Читать книгу Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya Jasanoff, Maya Jasanoff - Страница 11

In 1768, an East India Company officer took up his pen to sketch a panorama of Calcutta. It had been only eleven years since Plassey, and just three since the Company secured the Bengal diwani, but already Calcutta had all the bulk and bustle of an established, modern commercial town. Or at least so this Company officer’s drawing—which extends to a full eight feet—aimed to suggest. Waterfront perspectives like this were popular in part because it was from the water that the engines of British trade and power were seen to best advantage: docks, customs houses, cargo ships, men-of-war, fortifications. At the left of the picture are the Kidderpore docks, primed to load and unload the East Indiamen, the Company’s vessels, from their six-month voyages across the seas. Next comes Calcutta’s growing municipal center, anchored by a row of Palladian buildings and the long, low wall of the old fort. Church steeples are not much in evidence (the only one here belongs to the Armenian Church), but behind the old fort one can just make out the obelisk commemorating the victims of the Black Hole, erected by the incident’s most vocal survivor, John Zephaniah Holwell. Dominating the southern end of the city is the new Fort William, its stone points jutting over the Hooghly. This was the first major structure you would see approaching Calcutta by boat, and it was duly impressive—“reminding me of Valenciennes,” one visitor wrote in 1771, “regular, majestic and commanding.”¹ Rowboats and canoes skim over the water; great oceangoing ships stand gracefully at anchor. The Union Jack flies high. This is Calcutta as a merchant, a soldier, and a patriot would have liked to see it.

All of these visual flatteries were definitely intended by the soldier-artist, Major Antoine Polier, who presented his handiwork to high-ranking patrons in the East India Company. Polier had good reason to celebrate the Company and its newest capital. He had sailed to Madras in the year of Plassey, joining the Company army as a lad of sixteen. His first years in India were spent at war, fighting under Clive in the triumphant campaign against the French in the south. In the meantime, Polier specialized as a military engineer. Promotion was swift. Transferred to Bengal in 1761, he soon found himself in charge of redesigning Fort William as a state-of-the-art military installation. His panorama, with the new fort dominating the scene, was effectively a piece of self-advertisement, and it worked. As the painter William Hodges cooed some years later, this “considerable fortress…superior to any in India…reflects great honour on the talents of the engineer—the ingenious Colonel Polier.”² By 1766, Polier was chief engineer to the Bengal Army and a major, at the tender age of twenty-five.

In many respects, Antoine Polier’s rapid ascent echoed the rising stature of the Company he served. But there was one crucial fact about him that did not fit the conventional image—as even he drew it—of an emerging “British” empire in India. For Polier himself was not British but rather Swiss, born in Lausanne into a family of Huguenot émigrés. Both his ancestry and his mother tongue were French. And though he had glided up the ranks thus far, his foreign birth and connections now became an obstacle in a way they had never been before. Pressure was mounting in the Company against non-British officers. In 1766, the same year Polier was promoted to major, the Company passed a decree that no foreign soldier could rise above that rank. Polier was only in his mid-twenties, and already it seemed his career was coming to an end. “I now despair ever of seeing merit or long Service, the allowed qualifications to a candidate for preferment,” he would later complain.³

But elsewhere in India, opportunity beckoned. Across the native courts, from Mysore in the south to the Maratha kingdoms of the west, and in the Mughal provinces of Hyderabad and Awadh, European officers and technicians were in high demand: to design fortifications, develop arsenals, and drill troops able to rival those of the west. Compared with East India Company service, the pay was excellent, the lifestyle easy and permissive, the possibilities for personal advancement tremendous. If there was no future with the British Company, then Polier would seek one somewhere else. In 1773, he crossed the western frontier of Company-controlled Bengal and entered the province of Awadh, to work for its nawab, Shuja ud-Daula. For the next fifteen years Polier made his home in Lucknow, Awadh’s capital, inserting himself into a large community of European expatriates and a thriving regional court. He would never be British again. In Lucknow, he earned a small fortune, prominent friends, and recognition in European and Mughal circles alike. He also formed a large manuscript collection that anchored him firmly in both communities. Polier was one of many who discovered in Lucknow the means and chance to collect and cross borders. His friends Claude Martin, Benoît de Boigne, and even the nawab of Awadh himself, Asaf ud-Daula—who ascended the throne vacated by his father, Shuja, in 1775—did the same. Their stories bring a remarkable and little-explored side of imperial culture into view.

