CHAPTER XIII
THE PURIFYING OF BENGAL
When Clive quitted England for Bengal (June 4, 1764) he knew only that the war with Mír Kásim was raging, and that Mír Jafar had been reinstated in his position. It was not until he reached Madras, the 10th of April following, that he learned that Mír Kásim had been finally defeated, that his followers had submitted, that Mír Jafar was dead, and that the Nawáb-Wazír of Oudh had thrown himself on the clemency of the English. In the interval of twenty-three days which elapsed before his arrival in Calcutta (May 3), he had time, in consultation with the two members of the Select Committee who accompanied him, Messrs. Sykes and Sumner, to deliberate regarding the course of action which it would behove him to adopt on his arrival there.1
1 The other two were General Carnac and Mr. Verelst.
One of his first acts on arrival was to remodel the army. He placed General Carnac at its head, divided the European infantry into three battalions, gave regimental commands to two officers who had accompanied him from England, and regulated all the superior appointments in a manner the best adapted, in his opinion, to secure efficiency.
He dealt likewise with the Civil Service. Nothing had impressed Clive more than the evil effects of the predominance of venality and corruption during the rule which had followed his first departure, and he was resolved to put them down with a strong hand. He found, on his landing, a subject which gave him the opportunity he desired for showing publicly the bent of the line of conduct he intended to pursue.
Four months before his return, Mír Jafar, worn out by anxiety and trouble, had passed away. His position had become degraded, even in his own eyes. From having been, as he was on the morrow of Plassey, the lord of three rich provinces, he had become, to use the words of a contemporary Englishman,2 'a banker for the Company's servants, who could draw upon him as often and to as great an amount as they pleased.'
2 Mr. Scrafton. See Scrafton's Letters.
We have seen how the members of Council had benefited pecuniarily by the elevation of Mír Jafar to the masnad in 1757; by that of his successor in 1763; by Mír Jafar's re-elevation the same year. The opportunity of again selecting a successor was not to be passed over without their once again plunging their hands in the treasury of Murshidábád. They found that there were two candidates for the vacant office, the son of Míran, and therefore grandson of Mír Jafar, and the eldest surviving son of that Nawáb. The decision arrived at by the Council, then reduced by vacancies to eight members, was to sell the succession to the candidate who should bid the highest price for it. They decided in favour of the son of Mír Jafar, for, although illegitimate, he was of an age at which he could act on his own authority; the other was a minor, whose revenues would have to be accounted for. In return for their complaisance, it was agreed that they should receive a sum of money, to be divided as they might arrange, close upon ten lakhs of rupees; in addition, there was to be paid another sum, just over ten lakhs, for secret services rendered by one of their number, Mr. Gideon Johnstone, and by a Muhammadan, Muhammad Ríza Khán, who also, in pursuance of the arrangement, was nominated Deputy-Nawáb. This shameful bargain was signed, sealed, and delivered on the 25th of February, little more than two months before Lord Clive landed.
An order from the India Office, which reached Calcutta just thirteen days before the death of Mír Jafar, and which prohibited—by a new covenant, to be signed by all the Civil Servants in India—the acceptance by such servants of presents of any kind from the natives of India, greatly strengthened the hands of Clive in dealing with this transaction. Finding that in the Council itself he would be subjected to much cavilling, he at once superseded its action by declaring (May 7) that the Select Committee3 had been constituted. He then, with that Committee, assumed the whole powers of the Government, took an oath of secrecy, and had a similar oath administered to the only two of his colleagues who were present. He then set himself to examine all the matters connected with the succession to the office of Súbahdár of the three provinces.
3 See [Chapter XI].
He had to deal with men whom a long course of corruption had rendered absolutely shameless. Charged by Clive with having violated the orders of their masters in accepting presents after such acceptance had been prohibited, they replied that they had taken Clive himself as their model, and referred to his dealings with Mír Jafar in 1757, and afterwards at Patná, when he accepted the famous jágír. The reply naturally was that such presents were then permitted, whereas now they were forbidden. Clive added, among other reasoning, that then there was a terrible crisis; that for the English and Mír Jafar it was then victory or destruction, whereas now there was no crisis; the times were peaceful, the succession required no interference. He again charged the members of Council with having put up the Súbahdár for sale to the highest bidder, in order that they might put the price of it into their own pockets, and with having used indecent haste to complete the transaction before his arrival.
