The British Empire in India emerged dearly injured from the Second Anglo-Mysore War, shorn of the Madras Presidency, the original home of British colonialism and influence in east India. What’s more, the reputation of the British for invincibility had been sorely shattered, in battles such as Pollilur and Wadgaon, not to mention the sieges of Pondicherry and Madras. A powerful coalition of states had thrown the English into the sea in South India. At home, there was popular disgust for the failures of British arms, diplomacy, and policies in India.
Even in northern India, all was not well under heaven. In one of Warren Hasting’s less diplomatic moments, he had severely alienated the Raja of Benares, at this time Chait-Sinh, formerly a key English auxiliary in the crucial regions abutting Agra. Increasing burdens imposed upon him for the privilege of an English garrison, and then demands for cavalry, had led to increasingly evasive responses and ultimately Warren Hastings himself arriving on scene in August 1781 to force the recalcitrant Raja to pay up. This Chait-Sinh was not in the slightest mood to do and he resisted with the energy of despair, and Hastings’ actions sparked a major rebellion which had seen him forced to flee the city to avoid being unceremoniously lynched. With the British scrounging up every soldier they could get their hands on at the time to try to send a new army to the Carnatic to relieve Madras, there were simply no British soldiers on hand to put down the rebellion. The British were instead forced to call upon Oudh, the larger state to the west, also an allied/client state, to put down the rebellion. The fighting would drag out to 1783, and although ultimately successful, Oudh both increased its territory at Benares’ expense, effectively reducing the Raja of Benares to a city-state, and got vastly better terms in regards to financial subsidies from the British – extremely useful for Oudh in the context of massive misery and economic collapse in the midst of the devastating 1783 north Indian famine, but destroying Britain’s gain from the war, the increased Benares tribute, at a time when money was desperately lacking for the EIC in the context of the ruinous war against the French, Mysoreans, Marathas, and Hyderabad. Chait-Sinh sought refuge with the Marathas, becoming a sort of Maratha equivalent to Muhammad-Ali, Nawab of the Carnatic who was similarly ensconced with the British in Calcutta. In turn he was replaced by the British by his nephew, Mahipnarayan.
The increased degree of independence on Oudh’s part was demonstrated in 1782 when the Nawab of Oudh, Asaf-ud-Daula, desired to strip the begam or queen mother of Oudh of some of her lands, treatment to which she rejected: Warren Hastings backed the begam strongly but with Oudh troops responsible for putting down the rebellion in Benares, he had no real bargaining power and had to cede the issue to the Nawab. Oudh was still within the British sphere of influence, but was showing worrying signs of centralization and had aggrandized its territory and power, and seemed set on the path that the previous Nawab, Shuja-ud-Daula had followed so successfully: to take advantage of surrounding wars and crises, in the framework of the English alliance, for his own benefit. [1]
But this situation was not so grim as might otherwise be seemed. For one, the financial benefits of trade in south India were increasingly irrelevant to the trading profits of the British East India Company, whose real profits were drawn not from India, but rather from its bourgeoning Canton trade, fueled in large part by Bengal opium and export of Indian raw materials such as Gujarati cotton, and precious little of this was bound up with Madras’ trade. The Carnatic had been a politically unstable and often-devastated region, and it lacked the vast tax revenues and financial resources drawn from Bengal. And the alliance opposing the British rapidly broke down, and British influence was paramount in Hyderabad, and also in Delhi, which had had already proved useful in limiting the damage of Tipu Sultan’s victory.
A key lesson taken away by the British establishment as a whole was that they lacked the necessary information and understanding of India. This had a prosaic side, in that a lack of cultivation of Indian allies and powers that had led to British isolation, but there was also a deeper, more fundamental side. The British were strangers in a strange land and they had little understanding of Indian traditions, mentality, history, and even to an extent local languages, beyond a few Persian speakers who dealt with Indian administrations, and trade languages picked up by merchants. In order to govern, understand, control, and exploit Bengal, the British needed a greater understanding of Indian tradition and history. The British had become rulers, and could no longer skimp on their responsibilities and masquerade as simple merchants.
Thankfully, this was at the time of talented individuals in India who were moving policy in this direction. Although Warren Hastings might have been caught up with the general discrediting of British policy following the review of the British situation in India, and indicted in his trial of corruption and malfeasance[2] – which he was broadly innocent of, having been primarily responsible for the Bengal Presidency’s decisions and with no connection to the disastrous actions of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, and although his policies during the Benares Revolt were gauche and ill-judged they certainly were hardly a criminal affair – the foundations of his policy of oriental studies continued on. Perhaps even more influential was William Jones, who established the mutual relationship of Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, and English, as belonging to one great common family of languages. Jones theorized that Sanskrit was at the mother tongue of the European languages like Greek and Latin, starting a long belief of India as the root of European civilization and language.
