The Mughals and the British
By Syed Osman Sher
Mississauga, Canada
Europe’s trade interest in India is very old, especially for commodities like spices and textiles. Greek and Roman reports on trade with India were amply available on which the later-day Europeans formed their image of India.
Hegel observed thus in History of Philosophy: “The quest for India is a moving force of our whole history. Since ancient times all nations have directed their wishes and desires to that miraculous country whose treasures they coveted. These treasures were the most precious on earth: treasures of nature, pearls, diamonds, incense, the essence of roses, elephants, lions, etc., and also the treasure of wisdom. It has always been of great significance for universal history by which route these treasures found their way to the West, the fate of nations has been influenced by this.” After the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Muslim Arabs, direct contact with India was lost, but trade continued to be carried on thorough middlemen. This quest, however, took a new turn at the end of the fifteenth century. '
Crusading zeal against the Muslims and commercial zeal against spice monopolists were the motives which sent Columbus to America in 1492 and Vasco da Gama to Calicut in 1498. Europe had now found a southern direct passage to the East but in India, it initiated an era of European penetration and conquest that would last for four and a half centuries.
The English had started the search for a short passage to India as early as the fifteenth century. Later, a cartographer, named Sebastian Cabot, formed a company for this purpose. In 1583, some merchants sent a boat named Tiger to test the Portuguese blockade of the sea. They were captured and taken prisoners to Goa. One of them was Ralph Fitch who wrote back home: "Here be many Moors and Gentiles. They have a very strange order among them—they worship a cow and esteem much of the cow’s dung to paint the walls of their houses. They will kill nothing, not so much as a louse, for they hold it a sin to kill anything. They eat no flesh, but live by roots and rice and milk. And when the husband dieth his wife is burned with him if she be alive….In the town they have hospitals to keep lame dogs and cats, and for birds….Goa is the most principal city which the Portugals have in India…Here be many merchants of all nations”. (Quoted in A New History of India, Fifth Edition, Chapter 10, Stanley Wolpert)
The Mughals had reached the height of their grandeur at the time of Akbar. Though they had a mighty army, yet they did not have the support of a naval force. For the protection of annual passage of the pilgrims to Makkah the only choice for the Mughals was to seek the costly services of the Portuguese despite their bigotry. Between 1607 and 1611, English Captain Hawkins, who had become a companion of Emperor Jahangir and who had also obtained a mansab of 400, tried hard to seek privileges at Surat. His efforts bore no fruit as the Mughals appeared not to give an affront to the Portuguese. But when the East India Company's ships defeated the Portuguese at an estuary off Surat in 1612 it came as a breath of fresh air to the Mughals. The English now appeared to them as an alternative to the Portuguese. The Mughals were now willing to talk, and thus arrived Sir Thomas Roe, the new ambassador from King James's court, with costly presents in 1616. Even then, it took more than two years to convince the emperor and to obtain permission from him in 1619 for the East India Company to build a factory at Surat. In return, the English would provide protection to the commercial and pilgrim sea traffic from the Portuguese. The table was turned and the Company tacitly became the maritime auxiliary of the empire.
Sir Thomas advised the Company to rest content with the profits from 'quite trade', and not to seek territorial expansion like the Portuguese. In the 1680s, the Surat Council of the company found themselves in a state of belligerence towards the Emperor Aurangzeb on an ill advice from the Company's president at London. The Mughals seized their factory but after an apology and a promise of a respectful behavior, the emperor pardoned them. The factory at Suratwas restored. In addition, the Company was allowed to open a new settlement in Bengal. A piece of land was allotted to them, on which emerged Fort William in 1696, and it subsequently became the city of Calcutta. The British had thus gotten the footholds on both the eastern and the western sides of the Indian soil.
