Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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not to incur extra commitments and costs. It was a tension that nagged the Company right up to its demise in 1858. The best way around the problem was for the Company to pursue its ends behind the scenes: to develop an informal empire of influence and manipulation, rather than a formal empire of conquest and direct rule. Across the native courts of the subcontinent, a web of British residents, advisers, and spies worked to promote (and often shape) Company policy from within.10 The Company also forced Indian rulers—particularly the nawab of Awadh and the nizam of Hyderabad—to take in large numbers of Company troops, ostensibly to defend their states from outside attack. In return, the rulers had the pleasure of footing the bill for the troops’ expenses. Through this brilliant, nefarious system (known as the subsidiary alliance system), the Company was able to preserve the nominal autonomy of native states while embedding itself within them, and to increase the size of its army at low cost.
In the three decades after Clive left India, there was absolutely no doubt that British power was spreading across the subcontinent. The Company consolidated its rule in Bengal and pushed its influence outward into Awadh and other provinces. Nor was there any doubt that the social life and personnel of Company India was becoming in some sense more British, particularly in the army. The Company’s 1766 decree indicated wariness about welcoming continental Europeans—with their suspect loyalties—into its officer corps. The composition of the ranks also shifted. Embarkation lists of Company troops sent to India during the years of the American Revolution indicate a strong and growing reliance on Irish manpower. Of the 1,683 soldiers sailing to India on Company ships in the 1778-1779 season, a full third were Irish; of the 777 soldiers embarked the following season, the Irish made up 38 percent; and in 1780-1781, Irishmen accounted for 45 percent of embarkees.11 Though of course it would never be exclusively “British,” the white soldiery of the East India Company would never be as mixed as in the days of Robert Clive.
But this was still a far cry from the raj of crowns and trumpets, and there was no way anybody could even anticipate it would become that. For the generation after Clive, “British India” remained more a concept than a fact. Who was to be included among the British and who was not was up for debate: where did continental Europeans such as Antoine Polier fit? What was British and what was not—how would one characterize zones of informal empire such as Awadh?—was similarly far from settled. This was an empire under cover and in the making, and it required a fabulous assortment of cultural fusions and illusions to hold it together. As long as the ruse of Mughal authority remained, so did the need for Company agents to learn and abide by, however imperfectly, its workings, rituals, and language. (The East India Company only stopped using Persian as an official language in 1835.) As long as large numbers of continental Europeans remained in India, either in Company or in native service, the Company remained anxious about where exactly those Europeans’ loyalties lay. Was it with Britain? With native states? Or, worst of all, with France? Within the borders of Company territory, the lineaments of a British Empire in India might be taking discernible shape. But beyond the frontier, crossings and collaborations—between Europeans and non-Europeans, as well as between different kinds of Europeans—were a defining fact of life.
Nowhere in late-eighteenth-century India would one experience the pains and pleasures of life beyond the frontier more acutely than in Lucknow, capital of Awadh. Bengal’s immediate neighbor, rich, large, and strategically significant, Awadh was a prime object of Company desire. Warren Hastings and his successors worked hard, and effectively, to turn the province into a puppet state. (Indeed, Hastings’s behavior in Awadh ranked high among the charges at his impeachment.) Yet even as Awadh’s political importance faded, Lucknow blazed into cultural prominence. Under the reign of the nawab Asaf ud-Daula, the city emerged as India’s most cosmopolitan and dynamic center. Frontier regions have a way of attracting drifters, pioneers, and outcasts—people on the margins, people on the make. Lucknow’s ranks swelled with figures such as Antoine Polier, who were lured by the prospect of the fame and fortune that eluded them elsewhere. It quickly became home to some of the eighteenth century’s most unlikely “imperialists” and most remarkable profiles in self-fashioning.
Polier and his Lucknow peers were border crossers, social climbers, chameleons—and collectors. For it was as collectors and patrons of art that many Europeans in Lucknow cemented their newfound social positions. In Polier’s case, collecting manuscripts put the final touch on his stunning double persona as gentleman Orientalist and Mughal nobleman. His best friend, Claude Martin, performed a more extravagant reinvention. A French-born officer who considered himself British and had lived and worked in Lucknow for twenty-five years, Martin amassed one of eighteenth-century India’s greatest fortunes, and collections. In a staggering assemblage that rivaled those of the major European connoisseurs, Martin re-created an exquisite Enlightenment world in the heart of India. Lucknow even worked its transformative magic on the nawab of Awadh himself, Asaf ud-Daula. Asaf was universally reckoned a laughingstock as a ruler—if not worse, since it was during his reign that the Company established indirect rule. Yet as a collector and patron of art—European, as well as Asian—the nawab attained a stature and degree of autonomy he was otherwise denied.
These men’s stories reveal, in wonderfully personal detail, what it was actually like to live in an expanding, changing world. From Calcutta, or from London, empire might have looked a bit like Antoine Polier’s panorama: coastal outposts of ships, forts, and British flags. But from Lucknow, Polier’s adopted home beyond the frontier, it all looked rather less ordered.
The modern history of Lucknow began in January 1775, when the young prince Asaf ud-Daula succeeded his father, Shuja ud-Daula, as the nawab of Awadh. Shuja had been a true warrior-king, the grandson of a noble Persian soldier who had worked his way up the Mughal ranks to claim control of the province. Shuja’s reign had not been easy. All around him the Mughal Empire lay in disarray, racked by Afghan, Maratha, and now British incursions. As a vassal of the Mughal emperor, Shuja ud-Daula was expected to fight for Delhi; and fight he often did, leading an army he had built up with support from European advisers and technicians, Antoine Polier among them. At the same time, Shuja confronted the steady encroachment of his greedy and aggressive eastern neighbor, the East India Company in Bengal. In a showdown at Buxar, in Bihar, in 1764, Shuja ud-Daula, together with armies of the emperor and the nawab of Bengal, was defeated by the Company—a critical sign of the limits of Mughal power.
Pressed between empires, Mughal and British, Awadh needed a strongman and a strategist like Shuja at its head. Asaf ud-Daula was neither. Fat and dissolute, the prince seemed barely to have stirred from the banquet table when he was called to the throne. Asaf’s first move as nawab was away from politics, which he disliked, and away from his mother, whom he despised. He summoned his chief steward, Murtaza Khan, promoted him to the highest offices in the state, and left him free to run the government. Asaf then paid off his father’s retainers, packed up the old court at Faizabad, and moved west, to the small provincial town of Lucknow. There he settled into an abandoned old palace, far from his manipulative mother and the tiresome affairs of state.
It was hardly an auspicious beginning. In one fell swoop, Asaf had managed to antagonize his rich and powerful mother, Bahu Begum, alienate most of Awadh’s nobility, turn the administration on its head, and shatter the autonomy so carefully cultivated by his father. The East India Company, quick to take advantage of the weak new ruler, “speedily initiated” the nawab “into their modus operandi.”12 Just months after coming to the throne, Asaf ud-Daula signed a devastating treaty that forced him to cede territory to the Company—and with it, some half of his revenue—and to pay a higher subsidy for Company troops. He was also asked to expel from Awadh all Europeans “unauthorized” by the Company, notably his father’s continental military advisers—further indication of the Company’s growing anxiety about the presence of non-British Europeans in India.13