This period saw a great flowering of British study and interest in these languages, exemplified by the establishment of the Asiatic Society in Bengal as well as the expansion of oriental language schools and studies for British administrators in both Bengal and North India. Persian had been initially maintained as the language of administration in Bengal as a protectorate until the 1770s and still had important administrative roles, and British schools would become recognized as great specialties on Persian, translating numerous texts into English and training British diplomats for Persia as well as more broadly speaking the Indo-Persian world in India. There was also the study of Sanskrit and various vernacular languages of north India, which would bring an introduction to the great Indian classics and the roots of Hindu mythology.
But there was also a psychological element to this that went beyond simple pragmatism. British officials in Bengal felt isolated from home. There was a distance in physical terms of course, as there always had been, with a trip home requiring months, even years if the weather didn’t cooperate, alongside the rigors of the foreign climate with its heat, the lack of English women (as much as the French might sneer at that being an advantage), and a strange culture around them. But British agents, officials, merchants, in India traditionally could take pride in that they enjoyed the broad respect of the home country, and believe that they were expanding its power, prosperity, and wealth. Now, after the catastrophic defeats against Mysore and the Marathas, and in the midst of scandals concerning corruption and enrichment and illicit fortunes gained by British individuals in India, the British public’s opinion had soured on all things Indian.
In Bombay, and for those remaining traders in Madras, this was mixed with a feeling of guilt – after all, didn’t such accusations have a feeling of merit behind them? But the Bengal Presidency was mostly innocent of the disasters occasioned elsewhere, and instead of guilt, there was a feeling of outrage that they were lumped in with the other Indian presidencies about the calamity. In this context, feeling isolated from home, even rejected by it, they turned towards the India around them, embracing a study of Indian languages and history, or for the more physically inclined among them, the pleasures of Indian food, alcohol, music, and above all else women. The stereotype of British merchants and EIC officials as Orientalized in mores and customs, Indianized in their pleasures and lost in a foreign trollop’s embrace might have been exaggerated, but there was an element of truth to it. It would what’s more entrench itself, in a division of mutual incomprehension and rivalry between the EIC and other local administrators, one founded principally upon differences of policy and the rivalry of the merchants and government, but with a very real and growing cultural element as well.
This was just one of the cleavages in British India. There were three broad factions influencing policy in the subcontinent.
The first was the British government, which was animated by strategic concerns. It wished to see the French removed from India and to minimize their influence on the subcontinent, and to this effect to detach the Mysoreans , currently the most threatening power, from the French. It genuinely wished to cultivate a policy of friendship with Mysore, believing that with the end of the Carnatic as a zone of contention, it would be possible to remove the French factor from South India. British government acts, such as the India Act of 1784, called for ending British intervention and involvement in the native states, viewing this as having been the cause of disaster with the Anglo-Maratha War and the Anglo-Mysore War. Broadly speaking, it was indifferent towards most other Indian states, provided it could prevent the expansion of French influence among them – such as crucially in Hyderabad, increasingly drawn into the British sphere of influence but with French agents and officers employed by the government, and the Marathas, where French officers played a significant role in building up artillery forces and particularly Shinde’s new style army, as well as even being involved in civil engineering projects on the Ganges plains such as well construction for irrigation.
Even in the more firmly British-protected Oudh such paranoia asserted itself, where after the initial firing of many French officers in 1775 by the new Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula under British pressure, they would start to trickle back in during the Benares rebellion both to provide the army needed direction and because the British were clearly incapable of doing anything about it. Sometimes typical British insularity played its role too, since de Boigne, the Savoyard officer who bore the greatest credit for Shinde’s army, was commonly mistaken as a Frenchman by the British press and authorities, leading to an assumption of significantly more French influence among the Marathas than was actually the case, and it was true that many Frenchmen in India were completely mercenary and only interested in money instead of patriotic ties to la mère patrie, but at the same time there was a genuine French influence over many Indian states that the British found threatening.
