Читать книгу British Rule in India - Harriet Martineau - Страница 14

“In everything we do, we may be possibly laying a train of consequences, the operation of which may terminate only with our existence.”—Bailey.

Up to the time of Aurungzebe’s death, our relations with India were very simple, and might be easily and rapidly described. The Mogul Court was the one object which we had to observe, and in regard to which we had to act. To be on good terms with the Mogul Emperors was to be prosperous and safe: to incur their displeasure was to be in danger and difficulty. The Company had troubles outside the pale of their Indian relations; opponents at home, foreign rivals on the seas, and interlopers on their own commercial grounds; but, as far as the powers of India were concerned, the Mogul sovereigns were supreme, and our affairs were simple accordingly. We had to maintain and improve our commercial privileges, to secure a permanent footing in the country; and, for the rest, to buy and sell to the best advantage. But a time of change must come, sooner or later; and the nature of the change which must ensue on the death of such a sovereign as Aurungzebe, after a reign of forty-nine years, might be foretold, without any pretensions to second sight. When a ruler, wise, efficient, strong in will, and imposing in his successes, dies after a long reign, leaving several sons, a weak government, civil strife, and foreign war as a consequence, may be only too confidently anticipated. In the case of Aurungzebe and his sons, the chances of the future were even worse than usual. The last of the great Moguls commanded everything but affection. He irritated his dependants and subjects while compelling them to admire his abilities and his wisdom. He alienated the Hindoos (the great mass of his subjects) by constant checks and discouragements, while protecting them from Mussulman persecution. He was regarded by the Faithful as a greater monarch than even Akbar; yet they gave him no such effectual support as enabled him to accomplish his schemes. He conquered the Deccan; yet, in his old age, he had more and more to dread from the Mahrattas; and, as he himself disclosed, he was borne down by anxiety as to what he might have to endure in life, and dread of what he might have to encounter after death. It must have been plain to all eyes that bad times were coming; and the British would have foreseen, if their wisdom had corresponded to their needs, that complications and embarrassments must arise, largely affecting, if not entirely changing, their relations with the Mogul empire. In one instance by accident, and in another by a movement of foolish ambition, the British were on bad terms with Aurungzebe, some years before his death. In 1698, a pilgrim ship on its way to Mecca was taken by pirates, who were, or were said to be, English. The Emperor ordered the arrest of the merchants at our factories, and the seizure of Bombay; but his own agents were favourable to their British neighbours, and admitted their plea of innocence; and if anything was done, it was only in the way of inflicting a fine. We have already referred to the other case—that of the hostile movement in Bengal, in 1686, when the Company, strengthened by a few troops from home, hoped to obtain redress for losses and a territorial footing by seizing and fortifying Chittagong. The scheme failed, through misadventure and mismanagement; and the incident was one which naturally deepened the Emperor’s distrust, and confirmed the jealous antipathy of the Nabob of Bengal to the English. The aged Emperor’s life was prolonged beyond the period of rivalship in England and strife in Parliament which seemed likely to extinguish the Company’s privileges altogether, and under which the trade of India was practically free from 1693 to 1698: and Aurungzebe was still living when the associations which had battled for the commerce of his empire at length joined their forces as “The United Company of Merchants of England, trading to the East Indies.” While their old patron was failing in strength and spirits as he verged towards his 90th year, the British merchants obtained the grant of Calcutta, as before mentioned, built Fort William, raised Bengal from its subjection to Bombay up to the rank of a Presidency, and obtained from Parliament, in the form of an absolute prohibition of Indian manufactured goods for home consumption, a reversal of the free trade which had existed for several years, to the advantage of the public, and the discontent of the Company.

Then, after five years more, spent in establishing factories wherever they could be imposed, and in finding that many of them were more expensive than they were worth, the catastrophe arrived. Aurungzebe died in 1707; and with him the empire of the Moguls may be said to have passed away. Crimes of violence and treachery had been frequent before; now they occurred at the Court of Delhi and its dependencies in an unintermitting series, and external foes used their opportunities; so that when Aurungzebe had been dead thirty years, the empire was just in the state of helplessness and corruption which had tempted Timur and Baber to invade it. The same thing happened again. The greatest of Persian warriors, Nadir Shah, crossed the Indus towards the close of 1738, and was giving out his decrees from the palace at Delhi in March 1739.

Our concern with Indian history, in this place, is only in as far as it is connected with the conduct and the fortunes of the British on the spot. It is no easy matter to give even that much without tedious and irksome detail; yet the Interval between the death of Aurungzebe and the administration of Clive must not he passed over, if the subsequent history is to be understood, and in any degree relished. Perhaps the best way of conveying something like a clear impression of our Indian relations, from a century and a half to a century ago, is to offer a sketch of what life in India was like, after the founding of the three Presidencies. In the course of such a survey we may discover which of the crowd of native States involved British fortunes more or less with their own; and the rest of the multitude of potentates, with all their marches, battles, “treasons, stratagems, and spoils,” may be left undistinguished—on the understanding, however, that they must not be altogether forgotten, as if they did not exist, because it was a leading feature of the life of the British in India that they were always surrounded by rulers and peoples who were at feud, and who desisted from mutual slaughter only to enter upon conflicts of deceit and treachery. The alternative was between savage warfare in the field and diabolical bad faith in diplomacy; and the constant presence of such phases of social life must produce more or less effect on the condition, moral and material, of all spectators.

