When I read William Dalrymple’s books there are times when my whole being tingles with anticipation. Look at this opening paragraph to his final chapter in his latest book:

On 17 May 1798, two days before Napoleon’s fleet slipped out of Toulon and sailed swiftly across the Mediterranean towards Alexandria, a single tall-masted ship was tacking into the River Hooghly after seven months at sea. On board was a man who would change the history of India as much as Napoleon would change that of France; indeed, though his name is largely forgotten today, in the next seven years he would conquer more territory in India, and more quickly, than Napoleon conquered in Europe (335).

Can you feel the tingle? The mind is just itching to turn the page and when it beckons the finger so to do, it discovers that the man to whom Dalrymple is referring is none other than the older brother of Napoleon’s nemesis at Waterloo, sixteen years later, the Duke of Wellington. ‘The two (Wellesley brothers) would transform both India and Europe’ (336).

It is simply delicious.

William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy – an eleven boarding-pass book for me

The Anarchy tells the story of how the East India Company (EIC) conquered India. The ‘transition to colonialism took place through the mechanism of a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors’ (394). This conquest ‘remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history’ (394). ExxonMobil, Walmart, Google? ‘They are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company’ (394).

It is a remarkable story, resonant with warnings for our own time. It is a story about the ‘fatal blend of power, money and unaccountability’ (395) which characterises corporate influence. It is a story about ‘a trading company based in one small building – “a mere five windows wide” (63) – in the City of London defeating, usurping and seizing power from the once mighty Mughal-Empire’ (70) which, for some centuries, had been ‘so confident in its own strength and brilliance and beauty’ (394). How is this even possible? One hundred years into its history, the EIC still had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that ‘skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia’ (xxvi-xxvii).

When historians debate the legacy of British colonialism in India, they usually mention democracy, the rule of law, railways, tea and cricket. Yet the idea of the joint stock company is arguably one of Britain’s most important exports to India, and the one that for better or worse changed South Asia as much as any other European idea. Its influence far outweighs that of communism and Protestant Christianity, and possibly even that of democracy (394-395).

It all takes less than fifty years. That is like going back from today to people walking on the moon.

The story develops against the historical backdrop of the ‘Great Anarchy’. The last effective Mughal emperor was Aurangzeb and between his death (1707) and the ‘Company Raj’ taking full control (1803), India was a mess. ‘In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession’ (31). One chapter in the book is entitled ‘The Desolation of Delhi’ – so tragic, because in 1737 Delhi was ‘larger than London and Paris combined and it was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and imperial Edo (Tokyo)’ (36-37). ‘As the empire fell apart around it, it hung like an overripe mango, huge and inviting, yet clearly in decay, ready to fall and disintegrate’ (37).

In 1739 Nader Shah invades Delhi from Persia. It is the first invasion of India in two centuries. It lasts 57 days. He ‘never wished to rule India, just to plunder it for resources to fight his real enemies, the Russians and the Ottomans’ (43). Nader Shah had ‘broken the Mughal spell’ (44). ‘A horrible chaos overtook the Mughal Empire’ (56), as did a hedonism:

All pleasures, whether forbidden or not, were available and the voice of the spiritual authorities grew indistinct, drowned out in the uproar of partying. People got used to vice and forgot to promote what was decent, for the mirrors of their hearts could no longer reflect a virtuous face – so much so, that when catastrophe happened and society was torn apart, it was no longer capable of being mended (45, quoting Shakir Khan).

Into this setting steps so many absorbing characters. As I read, I imagined myself as a movie director. “Around which characters in the story could a movie be made?” I settled on four of them.
[NB: Dalrymple has this ‘Dramatis Personae’, ten pages at the start of the book, in which he introduces the key characters. Those pages, together with wikipedia and google maps, remained my constant companions as I savoured the story with a very slow reading of it].