By the time Antoine Polier moved to Awadh, British rule in India was taking root. In Bengal, the Company began to develop tools and institutions with which to govern its vast and unfamiliar new territory and subjects. To gather taxes, for instance, it needed data about population, agricultural production, and trade—to say nothing of knowledge of India’s basic geography. In 1765 the first survey of India was undertaken by Major James Rennell; his map “Hindoostan,” published in 1782, offered the European public its first coherent and detailed image of “India” as a geographical unit.⁴ To defend and control its territory, the Company recruited more and more Indian sepoys, which meant that officers had to learn local languages and how to accommodate the needs and expectations of high-caste Hindu troops (its preferred constituency). Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal from 1773 to 1785, set efforts to “know” India at the center of his governing program. Where Robert Clive tried to live India down, Hastings and his peers made it their mission to lift India up, searching through its past for ways to guide its future. Wanting to rule India according to its “own” traditions, Hastings sponsored projects ranging from the translation of Persian histories and the Sanskrit Bhagavat Gita, to the compilation of Hindu and Muslim legal traditions; from supporting a madrasa (Muslim school) in Calcutta and the first Bengali printing press, to promoting exploratory missions to Tibet. Alongside these Companyfunded Orientalist projects, “amateur” Orientalism flowered in Calcutta’s Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784.

Meanwhile in Britain, a skeptical public was learning about and fitfully coming to accept this new kind of overseas dominion, so different from the settlement colonies of the Americas. The paranoia over nabobs had subsided. East India Company propagandists worked to foster an image of the Company as a benevolent, fair-minded ruler. The Company did have its critics, and always would. The most eloquent was Edmund Burke, who in 1788 would lead the charge to impeach Warren Hastings for corruption and abuse of power. Owing not least to Burke’s intervention, the Hastings Trial (at least during the first of its seven years) would pose a higher-profile, more sweeping, and vastly more dramatic challenge to Company rule than the 1772-1773 Clive inquiry had done. But while Burke, and Whigs led by Charles James Fox, opposed the abuses of empire on moral grounds, they were mainly attacking Company “despotism”; the fact of British rule in Bengal was widely acknowledged and accepted. In the event, Fox’s radical East India Bill of 1783—which would have brought the Company under full parliamentary control—failed; William Pitt’s more moderate India Act of 1784 established a parliamentary Board of Control, which jointly supervised Indian government with the Company’s Court of Directors. (Hastings, whose sad, distinguished figure in the dock had won him more sympathy than opprobrium, was acquitted by the House of Lords in 1795.)

This, then, was the “British India” that Robert Clive had helped to build: an actual empire of conquest and direct rule administered with a blend of rapacity and paternalism, and an idea of empire gradually being woven into British government and society. Yet there were two significant respects in which late-eighteenth-century India was far from British. The first lay with men like Antoine Polier: the thousands of non-British Europeans who lived and worked under the East India Company banner. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s, the East India Company army—like the British Crown army, and the armies of many other European powers—relied heavily on recruits from across Europe. In 1766, for instance, the year of the Company’s decree on foreign promotions, only three in five white soldiers in the Madras army were actually English or Welsh. Continental European troops composed almost 15 percent of the army—more than the Irish (13 percent) or the Scots (11 percent). At the end of 1800, the ratios were still more pronounced: one in every five soldiers in the Madras army came from the Continent, while only half the army was English or Welsh. And if the Company’s white soldiery was by no means fully British, neither was it uniformly Protestant. Though most of these continental troops hailed from the stalwart Protestant regions of the north—the Netherlands, the northern German states, and Scandinavia—large numbers of French and southern Europeans, combined with the Irish Catholics, made for a substantial Catholic presence.⁵

