Warren Hastings in Bengal, 1772-1774, with appendixes of hitherto unpublished documents

Preface

Few makers of English histC^y are better known by name to their countrymen than Warren Hastings, but those who narrate his career or criticize his poHcy have given little prominence to a vital side of his workj

In 1765 Clive selS^up a Dual system (/f administration in Bengal which rendered the next seven years the worst in the country's history. In 1772 Warren Hastings became President and reorganized the government, now actually assumed for the first time by the English. Attention has been so focused on his disputes with Philip Francis and the consequent trial that his economic, civil, and judicial measures for relieving the distressed natives often escape notice. The aim of this book has been to try to correct the balance by presenting an account of them in the words of the Company's servants themselves, adding in the introductory chapters no more than was necessary to connect the documents on one thread — for, like Hastings, * I am little more than the compiler of other men's opinions '. *

For several reasons the period treated is confined to the two years 1772 to 1774. Hastings governed the three Presidencies for eleven years atter Lord No?;th's Regulating Act, but he was Governor of Bengal for two years before it, and it is in the civil administration ;^et up during those two^ears that the foundations of our system in India were laid. Hastings brought twenty-three years of Indian experience to the work : for those two years his hands were free ; he planned, organized, and executed his own policy unhindered ; it is by the action he then took that he must stand or fall. Whether the object of s judy be his character or the justice of our rule in India the years that follow can best be understood in the light of his original aims, for much of the legislation of the three succeeding decades was designed either to carry out those aims or to prevent their fulfilment.

Much the larger part of the documents have been drawn from the manuscripts at the India Office, the rest from the Winter collection at the British Museum. In attempting their interpretation I have been guided by the modern authorities enumerated.

viii ^ PREFApEl! ♦

I am deeply indebted to the courtesy;' of the members of the Record and Library departments of the India Office * for clues to the labyrinthine wealth of ma'nuscript correspondence and help in elucidating native terms. Mr. S. C. Hill has aided me generously bj'" reading and criticizing my chapters, and by bringing his wide experience to bear upon '^difficulties, while to him is(" ie the int'ereJting map reproduced from the Orme Manuscripts. ,

Permission to reproduce the two fine portraits of Warren Hastings has been most courteously accorded by my friends Mrs. Wansbrough \^nd Mr. MacGregor. The Abbot shows him at approximate\y the date of his finp^ return to England. It has always been in the hands of his sister, Mns. Woodman, and her descendants. In the second we have perhaps a work of ,the early seventies, just the period of the reforms. The well-known painting by T. B. Kettle in the National Portrait Gallery is probably a replica of this more complete portrait, which experts are inclined to attribute to the same artist.. The characterization is here, in my opinion, more delicate and the colouring truer to life, while there is greater finish in some details of the costume. The picture has passed in a direct line to the present owner from his ancestor, John Stewart, Judge Advocate-General, who either purchased or received it as a gift from Hastings himself. * My gratitude is due above all to my former tutor. Professor Ramsay Muir, without whose encouragement and guidance the book would not have been attempted, and to whose patient revision and^ illuminating criticism it owes 'what clain> ' it may have to the attention of students of India'n history. For the spieling of Indian names' and terms I have consulted the Imperial Gazetteer^ H. W. Wilson's Glossary^ and Gules' Hobson-Jobson, except' in a few cases where the word has become anglicized or it has seemed wiser to use the fcrm prevailing in the documents. The spelling and punctuatioij of the original documents have been adhered to except in a few cases where the eighteenth-century use of cap'ital letters has not been reproduced.

Since many inaccuracies must, I fear, stili remain, despite much time and many efforts spent to remove them, I would plead the 'disabilities of one who is neither an Indian official ^ n6r in any direct contact with the life of India, but drawn to the subject merely by its inherent interest.

M. E. MONCKTON JONES.

Contents

PREFACE

I. THE NATiyE STATE . ^ .

Appendix : Anonymous A<3;itint of Bengal

Chapter I * The Native State

Bengal in 1770 — ^ret, Character, Pooa^ation, Economic and Social Condition— The Village Community — Tire Zemindari — Trade and Industry — The Nawab's position, government, court.

