Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
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not really control what went on in India, all the more because, as the diarist Horace Walpole observed, they were now trying to rule ‘nations to whom it takes a year to send out orders’. It was not even easy for officials on the spot to understand the complexities of tax-gathering, and in 1772 the Company auctioned off tax-gathering rights to local men who were often the former zamindars themselves.
There were nest-feathering opportunities on a breathtaking scale. In his two years as Governor of Madras, 1778–80, Sir Thomas Rumbold amassed a fortune of £750,000, a third of which came in bribes and pay-offs from the local ruler, the Nawab of Arcot. Although he was the subject of both parliamentary and Company inquiries, Rumbold blithely shrugged off attempts to make him disgorge the loot and died a rich man. More junior officials who behaved in a similar way, however, might not be so lucky. Lieutenant John Corneille described how in 1755, Lieutenant Colonel Heron of the Company’s service was tasked with collecting revenue for the Nawab of Arcot only to be convicted by court martial of siphoning off part of the proceeds. He was stripped of his commission ‘and thereby rendered incapable of further service’. ‘I cannot but look upon Colonel Heron as guilty,’ wrote Corneille,
and I am confirmed in that opinion by the fact that the gentleman in the space of a few months found means to accumulate about twelve thousand pounds. It may be said, and it has been said by many, that as in most points he acted in a manner agreeable to custom his sentence was severe. But can that general ruling power [i.e. custom] subvert the rule of justice and make the fault less?52
As a junior King’s officer, Corneille’s own chances of shaking the pagoda tree were somewhat limited; but King’s officers were not entirely immune from greed. Clive, who did not like Eyre Coote, complained acidly that he was ‘a great stickler for the rights and privileges of a Royal officer, not least his own emoluments and allowances’. When Coote returned home to England in 1763 (having stopped en route at St Helena to marry the Governor’s daughter), he had enough money to purchase a substantial country estate in Hampshire, and was further gratified by the presentation of a handsome sword worth £700.
Coote, in short, had become a nabob – a man who had made his fortune in India and then invested it, as any successful London merchant might have done, in land: the word originated in English mispronunciation of the title nawab. Coote was the sixth son of an Irish clergyman, whose military career surmounted a setback in 1745 when, as an ensign in Blakeney’s regiment, he appeared in Edinburgh after the defeat at Prestonpans, happily still with his colour but, less wisely, well in advance of his regiment’s survivors. A court martial stopped short of cashiering him, as a lot of people had run away that day, but a furious George II thought ‘the crime so infamous in nature’ that he had ‘no further occasion’ for the services of the officers involved.53 Coote, with his refurbished military reputation and wellbred wife, could at least claim gentility. But many other nabobs could not, and the homeward rush of merchants desiring not simply landed property but the titles, prestige and social distinction that went with it exasperated not only the gentry who dominated Georgian England, but also merchants and tradesmen who found it harder to scrub the ink from their fingers. The nabobs tinkled into Parliament in force in the 1768 election, and in 1771 the play The Nabobs sent up the whole gang, turning the word into one of envious abuse.
Clive’s gains had already involved the Company in costly wars, and more followed as senior officials supported local rulers against their rivals for their own and the Company’s benefit, though it was sometimes hard to see where the two joined. The First Mysore War (1767–69) saw the Company ally itself with the Nawab of Arcot in an inconclusive campaign against the formidable Hyder Ali, a capable adventurer who had risen to become sultan of the southern state of Mysore. The episode caused widespread criticism, and – with the volatility of the Company’s stock, the apparent inability of its directors to control their employees, widespread resentment of nabobbery, and something of a genuine sense of moral outrage – fuelled public and parliamentary demands for reform. William Pitt the elder lamented that:
The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruption as no hereditary fortune could resist.54
Edmund Burke struck even harder, telling the House of Commons that: ‘The office given to a young man going out to India is of trifling consequence. But he that goes out an insignificant boy in a few years returns a great Nabob.’55 Indian society, he declaimed, was being corrupted by the money-grabbing activities of the Company’s servants, in a clear breach of the sacred trust that one powerful nation held towards another.
This agitation produced the Regulating Act of 1773. Although each presidency retained its own governor, a governor-general based in Calcutta would rule the whole of British India, with a council of four members appointed by the Cabinet and the Company’s directors. A supreme court, its judges appointed by the Crown, could hear pleas and appeals from both British and Indians. Day-to-day control of the Company lay in the hands of its twenty-four directors, only six of whom could stand for re-election each year. The government lent the Company sufficient money to deal with its immediate debts, and limited dividend payments on its stock.56 The Regulating Act, however, failed to remedy the Company’s ills, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general appointed under its provisions and seen by his many critics as the arch-nabob, highlighted its deficiencies. It took Pitt’s India Act of 1784 to establish a government-appointed Board of Control, based in London, and to strengthen the powers of the governor-general, appointed and replaced by the government of the day, over the three presidencies.
This system had only three significant modifications. When its charter was renewed in 1833, the Company was compelled to give up commercial transactions in return for an annuity of £630,000, taken from the territorial revenue of India. The Governor-General of Bengal was renamed the Governor-General of India, and a governor of Bengal was created, on a par with the governors of Madras and Bombay. In 1835 the lieutenant-governorship of the North-West Provinces was introduced. Lastly, the Company’s charter was renewed in 1853, the Governor of Bengal was reduced to the status of lieutenant governor and a legislative council was established.
In the short term the 1784 mechanism worked well enough. Lord Cornwallis, the first of the new governors-general from 1786 to 1793, went far to stamping out nabobbery amongst the Company’s servants, establishing a well-paid civil service, the root of the ‘covenanted’ Indian Civil Service whose members undertook not to involve themselves in commerce. The Company’s college at Haileybury in Hertfordshire, with a syllabus that included oriental languages, was not set up till 1809, but it was clearly rooted in the impartial bureaucracy established under Cornwallis. He defended the Sultan of Travancore, a Company ally, against Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu, in the Third Mysore War (1790–92). And in 1793 he concluded the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, delegating tax-collection rights to zamindars – much as the Mughal emperor had done.
Sir John Shore, Cornwallis’s successor, ran into difficulties because none of the previous reforms had really addressed the Company’s armed forces. These had risen from 18,000 in 1763; 6,580 of them in Bengal, 9,000 in Madras and 2,550 in Bombay. By 1805 there were no less than 64,000 in Bengal, 64,000 in Madras and 26,500 in Bombay. The officers of this army, as we shall see, were subtly different from those of HM’s regiments serving in India. They were often significantly less well off, did not purchase their commissions and, long after their civilian brothers had become properly regulated, they retained a keen interest in making extra money, usually through the scam of batta, allowances over and above their pay, which once reflected genuine campaign expenses but in many cases had come to be a lucrative allowance given for no clearly defined purpose. But their promotion prospects were far poorer than those of officers in HM’s regiments: of the thousand or so officers in Bengal in 1780, there were only fifty-two posts for majors and above, and battalions,