After the death of Aurangzeb, the successive Mughal emperors failed to have a firm hold on the Empire. Independent Nawabs and Rajas appeared alongside the rising Sikh and Maratha powers. The ensuing fiasco provided an opportunity even to foreign elements like the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the English to make inroads in the territorial expansion process. In the end, however,the English came out victorious. After their success against Nawab Sirajuddaula of Bengal in the battle of Plassey in 1757, the British got a firm hold on the administration of Bengal. In 1765, Clive secured the license of collecting the revenue, the Diwani, of Bengal from the emperor Shah Alam II. Gaining more strength, the Presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were brought under a unified administration, and Warren Hastings was appointed as the first Governor General of India in 1774. Thereafter, we see an array of Governors-General in India, which started the system of diarchy, i.e., the British East India Company ruling side by side the beleaguered Mughal monarchs. However, during this time, the awe of the Mughal monarchy was not lost. In the most expansive period of empire building, the British too maintained the practice of imperial grants and participated in the ceremonies of the Mughal authority—at least until 1848.
The Governor General, Lord Richard Wellesley, 1798-1805, had instructed his aides to show respect to the Emperor as was done by “almost every class of people” and “to acknowledge his nominal authority”. They were so enamored by Mughal grandeur that the British monarchs used for themselves the title of the Mogul emperors, Kaisar-i-Hind, and even continued the Mughal administrative system after establishing their rule in India in 1858.
By that time, public opinion in Europe had come to believe that its civilization was superior to all others'. Many were of the opinion that the introduction of Western Christianity in this Eastern country will catalyze the process of self-reformation. Thus, annexation of Indian territories, which was considered bad under Pitt's India Act of 1784, came to be considered good, rather holy, in order to impart 'the inestimable benefits of civilization'. Now concerted efforts were made to acquire territories through direct battles with local rajas and through the Doctrine of Lapse, which was introduced by the Governor General, Lord Dalhousie (1848-56). The Doctrine aimed at bringing under British governance those princely states whose rulers would die without leaving direct heirs. The custom of adoption so far practiced was not to be honored. In the course of eight years, Dalhousie annexed eight states including two Maratha states and one Muslim state of Oudh on this pretext. To crown it all, he gave notice to the Mughal emperor at Delhi that his title as the sovereign of India would lapse at his death, although he had many sons to succeed him to the throne.
By the early nineteenth century, the weakened country had accepted the foreign regime as its fate on the condition that the socio-religious fabric of society of both the Hindus and the Muslims was left untouched. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the Indian society came in deep throes of political, social, and religious stress. The reasons were many but the most severe and immediate irritant was the Doctrine of Lapse. Another provocation,though minor in nature yet having serious religious sensitivities, worked as a catalyst; and that was to bite off the end of a cartridge for loading the newly introduced Enfield rifle. Tasting the fat of cow or pig was sacrilegious for Hindu and Muslim faiths, respectively, which no soldier was prepared to commit. With the missionary activities going all around the country, both the communities were now convinced that a calculated assault was being made on their religion. The loading of the rifle was an impiety that put fuel on the smoldering restlessness. When the soldiers refused to carry out the order to load the rifles, they were punished. The result was a revolt, which soon turned into a full-scale War of Independence in 1857.
At that time the king, the eighty-two year old Bahadur Shah, was virtually a prisoner of the British. On August 27, the Emperor issued a Proclamation recognizing this movement as a joint Hindu-Muslim struggle to rid the country of British rule: “It is well known to all, that in this age the people of Hindoostan, both Hindus and Mohammedans, are being ruined under the tyranny and oppression of the infidel and treacherous English. It is therefore the bounden duty of all the wealthy people of India…to stake their lives and property for the wellbeing of the public. With the view of effecting this general good, several princes belonging to the royal family of Delhi, have dispersed themselves in the different parts of India” (The Azamgarh Proclamation, reprinted in 1857 in India, ed. Ainslie T. Embree, Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1963, pp. 1-3).
After victory, the British took the administration of India away from the East India Company and brought it directly under their own Government. Queen Victoria became the Empress of India. They abolished the Mughal monarchy. It was ‘the total extinction of a dynasty, the most magnificent that the world had ever seen.’ The aged emperor was tried for mutiny and treason against his own country and government. He was exiled to Rangoon. A notable poet on his own account, he wailed not for the loss of monarchy but for being banished from his beloved motherland. He wrote
Kitna hai badnaseeb zafar dafn kay lye
Do gaz zameen bhi na mili kuye yaar maein
(How unfortunate isZafar that for his burial
He could not even get five yards of land in his beloved home!)
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