In the middle of the eighteenth century there existed in Bengal a society of mixed race, of imrmemorial age, and of highly complex stru((^re ; but the Government in Bengal, as in other Provinces of the Mogul Empire, was falling into decay with the collapse of that rule. Into this complex organism,,at a critical time, the foreign body of the English East India Company had intruded itself. It had set up an irritation which the native Governors of Bengal and the Directors of the Company in England were alike impotent to allay.

In the year 1770 natural disasters, drought, storm, and famine, came to enhance the distress of the country; but in the critical hour relief was at hand. Warren Hastings was sent by the East India Company to their settlement at Calcutta as Governor in 1772, and by unsparing labour, coupled with imaginative insight into native needs, he converted the presence of the English from a bane into a s^mrce of healing and strength, first for Bengal itself, and then for the regt of an everwidening British India. He made the economic, religious, and social rights of the people his first care, anc^ built up the prosperity of the state upon the welfare of tffe cultivator. To analyse the work he did in the first two years of his governorship is the aim of this study, for it is on the foundations laid in the years 1772 and 1773 that the stability of British rule in India mainly rests. What Bengal was before the English came there, and how far they had acted upon and altered its condition by 1772, must be the first inquiry, and together with this must be studied the forging of Hastings's character to the temper needed for his task.

The Province of Bengal had by the middle of the eighfteenth century become practically independent of the Mogul emperors. It then comprised Bengal proper and its sister terri-

1526-9 «

THE NATIVE STATE tories, Bihar and Orissa, a total area o£ 149,2^7 square miles/ 20,000 more than that of Great Britain and Ireland.^ It reached from the southern border of Chittagong to the north of Tirhut, and from Assam 'to a variable line running from the neighbourhood of Palarnau to that of ,Bajasore, where it marched with the Maratha lands.

Tirhut and Bihar reach to the skirts of the Himalayas, and on the west are the hills of Chota Nagpur; but with these exceptions the territory of Bengal is ^ vast alluvial plain, lying under tropic skies and watered the early and later rains of the east and west monsoons. The damp heat makes it one of the richest grainfields of the earth, and for centuries it has borne a crowded population.

In the thronging multitudes of the Ganges valley the preponderant element is the Drayidian stock, but this is mingled on the east with a Mongol strain and receives through the north a leaven of Aryan blood. Bengal, lying in the extreme south-eastern corner of continental India, is farthest removed from those rock-avenues of the north-west through which invaders have poured time after time, to overrun the original Kolarian and Dravidian peoples of India. Only a small number of the conquerors at each onset penetrated so far east, driving the conquered peoples before them. The dwellers in Bengal are thus a survival of the debris of many successive dominations of northern India, and this is evidenced to-day by the caste system. C^ste is the diversity of religion and social custom stereotyped to serve as a barrier between the conquerors and the vanquished. It is natural that where the waves of invasion reached high-water mark the successive layers of flotsam should be most numerous and caste most elaborate, as it is in Upper Bengal. The final flood-tide was the Mahomedan advance, which reaching the north-west at the close of the twelfth century spread into Bengal under feakhtyar Khilji, the deputy of Mahomed Ghori; it culminated in the sixteenth century in the Empire of the Great Moguls, and from that time Bengal was continuously under Mahomedan rulers until the English acquired the supremacy.

No sound estimate can be formed from the scattered hints 1 Rennell's Map of Bengal.

