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Chapter 2 – The Governorship of Bengal (1772–74)

The Indian career of Warren Hastings is divided into two periods of almost equal length but of very different character. During his first residence of fourteen years in the country he served with credit in subordinate offices; but he does not seem to have carried home with him any reputation for signal ability or remarkable promise. In the second period of nearly thirteen years, dating from his assumption of the Bengal Governorship in 1772, his fortune was very different. After two years’ work at Madras he was promoted to be President and Governor of Bengal, an appointment which he probably owed chiefly to the ability which he had shown in reforming the Company’s commercial administration at Madras; for affairs at Calcutta were in a condition that required to be set right by some one who possessed the rare quality of tried integrity and personal incorruptibility. This position, which was greatly enlarged two years later by transformation into the Governor-Generalship, Hastings retained for thirteen years. No subsequent Governor-General has held anything like so long a tenancy of the office; nor has any of his successors had such difficulties to surmount with means so small and responsibilities so great, or to confront,

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with so little support, such powerful and vexations opposition in India and England. His name is writ large across a very important page of Indian history; and the period of his Governor-Generalship includes transactions of great complexity and consequence, which have been more talked about and less understood than any portion of the obscure and unattractive annals of our early administration in India. Most of the political complications in which he became entangled are sufficiently accounted for by the extraordinary confusion that prevailed all over India at this time; and we have also to remember that the same period was one of violent jarring collision among parties at home, of misrule by incompetent Ministers, and of national discredit and misfortune; of the American War, of Lord North’s ministry, of ignominious failures and great moral depression among the English people.

Of the state of Bengal and Upper India when Warren Hastings took up the governorship in 1772 it is necessary to attempt some description; though the method of interspersing short sketches of Indian history at intervals of this biography, with the vain hope of keeping the general reader at the true point of view, may very possibly neither interest nor instruct him. The dislocation of the empire was now so complete that it had been broken up into a number of independent principalities of varying extent and fighting strength. The possessions of the English in Bengal and Behar were surrounded on the land side by territories held under title-deeds and by tenures that were of no earlier date, and in no respect better, than their own, and by rulers whose dominion rested on a much less solid basis of military and financial

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organisation. It was this state of affairs that gave the English their opportunity of fixing themselves securely on the coast, and that rapidly drew them on into the heart of India. The country had been drained of specie by the predatory invasions of the Persians, the Afghans, the Mahrattas, and the Sikhs; trade and cultivation had fallen very low; the chiefs and tribal leaders who were contending for the land had no regular resources; they had neither certain revenue nor standing armies; they subsisted by the plunder of their marauding bands, and were deserted by their troops on a defeat or upset by a revolt. They were fatally jealous and suspicions of each other, and they soon discovered that the English were the only stable, solvent, disciplined, and trustworthy power in the .country. Beyond the northern border of Behar lay, in 1770, a connected group of these chief-ships, all under Mahomedan adventurers of foreign origin, who had been lucky enough to seize certain districts, and were strong enough to levy from them sufficient revenue for the support of their mercenary troops, but whose position was rendered precarious by the constant and imminent danger of attack by. the Hindu powers, the Sikhs, Mahrattas, and Jaths, who were vigorous and popular representatives of the foremost fighting tribes among the real natives of India, and who were supported by religions enthusiasm and antipathy to foreign domination. Of the Hindu powers, by far the most formidable for attack were the Mahrattas; although it may be observed that the occupation of the Punjab by the Sikhs, who were practically hostile to Islam, had cut the roots of the revival of any considerable Mahomedan rulership in Upper India by intercepting

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the communication with Afghanistan and Central Asia. No Mahomedan dynasty has ever flourished in the north which did not constantly recruit its vigour by fresh importations from beyond the Indus; and the class of rulers represented by the Vizier of Oude, the descendant by two or three degrees from an Afghan or Persian, with a mixed army of indigenous mercenaries, has always been ephemeral and has rapidly degenerated.

