Calcutta (8 page)

Hastings returned to Bengal two years after a famine there had wiped out maybe a third of the inhabitants. Calcutta had only just been described as a straggling village of mud-houses, with the whole ground south of Chandpal Ghat thickly covered with jungle. The ramparts of the old Fort William were crumbling, with huge gaps in them like the one left when Siraj-ud-Daula blew up St Anne’s. But there was still some life in the old fort, such as the circulating library and a so-called chapel next to the ruined Black Hole, available for worship on Sundays, used for the sorting of piece-goods on weekdays. Christians otherwise took themselves to premises next door to Selby’s gambling club, where the red mission church of the Danish preacher Kiernander stood; having lately lost his wife, he now drove around Calcutta in a four-in-hand and gave banquets and ogled two distinctly fat and reputedly rich ladies in his congregation.

His was not by any means the highest living in the place. It would scarcely match the scale of the local Commander-in-Chief, Sir Robert Baker, who ran a private trade in saltpetre and opium. Or of Richard Barwell, that stereotype of a rising breed of men, the British Nabobs. The son of an ex-Governor who was now a Director of the Company in London, his reputation in Calcutta ran in several directions at once. He was the outstanding flicker of bread pellets across the dinner tables of the community, able to snuff out a candle at four yards, when pellet-flicking was an esteemed amusement; it went on for years until someone flicked someone else once too often, was flattened with a side of mutton, challenged to a duel and all but killed. Barwell was also known as a man who would gamble on anything and though he seems more often than not to have lost heavily, he eventually went home with enough money to buy an estate at Stanstead in Sussex and a Parliamentary seat at St Ives. His ambition in chief had been to get rich quickly and he could hardly go wrong, gambling debts notwithstanding, with a father in Leadenhall Street and a sister Mary also in London to watch stock prices and elections and to inform him where to lay his commercial and social bets in
Calcutta
. He had a liking for Locke and Dryden. But mostly he
enjoyed the company of others, whether this meant flicking bread pellets with them, playing cards with them or dancing with them.

Calcutta, when it had a mind to, could mount an exquisite ball. It could revolve for a night round the delightful Miss Sanderson, who so captivated young men that sixteen once turned up
simultaneously
wearing a livery modelled on her pea-green French frock with pink silk trimmings. At some cost in that dreadful climate, no doubt, as a reporter of the period tries to convey. ‘Imagine to yourself the lovely object of your affections ready to expire with heat, every limb trembling and every feature distorted with fatigue, with a muslin handkerchief in each hand, employed in the delightful office of wiping down her face while the big drops stand impearled upon her forehead.’ In the end, Miss Sanderson married Richard Barwell.

This does not sound like life in a straggling village of
mud-houses
and it was that no longer, for Calcutta was expanding again. In place of the old Fort William, Clive’s new one was finished; and, bearing in mind the old garrison’s handicap with almost no field of fire, a vast area alongside had been ordered empty of everything but trees and a parade ground, or maidan. Business in real estate and mortgages was brisk and mansions were going up. Hastings built one himself in the rising suburb of Alipore, obtaining tons of marble from Benares for the staircase. He began to see Calcutta as the first city of Asia and not merely in size or wealth. He was more ambitious than that.

Unlike many of the British settlers in Bengal, he had on his first visit struggled with the language. By now he could speak Bengali and Urdu well and he had a grasp of Persian, which was the tongue of the Muslim court. He decided to create an
élite
of British officials, speaking the local languages and mindful of the local traditions, who would work more effectively within a hierarchy that was still curiously balanced between the Emperor’s court in Delhi and the Company’s offices in London. The object for Hastings, was not British Empire but a pervading British influence in India, and it was not to be a mindless one. So he drafted the plan to establish a Persian chair at Oxford and he drew up a scale of financial inducements to the study of Bengali
in Calcutta. Under his influence a new manner of men began to appear.

