The British in Bengal: Part II
Was the East India Company the precursor to modern Bangladesh where institutionalised corruption is the norm?
The American novelist and political activist, James Baldwin famously stated ‘I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.’ But if history is a vital part of our makeup, why do we turn away from it so fervently?
In order to delve further into the British in Bengal, I reached out to Uncle.
Baba Raihan,
The British East India Company was brutally selfish, ruthless and unforgiving in the pursuit of its goals. An example of this was the Company’s decision to force the farmers to cultivate indigo. Bengal was an agrarian economy where the vast majority of the population lived off tilling their land. The indigo planters who operated under the Company took recourse to coercion and compelled Bengali peasants to undertake indigo plantation. They were not allowed to cultivate rice, their staple food which led to mass starvation in Bengal. Famine was common in these times; Company officials ignored these terrible occurrences and more often than not were accomplices in this terrible tragedy.
Dinabandhu Mitra, a Bengali playwright poignantly depicted the sad plight of the hapless peasants in his magnum opus ‘Nil Darpan’ — The Indigo Mirror in 1860. This was translated into English by Michael Madhusudan Dutta and published by Reverend James Long, for which he was tried and sentenced to prison for sedition.
The recruitment policy of the Company is best exemplified by Huw Bowen in his book ‘The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833’ where he states that “Success was ultimately dependent upon connection and influence rather than the possession of any skills and aptitude for the post.”
New recruits were required to put down £500 as a guarantee— this is equivalent to £36,000 today. The higher the position and salary, the higher the requirement for a bond. Even in 1680, the President of an overseas factory had to sign a bond for £5,000 which is equivalent to £360,000 today. It is no wonder that bribery was institutionalised and respect for skills and abilities were markedly in short supply; success depending upon connection and influence.
The Company made bribery a sophisticated art. Robert Clive bribed the nobles of the court of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah— Jagat Seth, Rai Durlabh, Yar Lutuf Khan and Amir Chand — including the Commander in Chief of the Army, Mir Jafar and easily won the Battle of Plassey on the 23rd of June 1757. British historian, P E Roberts wrote “It was a mere rout rather than a battle.”
The Company furthered its business interests by establishing factories along the coast in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. The Calcutta fort was named Fort William. The Company’s private army had 26,000 soldiers at the end of the 18th century — double the size of the British Army!
The Permanent Settlement Act introduced in 1793 by Governor General Cornwallis was a landmark event as it created a class of zamindars or landed gentry who were granted proprietorial rights of the land they held. The historian, Bernard S Cohn wrote in The Journal of Economic History in 1961 that the Permanent Settlement Act led to the commercialisation of land in Bengal which was non-existent till then. The zamindars were often absentee landlords and managed their land through managers and intermediaries who had little or no attachment to the land.
The Act affected the life of peasants like never before. Hitherto they enjoyed rights of the land they held and had the unfettered right to cultivate any crops they desired. Now they were reduced to being tenants and the tenancy relied on the sweet will of the zamindar or his manager. Land revenue was fixed, the tenant obliged to pay it regardless of flood or famine which was almost a regular phenomenon; the fear of losing the right to cultivate became an existential one. This predicament gave rise to a class of moneylenders in rural Bengal whose oppression and exploitation would reduce the peasants to the life of an animal with human skin.
The Permanent Settlement Act affected agricultural production and productivity to a great extent. The zamindars spent little or nothing in terms of investment in their land. The peasants lacked the resources to spend anything on such basic materials as manure or fertiliser, irrigation facilities were absent; they had to eke out a living depending totally on the vagaries of nature.
The primary objective of the Company was to generate wealth to siphon off to Britain!
28 May 2020
Was the British East India Company the precursor to modern Bangladesh where institutionalised corruption is the norm?
What the East India Company took as guarantees is now required as a cash payment in order to secure a job or a promotion in certain sectors.
If we were to learn something from our shared history, the more we pay in order to unscrupulously reach the higher echelons of power, the more ruthless we become in exercising it.