It was the policy of the English, when Warren Hastings took charge of the Bengal Presidency, to maintain and strengthen this group of Mahomedan chiefships along their northern border as a barrier against invasion from beyond, and especially against the depredations of the restless, treacherous, and far-roving Mahratta hordes. The most considerable among these potentates, whose possessions, by their extent and situation, could best serve our purposes, was undoubtedly the Vizier of Oude; and the only effectual method of strengthening him was by lending him disciplined troops to be stationed in his country, and to be paid from his revenues, under treaty engagements for mutual defence. The English were at this time, and up to the end of Warren Hastings’ Governor-Generalship, honestly anxious not to extend their territories, although they were quite aware that it would be easy to do so. They saw quite clearly that by accepting the Dewanni they had stepped forward across the fine which formally separated private enterprise from public administration, and that they had reached the point “which, to pass, would be an open avowal of sovereignty.” That the moment was particularly favourable for the assumption and extension of sovereignty was no secret to the leading men who at that time

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surveyed the situation in India. By the end of the Seven Years’ War the French had been fairly beaten out of India; and in fact since 1763 no European rival has seriously interfered with us on Indian soil. It is a remarkable coincidence that the chronic invasions of India from Central Asia, which had for several centuries caused so many dynastic revolutions in the north, ceased at the same epoch, for the Afghan king, Ahmed Shah, retired finally behind the Indus in 1763; so that from that date we may reckon the commencement of an era during which the frontiers of India, by land and sea, were closed to all foreign powers except England. And we can now perceive plainly enough that so soon as the gates of India had been shut in the faces of all other maritime nations, our exclusive right of entry upon a vast arena, occupied only by a number of loose disorderly rulerships, offered great and tempting facilities to the unlimited expansion of our dominion. The course, indeed, that events have followed was actually foreseen a century ago; for it is a mistake to treat the growth of the British empire in the East as an equally marvellous and fortuitous run of national luck, of which the end would have amazed those who saw the beginning. There is ample evidence that the probability of the acquisition of all India by some European power was clearly-discerned by competent observers who stood on the threshold of the period, stretching over a hundred years from the battle of Plassey to the great mutiny in 1857, during which all those strides of conquest were made which have carried us from the seaboard to the Himalayas and the Afghan frontier. To quote only one well-known instance, Lord Clive foresaw in 1765, and plainly warned

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the East India Company in a letter that has been often quoted, that they were already on the straight road to universal dominion in the country.

Upon that road, however, the Company were in no haste to set out. We find them strenuously declaring in 1768 that they are “determined to make the provinces of Behar, Bengal, and Orissa the utmost limits of our views or possessions on that aide of India,” a prudent and pacific resolution that was indeed very tolerably observed in Northern India, where we had no wars and made no material acquisitions until the end of the eighteenth century; and long before that date the real power of directing political affairs had passed from the Company to the Crown. The policy of the Bengal government, when Warren Hastings took charge of it, was, as we have said, to strengthen and give armed support to the Vizier of Oude, in order to build up a firm breakwater against the incessant fluctuations of predatory warfare that distracted Northern India, In 1771 and 1772 the incursions of the Mahrattas had struck terror and despondence into the hearts of the weak Mahomedan rulers whose possessions formed the outer barrier of our own provinces. Ten years earlier, in 1761, they had found a leader of military genius in Ahmed Shah the Abdallee, when by uniting their forces under his command they had driven the Mahrattas out of North India by his crowning victory at Paniput. But the Mahrattas had now returned; the Delhi emperor had placed himself in their hands; they had attacked the Rohillas, and had threatened Oude; the peace and protection of our own frontier could only be provided for by concerting measures of common defence with our neighbours. These were the

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grounds upon which the Bengal government had adopted the plan of establishing and consolidating along the eastern bank of the Ganges river, from Benares up to the Himalayas, a strong and friendly state under the Company’s influence; and it was in the prosecution of this design, as we shall see later, that Hastings sent troops to assist the Oude Vizier in subduing Rohilcund. This policy was at any rate successful; for it gave Bengal a quiet and comparatively stable frontier for nearly forty years, and thus enabled our governors to make head against the serious embarrassments that encompassed our southern possessions in the Indian peninsula.