Allied to this faction, if for different reasons, was the British East India Company itself. Their motivations were different, since they were not concerned with French strategic penetration of India per se, even if they were not fond of French commercial competition (this was mostly confined to the Carnatic however so the generalized damage was limited) but rather with minimizing expenses. Although the loss of their trading posts in the Carnatic and their revenue there was painful, at the same time it was clear that the roots of the company’s profits lay towards the east – in China. In actual profit terms, India had become an afterthought, and it was Canton where real profits lay. The BEIC desired to cultivate this direction, to expand trade with China, particularly the booming opium trade, and to mostly use the feuding between the Marathas, Hyderabad, and Mysore as a way to gain additional commercial concessions, all at minimal Company expense.
The third faction was radically, diametrically, opposed – the revenge faction, principally consisting of British government officials, military men, and a scattering of bureaucrats and émigrés from the Madras presidency. Led by the British general Lord Cornwallis, of Yorktown fame (if not for himself), Cornwallis himself wished to personally avenge his defeats and win a path to glory. But there was more than simply personal animus behind this. The revenge faction did not believe that British policy in the Anglo-Maratha War and the Second Anglo-Mysore War was mistaken – simply ill-timed and ill-judged. British diplomacy had served them poorly by bringing together the Marathas, the Mysoreans, and Hyderabad against the British at one time, and at a moment when Britain was bound up in a global war against France, Spain, and America, which had spread British seapower far too thin. With a judicious cultivation of Hyderabad and the Marathas, it would be possible to reverse the table on the Mysoreans, and if France was otherwise indisposed, to win much-needed naval superiority. Their objectives were to retake the Carnatic, and to resume the march of British power in south India, restoring British prestige and British honor.
What’s more, the British had other assets to play against Mysore. The most effective of these was played early, even before the ink on the Treaty of Mangalore was signed: British influence in Delhi prevented Tipu Sultan from having his Carnatic claims as being formally recognized by the Mughal emperor. These were an immensely complicated arrangement, under which the Nawab of the Carnatic was under the suzerainty of the Nizab, but then became independent of him in 1765, while still maintaining links to the Mughal Emperor – the same situation as Mysore, which too formally was under Mogul suzerainty – and Mysore was de jure ruled by the Wodeyars, specfically Chamaraja Wodeyar IX. The Mysorean conquest of the Carnatic led to de facto authority being exerted by the Mysoreans there, but the British successfully prevented the Mughal Emperor from recognizing this. Tipu was also wildly pleased with his conquests and was eager to assert himself, but would probably have preferred to continue under theoretical Mughal suzerainty: this option was blocked to him if he wished to control the Carnatic legitimately. Thus he declared himself independent of the Mughal Empire. While Mughal power had long since been purely theoretical, especially for Indian Muslims, it was still a crucial legitimizing factor: they hoped that this would undermine Tipu’s legitimacy, especially in his army.
Normally, the power of the British government and of the EIC combined would have been more than sufficient to fight off the third, but in 1785 the Mysoreans and the Marathas went to war, and this was eagerly seized upon by Cornwallis’ faction to kill two birds with one stone: they proposed to loan five British infantry regiments to the Marathas, paid for by the Marathas, and to use it to wring commercial concessions from the Marathas too. This was against both the letter and the spirit of the Treaty of Mangalore which called upon the British and the French to refrain from interfering in the Indian states. But the British found a legal loophole: the regiments were officially transferred to the service of the Nawab of the Carnatic, who had sought refuge in British Bengal but was officially still an independent sovereign, who then transferred them to the Marathas. This legal fiction managed to provide enough of a smokescreen to get it approved, and tightened up British relations with the Marathas, and decreased expenses – leading to the British policy of Cornwallization – British-trained soldiers loaned out to friendly powers, paid for by them, both to increase friendly relations and more importantly to cut down on expenses.[3]
It was not however, well-received by the Mysoreans, and Tipu was extremely angered that the British had intervened in Indian affairs contrary to their treaties. It would be merely the beginning of a buildup of grievances that would threaten to lead to another conflagration. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the path to war is paved with government budget cuts.
[1]Much of the background from A l’Assaut de l’Asie, a 1901 French book that I’ve been working on translating for my own account into English, and which I never imagined would actually be useful beyond providing a look at European mentalities at the beginning of the 20th century. I’m still amazed that it actually turned out to be useful here.
[2]Historically he was found innocent. Here general dissatisfaction with India, his own mishandling of Benares, and the opprobrium heaped upon it in the context of the Carnatic disasters leads to him being found guilty.
[3]Similar to the original British policy of having client states pay subsidies to support British troops, but with the distinction of being less constrained, due to serious financial problems.