, scholarly, diligent and austerely workaholic, he was a noted Indophile who in his youth fought hard against the looting of Bengal by his colleagues. However his feud with Philip Francis led to him being accused of corruption and he was impeached by Parliament. After a long and very public trial he was finally acquitted in 1795.
Philip Francis
1740–1818
Irish-born politician and scheming polemicist, thought to be the author of The Letters of Junius, and the chief opponent and antagonist of Warren Hastings. Wrongly convinced that Hastings was the source of all corruption in Bengal, and ambitious to replace him as Governor General, he pursued Hastings from 1774 until his death. Having failed to kill Hastings in a duel, and instead receiving a pistol ball in his own ribs, he returned to London where his accusations eventually led to the impeachment of both Hastings and his Chief Justice, Elijah Impey. Both were ultimately acquitted.
Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis
1738–1805
Having surrendered British forces in North America to a combined American and French force at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, Cornwallis was recruited as Governor General of India by the East India Company to stop the same happening there. A surprisingly energetic administrator, he introduced the Permanent Settlement, which increased Company land revenues in Bengal, and defeated Tipu Sultan in the 1782 Third Anglo-Mysore War.
Richard Colley Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley
1760–1842
Governor General of India who conquered more of India than Napoleon did of Europe. Despising the mercantile spirit of the East India Company, and answering instead to the dictates of his Francophobe friend Dundas, President of the Board of Trade, he used the East India Company’s armies and resources successfully to wage the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, which ended with the killing of Tipu Sultan and the destruction of his capital in 1799, then the Second Anglo-Maratha War, which led to the defeat of the armies of both Scindia and Holkar in 1803. By this time he had expelled the last French units from India and given the East India Company control of most of the subcontinent south of the Punjab.
Colonel Arthur Wellesley
1769–1852
Governor of Mysore and ‘Chief Political and Military Officer in the Deccan and Southern Maratha Country’, he helped defeat the armies of Tipu in 1799 and those of the Marathas in 1803. Later famous as the Duke of Wellington.
Gerald, 1st Viscount Lake
1744–1808
Lord Lake, who liked to claim descent from the Arthurian hero Lancelot of the Lake, was not a man who admired diplomacy: ‘Damn your writing,’ he is alleged to have cried at an army bookkeeper. ‘Mind your fighting!’ Although sixty years old, and a veteran of the Seven Years War and the American War of Independence, where he fought against Washington at Yorktown, he was famous for his boyish charm and immense energy, often rising at 2 a.m. to be ready to lead the march, blue eyes flashing. He was Wellesley’s very capable Commander in Chief and in 1803 was put in charge of defeating the Maratha armies of Hindustan in the northern theatre of operations.
Edward Clive, 1st Earl of Powis
1754–1839
Son of Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’), he was the notably unintelligent Governor of Madras.
2. THE FRENCH
Joseph-François Dupleix
1697–1764
Governor General of the French establishments in India, who lost the Carnatic Wars in southern India to the young Robert Clive.
Michel Joachim Marie Raymond
1755–98
Mercenary commander of the French Battalion in Hyderabad.
General Pierre Cuiller-Perron
1755–1834
Perron was the son of a Provençal weaver who succeeded the far more capable Benoît de Boigne as Commander of Scindia’s regiments. He lived with his troops a hundred miles to the south-east of Delhi in the great fortress of Aligarh, but in 1803 betrayed his men in return for a promise by the Company to let him leave India with his life savings.
3. THE MUGHALS
Alamgir Aurangzeb
1618–1707
Charmless and puritanical Mughal Emperor, whose overly ambitious conquest of the Deccan first brought Mughal dominions to their widest extent, then led to their eventual collapse. His alienation of the Empire’s Hindu population, and especially the Rajput allies, by his religious bigotry accelerated the collapse of the Empire after his death.
Muhammad Shah Rangila
1702–48
Effete Mughal aesthete whose administrative carelessness and lack of military talent led to his defeat by the Persian warlord Nader Shah at the Battle of Karnal in 1739. Nader Shah looted Mughal Delhi, taking away with him the Peacock Throne, into which was embedded the leg
endary Koh-i-Noor diamond. He returned to Persia, leaving Muhammad Shah a powerless king with an empty treasury and the Mughal Empire bankrupt and fractured beyond repair.