The internal condition of Bengal and Behar, at the time when Warren Hastings assumed charge of the Presidency at Calcutta, was exceedingly bad. There was no real government in the district, for all power was concentrated in the hands of the Company’s representatives, who received the revenue and maintained their own troops; so that the nominal administration of the Nawab became a mere fiction, impotent to repress crime or enforce justice; every kind of fraud upon the revenue and extortion was practised by a crowd of native agents who pretended to act under the English name and authority; while the contrast between the inordinate profits to be made in trade monopolies and the trifling salaries paid by the Company, had demoralised the whole English service. As a native pithily observed to Warren Hastings a year or two later, the trade of the country was ruined because the government of the country was concerned in it; a heavy drain of specie for the foreign payments of the Company had hampered all transactions; and in 1771 a wasting famine had visited Bengal. The

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principal officers at Calcutta represented these evils to the Directors at home; but the only true remedy lay in the open assumption of the government by those who held the power, which involved an entire change in the form and character of the Company’s constitution. It is to be remembered that at this time the right of the Company to possess territory had been very seriously questioned in England, that their finances were seriously embarrassed, and that in 1769 the Ministers only permitted them provisionally to retain for five years what had been acquired, upon payment of a heavy bonus to the Exchequer. It was in these unfavourable circumstances that Hastings took charge of the governorship, armed with strict injunctions from the Company to redress abuses, to bring offenders to condign punishment, to preserve peace abroad and to reduce expenditure at home, but vested with no authority beyond that which the charter of a trading settlement conferred on its chief officer. The country was without a sovereign; there was no power that accepted the duty of making laws and enforcing them. The Company had indeed made up their minds at last, in 1771, to “stand forth as Dewan,” that is, to appear as controllers and administrators of the revenue; but all the work of keeping clown crime and punishing it was still committed to the native officials, who had lost all power and independence.

There is no fault to be found with the language in which the Directors expressed their indignation at the reports that had reached them of oppression, dishonesty, and misrule in the provinces. They laid their secret instructions on Hastings to make private investigation into the conduct of his own colleagues and subordinates,

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l a sure way of setting them against him; they committed to his sole tare the detection of crimes charged on the Company’s servants; and they ordered him immediately to dismiss and prosecute the two chief native revenue officers. They had officially assumed administration of the finances of the country, and they pressed for closer superintendence of the judicial courts; though they still held back from dropping the cloak by setting aside the titular jurisdiction of the Nawab, and from openly undertaking the responsibility of regular government in all its branches. Hastings himself seems to have thought the fiction not worth maintaining. He perceived clearly enough that no solid improvement would be made, except upon the plain foundation of the assumption of the country’s government by the English, and he shaped all his measures for gradually approaching that end; but in the meantime his methods of command were necessarily irregular, unauthorised, and indirect. He carried through nevertheless a fresh assessment of the land revenue, a matter of the highest importance; he formed plans for reforming and superintending the courts of justice, and for inspection of the public offices; he took up also the question of dealing effectively with the gangs of professional robbers who infested the frontier districts.

It must be mentioned that the chief of the revenue department, Mahomed Reza Khan, had been suspended upon the charge of heavy embezzlements; and that Nuncomar, afterward so notorious, had been selected on account of his well-known malignity towards the accused officer to collect evidence for the prosecution. The first suggestion of employing Nuncomar in this business had

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come to Hastings in a secret despatch from the Court of Directors; and Hastings acted on it though he knew the man to be dangerous, for in 1762 he had arrested and confined him on suspicion of treasonable machinations. Nuncomar’s son was also simultaneously nominated manager of the household of the titular Nawab, who, as a minor, was placed under the guardianship of Muni Begum, widow of a former Nawab, a lady whose seal or signature was freely used afterwards, with or without her privity, in the documents fabricated by Nuncomar for Hastings’ discomfiture.

