East
How one company with 35 employees plundered India
William Dalrymple’s new book chronicles the biggest corporate pillage in history
How did one financially-strained British company with a small office in London and a handful of employees go on become lord and masters of the entire Indian subcontinent? William Dalrymple’s new book The Anarchy chronicles the inconvenient bits of our history often swept under the rug. In a freewheeling conversation with Conde Nast Traveller, Dalrymple talks about the pillage of India by the British East India Company, his Mughal and Bengali connection and romanticised notions of the British Raj back home in the UK.
Tell us why this period of history of this part of the world interests you so? This is my fourth book on the British East India Company, and I have been writing about the subject for almost 20 years. The reason I wrote all these books is because this period of Indian history is totally neglected. Ashoka, the Guptas, Shah Jahan and the might of the Mughals and then the British Raj and the freedom struggle, they are all widely covered. But between these, you have these periods of fragmentation that no one really talks about. The East India Company period is one of those where everything goes to hell in a handcart and there are precious few heroes and certainly nothing in it from a nationalist point of view. But it is an incredibly rich period because it is where the foundations of a modern India are laid. It is the first time India comes together as a political unit. The Company, for all its asset plunders and other ruthless acts, does create a unified political unit that previous dynasties were never able to do. Also, this is where the origins of the Indian Army and many of the regiments created back then continue to serve to this day. That’s quite an important legacy that spans about 250 years, from 1599 to 1858. When we talk about the period before Indian Independence, we tend to think of the country being ruled by the British, but that wasn’t the case at all. It was one company that worked out of one office, five windows wide, on London’s Leadenhall Street and 100 years into its history it only had 35 employees. It’s truly astonishing to think.
How did the Company manage it?
They grow rich by shipping Mughal textiles, chintz, silks and particularly high-quality cotton around the world and to such a huge scale that by the mid-18th Century you have de-industrialisation in Mexico because of the sheer quantity of exports from India. The British Crown and the government gained enormously from the wealth the Company produced, both directly in terms of profit, but also in terms of tax revenue. But beyond fleecing the company, the British government is not really interested in what the company is doing. India is a long way away, a nine-month voyage away. It took about a year and a half to get messages to the UK and back.
So, at the start it was a corporate issue, a case of corporate violence, corporate irresponsibility and greed, all of which are incredibly modern issues. [Robert] Clive, for example, is one of the first who benefited from insider trading. He docks in Madras at the end of a nine-month voyage and is one of the first to hear about the British victory in the Battle of Buxar. He knows Company shares would soar because it had essentially taken over all of northern India. His first action is to write to his business agent in London saying, in code, to mortgage everything he owns to buy Company shares. He is as shady as they come. As far back as 1698, the Company is the first to be caught offering share options to members of Parliament if they vote to extend its monopoly. Forty percent of MPs own Company shares so they won’t be voting against their own interests.
Who are your favourite and least favourite characters during this period?
Favourite character, no question, has to be [Robert] Clive. He is the perfect villain. He is my Lord Voldemort. He is a small-time punk from a nowhere English market town called Market Drayton, and he organises protection rackets with his gang. Think Gangs of Wasseypur in 18th Century Shropshire. He is throwing stones through the windows of shopkeepers who aren’t paying his protection money. His parents try to get rid of him and pack him off to the Company where he twice tries to commit suicide because he is miserable. He tries to become a chartered accountant and he isn’t cut out for that at all. It is only a complete accident of the French capturing Madras that he escapes to the last Company post in south India where he trains as a soldier and that turns out to be something he is really good at. He breaks all the rules–he attacks at night, he attacks in fog and from behind during an age when war is all about diplomacy and chess games and gentlemen giving each other gentlemanly agreements. Clive has none of that. He is totally ruthless and brilliantly effective. But in the whole of his correspondence from India, there is not one mention of the beauty of the landscape, the beauty of the people… he doesn’t mention pagoda rising from palm trees. He is just after making a fortune. He is the tough, young kid from nowhere who gets a job at Goldman Sachs.
He is offset by his mirror image of Shah Alam (II), who is cultured, generous, kind, good and a complete loser. Time and time again, through bad luck and complete lack of ruthlessness, the Mughal gets taken advantage of, is betrayed and never quite succeeds. He is this tragic anti-hero.
Where all did the research for the book take you?
The book divides neatly down the middle–there are the East India Company sources and the Mughal sources. EIC sources are easy to get at because they are in two great stashes–it is either at The British Library in London. There are 35 miles of it. There is even more voluminous stuff at the National Archives of India. It is typically chaotic with indexes that have been lost.
Mughal sources are more diffused. You end up in all sorts of bizarre places. For example, Tonk, a tiny little town between Jaipur and Bundi and in the 19th Century an amazing Oriental library was set up there by a local nawab. And we found all manner of good stuff there including a new Shah Alam Nama that no one has ever used before.