First, we must glance at the British residents themselves, in their chief settlements. Of these the most important was Fort St. George, standing only a few yards from the sea, on a sounding shore, where the surf is too furious to be crossed except by boats of a peculiar construction. A worse place for foreign commerce could hardly have been fixed on: five miles of coast, with a strong current running along the shore, and a roadstead so exposed that, as often as not, the native rafts are the only means of communication with the shipping outside. It must have been a welcome amusement to the gentlemen, doomed to so monotonous a life, to see the agile natives put forth and return with their catamarans, casting their lives into the surf as into a lottery, to find a blank or a rich recompense for the daring. A large town of mean dwellings had sprung up near the fort; and outside the town some pleasant-looking country houses stood, each in its own garden. There lived the writers and the factors, and the merchants, seniors and juniors. Their work was to deal with the native weavers and indigo growers; to make advances to the poorest, and pay the balances, and see the cargoes packed, and conduct the correspondence home, and preserve the Company’s monopoly, and pay some little attention to the soldiers in the fort, and order in the factory. The Writers were the clerks and bookkeepers; and their pay was so small that the wonder is why they went so far, and to live in such a climate, for so little. The Factors ordered, received, and despatched the commodities. The Merchants conducted the commerce—the seniors having been writers for five years, factors for three, and junior merchants for three, and being now qualified to be Members of Council, with the chance of being President. What their pleasures were we learn from tradition and their correspondence. They rode in the cool hours; they played cards, and they looked out over the sea, like other clerks and merchants in countries remote from home. There was little to be told about any pursuits of a literary or other thoughtful character.

The life at Bombay was much the same, but with more variety, and perhaps more local vexations. The harbour was good: but nothing else in that small island was good. Whatever was not parched rock was swamp or pool. The tides are high; and there was then nothing to save the lower parts of the island from invasion by the sea. At times, the inhabitants of separate houses were isolated for days or weeks together. The place was unhealthy, of course. The island of Salsette, now united with Bombay by causeways, was then in the possession of the Mahrattas, who were anything but quiet and decent neighbours; and yet it was important to be on terms with them, as the salt soil of Bombay island would grow literally nothing but cocoa-nut trees; and there were emergencies when it was a matter of necessity to get food from Salsette. On the other hand, life was less stagnant at Bombay than in any other part of India. There was more material for mere amusement in the hunts on the Malabar shore, and in the remains of antiquity, like the rock temples on the island of Elephanta: but there were more stirring influences still in the liabilities of the position—in the piratical attacks from without and the mutinies within. It was necessary to keep constant watch and guard against the pirates of the Arabian Sea; and this was the more difficult from the frequency of mutiny within the gates. Six years after the cession of Bombay to the Company a revolt exercised the new powers of the merchants in decreeing and inflicting capital punishment; and a far more formidable one, eight years after, in behalf of the King as proprietor of Bombay, so endangered the Company’s tenure that the King had to interfere in their favour, and the western presidency was transferred to Bombay from Surat. Yet we meet with occasional notices of the manners of the time and place which show that the residents were not engrossed by their cares. A Mogul diplomatist and historian, who was sent to Bombay on a mission by Aurungzebe in a time of misunderstanding, reported of the merchants as knowing how to receive envoys properly, and making the most of the military material they had to display. The elderly gentlemen were richly dressed, and sufficiently acute and wise, though they laughed rather more than such personages should on such an occasion.

When the English in Bengal preferred settling lower down on the Ganges than Hooghly, their reason was that the site of Calcutta was more convenient for shipping, and therefore more secure. The aspect of their plot of land was discouraging enough. It was chiefly jungle and marsh, with three villages of thatched huts. There was scarcely a dwelling outside these poor villages. The Dutch and the French passed up and down between their shipping and their factories, which were higher up the river than Hooghly. Sometimes they were enemies, and sometimes only rivals; and they were the only companionable persons our factors ever saw, except on the arrival of their own vessels. The natives were vexatious people to deal with—indolent, slow, spiritless, but producing goods which were indispensable to commerce. The merchants were incessantly engaged in driving them to fulfil their engagements, and in vigilance against the lies and trickery which abounded among a timid race, always suffering under the oppression of native rulers. Occasional hunts, river trips, and hospitality to visitors, were the only recreation of the Calcutta merchants when once their houses were built along the river banks. The station was unhealthy; and their dwellings were too like English houses for the climate, and much less favourable to health and comfort than they might have been. It must be hoped that the managers and merchants here laughed as much as those at Bombay; but it must have been difficult at times to find the occasion.

Here is the little we can gather about the English agents, as they lived at the three presidencies. Something more is known of the orders of persons about them, who made up the business, the interest, and the anxiety of their lives, apart from their immediate commercial occupations.