In writing to a friend upon these transactions Hastings said: “I expect to be much abused for my choice of the Dewan (manager), because his father stands convicted of treason against the Company . . . and I helped to convict him The man never was a favourite of mine, and was engaged in doing me many ill offices for seven years together.” He also wrote to the Directors in 1772 that he had taken care to invest Nuncomar himself with no trust or authority, and that no danger could come from the son, whose disposition, unlike the father’s, was placid, gentle, and without disguise. Thus the son’s office gave cover to the father’s power, and his simplicity to the father’s cunning, a situation so exactly suited to Nuncomar’s special aptitude for wire-pulling and surreptitious intrigues, that it is hard to understand how Hastings could have been induced to adopt tactics that were neither clever nor particularly creditable. In fact the Governor-General gained nothing from them but the lesson that is invariably learnt by Englishmen when they attempt to finesse against Asiatics, for Mahomed Reza was finally acquitted; and

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Hastings conceived a deep distrust of Nuncomar, who had displayed a talent for preparing cases against, and laying snares for, an enemy, that seems to have startled Hastings with a curious presentiment of personal disquietude. The dislike and distrust was of long standing, since before he left Bengal in 1764 Hastings had received strong indications of Nuncomar’s ill-will; and long afterwards, when he was indignantly repelling the charge of having murdered him, he wrote to a friend that he “was never the personal enemy of any man but Nuncomar, whom from my soul I detested even when I was compelled to countenance him5.”

Meanwhile the Mahrattas had reinstated the Emperor Shah Alam in his palace at Delhi, and he had been compelled in return to join their expedition against the Rohillas, who were a kind of loose federation of Afghan chiefs holding possession of the rich tract that runs along the base of the Himalayas, from the Ganges eastward, up to the confines of Oude. About twenty years earlier the Mahrattas had extorted from these Rohillas, in the emperor’s name, bonds for the payment of a quit-rent on their lands; and to these claims was now added another kind of score against them, dating from the victory of Paniput, when the Rohilla cavalry had been in the foremost line of the grand onset which routed the Mahrattas with vast slaughter. But for that very reason the emperor’s policy in joining them was plainly ruinous to his own cause, since the only chance of his dynasty’s revival lay in some kind of combination among the Mahomedans against their common enemy. And so it turned out, for the Mahrattas, after seizing a

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part of the Rohilla country and exacting heavy money payment, speedily stripped the emperor himself of all authority, and prepared for a fresh attack upon the Rohilla chiefs, who implored aid from the Oude Vizier, who in his turn asked the English to help him with troops. If the Mahrattas were allowed to establish themselves in Rohilcund, it was certain that they would next enter the lands of Oude, which lay just beyond; and this would open out to them a road into the Company’s possessions, which were covered by the Vizier’s territory, and depended for their security upon his power of resistance. So the Rohillas made a defensive alliance with Oude, covenanting to pay forty lakhs as the price of his joining them to expel the Mahrattas; the English sent a force to act with the Vizier and the Rohillas, and the united army encamped on the Ganges in front of the Mahrattas, who after some plundering forays drew back westward into their own districts.

Such, therefore, was the general state and complexion of affairs at the end of Hastings’ first year of office, in the beginning of 1773; and it may be said that no English governor had ever found himself in a more difficult position. When an Asiatic province or kingdom comes under civilised dominion, it may be treated in one of two ways, – either by pulling clown the indigenous system and rebuilding the administration on a European plan, with any serviceable native material that can be found in the country – or by allowing the old government to stand and continue exercising authority after its own fashion, with certain limitations of its sovereignty. But in Bengal, as has been seen, the native government was loft standing after it had lost all power; a mere

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ruin that cumbered the ground, like a home in Chancery which no one can repair because the title is unsettled. The people had been extenuated by famine; the treasury was nearly empty; the official services, English and native, were thoroughly discouraged; the moral and material disorder was at its height.

Beyond his frontier Hastings saw the flood of Mahrattas invasion pressing higher and higher against the unstable breakwaters of Oude and Rohilcund. In England the Company were deep in debt, were contending for their existence with the Ministers, and were acquiring an ill reputation with the nation at large, among whom it was then a new thing to hear of merchants taking and governing Asiatic provinces, and to see their countrymen returning from the East enriched by tribute or trade monopolies, with money that had an Oriental odour of violence and corruption. The appointment of Hastings came just when public attention and indignation had been seriously roused at home, when the Company’s credit at home and in India was at its lowest, when money was mort needed and least available for internal reforms and external defence in Bengal. The moment had come, so dangerous for weak and bad governments, when improvements were imperatively demanded, and Hastings was literally at his wits’ end for ways and means. It is necessary to take into account these circumstances in passing judgment upon his foreign policy in 1772 and 1773, for while none of the transactions upon which he has been arraigned have been so justly censured as his share in the destruction of the Rohillas, it is certain that he was in great embarrassment, that he was pressed upon and surrounded by manifold difficulties, and that in his

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time very few European statesmen would have long balanced moral scruples against strong expedients for meeting a political emergency.

