It is an observation of Sir James Mackintosh that in the course of one generation the English lost one empire in the West and gained another in the East; and it may be added that England owes not only the loss but its compensation to the policy of the French Government. In the long war that had now ended, their navy broke the hold of England on the North American colonies, as repeated blows on a man’s arms make him let go his antagonist in a furious struggle. But they had so enfeebled themselves by their exertions to fight England on behalf of American independence that they were left powerless to interfere with her thenceforward in Asia, or to maintain their rivalry at sea.
From 1783 begins a kind of pause in Anglo-Indian affairs, varied in India only by a preliminary trial of strength with Mysore, and in England by violent party warfare over Indian questions. The French Government still continued, according to the reports of British diplomatists, to watch for an opportunity of interfering
again in India, but their foreign policy was now suffering incipient paralysis from their growing internal complications. With France, therefore, England had a truce that lasted for ten years, to our great advantage in India, until in the final decade of the eighteenth century a fresh and furious storm broke over Europe with such violence that it rebounded upon India, and levelled most of the remaining obstacles to the expansion of the English dominion in that country.
If we are to measure the growth of the British power in India by the expansion of its territorial dominion, the interval of twenty years between Clive’s acceptance of the Diwani in 1765 and the departure of Warren Hastings from India in 1785 may be reckoned as a stationary period. It is true that from Oudh we acquired Benares and Ghazipur on the north-west of Bengal in 1775 – although the transfer merely registered our possession of two districts which had long been under our political control – and that we also obtained Bassein and Salsette, small though important points close to Bombay. But during the Governor-Generalship of Hastings, we had been so far from extending our Indian domain that our hold upon our actual possessions had been severely strained, our territory had been invaded, our arms had suffered some reverses, and the safety of one Presidency capital, Madras, had been gravely endangered. In point of fact, the English ascendency in India at this time had by no means been conclusively established; for although we were proving ourselves the strongest of the powers
that were now definitely rising into prominence out of the confusion of the previous half-century, yet we were still confronted by jealous rivals, and our dominions were not large in proportion to those of other states.
Two things, nevertheless, had been demonstrated by the struggle that had been sustained by the English nation. It had been proved in the first place that the united naval forces of Europe could not drive England from the sea, or wrest from her the command of the great routes across the ocean between Europe and Asia. Secondly, it had become clear by this time that, so long as their transmarine communications with the mother country could be preserved, and so long as their invaluable possession of Bengal remained undisturbed, the English ran no risk of permanent or vital injury either from the Marathas or from Mysore. The position of these two formidable fighting powers in the centre and south of India undoubtedly still operated as a check upon the English, and they could have diverted our forces to an extent which might have placed us in some jeopardy, if any hostile state of heavy warlike calibre had become established about this time in Upper India. This might easily have happened, for the wide and wealthy plains of the north-west had hitherto been always the seat, and the source, of the largest and strongest military rulerships. But it so chanced, by the good luck which has always attended the English in India, that toward the end of the eighteenth century, when the Marathas and the Mysore dynasty were strong and threatening, England had little or nothing
Cenotaph of a native ruler at Jaipur
to fear beyond her north-western frontier. The ghost of the Moghul Empire, sitting crowned among the ruins of its ancient splendour, still reigned over Delhi. And although the imperial authority had lost all substance, the shadow of that great name still so far overspread the surrounding districts as to prevent their absorption under a new dominion.
Yet the political vacuum created by the final disintegration of the Moghul Empire, and the withdrawal of the Afghans, was already filling up in the Panjab, by the rapid rise and compact organization of the Sikhs. Under this new Hindu federation, much more closely knit together by ties of race and common faith than the Marathas, the people became animated by a martial
spirit and a fiery enthusiasm such as the Hindus had not hitherto displayed. The history of the Sikhs illustrates a phenomenon well known in Asia, where an insurrectionary movement is always particularly dangerous if it takes a religious complexion, and where fanaticism may endure and accumulate under a spiritual leader until it explodes in the world of politics with the force of dynamite.