Ghazi ud-Din Khan, Imad ul-Mulk
1736–1800
The teenage megalomaniac grandson of Nizam ul-Mulk, 1st Nizam of Hyderabad. He first turned on and defeated his patron, Safdar Jung, in 1753, then blinded, imprisoned and finally murdered his Emperor, Ahmad Shah, in 1754. Having placed Alamgir II on the throne in his stead, he then tried to capture and kill the latter’s son, Shah Alam, and finally assassinated his own puppet Emperor in 1759. He fled Delhi after the rise of the Afghan Najib ud-Daula, who succeeded him as effective Governor of Delhi.
Alamgir II
1699–1759
The son of the Emperor Jahandar Shah, and the father of Shah Alam II, he was taken out from the Salatin Cage and made puppet Emperor by Imad ul-Mulk in 1754, only to be assassinated on his orders in Feroz Shah Kotla in 1759, four years later.
Shah Alam
1728–1806
Handsome and talented Mughal prince whose life was dogged by defeat and bad luck but who showed an extraordinary determination through horrific trials. As a boy he had seen Nadir Shah ride into Delhi and loot it. He later escaped Imad ul-Mulk’s attempt to assassinate him and survived repeated battles with Clive. He fought the Company at Patna and Buxar, awarded the Diwani to Clive at Allahabad and defied Warren Hastings by his cross-country trek back to Delhi. There, with Mirza Najaf Khan, against all the odds he nearly succeeded in rebuilding the empire of his ancestors; only to see it vanish like a mirage after the premature death of that last great Mughal general. Finally, at his lowest point, the Emperor was assaulted and blinded by his psychotic former favourite, Ghulam Qadir. Despite these trials he never gave up, and only briefly – after the rape of his family and his blinding by the Rohillas – did he allow himself to give way to despair. In the most adverse circumstances imaginable, that of the Great Anarchy, he ruled over a court of high culture, and as well as writing fine verse himself he was a generous patron to poets, scholars and artists.
4. THE NAWABS
Aliverdi Khan, Nawab of Bengal
1671–1756
Aliverdi Khan, who was of mixed Arab and Afshar Turkman stock, came to power in 1740 in Bengal, the richest province of the Mughal Empire, in a military coup financed and masterminded by the immensely powerful Jagat Seth bankers. A cat-loving epicure who loved to fill his evenings with good food, books and stories, after defeating the Marathas he created in Murshidabad a strong and dazzling Shia court culture, and a stable political, economic and political centre which was a rare island of calm and prosperity amid the anarchy of Mughal decline.
Siraj ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal
1733–57
Grandson of Aliverdi Khan and the man whose attack on the East India Company factories in Kasimbazar and Calcutta began the Company’s conquest of Bengal. Not one of the many sources for the period – Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English – has a good word to say about Siraj: according to Jean Law, who was his political ally, ‘His reputation was the worst imaginable.’ The most damning portrait of him, however, was painted by his own cousin, Ghulam Hussain Khan, who had been part of his staff and was profoundly shocked by the man he depicts as a serial bisexual rapist and psychopath: ‘His character was a mix of ignorance and profligacy,’ he wrote.
Mir Jafar, Nawab of Bengal
c. 1691–1765
An uneducated Arab soldier of fortune originally from the Shia shrine town of Najaf, he had played his part in many of Aliverdi’s most crucial victories against the Marathas, and led the successful attack on Calcutta for Siraj ud-Daula in 1756. He joined the conspiracy hatched by the Jagat Seths to replace Siraj ud-Daula with his own rule, and soon found himself the puppet ruler of Bengal at the whim of the East India Company. Robert Clive rightly described him as ‘a prince of little capacity’.
Mir Qasim, Nawab of Bengal
d. 1763
Mir Qasim was as different a man as could be imagined from his chaotic and uneducated father-in-law, Mir Jafar. Of noble Persian extraction, though born on his father’s estates near Patna, Mir Qasim was small in frame, with little military experience, but young, capable, intelligent and, above all, determined. He conspired with the Company to replace the incompetent Mir Jafar in a coup in 1760 and succeeded in creating a tightly run state with a modern infantry army. But within three years he ended up coming into conflict with the Company and in 1765 what remained of his forces were finally defeated at the Battle of Buxar. He fled westwards and died in poverty near Agra.