One of them was Charles Wilkins, who within a year or two had completed a set of Bengali type-faces and started the first vernacular printing press in India. Another was Nathaniel
Halhed
, who composed a Bengali grammar. Jonathan Duncan
became
a Persian scholar and Henry Colebrooke became an expert in Sanskrit. William Jones, presiding over the Asiatic Society which Hastings founded in 1784, was to leave the most startling mark of all by arguing a common source for Indo-European languages. These men were the Orientalists, the first serious British students of Indian culture, whose conclusions were to be most strenuously disputed half a century later by Lord
Macaulay
. They evoked a golden age in India’s cultural past and they shared their discoveries with the native intelligentsia of Bengal. Racial privilege was anathema to them. They were rationalists, classicists and cosmopolitans for the most part and, put simply, they believed that both races in India had much to give to each other. They were, patently, an
élite
and in the Calcutta society of their day they must have seemed a very rarified group indeed.

Parliament, meanwhile, had stepped into the East India
Company’s
affairs. The 1770 famine had not only killed off people; it had demolished much of the revenue, which was how they tended to see Indian famines in Leadenhall Street. By 1772 the Com
pany
was in such straits that it went to the Bank of England for a loan, which was turned down. So it asked the Government for
£
1 million, and the money was advanced at the cost of a
Regulating
Act the following year. From now on, the Company’s dividend was limited to six per cent until the loan was repaid, and surplus receipts went to the Exchequer, with all accounts and correspondence submitted to Parliament. A Supreme Court was created for Bengal. Above all, a royal Governor-General was to sit in Calcutta from now on, with obscure but tacit authority over Madras and Bombay, and the first one was to be Warren Hastings at a salary of
£
25,000 a year. If Robert Clive had indeed laid the foundation stone of British India at Plassey, Lord North had just raised the scaffolding in London.

Hastings was to rule with a Council of four Members (at
£
10,000 apiece), each with a vote equal to his own, and this was to bedevil all he tried to do until a Member died and tipped the balance. One of the new Members was already in Calcutta, locally born and bred, and he was Richard Barwell. Two others, General Clavering and Colonel Monson, were powerfully
connected
at home; Clavering, indeed, was not only to be second to the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief, but he was George III’s private choice to succeed Hastings as soon as
possible
; and Monson’s wife, the Lady Anne, was the great-
granddaughter
of Charles II. Then there was Philip Francis. He was the son of a chaplain to the Fox family and he had been a War Office clerk. He was also almost certainly (though it was never proved) the Junius whose scurrilous attacks on public figures made vivid reading in the
Publick
Advertiser
at the time. He was engaging, he had soft hands, women liked him, and he was to leave his wife and children behind in England because he thought, among other things, that Betsy was not intellectually up to the company he was now about to keep. When the Indian appointment came up he had been unemployed for a year, some piece of patronage having broken down, so he set off for
Shropshire
and within a couple of months had the dive family utterly charmed. And his future was secured. Doubtless he had told them, as he was to tell others later, that he thought the
Government
of Bengal ‘the first situation in the world attainable by a subject’.

In April 1774 this bundle of rulers sailed in the East Indiaman
Ashburnham,
in consort with another vessel, the
Anson.
That contained the new judges, led by Chief Justice-elect Sir Elijah Impey. He had been at Westminster with Hastings, in company with William Cowper, Edward Gibbon and a brace of future Prime Ministers (Shelburne and Portland). He was to stay healthy in the taxing climate of Bengal by making sure that his court always rose for the day at one o’clock and by taking
regular
holidays by the sea, either at Chittagong or at nearby
Beercool
, where the beach was ‘totally free from sharks and other noxious animals except crabs’. He was also to complain bitterly
before long that he had not been able to lay up more than
£
3,000 a year since coming to Calcutta.