• 4

BENGAL IN i77f> 3

ipf early authorities of the proportion Mahomedans bore to other races in Bengal in the seventeenth century, beyond the broad fact that they formed the ruling class and not the mass of the population. Many of tlie original Dravidians of eastern Bengal who had not become Hinduized were converted to Mah'omed^nism between the thirtifnth and eighteenth centuries. As to the proportion in the Mogul's troops in 1655 we have Bernier's evidence : ^ ' For one Mahomedan there are hundreds of Gentiles ' (i. e. Hindus) ; but this do^s not, of course, apply to Bengal in part.^lar, and native armies were largely recruited at dll times from wandering mercenaries and not from the local population. Again, Buchanan's account^ of Bihar in 1807 gives the number of Mogul families at 600, and the Pathans at 6,000. He says, too, that by that date a large number of the Mahomedan people of Bihar had some admixture of Hindu blood, although the number of converts to Islam was less than it had been in former years.^ Here too the evidence is indirect and the racial problem is complicated by the religious, but at least we may infer from it that the mass of the population remained Hindu, that the Mahomedan minority itself included many by origin Hindus, and that the various branches of conquering Mahomedans still remained distinct from the people as a whole. If ^his is true of Bihar, tlie high road to Bengal, how much more is it l^Jcely to have been the case in Bengal itself } On the whole, it may be concluded of Bengal about 1750 that only in ^e higher ranks of society, the military and administrative posts, was the majority composed of Mahomedans, many of them of Turkish, Afghan, and Pathan origin. The conquering Moguls had neither dispossessed the Dravidian peasantry nor obliterated their social and religious customs.

Differing in much, the various subject groups had at least a common occupation. The masses were drawn to agricultural labour by the nature of their country. (The fertile mu3 soil gave three harvests of various grains in the year. All sorts of fruits abounded ; sugar, tobacco, cotton, and mulberry yielded rich returns to husbandry. The working up of

* Bernier, 1655-61, Travels in Hindostan, p. 188. 2 Montgomery Martin,. History of Eastern India, i. 140. B 2

TH|^ NATIVE STATE cotton and silk produced peasant indv.strieS' and developed' a trade which found its highway ready provided in the broad channel of the Ganges. For this great river, with its various mouths welcomes the shippilig and conducts it from the Bay of Bengal into the heart of tlie country, anc^ by its tributaries affords access to the whole oVnorthern India. The goods of Cashmere and Tibet find easy transit southwards, and from the dawn of history this traffic drew with it a number of industrial people to, settle and build aloi>'? the Ganges banks, and foster the trade of the rural commuA. .ies. But they were always a minority, and even to-day ^ the proportion of the agiicultural classes to all others is seventy-five per cent ) A rough and probably insufficient estimate gives the population of Bengal in 1750 as ten millions. Sir W. Hunter states it 2 as from twenty-four to thirty millions in 1790, and if this estimate is correct it is probable that the population was of equal amount in 1750, since it would take at least twenty years to remedy the appalling ravages of the famine of 1770 ; Dow, who wrote in 1770, mentions fifteen millions : ^ to-day it exceeds seventy-eight millions, 'the great Hindu mass of this population, in itself a blend of many peoples, professed a faith no less composite, in which Brahmanism combined and dominated a confiasion of earlier nature-worships) The Mahomedan' Government, on the other hand, was based on the Koran and the traditions of the first Khalifs. But in each, case it_was the relig'ous code which formed the basis for the social economy and the civil government, and the two peoples required separate judicial treatment whether in civil pr criminal causes.*

No polity could well have presented a more complete confusion to alien eyes than did that of Bengal to the merchants from England, who found themselves gradually forced, in self-

^ * Indian Census, 1901, pp. 23 and 204. Rural population estimated at 95 per cent., p. 23 ; agricultural population at |, p. 204. Mr. Percy Roxby, who investigated the subject in 191 3, puts the proportion at 60 per cent, directly employed in cultivation, 90 per cent, indirectly employed in cultivation.

2 Sir W. V^. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal, p. 36.

^ Alex. Dow, History of Hindostan, p. cxxxvi.

* Hastings in his first year of office employed N. B. Halhed to translate the Hindu laws, and sent home copies of them to Lord Mansfield. Vide p. 337; Gleig, iii. 159.

» 1

ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 5

preservation and for the welfare of its people, to undertake its conduct. Ih suchr circumstances the most devoted efforts could not have avoided some serious mistakes, but the East India Company'^ servants w^re far from devoting themselves to the problems of government*. Their paramount interest was their trade, and it was ine^table that much maladministration, injustice, and oppression should mark the early years of their dominion. Very few of them made any serious study of native customs or requirements or of the profound differences of race, religion, and caste which underlay native susceptibilities. .Not nmny troubled to learn Persian, Hindustani, or Bengali, and all who did not were at the mercy of interpreters in their dealings with high or low. One of the first to attain to a real understanding and appreciation of the native character was Warren Hastings, and he recognized that the key to the hardest part of the problem of English predominance in Bengal lay in the fair treatment of the ryot or cultivator.

