India: A History. Revised and Updated (69 page)

Within a decade of the English Company receiving its first royal charter in 1600, a Captain William Hawkins had journeyed from Surat to Agra to petition Jahangir for just such a
farman
. Provided with more lavish gifts or more impressive accreditation, a procession of hopefuls followed in his wake, amongst them Sir Thomas Roe, the first official ambassador from the Court of St James and the man who was so impressed by Jahangir’s jewellery. With India as a whole Roe was less impressed, dismissing it in much the same terms as had Babur. Prickly to the point of apoplexy about his diplomatic status, Roe also pontificated to his countrymen in India and thus antagonised the Company’s merchants, or ‘factors’, whose interests he was supposed to be representing. ‘If he [Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan] should offer me ten [forts] I would not accept one,’ he told the factors, ‘… for without controversy it is an errour to affect garrisons and land warrs in India … Let this be received as a rule, that if you will profitt, seek it at sea and in quiett trade.’ Although Roe’s idea of ‘quiett trade’ included a gratuitous attack on Mughal shipping once every four years – as he explained, ‘we must chasten these people’ – the directors of the East India Company had agreed with him about avoiding garrisons and wars. As a guarantee of favourable trading conditions an imperial
farman
looked to provide the perfect, because inexpensive, alternative.

But the
farman
had not been forthcoming, and garrisons and wars had followed. Madras had been acquired from the local nayak in 1640 and its foreshore immediately graced with the four-square Fort St George. Bombay, as noted, had passed to Charles II in 1661 as part of the dowry of his
Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza. After a disastrous attempt to install a royal garrison it had been leased to the Company, whose employees came to appreciate its greater security when Shivaji and his successors began their raids on Surat. The actual transfer from Crown to Company was by letters patent of 1668 which, presumably for reasons of bureaucratic convenience, described Bombay as being ‘in the Manor of East Greenwich in the County of Kent’; the rent of £10 was to be paid ‘in gold, on the 30th day of September, yearly, for ever’.

Calcutta had been founded twenty years later during the course of one of Aurangzeb’s lesser-known wars. In 1664 Shaista Khan, fresh from the Deccan and minus the thumb lost during that audacious Maratha raid on his Pune home, had been appointed governor of Bengal in succession to Mir Jumla, the conqueror of Assam. When Aurangzeb himself moved to the Deccan in 1682, Shaista Khan was still in Bengal, and in that year he welcomed to his capital of Dacca one William Hedges, a director of the English East India Company. Hedges sought to persuade Shaista Khan to cancel a new tax on the imported bullion with which the Company paid for its Indian exports and to petition Aurangzeb for the long-sought
farman.
As the brother of Mumtaz Mahal of the Taj, and so Aurangzeb’s uncle, Shaista Khan was believed to have considerable influence. At one point Hedges thought the
farman
was as good as signed. But in 1684 his diplomacy was undermined by a combination of the Company’s bitching Bengal factors and Sir Josiah Child, its bellicose governor in London. Shaista Khan drew the obvious conclusion: ‘the English are a company of base quarelling people and foul dealers.’ Negotiations were broken off; and a couple of years later – it taking that long for recriminations to reach London and retribution to reach India – two ships carrying exactly 308 Company soldiers sailed up to Hughli to press the Company’s suit and challenge an empire which had at the time at least 100,000 men in the field.
²⁰

The Company’s Mughal War, also sometimes known as ‘Child’s War’, figures no more prominently in histories of British India than it does in Mughal histories. It brought glory to no one. In Bengal, after a fracas in the Mughal port of Hughli, the English withdrew downriver, landed themselves at the spot which they later called Calcutta, then next year evacuated it. This performance was repeated in 1688–9 as the ‘war’ took a more serious turn elsewhere. In support of his Bengal brethren, the Company’s senior official in Surat (who was also called Child) had removed to the comparative safety of Bombay. Thence, in accordance with ambassador Roe’s long-remembered dictum, he began attacking Mughal shipping. Child in London applauded; within a year, he announced, ‘the subjects of the
Mogoll [would be] starving and dying by thousands for want of our trade’. Meanwhile the Child in Bombay boasted that if Aurangzeb chose to send the admiral of his fleet against him he ‘would blow him off with the wind of his bum’.
²¹
Aurangzeb did so choose, and ‘Child’s War’ – or perhaps ‘the Children’s War’ – thus spread from one extremity of the Mughal empire to the other. In early 1689 Sidi Yakub, the African who commanded a west coast fleet which served as the Mughal marine, took Bombay island completely by surprise. The English were besieged in Bombay Castle for most of the year and eventually capitulated.

