India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

CHAPTER IV

BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

The basic fact which has governed the whole evolution of British rule in India is that we went there in the first instance as traders, and not as conquerors. For trade meant co-operation. There could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in ships and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom into the Orient, our forefathers determined to emulate the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese and open up new ocean highways to the remote markets credited with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them indefinitely. The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen Elizabeth's charter first established three hundred years ago a few precarious settlements on the far-flung shores of a then almost unknown continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an embassy to court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of their power. Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians who flocked to their "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention in the internal affairs of India. Nor was it till, in the course of the great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only alternative to the greater danger of French dominion. It was the French challenge to Britain's position all over the world far more than any deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement, until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.

But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of almost constant co-operation between British and Indians. The East India Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force, its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops. At Plassey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company's forces, formed only a tithe numerically of the victorious armies that fought under Clive and Munro. The traditions of loyal comradeship between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day, with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulership of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring, wherever circumstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.

In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British Government and the British people to control the methods by which British dominion was to be exercised and maintained. So when the British in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers, they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. Those conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to influence also the attitude of the British people towards the alien races brought under their sway. The motives which prompted English colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. All were impelled primarily by the desire to attain wealth. But whilst our competitors never got much beyond that stage, and for the most part imagined that the only way to attain wealth was by a crude exploitation of subject countries and peoples, the British were saved from similar short-sightedness by the very different spirit with which the development of their own national institutions had imbued their rulers at home. By the middle of the eighteenth century a British Government had a very different sense of its responsibilities to the British people for the welfare of the nation as a whole from that which any continental ruler had been taught to entertain in regard to his own people. That sense of responsibility the British Government and the British people applied in a modified form to the administration of their Indian possessions.

So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the shores of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple. The three "Presidents" who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction. But matters assumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking abundant tithe of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend financial and military assistance in order to rescue the East India Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India. The grant of the Diwani to the Company by the titular Emperor of Delhi gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change. The magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the Company's coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable advances in order to replenish them, and the splendour of the fortunes amassed by many of the Company's servants who returned from India to spend them in ostentatious luxury and in political intrigue at home, combined with the brilliant achievements of British arms on Indian soil to focus public attention on Indian affairs. They became one of the live issues of British party politics.

There was much that was squalid and grossly unjust in the rancorous campaigns conducted first against Clive and then against Warren Hastings. But behind all the personal jealousies and the greed of factions there was a strong and healthy public instinct that the responsibilities assumed by the East India Company were greater than a trading association could safely be left to discharge uncontrolled, and that the State could not divest itself of the duties imposed upon it by the acquisition of vast and populous possessions. It would be idle to pretend that the British people already entertained any definite conception of a tutelary relationship towards the peoples of India, or were animated by purely philanthropic solicitude for the moral welfare of India. But the passionate oratory of Fox and Burke and their fervid denunciation of oppression and wrongdoing in India awoke responsive echoes far beyond the walls of Westminster. In 1762, when France had claimed, in the course of the peace negotiations which led to the Treaty of Paris, the restitution of the possessions she had lost to the East India Company, the British Government pleaded the absence of "any right of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive property of a body corporate." Only eleven years later, the House of Commons passed resolutions to the effect that "all acquisitions made under the influence of military force or by treaty with foreign princes do of right belong to the State," and the Commons had the country behind them. From 1773 onward British public opinion never hesitated to support Parliament in claiming and exercising supreme control over Indian affairs.

A very brief survey of the long series of enactments in which Parliament, asserting the right of "eminent dominion over every British subject in every country," gradually established its authority over Indian administration and moulded it to the shape which it virtually preserved until the Crown assumed direct sovereignty in 1858, shows how steadily the strengthening of Parliamentary control kept pace with the extension of British dominion in India. The first of these legislative measures was Lord North's Regulating Act, which was passed in 1773, just eight years after the East India Company had acquired for the first time the right of revenue and civil administration over vast territories in Bengal and in the Madras "Northern Circars," and thereby taken over the duties of government in respect of a great native population, absolutely alien in race, in religion, and in customs. Lord North's Act did not attack directly the problem of Indian government, but it sought to facilitate its solution by the East India Company itself by reforming its constitution at home, where the jealousies and intrigues of rival factions in the Board of Directors had often reached the dimensions of a public scandal, and by centralising the Company's authority in India, where, as the result of recent developments which had now established the centre of British gravity in Bengal, the post of Governor-General was created for the Bengal Presidency and invested with powers of control over the other Presidencies, Madras and Bombay, which had hitherto enjoyed a status of practical equality. At the same time an attempt was made to strengthen control from home by enjoining upon the Governor-General to keep the Board of Directors in London fully informed and to abide by its instructions, whilst a check was placed upon the executive authority in Bengal by the creation of a Supreme Court in Calcutta from which the present High Court is descended.

The defect of this legislation—a defect inherent to the situation in India itself—was the dualism it created by endeavouring to enforce Parliamentary restraints upon a Company which derived its title to government over the greater part of its possessions from the irresponsible despotism of the Moghul emperors. The Company was thus made to serve two masters, and at the same time it remained essentially a great trading corporation whose commercial and fiscal interests were always liable to conflict, and sometimes did conflict, with its duties towards both masters. The total collapse of the Moghul Empire removed before long one of the ambiguities of this situation, but the other endured in a greater or less degree until the East India Company itself disappeared, though every subsequent measure of Indian legislation at home tended to bring the Indian executive more and more fully under the control of the home Government.

Eleven years later Pitt's famous Government of India Act of 1784 marked a very important step forward. Another great war had been brought to an end by the Peace of Versailles in 1783, and whilst at its close we had lost the greater part of our North American Colonies, the genius of Warren Hastings had saved and consolidated British power in India. It was easy to criticise, and if we are to judge in accordance with modern standards, it is doubtless right to condemn some of the devices to which he resorted in the course of the long struggle he was often left to wage with little or no help, and sometimes in the face of active obstruction from those who, at home and in India, should have been the first to support him. Whatever his errors may have been, they were more than atoned for by the cruel persecution to which he was subjected whilst England was harvesting the fruits of his energy and courage. Pitt's Act was in fact the solemn consecration of all his greatest achievements, whilst it brought India into closer and more direct relationship with the Crown. Not the least of the difficulties with which Hastings, the only Governor-General appointed by the East India Company, was confronted arose from frequent opposition in his own Council, where he was merely primus inter pares. Pitt took care to provide against the recurrence of similar trouble in the future. But having strengthened the Governor-General's position, he took away the right of appointing him from the Company and transferred it to the Crown. Nor was that all. The Company itself was placed under the effective control of the Crown by the establishment in London of a Board of Control, of which the President was ultimately to develop into the Secretary of State for India, over the Courts of Directors and Proprietors. In substance, if not in form, India was already becoming a Dependency of the British Crown.