One would be the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam, the ‘spine of the narrative … a witness to the entire story of the Company’s fifty-year assault on India’ (xxxi). He is there at the beginning, a 12 year old when Nader Shah plunders Delhi and he lives into the times of Governor Generals Cornwallis and Wellesley. When Moghul Bengal falls he sets off to recapture it – but fails, remaining exiled and becoming a ‘puppet-dependant’ (206), ‘a high class prisoner’ (359), of the EIC and then the British. He is determined to return to Delhi with the forlorn hope of a ‘reconquest of his lost empire’ (269). He is more successful than anyone expected (more on that soon). The great tragedy in his story is his decision to save a young lad (Ghulam Qadir) from a family he conquered, housing him in a ‘gilded’ Qudsia Bagh (barely 400 metres from where we lived in Old Delhi!). At 20 years of age, this lad turns ‘psychotic’ initiating ‘a reign of terror’ that lasts just nine weeks. At one point he cuts the eyes of Shah Alam out of their sockets, leaving him blind. And so, by the time of Cornwallis and Wellesley, the emperor becomes ‘the sightless ruler of a largely illusory empire’ (359). Alongside this tragic life, we discover him to be ‘an exceptional poet’ (89). While not a glorious reign, it is ‘a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when all such qualities were in short supply’ (387). During the Great Anarchy, somehow Shah Alam manages to rule over a court of ‘high culture, and as well as writing fine verse himself he had been a generous partron to poets, scholars and artists (387). Yep, there is a movie in that story!

Like Dalrymple, I consider myself a bit of a ‘Dilly-wallah’ (someone belonging to Delhi) and so I felt the sadness in one poet’s description of the Delhi to which Shah Alam returned:

There is no house from which the jackal’s cry cannot be heard. The mosques at evening are unlit and deserted, and only in one house in a hundred will you see a light burning. The lovely buildings, which once made the famished man forget his hunger, are in ruins now. In the once beautiful gardens, where the nightingale sang his love songs to the rose, the grass grows waist high around the fallen pillars and ruined arches. In the villages round about, the young women no longer come to draw water at the wells and stand talking in the leafy shade of the trees. The villages around the city are deserted, the trees themselves are gone, and the well is full of corpses. Shahjahanabad (one of the old names for Delhi), you never deserved this terrible fate, you were once vibrant with life and love and hope (291-2).

Today’s Dilly-wallahs, accustomed as they are to the crush of crowds and the suffocation of smog, may well have some cause for empathy with this desolation.

Another candidate for a movie must be Mirza Najaf Khan. Dalrymple describes him as ‘one of the greatest generals of the eighteenth century’ (276) – and he doesn’t just mean in India, or in Asia – but anywhere in the world. ‘The last really powerful nobleman of the Mughal rule in India’ (290). Any lack of detail on his life simply leaves greater scope for imaginative story-telling, as movies are accustomed to doing. He comes across from Persia and becomes Shah Alam’s commander. He is the one responsible, against enormous odds, for enabling the Mughal Emperor to get back on the throne in the Red Fort in Delhi, ‘independent within his kingdom and beholden to no one’ (276). He builds an army and develops a strategy to take back the empire and does so in ‘less than four years’ (282). Astonishing. Then when he dies young, almost all those territorial gains are lost within two years. On my next visit to Delhi, I’ll be heading straight to his tomb, adjacent to the Safdarjung Airport.

If the phrase ‘white trash’ was in the vernacular 300 years ago, it may have been used, but only in whispers lest you lose your head, of Robert Clive. What a despicable man. He has three tours of duty in India and, on more than one occasion, saves the EIC investors back home – while also ensuring that he himself becomes ‘the richest self-made man in Europe’ (xxviii). Soon after his arrival, he ‘developed a profound hatred for India that never left him … (with) no interest in the country, no eye for its beauty, no inquisitiveness about its history and ancient civilizations, and not the slightest curiosity about its people’ (66). However he was a genius in battle. Although an ‘amateur soldier (67), he was ‘blessed with a reckless bravery; and, when he chose to exercise it, a dark personal magnetism that gave him power over men’ (66). Eventually he took his own life by slitting his jugular with a blunt paper knife. Yes, there is a movie in this guy as well – but it won’t be pleasant.

