Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult (4 page)

All this changed with Aurangzeb’s death. The decay of the Mughal Empire was bad for business, and as parts of the interior descended into civil war and chaos, the trading companies dotted around India became concerned for their profits. At the same time, rapid advances in Western military tactics and technology began to offer even small detachments of European soldiers
decisive
advantages over local troops. Improved muskets, better doctrine and, in particular, rapid-firing artillery meant that a well-led force of a few thousand men could defeat an army 20 times as large and, by the 1750s, when the final disintegration of the Mughal state began, both the English and the French East India companies had transformed themselves into minor powers along the coast. Their actual possessions were still minimal: a few strips of land around their ports and a handful of isolated trading posts in the interior. But both companies were shipping regiments of their own soldiers out from
Europe, and both recruited
sepoys
(native infantry) whom they equipped and trained to fight alongside their own troops.

The first British conquests in India dated from 1756, when, in one lightning campaign – the ‘Famous Two Hundred Days’, it became known – Robert Clive and a mixed force of British troops and sepoys routed a large Indian army and took possession of Bengal. The Company ruled the province through a puppet
nawab
, who depended almost entirely on British arms to quash intrigue and oppose the horde of rival states emerging from the ruins of the Mughal Empire. Clive and his successors were happy to oblige him, maintaining a large standing army that was – at least in theory – at the new ruler’s command. But British help came at a considerable cost. In order to fund the upkeep of his European
regiments
, the new nawab was forced to transfer ever larger portions of his dominions to the Company’s control. The rising British Empire in India was thus based not so much on conquest as on gifts of land
*
and trading rights made, reluctantly, by native rulers in return for military service.

This simple formula served the East India Company well for many years. By the 1790s Bengal had passed entirely under its control. Several incursions from the inland provinces of Bihar and Oudh were beaten off, with the
consequence
that the Company began acquiring lands and interests deep in the interior. It was firmly established in the city of Benares and had been gifted territory along the north bank of the Ganges in wealthy and populous Oudh. By the time the process had run its course, the Company’s influence stretched across almost the whole of Hindustan. Its most distant outposts lay within 200 miles of Delhi. And the profits it was extracting from its lands and its new privileges far outweighed existing revenues from trade.

The transformation of the English East India Company from a
merchant
venturer into what amounted to an imperial power took a long time and was far from easy. The Company of 1756 had excelled at trading,
shipping
and generating enormous dividends for its investors, and was developing a fair degree of competence in military affairs. But it utterly lacked the infrastructure required to run any country, much less one as huge as India. In not much more than half a century, it was forced to develop an entirely new administrative system, one peopled with governors
and political officers, ‘Collectors’ to assess and gather revenues, magistrates and police to keep the peace, and hundreds of clerks to labour over a vast mountain of paperwork. This it was plainly ill equipped to do, and it was only with the passage of the India Act of 1784, which placed the directors of the East India Company under the supervision of a
government-appointed
Board of Control and made it in effect an arm of the British state, that affairs in Bengal were fully regulated.

As late as 1790 there was no great wish, either in parliament or in the Company’s headquarters at East India House, to see British rule stretch across the whole of India. Indeed the costs of conquering and holding down the whole of the Subcontinent were so obviously colossal that streams of orders enjoining caution and strict economy flowed from London to Calcutta. The most valuable British territories, notably Bengal, were to be surrounded by pacified client states that would guarantee their security, but that was all. There were to be no further wars of conquest in the interior.

 

Unfortunately for the Company’s directors, two substantial obstacles now arose to prevent this moderate policy from being carried through. The first, for which they themselves were responsible, was the appointment of the bellicose Richard Wellesley
*
as Governor General of British India. Wellesley, a brilliant and ambitious nobleman, was sent out to Calcutta in 1798 with strict orders to keep the peace. But – much to the Company’s dismay – he soon showed himself to be a determined empire-builder so anxious to destroy the surviving native states that he ‘had barely touched Indian soil before he was preparing for battle’. In his path stood the second great barrier to peace in the Subcontinent: the Maratha warlords of the central provinces, whose aggressive posturings now provided Wellesley with the excuse he needed to plunge the Company into another Indian campaign.

The principal Maratha leaders were Sindhia of Gwalior – who had already conquered Delhi and subdued so many enemies that his lands now butted up against the British territories in Oudh – and the Holkar of Indore, whose own
domain stretched as far as the borders of Bengal. Sindhia and Holkar were bitter rivals, and at least as likely to go to war against each other as they were to attack the Company’s possessions. But both possessed formidable armies, and Wellesley quickly became convinced that the threat they posed was very real.

