Authors: Tirthankar Roy
The expenses of the local establishments were a source of concern for the London office. The instructions
stipulated that the local expenditure was to be funded by local revenues. But there were numerous avenues of corruption and wastage. Besides, London authorities did not fully understand the accounts. The chief officers recreated the pomp of an Indian royalty and employed far too many retainers. The governor is ‘respected as a Prince by the Rajas of the country’. He had the privilege of owning horse carriages and palanquins. He went out on business surrounded by dozens of peons and English guards, two of them carrying the Union Jack before his palanquin, Indian agents on both sides fanning him to drive the flies away, and a band of Indian musicians playing ‘Country Musick enough to frighten a stranger’ (Charles Lockyer, 1711).
Food and drink allowances provided an opportunity for ‘debauchery’. During a special dinner in early eighteenth-century Madras, one lamb dish cooked in the Mughal style and containing a liberal quantity of ambergris cost 200 rupees to make, over a hundred thousand rupees in today’s money. Ships owned by the Company’s servants were unofficially given a discount on the port duties. Allowance for buying gifts for the local notables supplied ways to pilfer money.
Much of our knowledge of life inside the factory comes from the consultations books.
The consultation books recorded everything that happened in the factory. What kind of events did they record? A snapshot based on the Masulipatnam book covering the period July 1682–December 1683 should be representative.
Consultation books were logbooks, devoting about a page on the affairs of each day. Some days were left blank because nothing happened. Of the subjects written about, if we exclude descriptions of quantities and prices of goods bought, there were perhaps three main topics. The routine or mundane included ships’ arrivals, advance news of ships, arrival of agents from other factories, negotiations with bankers on rates of exchange, negotiations with transporters and ‘washermen’ who processed cloth and, of course, reports of meetings (‘discourses’) with cloth merchants and agents. These subjects required no more than a few sentences. At a more serious and policy level were three issues: negotiations between the factors and the governor of the town and his emissary the ‘Eminent Merchants’, dealing with interlopers and settling contractual disputes with the cloth merchants. There was finally another head, under which were dealt contingencies like death, disease or sudden arrivals. Thus a prosaic account of receipts and payments would suddenly take a
philosophical turn and ponder on the frailty of human life. The humdrum routine was also broken when on occasions like a monsoon day in 1683, a ship from Bengal deposited the family of John Aelst, an unknown adventurer who wanted to set himself up as a diamond merchant.
The policy discussions were the most consequential. The governor Mahmud Ali Beg, from time to time, sent polite requests to the factory asking to buy cases of wine, spirits and sugar. The factory sent the goods to him, politely withholding the bill. This practice ‘the Councell Esteeme much the Cheaper way’ to maintain good relations. As the season changed, and interloper ships appeared on the horizon, it became clear what service these gifts were expected to buy. On 17 August 1683, a ship named Constantinople under John Smith lost its way in strong wind and came ashore. On board were ‘two Jews one named Rodriques the other Deporta’. The factory’s spies informed that ‘John Smith and two Jews’ were about to meet the governor. The factory promptly sent a retinue of agents to the governor’s court to dissuade him from meeting them. The governor’s goodwill was crucial in catching and prosecuting interlopers, a task that the factory had difficulty doing on its own. The governor, in turn, was reluctant to be seen as a patron of the English Company
in exclusion of all the other merchants of the town. On one occasion when the factors made a present and asked for help in apprehending an interloper, a plainly irritated Mahmud Ali refused the present, and ‘in a jeering way advised that one of us might go upto Court and get all interlopers defeated’. This setback was met with an order to all Indian agents to forthwith bribe the officers of the court.
The interlopers made the Company’s job of negotiating with Indian merchants a difficult one. On 20 November 1683, a heated argument took place with the Indian suppliers on account of a large consignment that was rejected for poor quality. The merchants refused to take back the cloth and threatened that they would henceforth ‘seek another market’. The Council retired for a private consultation and returned to the table, meekly accepting all demands having ‘thought best to humour them’. The reason for ready acquiescence was obvious—interloper ships had been spotted by the spies.