The districts of Allahabad and Corah, which flanked the Company’s possessions on the north-west, had been made over by Lord Clive in 1765 to the landless and homeless Shah Alam in support of his imperial dignity, and in order that they might not be occupied by troublesome neighbours; but in 1771 the Mahrattas had compelled the emperor to make over to them these districts by a formal Brant. This conveyance the Company determined to resist, so they placed the districts, which were close to their own border, under their own protectorate, and occupied Allahabad with a garrison. To allow the Mahrattas entry into this part of the country would have been to permit exactly what the original arrangement with Shah Alam was intended to prevent, the establishment of a predatory power that subsisted upon conquest and ravages, in a position that threatened equally the possessions of the Company and their ally the Oude Vizier. The policy of the Company was to consolidate the Vizier’s territory, to separate him from the Mahrattas, and to give him a substantial interest in a defensive alliance against them. Accordingly, when Hastings met the Vizier in September 1773 at Benares, a treaty was concluded transferring the Allahabad districts to the Vizier for a large sum of money, and for a subsidy to be paid to the Company’s troops that were to co-operate with him in maintaining his possession. The Vizier took the opportunity of sounding Hastings on his project of expelling altogether the Rohilla chiefs, and annexing to his own dominions all the country eastward

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of the Ganges, which would thus give him a strong and continuous frontier line along that river. He complained of the perfidy of the Rohillas as shown by their double dealings with him and the Mahrattas, of their failure to pay him the forty lakhs of rupees stipulated by an agreement of the previous year, and of the danger to Oude from a possible combination between the Rohillas and the Mahrattas against him. Hastings made no objection to the proposal of a joint expedition, saying only that the Vizier must find the money, as the direct benefit would be his; but toward the close of the interview the Vizier drew back, alleging that the engagement was too weighty for him. Hastings readily agreed to say no more about it, though he apparently still entertained the proposal as a kind of secret arrangement to come into operation at a convenient time; and the Vizier wrote again in November proposing the joint expedition, offering forty lakhs in cash with payment of the English military expenses, and requiring the troops to be furnished according to the Benares treaty. The reply, drafted by Hastings, was to the effect that a brigade should be sent to join the Vizier whenever he should require it for the entire reduction of the Rohilla country, and this letter, after having been laid before Council with an explanatory minute, was, after formal consideration, approved and despatched. In this minute the case was discussed entirely on grounds of political expediency; it was argued that the Rohillas formed a weak and untrustworthy garrison of a very important point in the outer line of defence against the Mahrattas; that they were capable of joining the Mahrattas against the Vizier, and that the acquisition of their country by the Vizier would

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considerably increase his wealth and security, in both of which advantages the Company would partake. On the other hand Hastings saw, and said plainly, that the expedition would be sharply criticised in England, and that “an unusual degree of responsibility was annexed to such an undertaking6.”

No political act of Hastings has been more severely condemned than his share in the Rohilla war. Parliamentary orators have thundered against the sale and extirpation of a whole nation, as if a conqueror had depopulated Rohilcund, slaying and expelling all the inhabitants, or driving them like the ten tribes of Israel into exile and captivity, and utterly annihilating an able and admirable dynasty. Macaulay has contrasted “the golden days when the Afghan princes ruled in the vale of Rohilcund” with the unjust and cold-blooded bargain for their min and spoliation; and Mill, who dissimulates strong prejudice under a tone of judicial impartiality, has passed a stern sentence upon the whole transaction. The business, in shorts has been so curiously misrepresented, that it is necessary here to give a short account of the origin and nature of the Rohilla domination in the province to which their name has become attached.