The secret of the Marathas’ military success lay in their willingness to wage war in the Western style. Both Sindhia and Holkar had made it their business to recruit European mercenaries – the men they hired were mostly French, but they included a few British officers as well – to purchase the latest guns and cannon and to train their sepoys to fight like the Company’s own infantry. Their new regiments were highly effective and conquered much of central and northern India; even the British regarded them as dangerous. But they were so expensive that it proved to be quite beyond the capacity of either ruler to support them.

Some older Maratha states had developed sophisticated administrations and ruled with fairness and even leniency over some of the richest lands in India. But Sindhia and Holkar could only maintain their armies by using them to extort taxes from their own subjects and ordering a never-ending cycle of attacks on other rulers. Starting with their nearest neighbours in the last years of the eighteenth century, the Marathas proceeded to devastate much of central India with such thoroughness that the land took decades to recover. By 1802, most of the territory east of Delhi had been ravaged by Sindhia’s men, while Holkar’s armies had left ‘not a stick standing within 150 miles of Poona; the forage and grain were consumed, the houses pulled down for fuel, and the inhabitants with their cattle compelled to fly from the destruction that threatened them’. The Marathas’ next target was Bihar, on the borders of Bengal. Inevitably, Sindhia’s raiders soon exceeded their orders and crossed into British territory, too.

The consequences were catastrophic. Wellesley seized the longed-for
opportunity
to make war. Company armies from Bengal and Bombay drove into the interior and the Marathas’ well-trained regiments were destroyed in a series of hard-fought battles. By 1804, both Sindhia and Holkar had been compelled to accept alliances with the British and the unwelcome presence of ‘Residents’ – political officers whose purpose was to keep Indian rulers in line – in their capitals. Only the displeasure of the Company’s directors, shocked by the
horrific
cost of Wellesley’s campaign, saved their lands from outright annexation.

For the people of the central provinces, the wars were even more
disastrous
. Great swathes of territory had been looted and burned, often more than once. Crops had been seized and forts, workshops and looms destroyed. Mile after mile of countryside had been depopulated. And – with Wellesley recalled to London in disgrace – most of the lands overrun by the Company’s armies were now abandoned so hastily that they fell into what amounted to a state of anarchy. The British did retain the Doab, and they guarded their flank by taking possession of Delhi, Agra and Etawah. But the thousands of square miles to the south were left effectively ungoverned, prey to famine, newly unemployed sepoys, rapacious local rajahs and bankrupt landholders forced to earn a living by their swords.

 

It was in these circumstances that Thomas Perry arrived in Etawah in the year 1811. Perry was a Londoner, an experienced Company magistrate who had first come to India more than a decade before his posting to the Doab. He had a good deal more experience of the interior of India than was common at the time, spoke the local languages well, and knew something of the difficulties of governing difficult and fractious territories. But the task confronting him was nonetheless a daunting one. For one thing, Perry reached Etawah to find that the town’s first British Collector, WO Salmon, had left the place in ‘a very disorganized and impoverished state’. Salmon had been forced by the Company’s incessant demands for revenue to auction off large swathes of the land around the city, and fear of seeing their
established
rights snatched away by wealthier rivals had led many desperate landholders to offer ‘a much larger sum that the estates could have yielded without all sorts of oppression’. Before long several Etawahan notables had failed to make good their guarantees and been dispossessed; others had resorted to extorting the required excess from their increasingly distressed tenants. A short while later Salmon’s successor, a Mr Batson, had further increased rents in several districts, so that ‘revenues had been run up to a ruinous extent’.

The consequences were predictable. Several more important men were ruined, and others driven into poverty. Company rule in Etawah became increasingly unpopular, and there was a good deal of unrest. ‘During the short period that I have been in charge of this office,’ Perry was forced to
report to his superiors, ‘almost daily reports have reached me of the
commission
of offences of the most heinous and aggravated nature.’

This might not have mattered so much in Bengal, where the bulk of the Company’s army was based, but Perry was almost wholly isolated. The nearest large military station was at Roy Barelly, several hundred miles away, and communication with Calcutta took weeks and sometimes months. The few assistants posted to the city with him were young and lacked experience of service in the
mofussil
, as the interior of India was known. Yet the
magistrate
was expected not only to impose the Company’s regulations upon the half-million people of the district and suppress the rising tide of banditry and violence sweeping up from the Maratha lands, but also to control the unrest festering within the town itself.

It was for these reasons that Perry was concerned by the discovery of so many unknown corpses in his jurisdiction. Keeping the peace in Etawah was a hard enough job in normal circumstances. The last thing he needed was dead bodies in the wells.