The chief plague of life at all the settlements was that hydra-headed body—the “interlopers,” or private traders. The hatred of interlopers seems to have been to the British factor in India something like the Indian-hating of the pioneer in the wilds of America. To track intruders who were trafficking under foreign passports was as good an excitement as tiger-hunting: and there was no lack of employment while that sort of enemy infested the country. Evidence was collected; complaints were sent home; captures were made, and offenders shipped off as prisoners. A series of Acts of Parliament was obtained to check this encroachment, culminating in one which declared all British subjects found in India outside of the Company’s service guilty of a high misdemeanour, and liable to seizure accordingly, for trial at home; but neither laws, perils, forfeiture, nor personal penalties availed to preserve the Company’s monopoly as long as foreign potentates favoured Indian enterprises, and offered passports to capitalists of all nations to prosecute them. No game laws have ever secured the preserves of the landed gentry; and a whole series of Acts failed to deter the interlopers. The factors had to hunt them the more the longer the conflict for the monopoly went on. The great ladies of Europe wore more and more Indian silks; and yet the commerce of the Company did not increase. The proprietors at home were dissatisfied with the returns: the managers on the spot declared their ill-success to be owing to the amount of illegal traffic; and though this was only partially true, their anxieties caused the interlopers to be the plague of their lives.

The sepoys began to occupy some time and attention. As soon as there were forts, there must be soldiers. A few recruits came out from home—a very bad set, for the most part. Deserters from the other European settlements in India offered themselves: but they were worse still—inasmuch as, in their case, the probability of treachery was added to the vices which had sent them adrift. At Bombay, but not on the eastern side, there were half-castes or converts, Indo-Portuguese by blood or by proselytism. In all the stations there was a better resource, though thus far a very scanty one, in the sepoys, or native soldiers. When first engaged, the sepoys were partly armed with bows and arrows, and partly with the sword and buckler of the country. They wore the usual turban, vest, and drawers, and were commanded by native officers. They were soon trained to the use of the musket; but no one thought of applying European discipline till they had proved their steadiness, and capacity of rendering good service in the forts. That no account was kept of their numbers at the respective settlements shows how little idea there was of the importance of this native soldiery to our future conquest and maintenance of our Indian empire. It appears that the French were beforehand with us in training the sepoys they found, as well as the negroes they imported. The sufferings of our factors from the French arms in 1746 proved how great the neglect of the British had been; and from 1748 onwards, the British sepoys were expressly reported of, as to their numbers and quality. Meantime, as the head of each presidency was Commander-in-chief of the troops of his settlement, he was more or less occupied with his few sepoys, on whom the safety of the forts mainly depended. They were supremely valuable as acclimatized soldiers; but, till long experience had proved their fidelity, they could not but be a great anxiety, as often as hostile movements of neighbours made them most indispensable.

Those hostile neighbours were of various races and qualities; but the two chief are all that can be noticed here.

The French had established a settlement at Pondicherry in the latter part of the seventeenth century; and the same sort of jealousy which our factors entertained of the Dutch and Portuguese was aggravated in the case of the French by the hereditary national hatred, which the state of Europe particularly strengthened at that time. The two nations gnashed their teeth and shook their fists at each other from Madras and Pondicherry (less than 90 miles apart) as they did from Dover and Calais. We shall see presently how their state of mutual vigilance issued in the middle of the last century.

The other formidable neighbour was the Mahrattas. Considering the space they occupy in the history of British India, it seems strange that they should have been as yet scarcely alluded to. The reason is that they rose into notice only in the time of Aurungzebe. Five centuries before, their name had occurred in Eastern chronicles as that of a conquered hill-people, supposed to live along the course of the Nerbudda, and up towards Guzerat—Candeish being a part of their territory. Sivajee founded the great modern Mahratta empire, but, dying a quarter of a century before Aurungzebe, his successors were kept down by the great Mogul. Nothing could check them, however, as a nation of predatory warriors: and they so managed their warfare as to win over a multitude of landowners by fear or favour. The nominal sovereigns of the Mahrattas were prisoners from generation to generation; but their hereditary prime ministers (the Peishwas) answered the purpose of viceroys. The method of rule was to confer large grants of land on chiefs, who were virtual sovereigns, while superstitiously acknowledging in words the supremacy of their rajah. At the beginning of the last century, the Mahrattas seem to have been here, there, and everywhere. Sivajee’s father had a tract of land in the Carnatic, and the command of 10,000 cavalry; so that the managers at Fort George might well live in dread of the Mahrattas. Mahratta chiefs were at Poonah and in Salsette, in Berar and in Guzerat; so that Bombay had to keep a yet more vigilant watch. They professed to approach the north-east no nearer than Berar: but not the less were they feared in Bengal. The Nabob of Bengal paid blackmail to them, or the rice crops of whole provinces were swept off: and the British fortified Calcutta, for the protection of their magazines of goods, and of food and ammunition.

Such was life in our Indian Presidencies for forty years after the death of Aurungzebe.