Clive could at the moment do no more than expose these men, now practically powerless. He forced them, however, to sign the new covenants. But his treatment of them rankled in their minds. They became his bitterest enemies, and from that time forward used all the means at their disposal to harass, annoy, and thwart him. When, finally, he drove them from the seats they had disgraced, in the manner presently to be related, they carried their bitterness, their reckless audacity, and their slanderous tongues to England, there to vent their spleen on the great founder of British India.
Having silenced these corrupt men, Clive turned his attention to the best means of regulating, on fair terms, commercial interests between the native and the foreigner. He soon recognized that the task of Hercules when he was set to cleanse the stables of King Augeas was light in comparison with the task he had undertaken. In the first place he was greatly hampered by the permission which the Court of Directors had granted to their Civil Servants to engage in private trade. So poorly paid were they, indeed, that private trade, or a compensation for it, had become necessary to them to enable them to live decently. The proposed compensation was afterwards adopted of fixing their salaries on a scale which would take away all temptation to indulge in other methods of obtaining money. Vainly did Clive press upon the Court the adoption of this alternative. Amongst our countrymen there is one class whose business it is to rule; but there are often other classes which aspire to that privilege, and which seize the opportunity afforded them to exercise power, but whose members possess neither the education, the enlightenment, nor the turn of mind to do so with success. Of this latter class were the men who had become the Directors of the East India Company. These men possessed no prescience; they were quite unable to make a correct forecast; they could consider only the present, and that dimly. They could not realize that the world was not standing still, and they would have denounced that man as a madman who should have told them that the splendid daring of Clive had made them the inheritors of the Mughal empire. Seeing only as far as the tips of their noses, these men declined to increase the salaries of their servants or to prohibit private trade.
Hercules could bend to his process of cleansing the stables of the King of Elis, the rivers Alpheus and Peneus. Clive could not bend the Court of Directors. The consequence was that his labour was great, his success incomplete. The utmost he could do, and did do, was to issue an order abrogating the privilege, used by the Civil Servants to the ruin of the children of the soil, to grant passes for the transit of merchandize free of duty; restricting such privilege to certain authorities named and defined. Upon the private trade of the civilians he imposed restrictions which minimized as far as was possible, short of its abolition, the evils resulting from permission to trade, bringing it in fact to a great extent under the control of the Government. In both these respects his reforms were wider, and went deeper, than those which Mír Kásim had vainly asked from Mr. Vansittart and his Council.
With regard to the salt monopoly, Clive had made investigations which proved that the trade in that commodity had been conducted in a manner which, whilst securing enormous profits for the few, had pressed very hardly on the many. He endeavoured to reduce this evil by placing the trade on a settled basis which, whilst it would secure to the natives a supply of the article at a rate not in excess of that which the poor man could afford, would secure to the servants of the Company fixed incomes on a graduated scale. His scheme, he knew, was far from being perfect, but it was the best he could devise in the face of the refusal of the India Office to increase salaries, and certainly it was a vast improvement on the system it superseded. Whilst it secured to the Company's servants in all departments an adequate, even a handsome, income, it reduced the price of salt to the natives to an amount from ten to fifteen per cent. below the average price to them of the preceding twenty years.
This accomplished, Clive proceeded to reconstitute the Calcutta Council. According to the latest orders then in existence this Council was composed of a president and sixteen members: but the fact of a man being a member of Council did not prevent him from accepting an agency in other parts of the Company's territories. The result was that many of the members held at the same time executive and supervising offices. They controlled, as councillors, the actions which they had performed as agents. There had been in consequence great laxity, much wrongdoing, complete failure of justice. Clive remedied this evil by ruling that a member of Council should be that and nothing more. He encountered great opposition, even amongst the members of the Select Committee, but he carried through his scheme.
Of this Select Committee it may here be stated that Clive used its members solely as a consultative committee. Those members had their duties, not always in Calcutta. Thus, whilst Carnac was with the army, Sykes acted at Murshidábád as the Governor's agent; Verelst supervised the districts of Burdwán and Mednípur: Mr. Sumner alone remained with Clive. This gentleman had been nominated to succeed Clive in case of his death or resignation. But it had become evident to Clive long before the period at which we have arrived that he was in every way unfitted for such an office. Infirm of purpose, sympathizing to a great extent with the corrupt party, wanting in energy, Sumner had given Clive but a slack support. This was the case especially in the matter of the reform of the Council just narrated.