The Company’s ‘envoys’, who in 1690 journeyed up to the imperial encampment to plead for pardon, did so with their hands tied in more ways than one. As a further indignity they were made to prostrate themselves before the emperor. But Aurangzeb was not unaware of the value of their trade nor of the danger of their making common cause with the Marathas. For a massive indemnity and promises of better conduct in future, he graciously agreed to the restoration of their trading privileges and the withdrawal of his troops. In the same spirit of forgive and forget, the Company’s Bengal establishment was allowed to return to the Hughli river where in 1690 it made a permanent settlement at Calcutta and began the fortifications of its ‘Fort William’. With the first Anglo–Indian war having been so decisively won by the Mughal empire, there was no mention of the
farman.

In the early eighteenth century Surat’s trade revived while Bombay struggled to compete. Peace with Sidi Yakub and the Mughal emperor made the Company’s shipping a natural target for the Mughals’ inveterate enemy, Kanhoji Angria the Maratha admiral. A book entitled
A History of the Indian Wars
which was published in England in 1737, a decade before the British were generally thought to have become engaged in Indian wars, contains little mention of ‘Child’s War’. Instead it turns out to be a colourful account of the almost incessant attacks launched by Kanhoji Angria against ships flying the Company’s colours and of the attempted British reprisals against Kanhoji’s strongholds on the Konkan coast. These ‘wars’ would drag on until mid-century. Although in the 1720s and ‘30s neither side could be said to be winning, the advantage lay decidedly with Kanhoji. Bombay’s trade suffered accordingly.

Madras and Calcutta, however, prospered. The Company’s Indian ‘investment’, or purchases, of mainly cotton textiles but also silks, molasses and saltpetre from Bengal and of indigo from Gujarat were proving highly profitable. So, from an Indian point of view, was access to the silver of the Americas, with which the Company paid for its purchases. On arrival the
silver was usually minted into rupees, thereby further monetising the Mughal economy which, if anything, grew more buoyant even as Mughal power declined. Indian bankers, entrepreneurs and officials benefited greatly from both the stability of the currency and the availability of capital. On the other hand, as the volume of trade increased, so did dependence on this seemingly unlimited source of treasure. In London too, as once in imperial Rome, there were other Jeremiahs who decried the haemorrhaging of their national reserves which resulted from such a one-sided trade. But with taffetas, muslins, chintzes and calicos taking over Europe’s linen cupboards, crowding its wardrobes and smothering its furniture, the Company brushed aside such criticisms, confident in the support of stockholders whose handsome apparel mirrored their handsome dividends.

Of more immediate concern to the directors of the Company were the activities of its employees in a personal capacity. English fortunes were notoriously made in India not by loyal service in the purchase and despatch of the Company’s piece-goods but by private investment in a variety of financial opportunities. Some were concerned with trade. Only over the ‘out and back’ traffic between England and the East was the Company able to enforce its monopoly. Within the East and within India itself, Company men took advantage of the decline in Indian-operated shipping which had begun during Portugal’s sixteenth-century
Estado da India
to invest heavily in the Indian Ocean trade. They owned or leased ships, freighted cargoes, sold insurance, and above all took advantage of the security and protection of their employer’s flag. Thus from Madras, as employees of the Company, the American-born Yale brothers amassed considerable fortunes in trade with Siam (Thailand) and Canton in China; part of Elihu Yale’s earnings would endow the college, and later university, in Connecticut which bears his name. Some Company men also invested in, and often defected to, shipping interests which did not recognise even the Company’s ‘out and back’ monopoly. These might be other European East India Companies like those of the Dutch or the French. They might be the ‘illegal’ English syndicates usually known as ‘interlopers’. Or they might be a bit of both – English interlopers sailing under a flag of convenience. Up the Hughli river in search of Bengal produce there sailed in the early eighteenth century vessels which, though largely financed by Englishmen, flew the colours of the Ostend Company, the Swedish Company, the Prussian Company, the Royal Polish Company and the Royal Danish Company.