The J^ijd -system. of Jiindusta^ rests on presuppositions/, unfamiliar to the Western mind, and has no close counterpart in the countries of the West ; that of Russia is perhaps of nearest kin to it. Property in land has not the same meaning for the Indian peasant as for our own. It involves rather a right to the produce, or some share of it, than ownership of the soil. It is not the land itself so mlfch as the toil which vivifies it and the harvest it yields that count irf India. This native point of view escaped the attention of the English. Consequently the tenure of the land»in ^engal proved the most baffling of all the difficulties which faced them. Added tt> these fundamental misconceptions were complexities of ten'vire to which they had no clue. The right of the original occupier was in most cases vitiated by economic failure or overlaid by a whole series of claims imposed by conquerors or by their agents for the collection of tribute, or arising from religious obligations. But on the unravelling of this tangle everything depended ; for the land-tenure of Bengal from the earliest times has formed the basis of the whole fabric of civil government. Warren Hastings grappled with this problem at the outset of his rule, and his reforms cannot be understood without making some preliminary study of the principles of

6 Ti^E NATIVE StATE

^ the native land-system. Its root lies in the organization of the village community, and with this the'analy^is is best begun.

The earliest and most common form of village in India seems to have been that set up^by the original primitive and Dravidian races, and is known as the * ryotwari ' type. In such villages the ryots have ^oarate holdin^s,'and this differentiates them from the ' joint ' villages, where the villagershave joint or common rights in the land. The villages mentioned in early Hindu^ literature seem to be of this ryotwari k.ind, and this view of its early prevalenc/^ is supported by the oldest customs still extant in certain mcitricts. The .Dravidians are said to ' have preserved their nationality pure and unmixed, and such as they were at the dawn of history, so they seem to be now '.^ The evidence, both ancient and modern, portrays^mall communities scattered within a wide tribal area and isolated in early times by stretches of waste jungle land, as would be the case in any country incompletely peopled. Such villages had no formal boundaries. Each original breaker of the soil claimed the produce of his clearing and might graze his beasts on the surrounding waste. This was held to be reserved for the use of the villagers as far as their watchman, standing on the edge of the arable, could make his voice carry ; but it was not their joint property^ like our English codimons : the property sense .was hardly developed fa'i' enough for such a conception to arise. The village, thus isolated, was almost forced to become a tiny self-contained and self-subsisting state. A headman ruled, usually no doubt a descendant of the first founder. He was called P^l^l. a name which survives to-day in southern an?d western India, where the ryotwari village still exists. < His office was hereditary and involved both dignity and responsibility. A special grant of land was his and he took precedence at religious and social festivals. He must answer for the comn^unity to the officers of justice and of revenue and had himself the right to raise taxes for the petty expenses of the village. He ruled with the aid of a ' mahato ' or scribe, now called a ' patwari \ usually a more capable and literate man than his

* Holdich, India, i. 202.

1 \

THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY 7 superior, and in most cases not one of the villagers, but the nominee of the* overlord. (To be self-sufficing these villages needed to supplement the cultivators by artisans and handicraftsmen, smiths, potters, ^nd carpenters, and a group of menials to do such tasks as would debase the higher castes. These low-born savants of the ^mmon needs were given huts apart from the freeholders, ana sometimes a strip of land for their subsistence. Their services were at the call of the community, which paid them out of the ^harvest-pile of grain.^ For these village coiAmunities, even in the eighteenth century, were little advanced beyond the most primitive economic stage. They hardly understood or needed coin, but used the precious metals for ornament in peaceful times and buiied their hoards when raiders threatened. One of the great difficulties that beset English administrators was this absence or periodical disappearance of currency. In the more exposed districts the headman's house was often fortified as a refuge for the community against the raids of hillmen, of dacoits, or of Maratha spearmen. Such, so far as we can penetrate the agelong vista of Indian history, has been the life of the Indian villager from earliest times. The tenacity and longevity of these little village commonweals would be unaccountable, judged merely by their strength to resist an enemy. The secret of it lies first in their producing T>ower as agricultural groups, and secondly in the Indian's love of the Soil, a passion as great as or even greater than that of the Irish peasant. Wave after wave of conquerors passedover them, plundering, even temporarily devastating the village ; yet century after century the same families of ryots are to be found, like waterweeds when the boat has passed, working back to their old places and settling down to their accustomed functions, though often enough with rights diminished. In them lay India's vitality. If one generation was expelled and died, its successor attempted to return when opportunity offered. The peasant's claim to the particular holding of his fathers was secured by a right of recovery valid for one hundred years.^^