On a more day-to-day basis, the subject of dialogue was contract fulfilment and the quality of goods delivered. With a ship waiting to be loaded, the contract orders needed to be met quickly, but the merchants were found ‘very shie in contracting for an Investment in soe short a time’. The factors’ job was to have them ‘smartly discoursed thereabout’ in accepting the contract.
Too often, merchants appeared daunted by the prospect of undertaking ‘so large an Investment as the like was never knowne before in this place.’ Inevitably, when the contracted time came to receive delivery upon such order, the council had to ‘express themselves very greatly disgusted’ by the delays. Another area where problems arose related to quality and design of the goods. Printed and painted cloths often came in samples at first, but were found either over-priced or ‘not with that Curiosity and Workemanship as desired’, again requiring much negotiation and lengthy discourses.
In 1720, a rough count showed that in Bombay, the factory population consisted of eighty employees and merchants, all men, about twenty-six women, nearly all of them married, eight children, and fifty soldiers. The numbers are not large, but they do not include the unspecified number of soldiers who had been dismissed from service, merchants who had left the factory to start private business and employees who had completed indentures and stayed on as traders. The numbers do reflect the hugely imbalanced demography of the factory population, as indeed was the case with many migrant merchant groups in this time. The average worker was a
junior officer or factor, a male in his twenties. If fortunate and enterprising, he could hope to complete an indenture with the Company without falling sick or dying, make enough money on the side, and then either return home to a life of ease, or stay on to improve his fortunes as a private trader. Until that moment of freedom, the hierarchy between the officers and the subalterns could become oppressive and the boredom of a clerk’s life too great to bear.
The temptation, then, to leave this prison and go out into the world was irresistible. But what was there outside the walls? The European sailors and soldiers formed a society quite distinct from those of the European factors, especially the higher officers. The two groups rarely socialized. The sailors’ lives were less orderly and subject to the uncertainty of warfare and climate. When ship repairing, an ongoing conflict, or simply the want of sufficient hands stranded a ship on shore, the sailors lived in the midst of a makeshift Indian settlement. This was the society outside the factory.
Liquor and women best symbolized the social distance between the senior factory officers on one side, and the poorer merchants, sailors and soldiers at the other end of the spectrum. Europeans faced the constant problem of securing alcoholic drinks in India, arguably the least
friendly country in the world to pursue such a project. The chief officers of the factory had access to imported wine and spirits. Madeira was brought into India by the crate-load, but was reserved for the bosses. Others procured their drinks in India. From sheer desperation, they drank almost anything anywhere. ‘Several Europeans lose their Lives by the immoderate use of tempting Liquors’, wrote Captain William Symson in 1715. He was referring to the fermented palm toddy of Surat. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the situation had improved only to the extent that a number of shore-side pubs were in operation in all the trade settlements, notably in Calcutta. But the quality of the drinks they served remained as dreadful as before. The main drink was ‘bowl punch’, a cocktail made out of arrack, jaggery, lemon juice and a squeeze of muscadine. The drink was thought to be the reason for the rapid decline in health and the consequent high mortality rate of European sailors waiting for a ship.
In the Lalbazar area in central Calcutta, where the police headquarters were located, about 1770 there had developed a cluster of ‘low taverns’ owned by Italian, Spanish and Portuguese characters. These places served ‘paria arrack to the great debauchery of the soldiers’. Before these ‘punch houses’ and ‘arrack houses’ were regulated, pubs called Harmonic, Union, Wright’s New
Tavern, Exchange, Crown and Anchor represented the real international face of Calcutta. A Bengali book published in 1915 stated that the ruined front of one of these pubs could still be seen on the old Kolutolla Street; a plaque showed the date when it started, 1767. Serving alcohol was always a legal business. As early as 1720, we know of a Bibi Domingo Ash, possibly an Indo-Portuguese, acquiring the license to distribute arrack in Calcutta. Yet, the pubs acquired a bad reputation that attached to the whole European working class of the city. They were sites of violent brawls and murders. One reason for the violence was that both European and Indian river-pirates sold the plundered goods in these pubs, and there were disputes over the sales. But the quality of the drink must have added to the foul mood.
