Abstract
Five recently reprinted volumes of the Calendar of Persian Correspondence show that both British and local rulers believed that the British were the legitimate successors to the Mughals. The volumes included for review here, especially the first three, show the first phase of indirect rule by the British. But the last two volumes show an increasingly aggressive British intervention in the later part of the eighteenth century, with no aversion to violent methods. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam in their new introduction to the volumes give a useful contextual account of the making of the British Empire in India. By meticulously attempting to detail translations and scribal transaction processes from the Portuguese period, they do a remarkable job of engaging with these documents in the context of new histories.
‘Scribal dynasties’ like the Konkan Brahmins with their exclusive hierarchies and entitlements, determined not only the very making of communities but also the nature of early European communication itself. By the second half of the eighteenth century, correspondence with these scribal groups show the bourgeoning ambitions of various others on the fringes of the Mughal Empire. They showcase how conflicts with groups like the Sikhs, Jats and Marathas helped the British gain a foothold on the chessboard of the Indian political scene for the first time in 1757 when the unsettled pre-eminence of the Mughals opened up possibilities in those troubled times. These letters show that by the late eighteenth century, the Mughal emperor sought protection from the very people who destabilised his existence in the upsurge of many ‘sub-imperial’ ambitions that created endangering possibilities.
The new introduction by Alam and Subrahmanyam is remarkably different from the old version in Volume 3, which only had some generic description of the correspondence in the first three volumes. This was written largely from a British perspective, and tried to justify a new empire in the making through the agencies of suspicion, treachery and intrigues since John Cartier. As explained in the earlier introduction, Bengal, Bihar and Northern Circars witnessed peace and stability under the watchful eyes of the British while other parts of India were infused with violence and chaos.
Extensive correspondence in these five volumes could nurture the expanding field of regional histories, of Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Karnataka, Maharashtra and undivided Andhra Pradesh, apart from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma and Nepal. With the new introduction and annotations, extensive glossary and appendices, this correspondence can be used in multiple ways. They offer a great range of detail showing how the infant imperial power engaged with a decaying shahzada and regional powers during the eighteenth century. The first volume demonstrates the British involvement in the matter of intelligence gathering, military preparations, gossip and intrigues. As recent studies in early colonialism have breached old paradigms, the correspondence pertaining to postal movements, money activities, gossip and imperial engagement with multiple enemies can be re-contextualised. The mixture of coercion, persuasion, request, treaty and treachery, supplemented as it was with explicit physical violence, does not appear so curious any more.
Correspondence between Mir Jafar and the new empire for their combined opposition to the shahzada show conspiracies at two levels—regional and local. The creation of this new empire was rooted in an ever-expanding set of native functional agencies, as one sees in characters like Mir Jafar and Mir Qasim. Thus, far from remaining neutral, the company encapsulated itself in the power dynamics of native agents and its informants. These dynamics are revealed in the correspondence regarding army movements, war activities and personal issues of regional elites. Though one also sees a reflection of European affairs, especially between Britain and France, which were extended to India, what the British faced in India was a permanent but inescapable presence of multiple fighting fronts. Volume 2 corresponds with continuous penetrative actions from the North West Frontier Province and the Sikh defence against it, which was discreetly entertained by the British. During this phase, a large number of otherwise historiographically marginalised rajas and umrah (elites) played a significant role, especially in the context of their local histories.
With historical agency vested in so many different people and institutions with varying interests, it is important to understand how their cooperation with colonialism inflected the percolation of colonial modernity in the interiors of India from the eighteenth century. These volumes also illustrate the ways in which Europeans located rulers and commoners within the framework of ‘inferior race’ and ‘infidelity’ by the extensive use of Christian symbolism and racialised signs. Construction of these cultural others was done through semantics such as ‘holy and high god’, ‘sacred soul’, ‘holy heaven’ and ‘evil of heaven’. Subsequently, these racial prejudices invariably found a response in the behavioural pattern of the autochthonous elites as well (vol. 3, p. 55). This superiority was ensured through complex constructions of courtly/noble adab (virtue) and the mechanism through which they were entertained.