On 19 October the new men disembarked at Chandpal Ghat at noon exactly, which Francis thought ‘a comfortable season for establishing the etiquette of precedency’. This was scarcely done to the satisfaction of General Clavering, for one. A royal salute of twenty-one guns from Fort William had confidently been expected but a mere seventeen salvoes were ordered instead. Worse, there were no guards, no person to receive the gentlemen or to show the way, no state. Just awful heat and confusion, not an attempt at regularity, and a Governor-General who only put down his work when his colleagues and judges were on the
doorstep
of his house. ‘But surely‚’ remarked a member of the
entourage
, ‘Mr Hastings might have put on a ruffled shirt.’ It was a bad start to a relationship already undermined by six months of plotting on the voyage from England. It was never to
improve
. Francis was soon to be dispatching his slanders to Lord North or Baron Clive in England. One letter concedes that Mr Hastings has some little talents of the third or fourth order, the next claims that Mr Hastings has wholly and solely sold and ruined Bengal. He kept this up right to the end, which was not until 1818 in England, where both Hastings and Francis died within a few weeks of each other. It was Francis who lobbied Burke for the impeachment at Westminster. It was now Francis who stimulated his colleagues in Calcutta to be rid of the Governor-General. They were willing accomplices, for the most part; Monson until he died within two years of arrival, Clavering until he followed soon after, having left strict instructions that Mr Hastings was not to be informed till he was buried. Only Barwell seems to have been rather more concerned with his pellet-flicking and his gambling; he had a duel with Clavering one day at Budge Budge, in which both missed with pistols and civilly apologized.

The Three, then, attacked Hastings over his organization of the revenue and they attacked him over his conduct of a war against the Rohillas beyond Oudh. They snubbed him at his tenderest point, and she was Mrs Imhoff. The two had met on an
East Indiaman bound for Madras, Hastings with his Member’s commission to Fort St George, Marian with her child and her husband the Baron, an impoverished miniaturist seeking a
cadetship
in the Madras army. Eventually the Baron returned to England, the child sometime after, and much later there was a divorce. The Reverend Tally-Ho Johnson then married Hastings and Marian in St John’s, Elijah Impey giving her away, and it was a love match that lasted deeply and passionately until Hastings died. But for the moment it was another small and mean weapon in the hands of Francis, Clavering and Monson. They finally nailed their quarry at his weakest point, though the wound did not bleed him till the impeachment at
Westminster
. This was the trial and execution of Nuncomar.

Nuncomar, seventy years old at his trial, had held many posts under a succession of native governments in Bengal; when
Siraj-ud
-Daula was Nawab he was Governor of Hooghly. He had become a wealthy Rajah and he was an unprincipled old rogue whose path had crossed that of Hastings during the latter’s first period in Bengal. Hastings disliked him intensely with that coldest arrogance which he seemed to reserve for Indians he judged shifty and underhand, though no Englishman had yet shown greater warmth to Indians in general or to individuals who passed muster with him. The dislike was mutual. No sooner had Nuncomar scented where the wind lay with the new Council of Bengal than he was cultivating its acquaintance in the most pointed fashion. Finally, he gave Francis a document purporting to prove that Hastings had been taking bribes and worse. It was like manna from above to the Three and they canvassed their new ally in return, attending his levees, receiving hospitality at his house. Only the door of the Hastings residence remained firmly shut on all these comers. And then, quite suddenly, the city was agape with the drama of events. The news spread that Nuncomar had been thrown into gaol, charged with forging a bond six years before. And forgery, as the British of Calcutta patronizingly knew, could be regarded as little more than a peccadillo among Indians.

The trial was conducted with speed, in eight days flat, and in spite of Sir Elijah’s preference for short sittings the judges
heard argument from eight in the morning till late each night, retiring twice a day to change their linen. Nuncomar fared well in his prison, eating sweetmeats for the most part, and receiving messages of condolence from Lady Anne Monson and from the gentlewomen of General Clavering’s house; Clavering’s aide-
de-camp
also paid him a call. In court the sittings were not only extended beyond the norm, but ran through a Sunday as well and at the end Sir Elijah made a summing up that was to cost him impeachment, too, thirteen years later. The entirely European jury found Nuncomar guilty, he was refused leave to appeal, and he was sentenced to death as a felon. A number of petitions on his behalf were either ignored or were stillborn, including one that Francis proposed from the Three but which Clavering and Monson declined to sign. Nuncomar hanged within seven weeks and he died with much dignity. And for every man in Calcutta who thought that he had got what he deserved, there were two convinced that he was the victim of judicial murder. After the two impeachments, posterity became as much inclined to take the first view as the second. At this distance the biggest pity of it seems to be that Hastings, of all people, should be tainted by it.