The word Rohilla, or mountaineer, seems to have been indiscriminately applied in India to the Afghans who during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came down in bands from their highlands to offer their services to the Delhi emperors. Daud Khan and Rehmat Khan, the sons of one of these soldiers of fortune, entered the imperial army early in the eighteenth century, and

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obtained a grant of land in the province of Katehur, afterwards called Rohilcund. The son of Daud Khan, Ali Mahmud, said by native historians to have been an adopted Hindu boy, raised himself to rank and consequence by seizing more land, enlisting Afghan retainers, procuring warrants of dignity and office from the court, and lastly by defeating a body of troops sent against him from Delhi, and killing the imperial commandant. This exploit so enhanced his reputation that all the roving blades and mercenary fighting men of the country side joined his company; he was able to bribe powerful officials at court, to enlarge his estates at his neighbours’ expense, to amass rich booty by lucky expeditions, and alter this time-honoured fashion to settle himself down into something like independent rulership over the greater part of Rohilcund. But in one of his continual broils and snatchings at contiguous property he unhappily fell into collision with the much more powerful founder of the Oude kingdom, Sefdar Jung, who was carrying on the same business on a larger scale, and who was also Vizier of the empire. The shark very nearly swallowed the pike; for Ali Mahmud was beaten, deserted by his banditti, surrendered, and was sent on parole to Delhi; his satrapy was broken up; and Rohilcund might never have existed at all if Ahmed Shah’s descent upon India from Afghanistan had not drawn northward the armies and great officers of the empire. Ali Mahmud escaped back to his country, raised fresh levies, recovered his estates and authority, crushed out the resistance of the Hindu landholders; and in 1746 he was again in a position to extract from the demoralised ministry at Delhi his investiture with

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the government of the whole province. At his death in 1749 he left an independent chiefship to his six sons, whom he committed to the tare of two kinsmen; one of whom, their uncle Rehmat Khan, thereafter termed Hafiz, or guardian, showed much ability in consolidating, administering, and defending the dominion. The Rohillas were again threatened by their old enemy Sefdar Jung of Oude, but he was again recalled to Delhi by news of danger to the capital; the Mahrattas who had accompanied him were bought off by bonds, and the Rohilla leaders now found leisure to set aside the sons of Ali Mahmud, and to make a partition of the territory among themselves. They fought well against the Mahrattas on the field of Paniput; and as the house of Timur was now virtually extinct at Delhi, the Rohilla sirdars had by this time made out for themselves a good working title and tenure, neither better nor worse than those of other military adventurers who had successfully folio wed immemorial usage in helping themselves to a kingdom in India. The towns were mainly peopled by Hindus: the lands were cultivated, then as now, by Hindu peasants; and large tracts were still held by Hindu clans, who had for centuries paid to a Mahomedan governor just as much revenue as he could extract from them, and who cared little whether he sent a part of their money to Delhi, or found his own strong box a safer and more convenient treasury.

But the Mahrattas were pushing up north-eastward; the Rohilla possessions lay open to their inroads, and Hafiz Rehmat Khan, the captain of the Rohilla confederacy, was not strong enough to keep them out, so he applied for aid to Oude and to the English. In 1772 he made

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with the Oude Vizier, Shuja-u-Dowlah, a treaty which was promoted by the English general, Sir Robert Baker, and signed in his presence, whereby the Vizier agreed, upon payment of forty lakhs, to join Rehmat Khan against the Mahrattas, who had actually passed the Rohilla frontier. The Oude forces accompanied by an English brigade accordingly made a junction with the Rohillas, whereupon the Mahrattas hastily retired. The Vizier demanded his money, but Rehmat Khan found difficulty in raising it among his brother chiefs, put him off with dilatory pleas, and finally it was not paid at all. To Shuja-u-Dowlah, who lived in perpetual terror of a combination between the Rohillas and Mahrattas against himself, this failure to pay was probably not unwelcome: he wrote to Hastings that he had been deceived, that the treaty witnessed by an English general had been broken, and he offered to pay the forty lakhs to the English if they would assist him to root out the Rohilla dominion, so that he might take possession of their country. To this, as we have seen, the Governor-General in Council finally agreed.