Shuja ud-Daula, Nawab of Avadh
1732–74
Shuja ud-Daula, son of the great Mughal Vizier Safdar Jung and his successor as Nawab of Avadh, was a giant of a man. Nearly seven feet tall, with oiled moustaches that projected from his face like a pair of outstretched eagle’s wings, he was a man of immense physical strength. By 1763, he was past his prime, but still reputedly strong enough to cut off the head of a buffalo with a single swing of his sword, or lift up two of his officers, one in each hand. His vices were his overweening ambition, his haughty self-importance and his inflated opinion of his own abilities. This was something that immediately struck the urbane intellectual Ghulam Hussain Khan, who regarded him as a slight liability, every bit as foolish as he was bold. Shuja, he wrote, ‘was equally proud and ignorant …’ He was defeated by the Company at the Battle of Buxar in 1765 and replaced by Clive back on the throne of Avadh, where he ruled until the end of his life as a close ally of the EIC.
5. THE ROHILLAS
Najib Khan Yusufzai, Najib ud-Daula
d. 1770
Former Yusufzai Pashtun horse dealer who served the Mughals as a cavalry commander, but deserted to Ahmad Shah Durrani during his invasion of 1757. He became Ahmad Shah’s Governor of Delhi, based for the final part of his career in his eponymous capital of Najibabad, near Saharanpur, until his death in 1770.
Zabita Khan Rohilla
d. 1785
Rohilla chieftain who fought at Panipat and rebelled repeatedly against Shah Alam. He was the son of Najib ud-Daula and the father of Ghulam Qadir.
Ghulam Qadir Khan Rohilla
c. 1765–1787
Ghulam Qadir was the son of Zabita Khan Rohilla. He was captured by Shah Alam at the fall of Ghausgarh in 1772 and taken back to Delhi where he was brought up as an imperial prince in Qudsia Bagh. Some sources indicate that he was a favurite of Shah Alam and may even have become his catamite. In 1787, possibly in revenge for offences at this time, he attacked Delhi, looted the Red Fort, tortured and raped the imperial household and blinded Shah Alam. He was eventually captured and himself tortured to death by the Maratha troops of Mahadji Scindia.
7. THE SULTANS OF MYSORE
Haidar Ali
d.1782
Officer in the Mysore army who overthrew the Wadyar Rajas of Mysore in 1761 and seized power in their place. Having learned modern infantry warfare by observing French tactics, he offered strong resistance to the East India Company, gaining his most notable victory alongside his son Tipu Sultan at Pollilur in 1780.
Tipu Sultan
1750–99
Warrior Sultan of Mysore, who defeated the East India Company in several campaigns, most notably alongside his father Haidar Ali at the Battle of Pollilur in 1780. He succeeded his father in 1782 and ruled with great efficiency and imagination during peace, but with great brutality in war. He was forced to cede half his kingdom to Lord Cornwallis’s Triple Alliance with the Marathas and Hyderabadis in 1792 and was finally defeated and killed by Lord Wellesley in 1799.
8. THE MARATHAS
Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle
d. 1680
Maratha war leader who carved out a kingdom in the Deccan from the ruins of the Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur and then fought against the Mughal Empire, which had conquered Bijapur in 1686. Having turned himself into the nemesis of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, he
built forts, created a navy and raided deep into Mughal territory. He was crowned Chhatrapati, or Lord of the Umbrella, at two successive coronation ceremonies at Raigad towards the end of his life in 1674.
Nana Phadnavis
1742–1800
Pune-based statesman and minister to the Peshwas, known as ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’. He was one of the first to realise that the East India Company posed an existential threat to India and tried to organise a Triple Alliance with the Hyderabadis and the Sultans of Mysore to drive them out, but failed to carry the project through to its conclusion.
Tukoji Holkar
1723–97
Dashing Maratha chieftain who survived the Battle of Panipat to become the great rival of Mahadji Scindia in north India.
Mahadji Scindia
1730–94
Maratha chieftain and statesman who was the most powerful Indian ruler in northern Hindustan for twenty years, from the 1770s onwards. Badly wounded at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, he limped for the rest of his life and became hugely fat, but he was a shrewd politician who took Shah Alam under his wing from 1771 onwards and turned the Mughals into Maratha puppets. He created a powerful modern army under the Savoyard General Benoît de Boigne, but towards the end of his life his rivalry with Tukoji Holkar and his unilateral peace with the East India Company at the Treaty of Salbai both did much to undermine Maratha unity and created the conditions for the final Company victory over the Marathas nine years after his death.
Peshwa Baji Rao II
1775–1851
The Last Peshwa of the Maratha Empire, who ruled from 1795–1818. When he first succeeded to the musnud he was slight, timid, unconfident-looking boy of twenty-one with a weak chin and a downy upper lip. He quickly showed himself comprehensively unequal to the challenge of holding together the different factions that made up his Maratha power base, and the treaty he signed with the East India Company at Bassein in 1802 led to the final unravelling of the great Maratha Confederacy.