Thomas Pitt, once an interloper, then a Member of Parliament, had already made and spent one Indian fortune when in 1699 he returned to Madras as governor of its Fort St George. He stayed there for twelve years,
amassing a second fortune which included the Pitt diamond (bought for £45,000 and sold to the Regent of France for £135,000); it would comfortably sustain the political careers of his prime ministerial grandson (Chatham) and great-grandson (William Pitt the Younger). Governor Pitt also jealously protected the Company’s interests during the uncertain times before and after Aurangzeb’s death. In 1701 another English ambassador, the first since Roe, had toiled up to the emperor’s peripatetic court in the Deccan with a lavish presentation of cannons, horses and cartloads of glassware and crockery. But Aurangzeb would only entertain the idea of a
farman
if the English would undertake the expensive task of policing the Indian Ocean and suppressing the piratical activities of mainly European interlopers and renegades. No such undertaking was forthcoming, and nor was the
farman.
The embassy proved to be the expensive disaster which Pitt had predicted.

Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 and the subsequent succession struggle opened new possibilities. On behalf of Prince Muazzam, an imperial intermediary asked for English assistance in cutting off the retreat of one of the prince’s rivals; in return, Pitt was invited to draw up the terms of a
farman
. Although the prince’s rival never reached Madras, Muazzam duly ascended the throne as Bahadur Shah and the Company began assembling the elephants, horses, clocks and musical boxes deemed suitable to accompany another mission to the imperial court. When Pitt left India in 1709 he was still sanguine of its prospects, and in 1710 overtures from the same intermediary, who had now been posted to Bengal, were renewed. The clocks and elephants were duly shipped to Calcutta and by 1712 the mission to the Mughal was ready to start. Then news came from Delhi that Bahadur Shah had died.

His ‘imbecilic’ successor barely lasted long enough for an exchange of letters, but with the accession of Farrukhsiyar the Company’s hopes soared again. The new emperor had been brought up in Bengal, where his father had been governor after Shaista Khan. He was known to some of the English in Calcutta, and the Company had supplied his nursery with toys. Evidently the toys had been appreciated, for news that some forty tons of more adult exotica now awaited the emperor’s orders brought an interim confirmation of the Company’s existing privileges plus a request that the mission proceed to Delhi forthwith. In 1715, headed by the unexciting John Surman and guarded by some six hundred troops, a caravan consisting of 160 bullock carts, twelve hundred porters, and a choice assortment of carriages, cannons and camels headed west across the Gangetic plain.

‘Considering the great pomp and state of the kings of Hindustan, we was very well received,’ wrote Surman on arrival in Delhi. He relished the
impressive ceremonial and was soon dispensing lavish bribes. Meanwhile the mission’s doctor successfully treated some swellings in the imperial groin. He was handsomely rewarded, but as to the
farman
Farrukhsiyar remained infuriatingly indifferent. Only when threatened with the withdrawal of the Company from Surat and its other establishments in Gujarat did he relent. Losing the Company’s bullion and trade for the price of a piece of paper was unthinkable. On New Year’s Eve 1716, more than a century since Captain William Hawkins had first applied for it, the
farman
received the imperial signature.

Explicit as to the territorial and commercial rights enjoyed by the Company throughout India, the
farman
did indeed ‘indicate such favour as has never before been granted to any European nation’. In Calcutta, Madras and Bombay celebrations were held, toasts were drunk, and salutes fired as the document was paraded through the streets and proclaimed at the cities’ gates. ‘Our dear bought
farman
’ became ‘the Magna Carta of the Company in India’. It provided imperial confirmation of a host of privileges, some of which had hitherto been more assumed than assured. It inducted the Company into the political hierarchy of Mughal India through a direct relationship with the emperor which bore comparison with that enjoyed by imperial office-holders. And in that it legitimised action against anyone supposedly infringing its terms, it offered great scope for future intervention. Thirty years later it would be on the strength of Farrukhsiyar’s
farman
that Robert Clive would justify his advance to Plassey and the overthrow of Bengal’s nawab.