1 For facts concerning the ryotwari village see Baden-Pow^ell, The Indian Village Community^ pp. 8-19, * Elphinstone, History of India, p. 77.

8 Tf|E NATIVE S-^ATE

(Thus far the Indian village has been described as an inde-^ pendent organism, self-supporting and *^self -ruling, unaffected by the rise and fall of dynasties ; but this is only in part true to the facts. However foreign.such dynasties might be, and however remote their seat of empire, they yet depended for their very existence on this l^mble source 6i Wealth, the ryot and his produce. Whenever a strong government was set up it tightened its hold on the land revenue. Above all, when the Moguls became supren^e the status of the landholding villager was modified for good and all, though / e was not radically displaced. The earliest sovereigns seeiii to have made no specific claim to ownership of the land, whether settled or wa'Ste, though such a claim was involved in their receiving a complimentary share of the produce, but at some later point such claims became defined. Certainly the Moguls, like feudal sovereigns, claimed to be the ultimate lords of the land and raised an assessment or rent in every province.^ This rent took the form of a more or less fixed proportion of the produce of the land.>

The first definitely recorded assessment of the amount due from each district is known as the 'Toomar Jurama It was drawn up by Todar Mai, Diwan to the great Akbar, and fixed the proportion at a quarter of the produce. In theory this continued to be th6'*amount leviable from the occupants of land till the English acquired control, but in fact the amount varied widely and sometimes rose as high as one-half.^ This burden was further ^.welled by two sets of Vahwa,bs ' or additional cesses, the one imposed by the provincial governor, the qther by the Zemindar, or district collector; and the repeated prohibitions inserted in ' sanads ' or contracts siiow

^ Sir W. Hunter, Introduction to Bengal MS. Records : ' It must be borne in mind that the collection of revenue formed almost the sole idea of government among the Native Powers who erected themselves on the ruins of the Mogul Empire ; that it was essentially the function of government which was made over to the East India Company in 1765 by the Imperial grant for Bengal ; and that it was out of the Revenue Administration thus conferred upon the Company that its judicial courts, civil and criminal, and its police jSystem gradually developed,'

^ Bengal MS. Records, i. 28. Holwell, Historical Events, p. 221 : * The established ground-rent is three Sicca Rupees per begah (about J of an English acre) throughout the Empire.'

*THE RYOT 7 9

^that they were in the habit of imposing fresh cesses on any pretext. ' In_,tlie aggregate,' says Sir W. Hunter, ' s_o_ much was taken by the State as to leave the land no selling value, beyond that of the crop on itt Cohere was thus little margin for the ryot above a bare subsistence. The Zemindars were adepts in squeefein'g the cultivatgpto the point of ruin and then letting go to prevent his desertion. In fine, under native rule the limit of extortion was commonly the point of exhaustion, and that only. Nevertheless, the peasant in some degree retained his positionlb relation to the land. For to make any revenue possible, thtTmdispensable cultivator had to be kept at work, and so the ryot's claims to his hereditary holding were allowed and continued to be recorded in written or oral form^ C Baden-Powell emphasises the baseless security of the peasant holder.^ He points out that there was never a time when the law forbade the lord to turn out his tenant or so to rack the rent that he preferred flight to the struggle to live. On the other hand, mere economic gravity secured the ryot, for if he fled and left the land untilled, the lord's only chance of revenue vanished with him. The peasant could commonly find a fresh holding or at least occupation : his labour was worth his keep. The only tie that bound him to stay and endure oppressive taxation was his love of the land ; and this was so strong that, even when 1?he plot had passed for years into other hands, the peasant would still be able to point out among tlie new divisions the fields that were the * sir ' or holding of his house. Such was the lowest class of society in Bengal, that of the agricultural peasant or ryot. Under the Mogul Empire the ryot's welfare was carefully cherished and oppression checked so that the ruler could count upon the support of the masses against rebel nobles.)

