Empire and Its Contents: John Company’s Legacy Survives in India

The real test of the British Raj lies longevity of the institutions and how they have fared in independent India.

General Lord Cornwallis receiving two of Tipu Sultan’s sons as hostages in the year 1793. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” ~ The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides.

When the English East India Company (EIC) was granted the royal charter by Queen Elizabeth on 31 December 1600 to trade with much of Southeast Asia and India, its merchants and shareholders had no plans of building an empire. And when Job Charnock set up base in Kolikata on 24 August 1690 and Robert Clive routed the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah’s army in 1757, the EIC still had no grand designs of an empire.

East India House, the London headquarters of the East India Company.(Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

Came for Business, Not for Conquest

With Bengal as the “bridgehead”, the foundations of the empire, however, took roots in the early years of the 19th century, by which time the EIC’s control over territory, in Bengal (Bengal, Bihar and Orissa) and other scattered establishments in the south, was near-total.

There is no denying that conquest of the sub-continent could not have been possible without the dual use of war and politics, but what the EIC brought in 1757 and which continued for two more centuries, was nothing short of “revolution” as Clive once sought to describe British ascendancy over Bengal.

Today, 417 years after the first EIC schooners sailed for India and the trading Englishmen took to dominion and governance, it would be instructive to assess, in the light of the “impact of foreign rule on conquered societies” and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, whether the traders and subsequently a mammoth governing machinery operated by the sahib-administrators from the covenanted civil service were “formidable agents of change” – positive and inspiring, in this case. When sub-continental historiography is split between the defenders and vilifiers of empire, the troubling question that crops up, in the words of Thomas R Metcalfe, is: “Could a liberal democracy (Britain) assert a claim to imperial dominion based on conquest?”

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)General Lord Cornwallis receiving two of Tipu Sultan’s sons as hostages in the year 1793. 

It is in the context of this question that the quotation above is significant: Power alone was the guiding principle behind the EIC, and then the British crown and the bureaucracy’s contemplation of India. And yet, the nearly 200 years of British rule was, in the words of PJ Marshall, “an enduring tension between two ideals, one of similarity and the other of difference, which in turn, shaped differing strategies of governance…At no time was the British vision of India ever informed by a single coherent set of ideas”.

The English Move to Conquest

This distinction is best reflected in Englishmen’s understanding of India: Their perception and practice of liberalism extended to the social, political and economic spheres. In the beginning, especially after Plassey and Buxar (1764), the British sought to occupy the space vacated by the Mughal empire, which had begun crumbling. In their quest to “understand” the India of “differences”, many Englishmen adopted a syncretic lifestyle, conceiving Indians as “people like themselves”.

General Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington and on the horse) directing a Battalion of Madras Native Infantry at the Battle of Assaye, 1803.(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

But with the expansion and deepening of territorial domination, the decisive shift to establishing and institutionalising laws to govern gained momentum, benefitting the new rulers across the social, political and economic realms, while at the same time showing that the subjugated people could be “transformed into something resembling a facsimile of themselves”.

It is undeniable that the initial years of conquest and plunder were marked by immense human sufferings – the Bengal famine of 1770 and interminable wars and spoliation – but by the time the “imperial enterprise” gained a foothold over eastern India, genuine attempts at social and political reforms not only took shape, but were institutionalised within a legal system that was truly revolutionary. These were no small achievements, considering that vast swathes of India of the time were steeped in ignorance, obscurantism and barbaric practices that bordered on savagery, especially when the people were resistant and impervious to change.

It is not that people across most princely states of the time were hostile to these transformations. In Bengal, parts of southern India and in most other princely states, the British found willing partners among Indians amenable – though sometimes anxious – to the changes, primarily educational and cultural, sweeping across the sub-continent. Empire, then, was the result of collaboration of a class of people who grew up on a partial diet of western liberalism and the fruits of economic expansion and distribution of wealth.

The British Identified Themselves as ‘Not Indian’

Western scholars of empire, such as Thomas Metcalfe, have persuasively argued that “as the British endeavoured to define themselves as ‘British’, and thus as ‘not Indian’, they had to make of the Indian whatever they chose not to make of themselves”.

In other words, Europeans of the time sought to “create a notion of an ‘other’ beyond the seas”. This creation of a duality – the enlightened vs the savage or uncivilised – was part of the liberal and enlightenment project to dominate and control other people. But Metcalfe was wrong to ascribe to the British their view of ‘Oriental despotism, that “Asian countries had no laws or property, and hence its peoples no rights”, because as governance dug deep roots, it brought with it political stability, territorial unity, universalism of law and social reforms, including emancipation of women, and, above all, the rule of law.

In the 1857 war, known by many as the first war of Independence, sepoys rebel in combat with British troops.(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The decisive break for the British and their subjects came in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny – which was a seminal phase in the history of British India – profoundly transforming forever, the social and political fabric of the sub-continent. But the queen’s dominion – the Raj, as British India subsequently came to be referred to – was now wrapped by an ever-burgeoning bureaucratic “steel frame”, which not only extracted taxes but also adjudicated civil and criminal cases, besides evolving codified bodies of legal instruments for a land where the contempt and disrespect for the law was age-old. While the British mixed administrative sternness and/or fair play in their conduct of the business of governance, they undertook the task of building educational institutions across every district of undivided India, an achievement that could – and should – shame an independent India.

In An Era of Darkness, Tharoor likens the British as “marauders”, implying that the gratuitous loot and plunder by the greedy and rapacious merchants of the EIC was unending. He seeks to absolve the “servant who opened the door to him (the marauder),” ignoring that the collaborator did so not out of “fear” or “cupidity”, but because he saw in his collaborationist actions ways and means to achieve gains. What Tharoor does not take into account or considers only briefly in passing is the institution-building of the British that became the foundation on which all of India rests today.

Indeed, in the first chapter of An Era of Darkness, titled ‘The Looting of India’, Tharoor cites an American historian and philosopher, Will Durant, who “tore apart the self-serving justifications of the British for their long and shameless record of rapacity in India”. What Tharoor, however, misses is Durant’s ignorance of how, long before his visit to India in 1930, the British had allowed for a healthy indigenous political climate to develop that would, in time, gather pace to culminate into the national/independence movement.

Test of British Raj Lies In The Testimony of its Structures

The real test of the success or failure of empire must be seen not in the “paternalism of the Raj”, but in the longevity of the institutions that the British bequeathed to us and how they have fared in independent India. The political history of independent India is replete with far too many unfortunate instances of how successive political leaderships have caused wanton destruction of the social and state institutions that were passed down in the years prior to and beyond independence.

The promise and reality of independence ought to have ushered in another revolution, even if it required dismantling the physical, if not the intellectual, residue of the past. But successive bands of political leaders had neither the stomach nor the vision to usher in even an iota of that change that the British ushered in.

Last September, when I visited the 19th century superintendent of police’s colonial bungalow in Balasore, that my dad occupied in the mid-70s, I was struck by two things: Its durability and, for all the bluster and expletives that Indians use in relation to the British empire, we continue to live – and prosper – in its shadows.