Few of the employees could get the chance to marry European women. Even among the officer elite, the presence of European women often caused more duels than marital alliances. Nor did the officers and employees appear too fussy about the ethnicity of partners in the seventeenth century. There was even a positive preference for Indian women, and possibly some competition between the European nationalities for local women. ‘The rich exuberance of the country,’ François Bernier wrote in the 1680s, ‘together with the beauty
and amiable disposition of the native women, has given rise to a proverb in common use among the Portuguese, English, and Dutch, that the Kingdom of Bengale has a hundred gates open for entrance, but not one for departure’. The interest was just as lively a century later. Otherwise a severe critic of the Bengalis, the Dutch officer John Stavorinus (1770) softened on the subject of Bengali women, and acknowledged that they were ‘well-proportioned’, even if ‘uncommonly wanton’. Indian women were ‘much admired by the European gentlemen’, wrote another contemporary. The specially coveted ones were the ‘ladies of the Gentoo cast’, being ‘so exquisitely formed, with limbs so divinely turned, and such expression in their eyes’, etc. (Philip Stanhope, 1784). A merchant of Calcutta in the 1780s, Bartholomew Burgess wrote a whole treatise on the many uses of the veil, pragmatic and romantic, of ‘the Indostan female’.
Lyrical as the sentiment was, no woman of the Brahmin and the merchant classes was available to the Europeans. For, ‘the Rich Merchants make Sure to marry their children before they come to 8 years of age’ (Thomas Bowrey, 1670). And as for the grown-up women of the wealthy classes, ‘their seclusion from society is … most rigidly adhered to’ (William Tennant, 1804). The elite among the Indians, whether Muslim or
Hindu, shut the door of their inner social circles firmly in the face of the Europeans.
When the Europeans sought Indian women, they came to the shore-side townships that had a ready supply. In the 1770s, the northern suburb of Calcutta Baranagar had become famous ‘on account of the great number of ladies of pleasure’ plying their trade under license issued by the Dutch company (Stavorinus). Some befriended the dancing girls and had to suffer their ‘exceedingly annoying’ music as punishment. Others socialized in the sprawling slums outside the white factory towns and mixed with the artisans and other working people. A large number, of course, took mistresses from the same pool. An account of the daily life of the typical English merchant of Calcutta in 1770 notes matter-of-factly that at eight in the morning when the head attendant enters the master’s bedroom, ‘a lady quits his side’ and either takes a private staircase to go upstairs or is conducted out of the premises, as the case may be.
The attempts to bypass the rigidities of Hindu society produced some touching moments. William Hickey, attorney, socialite and one of the richest citizens of Calcutta in the 1780s, in his memoirs referred to his companion as ‘my little’ sweeper-woman. But in the larger expatriate English community, the result of these choices was a hardening of caste sentiments among the
ruling class, members of which were rich and powerful enough to marry European women. All alliances between the English and Indian women were looked down upon. The children of such alliances, often successful artisans and merchants themselves, were barred from government and military positions until the mid-nineteenth century.
One of the first tasks of a newly-appointed priest was to consecrate marriages and baptize children (even the wives) with retrospective effect. We know very little on the relationship between the European son-in-law and his Indian relatives. Whereas for the officers, we can assume they kept their Indian relatives at an arm’s length, many sailors and soldiers in the late 1700s did in fact live in the ‘black’ townships.
Partly owing to these alliances, the social exclusiveness of the factory premises was fast disappearing in the eighteenth century. A substantial class of European and Indo-European artisans, traders and soldiers lived in the Indian quarters. Many Europeans sought service with the Indian princes, usually as mercenary soldiers, and they needed to engage socially with the courtiers and Indian soldiers. At the same time, more European women than before had begun sailing to India in the hope of marrying the ‘nabobs’. As the officer and the administrative class had greater access to European
women, the sailors, traders and soldiers who married working-class Indians were pushed closer to the Indian society. The inevitable effect of the dual trend was the effort to racially downgrade the Indo-European mixed population in the nineteenth century. Mimicking the Indian upper castes, the European ruling elite treated marriage beneath the caste, in this case non-Whites, as a ground for social exclusion. In a curious reversal of roles, instead of fallen women, the society was creating thousands of fallen men, whose lower social status was cemented by exclusion from superior jobs that were reserved for those born of purer alliances.