Even Calcutta, that most British of Indian cities, was a lot less British than images let on. Popular aquatints produced in the 1780s by the uncle-nephew team Thomas and William Daniell showed a polite and well-tended city, where swift phaetons flew over the streets as sepoys paraded past. But north of the wide avenues and clean white colonnades of the city center twisted the narrow lanes of Calcutta’s Bengali districts, home to anywhere from one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand Bengalis.⁶ Also outside the frame were the Armenian and “Portuguese” (often a synonym for mixed-race or Indian Catholics) quarters, each with long-established communities. (When Siraj ud-Daula marched on Calcutta in 1756, more Portuguese and Armenian militiamen were on hand to defend the city than regular European troops.)⁷ And according to a “List of Inhabitants Residing in Calcutta,” drawn up in 1766 for Clive, only 129 out of 231 European men—more than half—were formally British, that is, English, Welsh, or Scottish. Twenty were Irish, another twenty from German states, and the rest from virtually every corner of western Europe. They included discharged veterans, resettled émigrés from French Chandernagore, and a wide range of enterprising souls, such as John Richard, Calcutta’s French pastry chef; John Davour, “Lord Clive’s German musician”; and Laurens Orman, a Swede who lived in Calcutta from 1759 to “keep a Punch house with permission.”⁸ Probate records offer evidence that communities mixed: Bengalis, Armenians, Portuguese, Britons, and continental Europeans regularly encountered one another at estate sales and auctions.⁹

The other way in which “British India” was far from British lay in regions such as Awadh, in the areas under at best indirect control, beyond the frontiers of formal Company rule. Fifteen years after Plassey, British Indian towns remained coastal toeholds on the very edges of the Mughal Empire. Company territory consisted chiefly of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay—a triangle of significant possessions, yet together just a tiny fraction of a massive and contested land. The vast majority of the subcontinent remained in the hands of the Mughal nobility and other Indian rulers. The nawabs of Awadh and the nizams of Hyderabad governed the two largest and richest Mughal provinces—just to the west of Bengal and Madras, respectively, and thus just on the border of Company domains. Other important regional rulers included the confederacy of Maratha leaders in the west, and various independent rajas and sultans in the south, notably Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore. None of these states would fall into direct British control for decades to come; many never would.

Nor did many Britons want them to. Possessing Bengal certainly encouraged some top figures in the East India Company to acquire more. There were new commercial and strategic interests to protect, new desires to satisfy, new and neighboring territories to bring into line with Company ends. But old imperatives remained. The Mughal emperor still sat on his throne. It was probably beyond the Company’s ability to topple him; it was definitely beyond its strategic and economic interests. The Company was still a company. It needed to turn a profit for its shareholders, as well as abide by its charter and the dictates of Parliament’s Board of Control. Further costly armies, expensive conquests, and showy heroics were undesirable; to many, having to administer Bengal was bad enough.

This meant that the Company walked a fine line between trying to consolidate and extend its influence, and trying not to incur extra commitments and costs. It was a tension that nagged the Company right up to its demise in 1858. The best way around the problem was for the Company to pursue its ends behind the scenes: to develop an informal empire of influence and manipulation, rather than a formal empire of conquest and direct rule. Across the native courts of the subcontinent, a web of British residents, advisers, and spies worked to promote (and often shape) Company policy from within.¹⁰ The Company also forced Indian rulers—particularly the nawab of Awadh and the nizam of Hyderabad—to take in large numbers of Company troops, ostensibly to defend their states from outside attack. In return, the rulers had the pleasure of footing the bill for the troops’ expenses. Through this brilliant, nefarious system (known as the subsidiary alliance system), the Company was able to preserve the nominal autonomy of native states while embedding itself within them, and to increase the size of its army at low cost.