The Council seem at first to have hoped that the Vizier would let the business stand over, and would not call on them to fulfil their promise of sending troops. But he lost no time in making his requisition; the combined forces entered Rohilcund in the spring of 1774; the Rohilla army commanded by Hafiz Rehmat Khan met them, fought bravely, and was utterly defeated with the loss of their chief in a single engagement. The Vizier seized all the public treasure; his troops plundered in the usual style; the British commander was alternately indignant at their cowardice in the field, at their excesses

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after the battle, and at the Vizier’s refusal to allow his men a share of the prize-money; and the Council at Calcutta dunned the Vizier for the forty lakhs due on their agreement.

The Council believed the expedition to have been not only a political success and a military exploit – they also regarded. it as a sound financial operation. They wrote home in October, 1774, that they had secured an advantageous peace, and seventy lakhs of rupees; but Hastings soon discovered, what he ought certainly to have foreseen, that by going into partnership with an Oriental potentate, without taking a share in the direction as well as in the profits of the enterprise, he had become responsible for the rapacity and inhumanity of successful Asiatic warfare, at a distance which placed the Vizier far beyond effective control from Calcutta. It is extraordinary that his Indian experience did not forewarn him of this contingency; and it must be admitted that he appears to have been singularly blind to the political immorality of the whole transaction, although its expediency, judged simply as a move on the chess-board, is sufficiently defensible. It is true that his barrier-policy may be said to have been so far successful that the Vizier retained undisturbed possession of his acquisitions until the end of the century, when Rohilcund was ceded to the English. Nevertheless nothing but the urgent necessity of self-preservation can warrant unprovoked invasion of a neighbour’s country; and it must be confessed that the war has left a stain upon the reputation of the Company in India, where a shifty line of policy is far more unsafe than a weak frontier; while it has been the last occasion upon which English troops have joined in a campaign

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with Indian allies, without retaining control of the operations. Hastings was yet at the beginning of his governorship, and this business showed that he had much to learn in high politics; for certainly his conduct betrays less than his ordinary insight into consequences and his usual skill in handling an important affair; and nowhere does Mr. Gleig, his biographer, appear so feeble as his advocate. Mr. Gleig dilates on the absurdity of holding Hastings responsible for “details of military operations” which he never sanctioned or approved; and totally fails to perceive that all men, especially men in command, are directly answerable for the indirect but probable consequences of their acts and orders. The expedition against the Rohillas was wrong in principle, for they had not provoked us, and the Vizier could only be relied upon to abuse his advantages. When Colonel Champion, who led our brigade, said that the British reputation was in the hands of the Vizier, and that the Oude army would have been routed if the British troops had not stood firm, the Calcutta Council felt the rebuke, and could only rejoin by a solemn reprimand. On the other hand, Macaulay’s splendid and glittering phrases have thrown a false air of romance over the real origin and character of the Rohilla chiefships, which merely represented the fortuitous partition of an imperial province among military adventurers. In their origin, political constitution, and their relations to the bulk of the people, they might be likened to the Mamelukes of Egypt, who also were a military confederacy under a chief of their own, paying a nominal allegiance to the Sultan for a province which they had seized. And they were in reality suppressed for reasons not unlike

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those which led to the political destruction of Poland, because their constitution was weak and turbulent, and because, therefore, they could not be trusted to hold an important position on the frontiers of more powerful States. The allegations that the country was ravaged far and wide, and that the family of Hafiz Rehmat Khan were cruelly treated by the Vizier, were investigated at the time, and were proved by evidence to be unfounded or very greatly exaggerated. The change of government did not disturb the cultivation of the lands; and although the families of the Rohilla chiefs were confined and sent away into Oude, they were treated with no other severity. The alleged depopulation of the country reduces itself, on close examination, to the banishment out of Rohilcund of about twenty thousand Rohilla Afghans found in anus, out of a population of nearly a million, including some seven hundred thousand Hindus7. But it must be admitted that for some years afterwards the Nawab’s officers governed Rohilcund very badly, and that the people had reason to regret the able personal administration of Hafiz Rehmat Khan.

Footnotes

5. Gleig, iii. 357.

6. Appendix 23. 5th Report.

7. Hamilton, The Rohilla Afgans (1787), p. 269; see note.

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