Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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to prevent them from amassing too much power for themselves—now many provinces were governed by essentially independent rulers, who turned their offices into hereditary positions and no longer regularly delivered their tax revenues to the emperor. In the 1720s, for example, the Persian Shiite military commander Safdar Jang took control of the province of Awadh and made it effectively a hereditary kingdom for his family. In Bengal, in the east, Nawab Alivardi Khan ruled as a virtually independent sovereign from 1740 to 1756. In the south, wars of succession in Hyderabad and Arcot split the old establishment and sucked neighboring rulers into the fray. From the west, the Marathas pushed into Mughal domains, capitalizing on imperial disarray. In short, the Mughal Empire was fragmenting, and eager hands reached in from all sides, grasping for the pieces.16
Among the powers bidding for influence in late Mughal India were the British and French East India Companies, each of which aimed to improve its position at the other’s expense. The outbreak of Anglo-French war in 1739, coinciding with a succession crisis in the South Indian region of the Carnatic, gave both their chance. (Both also, for the first time, enlisted Indian sepoys to supplement their otherwise relatively small forces.) Under the visionary expansionist François Dupleix, the French captured Madras in late 1746. Ultimately, however, it was the British who prevailed when their ally Muhammad Ali Walajah succeeded in claiming the title of nawab of the Carnatic. (Madras was returned to Britain under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.) One of the commanders instrumental in Britain’s victory was a young East India Company clerk turned soldier called Robert Clive. He was rewarded with a promotion to colonel. Dupleix, however, was recalled by Versailles in 1754. With him, some have said, disappeared French ambitions for a territorial empire in India—but, in fact, French influence in South India would simmer for decades to come.
While the battle for ascendancy between Britain and France raged in the south, a new obstacle to British trade appeared in Bengal to the north. From their capital at Murshidabad, the nawabs of Bengal presided over the richest province of the Mughal Empire. Cotton cloth, raw silk, saltpeter, sugar, indigo, and opium—the products of the region seemed inexhaustible, and all the European merchant companies set up factories to trade in them. Traveling downriver from Murshidabad was like traveling across a mixed-up map of Europe: there were the Portuguese at Hughli, the Dutch at Chinsura, the Danes at Serampore, the French at Chandernagore, and, of course, the British at Calcutta.
In April 1756, the venerable nawab Alivardi Khan died and was succeeded by his nephew and adopted son, Siraj ud-Daula, then about twenty years old. Siraj was described by a contemporary British historian as a “man of the most vicious propensities,” suspicious, stubborn, and violent—toward the East India Company, at any rate, a central target of his animosity.17 On coming to power, Siraj ud-Daula promptly requested cash gifts from the European trading companies (which was customary), and asked them to disarm themselves. The Dutch and French complied. The British, however, flagrantly refused to pay and continued to build up their establishment at Fort William, in Calcutta. Convinced that the Company was plotting against him, and determined to make it submit, Siraj marched on Calcutta within weeks of ascending the throne. He seized the little settlement in the space of one day. On the night of the capture, the nawab locked approximately one hundred fifty of Calcutta’s European residents into the garrison dungeon, or “black hole,” as such military prisons were often called. By morning, some sixty of them were dead, suffocated in the stifling, airless space. The incident, still remembered in Britain as “the Black Hole of Calcutta,” quickly became one of the most emotive and sensational episodes in the history of British India. Company propagandists played up the tragedy as a way of justifying their employer’s conquests in Bengal to a potentially critical British audience. But this defeat by an Indian ruler also served as a cautionary reminder of British (and European) weakness in the face of attack, and their sheer smallness of numbers.18
When news of Calcutta’s fall reached Madras, nearly two months later, the Company promptly launched a punitive expedition. To command it, they appointed Colonel Robert Clive, recently returned from a short leave in Britain. At thirty-one, Clive was a tough, war-hardened veteran, to outward appearances all self-confidence and swagger; few could know that he was also prone to punishing bouts of depression and had attempted suicide twice. Clive and his force of about twelve hundred landed in Bengal in December 1756, just as word arrived that Britain and France were again, officially, at war. The news, long expected, injected new strength and purpose into Clive’s mission. He was now there not only to reassert the East India Company’s strength in Bengal and bring Siraj ud-Daula into line, but to try to eliminate the French, Britain’s chief competitors for trade and influence, and the nawab’s possible allies.
After a day of intense fighting, with high losses—another reminder that the balance of power was by no means in European favor—Clive retook Calcutta in early February.19 He then moved upriver, to the French settlement of Chandernagore, capturing it in late March. This, too, was a tough fight, for the city was well fortified and Clive’s men outnumbered; losses on both sides were heavy, and in return for their exertions, Company troops violently plundered the town. (Though “the Dutch [as usual] have secured all they could get,” one officer snapped.)20 Clive moved into the final phase of his campaign: to depose Siraj ud-Daula and install a new, pro-British nawab in his stead. For some weeks Clive and the nawab traded letters and ultimatums; Company demands included the full restitution of trading privileges and the expulsion of the French. But by early June it was clear that a confrontation was at hand. The nawab joined his army at Plassey, south of Murshidabad, and on June 13, Clive’s modest army of 3,000 men (2,100 of them sepoys), with just eight small cannon, set off north from Chandernagore to fight him.
They reached Plassey nine days later, on June 23, 1757. It was almost exactly a year after the fall of Calcutta, and—like the night of the Black Hole—a day of punishing heat, before the monsoons, when summer is at its most intense and the air is a thick, still fug. Clive had headquartered himself in a hunting lodge belonging to the nawab called Plassey House; most of his men camped in a nearby mango grove, hidden from view by the dark, waxy leaves and a high mudbank. One mile away lay Siraj ud-Daula’s vast encampments. With him were thirty-five thousand infantry, fifteen thousand cavalry—many of them able, well-armed Pathans—and more than forty pieces of heavy artillery, superintended by a team of French experts.21 The Company was outnumbered almost twenty to one, and severely outgunned. In terms of equipment and manpower, to say nothing of familiarity with the terrain, there was no contest.
Yet like so many of Britain’s early Indian adventures, the battle of Plassey rested on a foundation of lies, spies, and betrayal. For, during his one year on the throne, Siraj ud-Daula had alienated not only the East India Company but many of his own subjects, particularly those who did business with the Company. A powerful contingent of bankers, merchants, and courtiers had joined forces with Company agents to oust the nawab. Bengal hummed with rumor and conspiracy. At the heart of the plots was one of Siraj’s top commanders, a nobleman named Mir Jafar. Through a series of backroom maneuvers, the Company signed a treaty with Mir Jafar in which he agreed to grant the Company huge cash rewards and privileges in exchange for its assistance in toppling Siraj ud-Daula and installing him as nawab of Bengal instead. At the battle everyone now expected, Mir Jafar agreed to “stand neuter,” if not to lead his troops away from the fight. In effect, Plassey was won before it was even fought.22
Early in the morning, the pounding from the nawab’s heavy artillery began, with an attack on one portion of the Company line. Most of the Company soldiers huddled behind their mudbank, hoping to hold out till nightfall, when they could make a counterattack. Clive, standing on the roof of Plassey House, could see the great mass of the army he faced, commanders on elephants, resplendent formations