CHAPTER TWO Crossings

       I. Beyond the Frontier

In 1768, an East India Company officer took up his pen to sketch a panorama of Calcutta. It had been only eleven years since Plassey, and just three since the Company secured the Bengal diwani, but already Calcutta had all the bulk and bustle of an established, modern commercial town. Or at least so this Company officer’s drawing—which extends to a full eight feet—aimed to suggest. Waterfront perspectives like this were popular in part because it was from the water that the engines of British trade and power were seen to best advantage: docks, customs houses, cargo ships, men-of-war, fortifications. At the left of the picture are the Kidderpore docks, primed to load and unload the East Indiamen, the Company’s vessels, from their six-month voyages across the seas. Next comes Calcutta’s growing municipal center, anchored by a row of Palladian buildings and the long, low wall of the old fort. Church steeples are not much in evidence (the only one here belongs to the Armenian Church), but behind the old fort one can just make out the obelisk commemorating the victims of the Black Hole, erected by the incident’s most vocal survivor, John Zephaniah Holwell. Dominating the southern end of the city is the new Fort William, its stone points jutting over the Hooghly. This was the first major structure you would see approaching Calcutta by boat, and it was duly impressive—“reminding me of Valenciennes,” one visitor wrote in 1771, “regular, majestic and commanding.”¹ Rowboats and canoes skim over the water; great oceangoing ships stand gracefully at anchor. The Union Jack flies high. This is Calcutta as a merchant, a soldier, and a patriot would have liked to see it.

All of these visual flatteries were definitely intended by the soldier-artist, Major Antoine Polier, who presented his handiwork to high-ranking patrons in the East India Company. Polier had good reason to celebrate the Company and its newest capital. He had sailed to Madras in the year of Plassey, joining the Company army as a lad of sixteen. His first years in India were spent at war, fighting under Clive in the triumphant campaign against the French in the south. In the meantime, Polier specialized as a military engineer. Promotion was swift. Transferred to Bengal in 1761, he soon found himself in charge of redesigning Fort William as a state-of-the-art military installation. His panorama, with the new fort dominating the scene, was effectively a piece of self-advertisement, and it worked. As the painter William Hodges cooed some years later, this “considerable fortress…superior to any in India…reflects great honour on the talents of the engineer—the ingenious Colonel Polier.”² By 1766, Polier was chief engineer to the Bengal Army and a major, at the tender age of twenty-five.

In many respects, Antoine Polier’s rapid ascent echoed the rising stature of the Company he served. But there was one crucial fact about him that did not fit the conventional image—as even he drew it—of an emerging “British” empire in India. For Polier himself was not British but rather Swiss, born in Lausanne into a family of Huguenot émigrés. Both his ancestry and his mother tongue were French. And though he had glided up the ranks thus far, his foreign birth and connections now became an obstacle in a way they had never been before. Pressure was mounting in the Company against non-British officers. In 1766, the same year Polier was promoted to major, the Company passed a decree that no foreign soldier could rise above that rank. Polier was only in his mid-twenties, and already it seemed his career was coming to an end. “I now despair ever of seeing merit or long Service, the allowed qualifications to a candidate for preferment,” he would later complain.³

      But elsewhere in India, opportunity beckoned. Across the native courts, from Mysore in the south to the Maratha kingdoms of the west, and in the Mughal provinces of Hyderabad and Awadh, European officers and technicians were in high demand: to design fortifications, develop arsenals, and drill troops able to rival those of the west. Compared with East India Company service, the pay was excellent, the lifestyle easy and permissive, the possibilities for personal advancement tremendous. If there was no future with the British Company, then Polier would seek one somewhere else. In 1773, he crossed the western frontier of Company-controlled Bengal and entered the province of Awadh, to work for its nawab, Shuja ud-Daula. For