WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

The Anarchy by William Dalrymple ; Published by Bloomsbury Publishing; Pages 524;Price Rs 699/-

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The book under review is William Dalrymple’s fourth book on the East India Company. He highlights the fact that the Indian economy was rich but a ruthless betrayal by the Indian rulers benefited the East India Company and they made the most of the vulnerable situation of India and went on a rampage to conquer India. This book is about that betrayal.

It does not aim to provide a complete history of the East India Company but answers the question of how a single business operation, based in one London Office complex managed to replace the mighty Mughal empire as masters of the vast sub-continent between the years 1756 and 1807.

Dalrymple brings out clearly that it was not the British government that seized India in the middle of the Eightenth century but a Private Company. India’s transition to colonialism took place through the mechanism of a For-Profit corporation which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

It tells the story of how the Company defeated its principal rivals—the Nawabs of Bengal and Avadh, Tipu Sultan’s Sultanate and the great Maratha Confederacy---to take under its own wing the Emperor Shah Alam, a man whose fate it was to witness the entire story of the Company’s fifty year-long assault on India and its rise from a humble trading company to a fully fledged imperial power .The life of Shah Alam forms the spine of Dalrymple’s book.

This volume traces the story of corporate violence which deals with the origins of the Empire. It covers a two centuries offense which was not only aided and enabled by Indian sepoys but even paid for very largely by the loans given by Indian bankers. It was in 1757, with the Battle of Plassey, that Company began to be transformed from a mere trading organisation to a burgeoning colonial power.

The history of the company was not only a saga of conquest; it also sheds light on the dark secrets that people liked to ignore. “There’s no way a bunch of foreign merchants with no military might could take over India.The degree to which it was facilitated by the Indian financial class, especially the Marwari bankers of Calcutta and Benares is what enabled it to take over.”

The Marwari community of traders and bankers, especially the Jagat Seths who were Oswal Jain bankers from Jodhpur state helped in a huge way.

It was the money from these Marwaris that later financed the conquest of British India, “through the loans they granted to the East India Company.”

The Company remains today History’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power—and the insidious means by which the interests of the shareholders can seemingly become those of the State.

The volatile, widely disliked Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, had made an intractable enemy of Bengal’s Marwari bankers, the Jagat Seths, who saw better prospects in investing with the East India Company than supporting him. The Jagat Seths offered the company more than £4m (about a hundred times that in current terms) to unseat Siraj ud-Daula and install a compliant collaborator in his stead. Robert Clive, who stood to make an immense personal fortune, gladly accepted. Plassey was in truth a “palace coup”, executed by a greedy opportunist, won by bribery and betrayal.

A snobbish disdain for the extravagance of the “nabobs” (Clive foremost), and fear about their corrupting influence on British politics, led to a Regulating Act designed to bring the company under tighter parliamentary control. The man picked to run a cleaner administration was the “plain-living, scholarly, diligent and austerely workaholic” Warren Hastings, who spoke several South Asian languages, had a “deep affection for India and Indians”, and sponsored serious scholarship on Indian culture. But Hastings’s “rule was as extractive as ever”, and his ruthless tactics towards the company’s Indian subordinates got him spectacularly impeached in 1787.

Dalrymple’s greater achievement lies in the way he places the company’s rise in the turbulent political landscape of late Mughal India. It was contemporary Indian chroniclers who called this period “the anarchy”, due to the waves of invasion and civil war that shook Mughal power and allowed a host of regional actors – of which the company was merely one – to gain ascendancy.

Dalrymple draws on reams of scarcely used documents in Persian, Urdu and other languages (unearthed by skilled researchers and translators) to animate characters such as the brilliant Mughal general Najaf Khan, the vengeful Rohilla prince Ghulam Qadir, and the canny Maratha statesman Mahadji Scindia.

The emperor Shah Alam, the tragic hero in a book rife with villains – a figure who had witnessed the Persians sack Delhi, battled against Clive, survived an assassination plot, the rape of his family, and a hideous blinding – would live out his remaining few years as a pensioner in the Red Fort, where he dictated “the first full-length novel in Delhi Urdu” about “a prince and princess tossed back and forth by powers beyond their control”.

A taste of Dalrymple’s story telling.

“ It is the dawn of the 19th century, and in a desolate fort, on a frayed throne, sits Emperor Shah Alam. Now seventy-five, the old, blind king still sat on the gilt replica of the Peacock Throne amid his ruined palace, the sightless ruler of a largely illusory kingdom.” Blinded, humiliated, used as a pawn, the Mughal king with no kingdom is one of the many compelling cast of characters who come to life in this magnificent book which shows how India, which was once among the greatest economic powers in the world, became a colonised State exploited for its natural resources, her people reduced to penury and degradation. And how, amazingly, this was done by a privately held conglomerate over a period of just 50-odd years.

“ It was not the British government that began seizing large chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company... ” says Dalrymple in the introduction to the book.

Dalrymple tells his story cleverly,describing in detail the people who played key roles in the rise of the Company, as well as the many battles and invasions across the subcontinent during this tumultuous time. The volume portrays vividly the British, Mughal, Maratha, Afghan, Rohilla, Nawabs, etc. Robert Clive attracts the historian’s greatest contempt. Robert Clive once celebrated as “Clive of India”, enters here as a juvenile delinquent from Shropshire who arrived in Madras in 1744 as an 18-year-old clerk, but found his vocation as a thuggish fighter in the company’s small security force. Clive displayed total hatred for Indians, describing them as “indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly”. He was ambitious, power-hungry and incredibly avaricious. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, he was one of the richest men in Europe and his machinations set the Company on the path to what it came to be. Eventually,Clive committed suicide, cutting his jugular vein with a blunt knife. The eminent lexicographer,Samuel Johnson wrote, “Clive had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of that impelled him to cut his own throat.”

Equally intriguing as Clive is the figure of Shah Alam, described by Dalrymple as “handsome, sophisticated, urbane and gallant”.Alas! The Mughal emperor who was king only in name. Over the years, the British realised that no amount of administrative control guaranteed them the prestige that came with being allied with the Mughal dynasty. Even when no kingdom remained, the people still recognised the Mughal king as their ruler. Shah Alam was to become beholden to the British, the Marathas, the Nawabs of Awadh and Bengal”. The account of how Ghulam Qadir, the son of a defeated Rohilla ruler, turned on his benefactor, Alam, and blinded the king, ruthlessly decimated his family and raped its women, is perhaps the most harrowing in the book.

Dalrymple quotes extensively from Mughal and British historians, their voices forming a fascinating second layer of narrative. One of these is Ghulam Hussain Khan, whom Dalrymple describes as the most perceptive historian of 18th-century India. He left a detailed and near-eyewitness account of events related to the Mughals and the Nawabs of Bengal in Seir Mutaqherin. Dalrymple mentions that his book is heavily dependent on the Company’s own voluminous records in London and New Delhi.

The Anarchy is also how globalisation began and events in distant Europe and America directly impacted the lives of ordinary Indians. For today’s world, it serves as a warning as to how unbridled corporate growth with the connivance of corrupt governments can bring a country to ruin.

The period covered by Dalrymple is one of of greatest corruption, loot and plunder as well as human rights abuses.

The book is absolutely riveting—as fast paced as Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie put together. Not dry-as-dust History but robust, lively and vigorous presentation is guaranteed when the Chronicler is Dalrymple.

P.P.Ramachandran.

8/2/2020.