The Great Mogul was the theoretical owner of the whole / land. Akbar divided it into twelve great provinces or ' Subas'. Each province was handed over to the care of two officers, the Nawab and the Diwan, who represented the Emperor respectively in his dual character, as conqueror and as landholder The military deputy, Nawab-Nazim or * Baden-Powell, Land Revenue of India, p. 137.

10 T^E NATIVE sf ATE

Subadar, became a practically independent prince in the latter half of the eighteenth century. * At first these officers were appointed and replaced at the Emperor's good pleasure, x» but they gradually acquired anthereditary h6\d on their terri-

^^^^f^ J, ^ ^^^^s. The province of Bengal was acquired by Akbar in ^ -- m. ^ ^576, and was thenceforwai^ entrusted to*Nawabs. It was li, Vi-*-***- divided into circars or governments, of which there were ^«>.^^ r thirty-four at the end of Shah Jehan's reign. Each of these U*Zo /^w? was subdivided into '^arganas of irregular size, * the oldest, ^ the least, the most universally known ao^l established division of land throughout Hindostan',^ TheV':kolder9 of these par- ^ ganas obtained so much independence that in 1722 Murshid

Kuli Khan, who was both Nawab and Diwan of Bengal under Aurangzeb, found it necessary to reorganize the system. He made thirteen divisions, called chucklas, instead of the ancient circars, and reduced the size of the parganas, increasing the number of them to a total of 1,660. At that date the province paid to the Emperor a farm of forty-three lacs of rupees. This rent was levied only on Khas, i. e. Khalsa or Government land, which then constituted three-quarters of the whole area. The rest was jagir, i.e. land the revenues of which had been granted to individuals.

The care of the finances was the special duty of the Em- " peror's civil deput/, the Diwan, who was, in the palmy days of the Empire, a separate person from the Nawab and a valuable check upon him.^^ If the Nawab showed a tendency to excessive display or raised too many troops, the Diwan would be instructed to withhold or reduce the proportion of the revenues assigned to him for the expenses of the Nizamut, i. e. his administration. On the other hand, the Diwan was dependent on the Nizamut for any forces which he might require to effect the collection of the revenues. It is obvious that of these two ministers the Nawab would stand the better chance of survival so soon as the central authority grew weak, and in fact the Diwani of Bengal, for a century before Plassey, was constantly

1 Parliamentary Papers, 1812, vol. vii, p. 343 ; J. Grant's View of the Revenue of Bengal.

* The best contemporary account of their relations is in Vansittart's Narrative, vol. i, p. iv.

THE DIWANI ^ II

^lled by nominep of the reigning Nawab, with the result that

the distinct line between the Nizamut and the Diwani tended

to be lost and their functions merged. Originally Nawab and

Diwan, each in his own deparfmeat, shared between them the

Emperor's judicial powers. To the Nawab-Nazim, as the

representative of force and ord#, belonged the maintenance ^/ ^ ^

of the peace, criminal jurisdiction, and the sole right of

inflicting capital punishment. He delegated this power to

officers called Faujdars; crimes were tried in local courts of

Faujdari Adalut, wwi an appeal to a court at the capital,

known as the* Sudd^ Faujdari. The Diwan, on the other j-^^

hand, being concerned with the tenure of land and with *

finance, received the charge of civil jurisdiction, and suits ^/ ^-^^

arising out of property were heard in his Revenue courts.

The Diwan's office being organized rather to facilitate the

collecting of the land revenues than to ensure justice for

individuals, his Khalsa, or Central Court of Revenue, was at

once the seat of justice and the Court of Exchequer. Below

it and with a right of appeal to the Royroyan, the head of the

Khalsa, or to the Diwan himself, were Courts of Diwani Adalut