Pursuing his inquiries Clive soon discovered that the administration of the civil districts and divisions by the Company's officers had been as faulty and corrupt as it well could be. The case, after examination and report, was tersely put by the Court of Directors in their summary of the state of Bengal on his arrival there. They described the three provinces, Bengal, Bihár, and Orissa, as 'a súbah'4 disarmed, with a revenue of almost two millions sterling, at the mercy of our servants, who had adopted an unheard-of ruinous principle, of an interest distinct from that of the Company. This principle showed itself in laying their hands upon everything they did not deem the Company's property. To reform the abuses so described Clive invoked the assistance of those who ought to have been immediately concerned in the introduction of juster administration. He invited the young Nawáb and his councillors to Calcutta, and held with them long conferences. The disclosures which followed more than confirmed the worst fears he had entertained regarding the all but universal corruption of the members of the Civil Service. It was in consequence of these disclosures that he compelled the retirement from the Council, as he had found it composed on his arrival, of five of its members, and suspended the remaining three. He filled up the vacancies thus caused by indenting on Madras for a sufficient number of civilians to raise the total number of councillors to twelve.
4 The word 'Súbah' is used here to mean one of the large divisions of the Mughal empire.
These sweeping reforms produced their natural effect. Clive became hated. The civilians and their friends and accomplices acted according as their natures were dominated by fear or by love of revenge. Of the former, one, greatly inculpated, the chief agent of Patná, committed suicide. Of the latter, many formed amongst themselves an association, of which the following were some of the principal articles:—'all visits to the Governor were forbidden; no invitations from him or from the members of the Select Committee were to be accepted; the gentlemen coming from Madras were to be treated with neglect and contempt; every member who should deviate from these rules would be denounced and avoided.' At a later period their hostility indicated itself in a more serious manner.
Of the young Súbahdár Clive formed but a poor opinion. He seemed to him a nullity. The one man of ability about him, the minister Muhammad Ríza Khán, the chief of those who had been bribed to raise him to the masnad, was absolutely without scruple. Clive was most unwilling to trust the political education of the Súbahdár to such a man, or to others about him who possessed his unscrupulousness but did not share his ability. But it was difficult to discover a better man; and Clive had ultimately to be content with the endeavour to lessen his influence by associating with him Rájá Duláb Rám—the general who had conspired with Mír Jafar before Plassey—and with the head of the great banking-house of the Sét family. But the influence of Ríza was too deeply founded to be lightly shaken.
The introduction of the reforms I have noted caused a great strain on the constitution of the illustrious man whose iron will carried them through. He had to fight against a faction of interested men, assailed by abuse, thwarted by opposition, and opposed secretly by at least one of the colleagues sent to support him. He was absolutely alone in the contest. But his brave heart and his resolute will carried him through. It was far more trying than fighting a battle, or planning and carrying through a campaign. In those cases there is always the excitement of constant action; the daily, often hourly, survey of the positions; the certaminis gaudia so eloquently described by Attila; 'the holiday,' as that great conqueror called it, 'of the battle-field.' In the daily examinations of deeds which call a blush to the cheek, and of devising measures to repress them in the future, Clive found none of these excitements. But though the work was dreary and heartrending, though, by reason of the opposition he encountered, it called into action all his mental vigour, all his intelligence, all his determination, it was terribly exhausting. It wore him out. Well might Sir John Malcolm write that it may be questioned 'whether any of Clive's many and great achievements called forth more of that active energy and calm firmness for which he was distinguished than was evinced in effecting the reform of the Civil Service of Bengal.'
There accompanied, moreover, in all his civil contests, another mental trial. From causes which have been stated none of the reforms, he constantly felt, could be stamped as 'thorough.' They were none of them complete. He did much; he broke down corruption; he laid the foundation for a permanent and perfect reform; he checked an enormous evil; he infused a healthier tone into the younger members of the service; he aided largely towards the rehabilitation of the British name, then sunk deep in the mire. But the want of intuition, of foresight, of the Court of Directors rendered it impossible for him to do more. That ultimate aim was to come after him; his principles were to triumph; his harassing work had not been done in vain. It was by adopting in their entirety the principles of Lord Clive that the Civil Service of India became one of the noblest services the world has ever seen; pure in its honour; devoted in the performance of its duties; conspicuous for its integrity and ability. It has produced men whose names would have given lustre to any administration in the world, and it continues to produce them still. The work of a great man lives after him. There is not a member of the Civil Service of India who does not realize that for them Clive did not live in vain.
Our admiration for him at this epoch of his career will be the greater when we realize that the administrative reforms I have mentioned were only a part of the duties which devolved upon him. Simultaneously with the dealing with them he had to devote his time and attention to other matters of the first importance. To the consideration of these I shall ask the reader's attention in the next chapter.