The British in Bengal
The East India Company
Eid Mubarak! During the holidays I came across a rather dated article by Amanda Ruggeri on the BBC website about ‘The world’s most powerful corporation’* from 2016. The article looks at working for the East India company which was the largest company in the world in the 19th century and how that compares to working for a modern day multinational behemoth.
This led me to think about the continuous influence of the British Raj on modern day Bangladesh, 73 years after the British left the sub-continent. I am fairly confident that modern Bangladeshis have limited knowledge about the British in Bengal and India as a whole.
In this respect, I asked Uncle to start a series of short stories on how the 190 years of British rule has left a lasting legacy on Bangladesh. I am a history fanatic and abide by Confucius who stated “Study the past if you would define the future.”
Baba Raihan,
Thank you for sharing Ms Ruggeri’s article. It is an attempt to showcase the feats and achievements of the most powerful multinational corporation of its time. Founded in 1600 by a Royal Charter during the reign of Elizabeth I, the British East India Company was granted a monopoly over business in Asia. The Company seized the opportunity with unwavering zeal, indomitable determination using a range of Machiavellian manoeuvres.
History has not failed to record the perfidy through which it not only conducted its mercantile interests but also in waging and winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Trickery, chicanery, mischievousness and devious betrayal and doublespeak became prominent in all its actions and inactions.
The Company secured the Diwani** of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa after their decisive victory in the battle of Buxar in 1764 which gave it the exclusive right to collect revenue from the entire region.
The Company officials pounced upon the hapless peasants with such brutality and ruthlessness that it led to the great famine of 1770. The famine affected the Lower Gangetic Plain of India from Bihar to the Bengal region and is estimated to have caused the deaths of about 10 million people. Warren Hastings, the Company’s first Governor General in his report to the Company Headquarters in London mentioned that one third of the population in the affected region starved to death.
The Company’s successors, the British Government not to be outdone, caused another famine in Bengal in 1943 that caused the death of three million people. The famine was a result of the policy failures of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.*** The British had diverted grain from starving Bengalis to stock the war efforts of the Army in the East and to top up supplies in Europe.
These two famines and the consequent tragic elimination of a few million people of India poignantly depicts how brutal and unforgiving they were in their ignoble pursuit of destruction and loot of India (modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh).
Will Durant, the American philosopher and historian wrote in his 1930 polemic The Case for India: ‘The British Conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilisation by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of ‘legal’ and illegal plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy three years.’
Predictably, the rapacity and loot and plunder of the Company went on unabated culminating in the enactment of the Permanent Settlement Act, 1793 which stripped the impoverished and downtrodden peasants of the rights to their land that they had held for centuries.
25 May 2020
Uncle’s first story is an eye opener to those who have a limited knowledge of the British in India. I will end with the American author and filmmaker, Michael Crichton’s quote “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”
*https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160330-the-worlds-most-powerful-corporation
**Diwani is the revenue administration of the Mughal Empire. The East India Company hence received the right to collect Tax in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