Likewise, Volume 3 demonstrates the last stage of the first phase of the new empire under John Cartier. By this time the British had mustered complete control over Indian affairs by successfully defeating the French power in India and relegating the Marathas to a residual power. However, these developments were hardly without problems, particularly in the south where aggressive conflicts between the British and regional powers, especially Mysore under Hyder Ali, were underway. Like a carom board after the first slammer, the Indian affairs of the company witnessed variegated conflicts and bargaining after Plassey. The mosaic of regional power centres and their intra/inter political conflicts in effect heralded a new empire and ultimately made them the virtual masters of India beyond the designation of ‘Dewan’ of the Mughal Empire. This created much frustration amongst disgruntled elites like Mir Qasim who conspired with the Marathas and other chiefs to trouble the English, while Shuja-ud-Daula visibly expressed his unhappiness with the English. Correspondence also shows that the British had to wage war against the hostile oriental climate. They scornfully ‘recognized’ the Indian climate as hostile and unhealthy for imperial ambitions (vol. 3, pp. 389–90). When it comes to common people, it was not only the absence of effective governance which created misery, but also the ravages of natural calamities, famine, loitering war bands across the Gangetic plain and ‘noble’ political somersaults by rulers and nobles. In the British-dominated areas, famine itself became a major historical character, deciding the very nature of their rule. This is an indispensible volume for historians working on the Marathas, especially for its voluminous information about eighteenth-century Maratha activities outside the greater Maharashtra region. It also draws readers’ attention to three variegated political conflicts amongst the Mughals, Marathas, Jats and Rohillas who made social life in the region very challenging. These politically uncertain situations and the need to ensure local support and continuous inflow of revenue prompted the British to actively involve themselves in local cultural life, for example, agricultural rituals such as punia.
Volume 4 attests how Warren Hastings became the most powerful governor general of the East India Company during a period of great political uncertainties. Warren Hastings assumed charge when the British-controlled areas were witnessing long spells of famine and a furious outbreak of small pox in which half of Bengal’s population perished. A number of environmental disasters, epidemics and climatically induced difficulties thus conditioned the choice of the governor general. Hastings subsequently introduced the system of ‘dual-government’ to tackle the administrative and social situation in the Bengal presidency. By suppressing ‘highway robberies’ and ‘sanyasi marauders’, he was rechristened the ‘founder of a new empire’, and a large number of complimentary letters from the Mughals and regional powers show how he was received in Indian circles. Warren Hastings consolidated his administrative achievements by removing his long-standing loyalists—now political and financial liabilities—through ‘proper trial and error’ methods (vol. 4, p. 62). Thus, he could remove important stakeholders in the British administration such as Mir Muhammed Riza Khan.
Volume 5 continues to describe the shifting personalities, loyalties and priorities of the imperial power during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Longer narratives and correspondence between the British and the Mughals and the British and the Marathas give us the nitty-gritty of changed power equations of the time. What one sees in this volume, interestingly, is the escalated tension between the tribal population and the colonial power. This prepared the empire to change its perceptions towards the people in the region, which subsequently led to the setting up of new criminal courts for harsh institutional ‘corrections’. This created a huge volume of information on ‘banditry’ across the region, and the fermentation of resistance from common people. Imperial power also regulated resentment and allies by directly getting involved in the personal and public affairs of Bengali Muslim nobles, like property issues, inheritance, marital affairs and pilgrimage. Though largely political in nature, this correspondence reflects equally on court/popular culture of the period. Descriptions of arz and nazrana, petitions and royal gifts sent to British governors and officers, show the rigorous effort to normalise relations with the new imperial power. Gifts became the bridging agency in the political tradition of the eighteenth century, whereby things like ice, medical plants, Kashmir shawls, fruits, exotic birds, elephants, cheetahs, pearls, vassals, winter clothes, holy waters, pets and exotic horses became more and more cherished. Gifts corresponded to the status of the giver and the designation of the beneficiary, so as to create a channel for political engagements and conflict resolution.
Taken together, these volumes are important to understand the minds of both the colonial makers and their subject population. They graphically bring out the continuously changing loyalties and the siding of native informers with the new empire from the second half of the eighteenth century. Students of British engagement with India, as well as those who deal with French and Dutch history in the subcontinent, will find these volumes extremely important for the ways in which they help to re-contextualise colonial engagements with local/regional political networks. Although the glossary is not very extensive, it makes an important contribution in making accessible the details in these volumes. As a reprint, their materials are not novel, but there is a freshness in the volumes thanks to the re-contextualisation of materials by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam.
However, like any other ambitious reprint, these volumes are not without mistakes. Readers will wonder why there were certain long gaps between correspondences, sometimes months together. Neither footnotes nor any other references address the reasons behind these long intervals between communications: notably between 18 April and 5 August, and 14 August and 13 December, of 1759 (vol. 1, p. 17). Likewise it would have been useful to give details of certain ‘question marked’ lesser-privileged individuals in the correspondence as to avoid confusion about their identity. Readers will also not miss the considerable number of spelling mistakes and other typographical errors. Apart from such trivial mistakes, one could also wonder if the Koran actually talks about Alexander the Great, who was believed to have built a protective wall against Gog and Magog, the creators of moral disturbances (vol. 1, p. 367).
In short, in these remarkable correspondences one sees how colonialism arrived in India under subterfuge. The British promised much to Indian elites—restoring their fallen honour, protecting their land and power, and clearing out the undesirables from their surroundings, without showing their actual intention of conquest, especially during the initial stages of their sojourn.