Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (29 page)

Clive took command of two hundred British soldiers and three hundred Indian sepoys (native soldiers in British service), but did not head to Trichinopoly. Instead, in the midst of a thunderstorm he overwhelmed the provincial capital of Arcot, forcing Chunda Sahib to send reinforcements there from Trichinopoly, thus saving British forces. But the French immediately laid siege to Arcot, where Clive and his followers had holed up in the fort. Their defenses were meager. As Macaulay recounts, the walls were “ruinous,” the ditches “dry,” and the ramparts too “narrow” to admit their guns. As death and hunger set in, “the devotion of the little band to its chief [Clive] surpassed any thing that is related of the Tenth Legion of Caesar, or of the Old Guard of Napoleon.”
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Although he had scant training, Clive turned out to be a military natural, given that the essence of soldiering is leadership or “undaunted
resolution”—that is, the ability to rally men to your side, especially in adversity. Indeed, in such fluid little wars and engagements, tipping the balance owed much to improvisation and plain luck.
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Having successfully withstood a fifty-three-day siege at Arcot through ingenuity, sheer endurance, and seeming ubiquitousness during the fighting, the twenty-six-year-old Clive single-handedly turned the tide against the French. Madras and its interior hinterland were about to be secured for Great Britain.

In 1753, Clive returned to England triumphant, whereas the equally brilliant and psychologically complex Dupleix—more than twice Clive’s age—returned to France the following year in disgrace and, stripped of his considerable fortune, died in obscurity.

In 1755, Clive set sail once more for Madras. Arriving there the next year to take command of Fort St. David, where his mission was to complete the expulsion of the French, he nevertheless became embroiled in the affairs of Bengal far to the north, the richest part of India, which had been a main revenue source for the Mughals to fund their Deccan wars. As Macaulay puts it in his matchless prose:

It was also a filthy and sodden fen astride the Tropic of Cancer, consisting of “new mud, old mud, and marsh,” in the words of a geographer quoted by the British travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse.
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The
commercial heart of this fecund and rotting vastness was Calcutta, a port on the Hooghly River that, in turn, emptied into the Bay of Bengal. Here the British East India Company operated under the protection of a nawab (viceroy) who ruled the territories of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar in the name of a Mughal figurehead. In 1756, the nawab, Aliverdy Khan, died and was succeeded by his grandson, a youth of less than twenty, Surajah Dowlah. Macaulay describes him as cruel, selfish, drunken, debauched, and full of hatred of the English. Furthermore, he surrounded himself with “dregs … recommended by nothing but buffoonery and servility.”
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And so it was that the nawab, after finding some pretext, marched with his army upon Fort William, the English stronghold in Calcutta. Whereas the specter of Dupleix and his army had forced the British in Madras to be not only traders but soldiers and statesmen besides, in Calcutta the English seemed to have only the first quality, and were consequently terrified. Fort William fell without much of a fight. Then what Macaulay calls “that great crime” occurred, to be immortalized in British lore, with its likely exaggerations.
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In 1756 the monsoon rains did not arrive until June 21, meaning that the night of June 20 was the most horrid, sultry night of the year, with flesh-disintegrating humidity. On this night the nawab’s guards threw dozens of English men and women into the “Black Hole of Calcutta,” an eighteen-foot airless cube, where most perished before the guards opened the doors the next morning—after the nawab had “slept off his debauch,” in Macaulay’s recounting, and “permitted the door to be opened.”
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Though it was claimed that 146 people were thrown into the hole, the actual number was more likely sixty-four, of whom twenty-one survived.
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When news of the events in Calcutta reached Madras that August the cry for vengeance was universal. Clive was put at the head of nine hundred British infantry and fifteen hundred native sepoys to punish a nawab who, as Macaulay points out, “had more subjects than Louis the Fifteenth or the Empress Maria Theresa.”
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They set sail north along the Bay of Bengal in October. However, owing to adverse winds that meant detours to the coasts of Ceylon and Burma, they did not reach Bengal until
December. Clive was all business, quickly routing the native garrison at Fort William and reconquering Calcutta. The nawab sued for peace, but Clive was against dealing peaceably with him, given the nawab’s character and previous actions. But the East India Company in Calcutta was eager to resume business, and in Madras it was anxious for the return of its army and weapons. Thus, Clive consented to negotiate. Macaulay explains:

In fact, Clive lacked slyness and cunning. According to Macaulay, he was “constitutionally the very opposite of a knave.” Clive’s dynamism—the ability to get things done on and off the battlefield—had arisen not from sleaziness, but simply from a larger-than-life energy and enthusiasm, especially when it came to taking risks. In fact, there is little evidence that he ever acted improperly with a fellow Englishman. As it turned out, this “stain on his moral character” was confined to dealings with Indians: “he considered Oriental politics as a game in which nothing was unfair.”
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In other words, his immorality did not flow naturally from his personality, but rather represented a calculated—we could even say, strategic—decision.