The martyrdom of their first prophet, and their persecution by the later Moghul emperors, had engendered in the hardy Sikh peasants a fierce hatred of Islam. They had been repressed and broken by the Afghan armies of Ahmad Shah, who routed them with great slaughter in 1761. But in 1762 they defeated and slew his governor at Sirhind; and in 1764 Ahmad Shah was recalled to his western provinces by a revolt in Kandahar. He died in 1773, after which date the grasp of his successors on the Panjab relaxed, and the Sikh confederation became closer and more vigorous. They were subdivided into misls, or military confederacies, under different chiefs, who fought among themselves and against the Mohammedans, until, by 1785, the Sikhs had mastered the whole country between the Jihlam and the Sutlaj Rivers in the centre of the Panjab, were threatening the Mohammedan princes about Delhi, and had made pillaging excursions eastward across the Ganges into Rohilkhand.
To the English in Bengal this revival of Hindu nationality in upper India was exceedingly serviceable and opportune. For, in the first place, their real danger,
the only substantial obstacle to their rising ascendency, lay always, then as now, in the possibility of some foreign invasion by the army of some rival power led by a chief at the head of the fighting tribes of Central Asia. But the Sikhs were making it impossible for any such Asiatic army to penetrate into the heart of the Panjab without encountering the obstinate resistance of men united to defend their faith and their fatherland, in a spirit very unfamiliar to the quiescence of ordinary Hinduism.
The kingdom founded by Ahmad Shah had extended, from its citadel in the Afghan mountains, on the west over Khorasan, and on the east over the Upper Panjab. It had thus been built up by wresting one frontier province from Persia and the other from India, and as the Afghan ruler was cordially detested in both these countries, whenever he was engaged by invasion or revolt on one flank, the opportunity was sure to be taken by his enemies on the other. Even Ahmad Shah failed to hold such a position without great exertions, and after his death it became quite untenable. Twenty years later Zaman Shah, a very able Afghan king, was obliged to retire from Lahore. This last abortive expedition closed the long series of irruptions by the Mohammedan conquerors, who for seven hundred years had swept down from the north upon the plains of India, and had founded dynasties which were only sustained by constant recruitment from their native countries beyond the mountains. Thenceforward the Sikhs were not only able to hold the line of the Indus River
against fresh invaders; they also cut off the channels of supply between Central Asia and the Mohammedan powers to the south of the Sutlaj, who were, moreover, kept in constant alarm by this actively aggressive Hindu community on their northern frontier.
The effect was to maintain among the fighting powers in Northern India an equilibrium that was of signal advantage to the English by preserving their north-west frontier unmolested during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a critical period when they were fully occupied with Mysore and the western Marathas. The barrier of Oudh set up by Hastings, although it had been sufficiently effective against the predatory Maratha hordes, would have been of little use for withstanding the much heavier metal of attacks from Central Asia. But the fierce enmity of the Sikhs kept out the foreign Mohammedan, and prevented the resuscitation of any fresh Islamite dynasty upon the ruins of the old empire at Delhi or Lahore. By the time that the Sikh power had become consolidated under Ranjit Singh, in the first years of the nineteenth century, the English had met and overcome their southern rivals, and could then turn their forces northward without fear of any serious diversion on their flanks or rear.
The position of the Sikhs on both sides of the Sutlaj was also useful at this period in setting bounds to the encroachments of the Marathas, who were now again pushing northward under Sindhia. This ambitious and able chief was endeavouring to carve out for himself an independent principality in the upper provinces. He
had attached himself to one of the parties that were contending for the possession of imperial authority at Delhi, and had rewarded himself by marching up with a large army in 1785 to obtain his own nomination as vicegerent of the empire. The emperor’s eldest son had applied to the English for assistance; and Hastings had been much tempted, just before he quitted India, by the project of sending an expedition to Delhi for the purpose of setting the Great Moghul again on his feet, and of making English influence paramount at his capital.