Clive arrives in Madras just as his ‘tryst with destiny’ is developing further north in Bengal. Another nasty piece of work, Siraj ud-Daula, has taken over as the Mughal-in-charge up in Murshidabad. He decides to pop down to Calcutta and lay waste to the operations of the EIC. At one point he places 100 people (+ or – 40, say the historians) into ‘a punishment cell about 18ft by 15ft’ (105). They all die of suffocation leaving behind the reputation which is the Black Hole of Calcutta (‘150 years later (this episode) was still being taught in British schools as demonstrative of the essential barbarity of Indians and illustrative of why British rule was supposedly both necessary and justified’ (196)). Clive comes north, exacts swift revenge at the Battle of Plassey (1757) and installs a puppet ruler (Mir Jafar, a ‘prince of little capacity’ 141) – a strategy that is often to be used, as it preserves some honour for the puppet, while also retains control of its strings! From Plassey onwards, the trajectory is set, the die is cast. ‘This was the moment a commercial corporation first acquired real and tangible political power … (it) initiated a period of unbounded looting and asset-stripping by the Company’ (134) – as ‘Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain’ (xxviii). In 1760 Clive goes home with his loot, purchases some estates, buys his way into parliament – and then returns to India a few years later. You’ll have to read that part of the story for yourself.

There is one more candidate for a movie. It is because I cannot shake the image of a seventeen year old Tipu Sultan leading a raid on the British at Pollilur and dealing to them the ‘the severest blow that the English ever suffered in India’ (255). Goodness me. Who is this guy? He is the Tiger of Mysore, making headlines in newspapers right through last week as people debate whether his name should be excised from school textbooks. At one point ‘one in five British soldiers in India were held prisoner by Tipu in his fortress’ (256).

Tipu is as fascinating as he is controversial. He was a poet, as ‘imaginative in peace as he had been in war’ (319). He made an effort ‘to win the love of his subjects’, especially Hindus, ‘wooing and protecting’ them (319). Although a Muslim, he ‘believed strongly in the power of Hindu gods’ (320), keeping a ‘dream book’ in which he kept a record of his encounters with them. He was an innovator with weapons and fighting. Although portrayed by the British as a ‘savage and fanatical barbarian, he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual, with a library containing 2000 volumes in multiple languages’ (321). He did woo Napoleon eastwards to India, with a note from Napoleon in Cairo recorded in the book telling Tipu he is on his way – but Lord Nelson ended that idea in the Battle of the Nile in 1798. Wellesley did finally get his man (well, both men – because he defeated Napoleon a few years later) and on Tipu’s death, he asks people to raise their glasses to ‘the corpse of India’ (354).

Shah Alam. Mirza Najaf Khan. Robert Clive. Tipu Sultan.
They are just four of the blockbusters possible from this story…

There are so many other little touches I enjoyed, as I read.

The role which the monsoons play in the battles which shaped the history of India. The inclusion of three separate collections of images to accompany the story. The enormous amount of money associated with the EIC (with Dalrymple frequently adding footnotes to give what the amount would be in today’s world). The way Powis Castle in Wales has ‘more Mughal artefacts stacked (in it) … than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi’ (xxiii, thanks largely to Robert Clive’s looting!). The number of streets, towns and cities in New Zealand named after horrid people who made a mess of India.

… and the way we can be products of our past. Cornwallis came to India pretty much straight from chastening defeat at the hands of George Washington in an uprising led by descendants of fellow European settlers. He determined that this was not going to happen in India (where, by 1800, 1-in-3 British men were cohabiting with Indian women), with the introduction of ‘a raft of unembarassedly racist legislation’ (327) that ensured that ‘Anglo-Indians quickly found themselves at the beginning of a long slide down the social scale’ (328).

History marches on. In 1803, the Great Anarchy is followed by ‘the Golden Calm’ (381) – until ‘the greatest anti-colonial revolt in history’ (387) – what Indians now refer to as their First War of Independence and the subject of Dalrymple’s The Last Moghul. This uprising was subdued, Victoria became Empress of India, the EIC died in 1874, and India remained in British hands for 144 years, until 1947, when its ‘tryst with destiny’ (Nehru) ushered in its independence.

nice chatting

Paul