In the three decades after Clive left India, there was absolutely no doubt that British power was spreading across the subcontinent. The Company consolidated its rule in Bengal and pushed its influence outward into Awadh and other provinces. Nor was there any doubt that the social life and personnel of Company India was becoming in some sense more British, particularly in the army. The Company’s 1766 decree indicated wariness about welcoming continental Europeans—with their suspect loyalties—into its officer corps. The composition of the ranks also shifted. Embarkation lists of Company troops sent to India during the years of the American Revolution indicate a strong and growing reliance on Irish manpower. Of the 1,683 soldiers sailing to India on Company ships in the 1778-1779 season, a full third were Irish; of the 777 soldiers embarked the following season, the Irish made up 38 percent; and in 1780-1781, Irishmen accounted for 45 percent of embarkees.¹¹ Though of course it would never be exclusively “British,” the white soldiery of the East India Company would never be as mixed as in the days of Robert Clive.

But this was still a far cry from the raj of crowns and trumpets, and there was no way anybody could even anticipate it would become that. For the generation after Clive, “British India” remained more a concept than a fact. Who was to be included among the British and who was not was up for debate: where did continental Europeans such as Antoine Polier fit? What was British and what was not—how would one characterize zones of informal empire such as Awadh?—was similarly far from settled. This was an empire under cover and in the making, and it required a fabulous assortment of cultural fusions and illusions to hold it together. As long as the ruse of Mughal authority remained, so did the need for Company agents to learn and abide by, however imperfectly, its workings, rituals, and language. (The East India Company only stopped using Persian as an official language in 1835.) As long as large numbers of continental Europeans remained in India, either in Company or in native service, the Company remained anxious about where exactly those Europeans’ loyalties lay. Was it with Britain? With native states? Or, worst of all, with France? Within the borders of Company territory, the lineaments of a British Empire in India might be taking discernible shape. But beyond the frontier, crossings and collaborations—between Europeans and non-Europeans, as well as between different kinds of Europeans—were a defining fact of life.

Nowhere in late-eighteenth-century India would one experience the pains and pleasures of life beyond the frontier more acutely than in Lucknow, capital of Awadh. Bengal’s immediate neighbor, rich, large, and strategically significant, Awadh was a prime object of Company desire. Warren Hastings and his successors worked hard, and effectively, to turn the province into a puppet state. (Indeed, Hastings’s behavior in Awadh ranked high among the charges at his impeachment.) Yet even as Awadh’s political importance faded, Lucknow blazed into cultural prominence. Under the reign of the nawab Asaf ud-Daula, the city emerged as India’s most cosmopolitan and dynamic center. Frontier regions have a way of attracting drifters, pioneers, and outcasts—people on the margins, people on the make. Lucknow’s ranks swelled with figures such as Antoine Polier, who were lured by the prospect of the fame and fortune that eluded them elsewhere. It quickly became home to some of the eighteenth century’s most unlikely “imperialists” and most remarkable profiles in self-fashioning.

Polier and his Lucknow peers were border crossers, social climbers, chameleons—and collectors. For it was as collectors and patrons of art that many Europeans in Lucknow cemented their newfound social positions. In Polier’s case, collecting manuscripts put the final touch on his stunning double persona as gentleman Orientalist and Mughal nobleman. His best friend, Claude Martin, performed a more extravagant reinvention. A French-born officer who considered himself British and had lived and worked in Lucknow for twenty-five years, Martin amassed one of eighteenth-century India’s greatest fortunes, and collections. In a staggering assemblage that rivaled those of the major European connoisseurs, Martin re-created an exquisite Enlightenment world in the heart of India. Lucknow even worked its transformative magic on the nawab of Awadh himself, Asaf ud-Daula. Asaf was universally reckoned a laughingstock as a ruler—if not worse, since it was during his reign that the Company established indirect rule. Yet as a collector and patron of art—European, as well as Asian—the nawab attained a stature and degree of autonomy he was otherwise denied.

These men’s stories reveal, in wonderfully personal detail, what it was actually like to live in an expanding, changing world. From Calcutta, or from London, empire might have looked a bit like Antoine Polier’s panorama: coastal outposts of ships, forts, and British flags. But from Lucknow, Polier’s adopted home beyond the frontier, it all looked rather less ordered.