Meanwhile, the nawab, Surajah Dowlah, was nothing if not calculating. He concluded a treaty with Clive, even as he conspired quietly with
the French at nearby Chandernagore to drive out Clive’s forces from Calcutta. The British, who got wind of the nawab’s designs, successfully attacked Chandernagore before the French could send reinforcements from their bases in the Carnatic in southeastern India. “By depriving the French of their most profitable operation,” writes Keay, “and of the base from which both Pondicherry [in the Carnatic] and their Mauritius establishment were provisioned, it undermined” France’s whole position in the Indian Ocean.
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Clive decided next—against the advice of some of his fellow Britons—to support a coup against Surajah Dowlah, to be led by Meer Jaffier, the principal commander of the nawab’s troops. When one of the Bengalis involved in planning the coup threatened to reveal it if he was not guaranteed a sum of money, Clive drew up two treaties: a real one with no mention of a reward for this fellow, and a fake contract that did. When a fellow British officer refused, out of conscience, to sign the counterfeit treaty, Clive simply forged the man’s signature. His scruples were limited to contacts with his own race, making him in the final analysis, claim his severest critics, reprehensible.
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Though moody and suicidal after the fact, Clive was not given to worry or reflection in the midst of an operation. His bravado was on full display before the battle that—perhaps more than any other individual event—would determine the fate of the Indian Subcontinent. The armies of Surajah Dowlah and Clive had gathered a few miles from each other, when it was agreed that once hostilities commenced Meer Jaffier would desert with his forces to the side of the British. But Meer Jaffier’s fears overcame his ambition; he dithered with cold feet.

For Clive at this moment, it was no easy decision to cross a river and engage an army twenty times the size of one’s own, so he called a war council. The majority of his fellow officers advised against giving battle, and Clive concurred momentarily. “Long afterwards,” Macaulay writes, Clive said “that he had never called but one council of war, and … if he
had taken the advice of that council, the British would never have been masters of Bengal,” and ultimately of India. According to Macaulay’s account, Clive retired under the shade of some trees and passed an hour in thought. “He came back determined to put every thing to the hazard, and gave orders that all should be in readiness for passing the river on the morrow.”
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He decided henceforth to take the responsibility for whatever happened completely on himself.

The next day, upon fording the river, Clive’s army set up camp after sunset in a mango grove near Plassey, north of Calcutta, within a mile of the enemy. Clive spent the night lying awake, listening to the drums and cymbals of the enemy camp. It is hard to imagine a person subject to more pressure and consequent anxiety.

The next morning, June 23, 1757, the two armies met at Plassey. The nawab’s cavalry alone numbered fifteen thousand. Then there were the forty thousand infantrymen armed with pikes and swords, bows and arrows. But only twelve thousand troops would take part in the battle. The British-led forces numbered a mere three thousand of which a thousand were English. Both sides unleashed their cannons. Whereas Surajah Dowlah’s field pieces failed to fire properly, those of the British “produced great effect,” killing some of the most distinguished officers in the nawab’s ranks. The nawab’s forces began to retreat, and one of Clive’s officers, seizing the initiative, ordered a full-scale advance. The battle lasted barely an hour. As Macaulay writes, “With the loss of twenty-two soldiers killed and fifty wounded, Clive had scattered an army of nearly sixty thousand men, and subdued an empire larger and more populous than Great Britain.”
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With the British victory, Meer Jaffier replaced Surajah Dowlah on the throne. Dowlah was murdered for his crimes, a grisly act, however deserving the victim might have been. While the British played no direct part in it, the murder was one to which they had set the political context.

More troubling to British sensibilities was the amount of money that changed hands. Meer Jaffier sent 800,000 pounds sterling in silver downriver to Calcutta, of which Clive helped himself to between 200,000 and 300,000. Clive literally “walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds.” There was nothing strictly illegal in this. Clive was a general not of the crown, but of the company, and the company had indicated that its agents could enrich themselves by means of the generosity of the native princes. Macaulay even suggests that it was a wonder that Clive did not take more, but adds:

The problem with Clive is that being a larger-than-life risk taker, who operated in a savage, frontier environment in which he made up his own rules accordingly, the very traits that allowed him to form the foundations for a British empire in India, were also the ones that make us uneasy. But there was certainly, as Macaulay indicates, an element of hypocrisy in the opprobrium that greeted him back in England. “It was a very easy exercise of virtue to declaim in England against Clive’s rapacity; but not one in a hundred of his accusers would have shown so much self-command in the treasury of Moorshedabad.”
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And not one in a hundred would have shown so much audacity, repeatedly willing to risk an entire reputation on yet another throw of the dice. When in 1759 seven Dutch ships arrived in the Hooghly from Java, Clive would have been within his rights to accept their presence. Meer Jaffier favored the Dutch as a balancer against the British, and Clive was loath to upset his relationship with his own chosen nawab. Moreover, London was already engaged in a war with the French and could least afford another enemy. Yet knowing how the Dutch presence would threaten Britain’s emerging hold on India, Clive ordered an attack completely on his own, and the Dutch were subsequently routed.