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The opening line of The Anarchy tells us that ‘loot’, meaning ‘plunder’,
was one of the first Hindustani words to enter the English language in the
late eighteenth century. The timing was no coincidence because this was
the period when Robert Clive and others of the East India Company were
stripping the Mughal Empire of its treasures. Much of it ended up,
Dalrymple continues, ‘room after room of imperial plunder... more than on
display in the National Museum in Delhi’ in the remote Welsh Marches
castle at Powis, home of Clive’s daughter-in-law Henrietta, Countess of
Powis. The Anarchy tells of the disintegration of the Mughal Empire in the
eighteenth century, undone from within by the inadequacy of its rulers and
from without by the plundering of its neighbours, the Rohillas, the
Marathas, Tipu Sultan of Mysore and, particularly greedily and
successfully, the East India Company. Dalrymple writes with relish. He is
a storyteller whose bracing exposition is given historical validity by
eyewitness accounts translated from Persian, Urdu and Hindustani when
necessary and pinned down, as often as not, by startling detail. To add to
the colour are Dalrymple’s views, forthrightly expressed without the
academic equivocation of the ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’. It is irresistible.
A good example is his account of the negotiations leading to the Treaty of
Allahabad (1765) in which the Company was granted the diwani - the
office of economic management of the Mughal provinces in return for
administering them - a hugely significant transfer of power. ‘A trading
corporation had now become a colonial proprietor and corporate state’,
writes Dalrymple. Clive arrives outside Allahabad ‘tormented by bugs and
flies’ and meets for the first time the young Emperor Shah Alam whose
‘grave deportment bordered on sadness’. To give the Shah stature he is
enthroned the next morning ‘on a silk-draped armchair perched perilously
on Clive’s dining room table’ placed outside Clive’s tent. Negotiations do
not take long.
Dalrymple tells us that according to the Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain
Khan whose Tarikh e-Gulzar e-Asafia was translated into English in the
1790s ‘much negotiation was done and finished in less time than would
normally have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass or a beast of burden’.
Dalrymple concludes his exposition on the significance of the Treaty by
saying, bluntly, that while for Clive and the shareholders of the Company
the diwani was another triumph, ‘for the people of Bengal it was an
unmitigated catastrophe’. The unregulated plunder that ensued reminded
him of the Macaulay quote that the Company looked on the Mughal
Empire ‘merely as a buccaneer would look on a galleon’.
Shah Alam, whose long life (1728 - 1806) covers most of this book, is for
me the most noble and tragic character in it. In old age, despite being
cruelly blinded and living in poverty, he defies the Company as far as he is
able. He presides over a court of high culture and edits his lifetime
collection of poetry, songs, and a 4,000 page novel: the first written in
Urdu. Nevertheless, considering the structure of The Anarchy, Shah Alam
is at times an infuriating distraction. Just when Siraj ud-Daula is about to
capture Calcutta (1756) and incarcerate the firangis (foreigners including
Britons) in the Black Hole, there is a ten-page digression to introduce Shah
Alam. Just when Warren Hastings is about to be impeached (1788), one of
the most significant events in the history of the Company, there is a whole
chapter’s digression to tell us about the fate of poor Shah Alam in the
‘desolation of Delhi’ by the Rohillas and Marathas in the 1770s and 80s, in
which the Company played no part.
The Anarchy ends with the capture of Delhi by General Lake in 1803 and
Shah Alam’s death soon afterwards. Now the Company ruled India. ‘The
Great Anarchy’ was succeeded by ‘The Golden Calm’. As the
contemporary poet Khair-ud-Din put it in another delicious quote, ‘the
country is now flourishing and at peace. The deer lies down with the leopard, the fish with the shark, the pigeon with the hawk, and the sparrow
with the eagle’. Just as the Company’s army numbered an establishment of
ten supporters (from mahouts to ‘votaries of pleasure’) for every one
fighting sepoy, so by now Dalrymple is supported by an establishment of
researchers, translators and typists, archivists and advisers whose assistance
has resulted in this incomparable book, the result of six years work.
Unlike many books published today it looks good too, with no fewer than
48 pages of colour prints. They do not include the picture that to me sums
up the blind dishonesty of the Company in the eighteenth century. Hanging
in its boardroom until moved to the Foreign Office (who have since
removed it from public view) is a classical portrayal of a half-naked black
female emerging from the darkness, crouching before Britannia lit by shafts
of light, to whom she is offering up a cushion dripping with precious
stones; Britannia sits on a cloud, hands spread wide by a pearl necklace, as
if receiving what is her due. It is called ‘The East Offering her Riches to
Britannia’. Shah Alam could have written a ghazal about it. It is surely
justice that when the Company was closed down in 1874 it was with ‘less
fanfare than a regional railway bankruptcy’. Today the brand name is
owned by two brothers from Kerala, Dalrymple reports, who use it sell
‘condiments and fine foods’ in the West End of London.
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