But the Company, though alarmed at this notable aggrandizement of the Marathas in a new quarter, could not yet venture to oppose Sindhia’s enterprise, and the project of reviving the moribund empire under European influence – which had passed across the vision of Dupleix, of Bussy, and of Clive – was once more reluctantly abandoned by Hastings as impracticable. Yet it was in fact only premature, for twenty years later the march to Delhi and the expulsion of the Marathas were actually accomplished under Lord Wellesley’s orders. In the meantime, Sindhia, who occupied both Agra and Delhi after Hastings’s departure, became so confident as to send to the English Government, in his Majesty’s name, a requisition for tribute on account of their administration of the imperial province of Bengal.
The year 1786, therefore, when Lord Cornwallis reached India, found the English still confronting the Marathas in the west and north-west, and Tippu Sultan,
Lord Cornwallis
the Mysore ruler, in the south, but with no other rivals of importance in the political or military field against them.
We have seen how, from the time when the European nations first acquired valuable interests in India, the course of events in India has gradually been drawn more and more within European influences.
The weaker Asiatic states have felt the attraction of the larger and more active political bodies; wars in the west have kindled wars in the east; and the clash of arms has reverberated from one to the other continent. The outcome of the contest was, as has been said, that England now held undisputed supremacy, as against other European nations, in India. Then, as the connection between the British nation and its great dependency grew
to be closer, as the points of contact multiplied, and as the value of her magnificent acquisition became known to England, her clearer recognition of national rights and duties brought Indian affairs within the current of domestic politics.
Not only foreign wars, but the struggle of Parliamentary parties at home had lately affected India. In 1780 Lord North moved in the House of Commons for an order that the three years’ statutory notice of intention to dissolve their charter should be given to the Company. The motion was carried against the strenuous opposition of Fox, who asked the minister whether he was not content with having lost America, and of Burke, who warned the House not to throw away the East after the West in another chase after revenue. Nevertheless, by 1783, when the period of notice was expiring, the point of view taken up by these great orators, who were then in office, had materially changed. The conclusion of peace in Europe and America in 1783 had now given the English, after an interval of ten years, a second opportunity of looking into the condition and management of their distant possessions; the loss of the western colonies had sharpened their solicitude for the new dominion that had been gained in the East.
There could now be no doubt that England had acquired a great Indian sovereignty; for although the wars and perpetual contests of the last seven years had for the time imperilled her position in the country, the general result was to prove its stability under severe
pressure, and thus to confirm rather than impair British ascendency. Warren Hastings, in reviewing the state of Bengal at the end of his Governor-Generalship, wrote that the late war had proved to all the leading states of India “that their combined strength and politics, assisted by our great enemy the French, have not been able to destroy the solid fabric of the English power in the East, nor even to deprive it of any portion of its territories.”
It was this conviction that the Company were now masters in India, that they had grown too powerful for a trading association – so powerful, indeed, as to have become an anomaly under the British constitution and even a danger to it – that gave weight and momentum to Burke’s assault upon the whole system. In his speech delivered in December, 1783, upon Fox’s East India Bill, which was to transfer the Company’s authority to Parliamentary Commissioners, he enlarges upon the extent of the Company’s territory and the immense range of their arbitrary despotism. “With very few, and those inconsiderable, intervals, the British dominion, either in the Company’s name or in the names of princes absolutely dependent on the Company, extends from the mountains that separate India from Tartary (the Himalayas) to Cape Comorin, that is, one and twenty degrees of latitude. ... If I were to take the whole aggregate of our possessions there, I should compare it, as the nearest parallel I could find, to the empire of Germany. Our immediate possessions I shall compare with the Austrian dominions, and they would
not suffer in the comparison. ... Through all that vast extent of country there is not a man who eats a mouthful of rice but by permission of the East India Company.”