Did you uncover anything in your research that took you by surprise?
In a sense, the surprising stuff wasn’t the shocking stuff. None of the loot or plunder surprised me because one has such a dim view of the Company. The shocking stuff just confirms your prejudices. Even when, in the middle of the Bengal Famine [of 1770], the shareholders of the Company vote in London to increase their dividend from 10 to 12.5 percent even as one million Bengalis are lying dead. They have heard of the famines there and yet the EIC through violence has maintained tax collections at full rate. So, they expect because there is a famine only half the tax will come and so literally to the point of abandon, they extract this tribute from the locals.
What was surprising is when the famine is known about in Britain how much the British press reacts exactly as the modern press would. It is front-page news and you get whistleblowers from Calcutta writing about how there are 100,000 corpses on the streets and how the skies are clouded by vultures and how you couldn’t walk out onto the streets without seeing bodies eaten by dogs and vultures. The reports are graphic, and this causes huge outrage. And you wouldn’t expect this in an age when slavery was rife. Admittedly it is mixed with jealousy about how rich these Company people were. You have these Company men coming back with huge fortunes, buying enormous country houses and buying up Parliament. Lady Clive is rumoured to have a pet ferret with a diamond necklace. There are marches in the street with effigies of Clive being burnt, plays put on in London’s Haymarket with Lord Vulture being parodied. But ultimately Clive dies miserably of his own hand. He cuts his own throat. He is indicted on charges of wrongdoing and although cleared by Parliament, his name is mud and people hoot at him in the streets and he is known as Lord Vulture by that point because of his conduct during the Bengal famine.
What are the three places in India anyone interested in this period of the country’s history must visit?
Murshidabad, which used to be the capital of Bengal and is a four-hour drive from Calcutta, is astonishing. It was the biggest city in Bengal and the size of London in the 18th Century. Now it is just a series of villages with these vast ruins creeping out of the jungle on the banks of the Bhagirathi River. Srirangapatna, Tipu Sultan’s island fortress, like Alcatraz, in the middle of the Kaveri river, is also an incredible ruin. The city which was huge back then was totally looted and pillaged by the Company in 1799 and has never recovered. A lot of Kolkata, which was the Company’s capital, also dates from this period.
What are the three places in the UK where you can go to see some of the treasured looted from India?
Powis Castle in Wales probably has a greater collection of artefacts and artwork from this period than any one place even in India. Tower Castle holds another good bit of Company loot. And the British Museum, where the entire statue collection dates from this period of Indian history
Tell us a little about the family you had in India during this period.
My family was exactly the sort of people who joined the Company. They were minor Scottish gentry. You had to be pretty desperate to apply to the Company because three-quarters of the kids that went to India never came back. They died there. Likewise, generations of the younger sons of my family were sent out and most of them never made it back including the two out of three Dalrymples in the book, Stair, James and Alexander. Only Alexander Dalrymple made it back. I, in fact, have both Mughal and Bengali blood. James Dalrymple, who doesn’t make it back to the UK and is buried in Secunderabad today, married Muti Begum who was Noor Jehan’s younger sister’s great grand-daughter. On my other side of the family, my great grandfather was born to a Bengali lady from Chandannagar. It is from this side of the family that I am related to Virginia Woolf, our grandmothers were siblings. So, Virginia also has Bengali blood. If you look at her photographs, she actually has quite an Indian look about her.
How do you think the book about all this loot and pillage is going to be received in the UK?
The Brits quite enjoy the idea of being villains. They have watched enough Mel Gibson movies to develop a taste for it. There is however an underlying assumption that it wasn’t all that bad. There was quite a lot of parasols, elephants and croquet lawns and it was all very cosy and Mountbatten loved Nehru. The British have this fantastic, romanticised view of their relationship with India seen through rose-tinted glasses.
What’s your writing routine like?
I live on a farm in Mehrauli which is really perfect for writing. This book took six years, and the first couple of years is just gathering information, getting the Persian stuff translated. Then there is a period of just sitting at my desk, putting it all together into the dateline—this is a laborious process. But then when it actually comes to writing, I compare it to Chinese cooking where you spend a lot of time prepping the ingredients, chopping up the vegetables and then you shove it all in to the pan and put it on high heat and you are done ten minutes later. That’s what I try to do with the book, all the bits of info and quotes diced and ready to fry. I treat this writing period like exams–I stop drinking, bed early, print out the day’s writing before going to bed, rise early, read the previous day’s work before looking at emails, writing new material by 10 in the morning and continuing through lunch till about 4 in the afternoon and then collapse, half snoring in to Netflix in the evening. I have been watching Wild, Wild Country and next up is Chernobyl. I am naturally very sociable, but I restrict my socialising during these periods.
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury Publishing; INR699)
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