There is great exaggeration in this description, and the German parallel is substantially erroneous; nevertheless, it is worth observing that more than a century ago, within twenty-five years after the battle of Plassey, the predominance of the Company throughout India was treated as a fact only too completely accomplished. Nor can it be doubted that Burke’s survey of the situation was, in the main, correct; the weakness of all the native states had been ascertained; the groundwork of empire had already been firmly constructed. And subsequent events rapidly verified the judgment of Hastings that “nothing but attention, protection, and forbearance,” an equal, vigorous, and fixed administration, and free play for its vast natural resources and advantages was needed to secure the rise of India, under British ascendency, to a high and permanent level of national prosperity.
For some years the constitution and conduct of the East India Company had been undergoing thorough investigation before committees of the House of Commons, with the result that the need of many reforms, and the expediency of imposing more control on the management of Anglo-Indian possessions, had been agreed upon unanimously. The reports of the committees were submitted, and resolutions proposed, in 1782, at a moment when the old political parties were breaking
A village god in the Bombay Presidency
up and reconstituting themselves into new groups under fresh leaders, when the famous Coalition Ministry was in process of formation, and when the bitter contentions between hostile factions were at their height. In these resolutions the whole recent administration of the Company was severely condemned, the directors were required to recall Warren Hastings, and it was further resolved that the powers given to the Governor-General and Council must be more distinctly ascertained.
When the Coalition Ministry took office, Fox introduced a bill altering the whole of the Company’s constitution, which was supported by Burke in a speech loaded with furious invective against Hastings and the
The Ghat Temple, Cawnpur
Company, both of whom he charged with the most abominable tyranny and corruption. Against some of the Company’s servants the true record of misdeeds and errors was sufficiently long; but Hastings was a man of the highest character and capacity, an incorruptible administrator who had done his country great and meritorious services. Yet his integrity was virulently aspersed, and all his public acts wantonly distorted, in speeches that invoked against him the moral indignation of partisans engaged in the ignoble wrangle over places, pensions, and sinecures, among whom none had been exposed to similar trials of a man’s courage or constancy, and only a very few would have resisted similar temptations.
In this manner the report and resolutions were used as fuel for the engines of party-warfare to drive the bill through Parliament against some very solid opposition. Nevertheless, the essential question before the Commons and the country was not so much whether the Company and their officers were guilty of crimes that were for the most part incredible, as whether the patronage of India should be the prize of politicians, who, after furiously denouncing each other’s measures and principles, had made a very dishonourable coalition to obtain office. On this point the king, with a majority of his people, was against the ministry that had been formed under the Duke of Portland by Lord North’s association with Fox and Burke.
It thus came to pass that the pitched battles of the memorable Parliamentary campaigns of 1783– 1784
were fought upon Indian ground; Fox and Burke were defeated and driven out of office; the East Indian Bill was rejected; the Coalition was upset by George III and by Pitt, who rose at once to the summit of ministerial power. In 1784 Pitt carried through Parliament his act which vested full superintendence over all civil, military, and revenue affairs of the Company in six commissioners appointed by the Crown. The chief government in India was placed in the hands of the Governor-General with three councillors, whose authority over the minor Presidencies was complete on all matters of diplomacy, of peace and war, and of the application of the revenues; and by a subsequent act of 1786 the Governor-General was empowered to act on his own responsibility in extraordinary cases, without the concurrence of his Council.
This system of double government, by the Company under the control of a minister directly responsible to Parliament, lasted until 1858, when the Crown assumed the sole and direct administration of India, a project that had been under the consideration of the elder Pitt a hundred years earlier. The immediate effect of Pitt’s act was a great and manifest improvement in the mechanics of Indian government, removing most of the ill-contrived checks and hindrances which had brought Hastings into collision with his Council and the subordinate governments, abolishing the defects that he had pointed out, and applying the remedies that he had proposed. All preceding governors had been servants of the East India Company; and Hastings, the first
and last of the Company’s Governors-General, had been the scapegoat of an awkward and unmanageable governing apparatus, hampered by divided authority, and distracted by party feuds in Calcutta and in London. The position and powers of the chief executive authority in India were henceforward very differently constituted, and the increased force of the new machinery very soon became visible in the results.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage