Calcutta Read online

  Watching all this, Captain Hamilton is seeing a pattern emerge that is to repeat itself on an increasing scale in Calcutta for a long time to come. He remarks of Mr Weldon, who comes to the town as a Commissioner in 1709, that ‘His term of governing was very short and he took as short a way to be enriched by it by harassing the people to fill his coffers.’ A seaman’s wife, ‘a little inclined to lewdness in her husband’s absence’, entertains a couple of Armenians, and they quarrel over her; Weldon reprimands both but gives one man sole rights to the woman for Rs 500 cash. Life sounds even lustier just up the road. ‘Barnagul is the next village on the River’s side above Calcutta, where the Dutch have a house and garden; and the Town is famously infamous for a seminary of female Lewdness where Numbers of Girls are trained up for the Destruction of unwary Youths, who study more how to gratify their brutal passions than how to shun the evil consequences that attend their folly, not withstanding the daily Instances of Rottenness and Mortality that happen to those who most frequent those schools of Debauchery.’ The air of disapproval is so strong and the haphazard use of capital letters so pointed, that it is sometimes rather difficult to remember that this is a seadog writing. Possibly Captain Hamilton was a secret maritime evangelist, for he takes pains to note that ‘In Calcutta all Religions are tolerated but the Presbyterian, and that they browbeat.’ He also tells us that the Company has a good hospital here ‘where many go in to undergo the Penance of Physic, but few come out to give account of its operation’. And he observes that on the other side of the river from rising Calcutta, where the twin city of Howrah now is, there are docks for repairing and fitting ships ‘bottoms, and a pretty good garden belonging to the Armenians. Note the precision – ‘ships’ bottoms’, not just ‘ships’; this is a seadog after all.

  The Armenians are a puzzle in the origins of Calcutta. The Dutch we know about; they had settled twenty-five miles upstream at Chinsurah in 1653 and they were to stay in their Fort Gustavus until they were ceded to William IV together with £100,000 in exchange for Sumatra. We had, of course, fought them in between. There was a bonny scrap in 1759 when a Dutch fleet of seven ships came up the Hooghly without pilots – either a marvellous or a lucky piece of navigation in that treacherous river – and attacked a handful of East Indiamen anchored below Melancholy Point. They were beaten off after they had shot the Duke of Dorset through and through, leaving ninety cannonballs in her hull, without even managing to kill one of her crew, because the Englishmen had lined their quarters with bags of saltpetre, a crazy fire risk to take. This was the occasion when Colonel Forde, observing Dutch soldiers put ashore, and knowing the two countries were nominally at peace, wrote to Robert Clive – no longer a depressed Company bookkeeper but a brilliant soldier and Governor – for an Order-in-Council to fight. And Clive, who was playing cards when the message came, wrote back in pencil; ‘Dear Forde – Fight them immediately and I will send you an Order-in-Council tomorrow.’

  We know about the French, too. They had founded a colony at Chandernagore in 1673, a little way down the river from the Dutch, and not until Napoleon was out of the way did the British feel at ease in this proximity. Strong and flourishing under Dupleix, bombarded a little later by Admiral Watson, the story of the French on the river is one of recurring dispossession and retrieval. The longest period the tricolour was missing from the flagstaff of the Administrateur’s house was from 1794 to 1815. Indeed, it outlasted the Union Jack in Calcutta, in Bengal, in all India. The little colony remained in French hands until it was gracefully handed over after a referendum of its people in 1951. Nearly twenty years later, its singularity was almost entirely dissolved in the absorbing atmospheres of Bengal, leaving only traces of the past among a few rotting tombstones, a sign outside a shop exclaiming ‘Wine!’ and ‘Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité!’ still faintly inscribed upon a decaying gatepost. And a Bengali poetry magazine circulating in Calcutta under the title La Poésie, because its editor was educated in French Chandernagore.

  We also know about the Danes, though they were not to found their mission station at Serampore for half a century yet. But the Armenians remain a problem to the student of Calcutta. They had probably been in India at least as long as the Portuguese and possibly before. The standard history of their association with the country asserts, a little vaguely, that they had come overland, by way of Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet, as commercial birds of passage before ‘any other Europeans’. They settled at the invitation of the Emperor Akbar, who made a Queen of the Armenian Mariam Zamani, and who allowed her kinsfolk to build a church at Agra in 1562. By 1690, so we read, ‘The Armenians were the most favoured subjects of the Delhi Government … and had been held in high esteem by the Mogul Emperors from the days of Akbar downwards for their loyalty and integrity.’ They did very well for themselves in Bengal, whenever it was they arrived, and they showed pleasure in their new masters when they got the chance. When George III had recovered from his madness in 1789, and the news reached Calcutta, ‘a general expression of joy was made by all the inhabitants’. But the most conspicuous and brilliant illuminations were displayed by an Armenian merchant by the name of Catchick Arrakiel. His loyalty did not escape the notice of Lord Cornwallis, who on interrogating him what particular interest he felt in the life of His Britannic Majesty, received this reply: ‘I have, my lord, lived under his Government for near thirty years, it has never injured me, but on the contrary has always afforded its protection and this, with industry, has enabled me to accumulate a very plentiful fortune.’ His son was so grateful for this protection that he raised and kept at his own expense a company of 100 Armenian volunteers to defend the industry of Britons and others when the regular Army was in the Deccan. And a British voice approvingly remarks at the start of the nineteenth century that the Armenians are the most respectable and perhaps the most numerous body of foreign merchants in the capital. They trade with China to the East, Persia to the West, and most places in between. Their information from all sides is deemed the most accurate and minute of anyone’s in their profession. They are attentive, regular and diligent in business, and never do they think of departing from their lives and indulging in dissipation even after a competency has been acquired.

  The question is, when did these worthy merchants arrive in the Hooghly? What were they doing between the building of a church at Agra in 1562 and the founding of a capital city at Sutanuti in 1690? Mesroub Jacob Seth, the author of the Armenian history, claims that the merchant Khojah Israel Sarhad, a favourite of the Bengal Nawab, came down from Delhi to negotiate on the Company’s behalf the sale of the three villages a few years after the foundation and Charnock’s death. This, together with Hamilton’s references, appears to be the earliest report of Armenians in the district.

  The problem arises because of a gravestone in the Armenian Churchyard in Calcutta. The building is eighteenth century, a cool oasis in the middle of a crammed bazaar. But half way across the yard, which is completely paved with graves, there is a black granite slab marking the tomb of ‘Rezabeebeh, wife of the late charitable Sookias.’ And the date on it is 21 July 1630. Does it mean that there were Armenians already trading from Sutanuti or Kalikata when Charnock finally dropped anchor and that his log forgot to mention them? Or is it just the slip of a mason’s chisel? A small point, maybe. But in the Calcutta Club of an evening they can engross themselves for hours in lighter topics than that. And the whisky, for an hour or two, might not taste quite as Scotch if it were suddenly established beyond doubt that the capital of the Raj had been started not by a gentleman adventurer from England, grown honourable in the Company’s service, but by a tradesman from Isfahan with no pedigree at all.

  *

  The start of the eighteenth century sees the middle of the three river villages giving its name, already Anglicized, to the whole spreading settlement; presumably because the first substantial buildings (judiciously for storage, not comfort) have been erected at Kalikata, away from the still makeshift living quarters of Su
tanuti. It sees Bengal declared a Presidency, junior by several years to Madras and Bombay, but soon to overtake both in power and prestige. It sees Job Charnock’s son-in-law, now Sir Charles Eyre, President of Bengal and Commander-in-Chief of the United East India Company’s Fort William. It sees the beginnings of a remarkable expansion throughout India which, as Philip Woodruff has remarked, is within little more than half a century to present the Company Directors in England ‘with an empire at which they looked with the incredulous elation, shot with sharp twinges of doubt, of a village grocer who has inherited a chain of department stores and is not quite sure whether they will pay him a profit beyond his dreams or drag him down to ruin’.

  By now, young men are heading for the Hooghly in boatloads from the Thames. As Company servants they are required to salute the captain of the Indiaman on his quarterdeck whenever they see him during the voyage, they appear at meals to a roll of drums and they must have their cabin lights out at ten p.m. sharp. They are mere Writers on the Company payroll and the Company pay is not excessive. The young man has had to find for his passage and his keep on board ship. And although he is fed and accommodated free in a Writers’ building on arrival, he must furnish his rooms and obtain servants, washing, candles and many other necessities at his own expense. Young Robert Clive, making a similar journey (to Madras) within a few years, complains to his father that on the Company’s stipend of £3 10s. a month it is as much as he and his colleagues can do to live at all, what with the dearness and scarcity of everything. The immediate prospect, on top of all this, is three or four years of drudgery with account books. No wonder Clive twice tried to blow his brains out and pined, of all places, for Manchester.

  It was a system based upon a grasping premise in England and it made for grasping behaviour in India. It spawned men with an eye to the main chance above all things, who were shortly to discover that although they might have come to Calcutta penny-pinching, they could rapidly acquire a fortune if they set about it in the right way. Their sense of direction would soon be established for them if they took a look at their immediate lords and masters. The settlement was governed by a Council of nine members. The President, who was also First Member, received an emolument of £100 a year; his eight assistants by now received £40 a year. In addition to these salaries the Members in Council were given free board and lodging and a palanquin allowance of Rs 30 a month. On the face of it they were not doing much better than their Writers. But every one of them was also allowed to trade freely and privately – as other Company servants were not – and the profits on free trade in Bengal could easily amount to several hundred times a Member’s salary. And before very long, regulations notwithstanding, the Writers and other underlings were inspired by this example to follow it as best they could. The result was that even Clive, a fairly ruthless rogue from childhood, seems to have been shocked by his first acquaintance with Calcutta, and that was after an experience of Madras. It was not only the most wicked place in the Universe in vague terms. Precisely, it was that ‘Corruption, Licentiousness and a want of Principles seem to have possessed the Minds of all the Civil Servants, by frequent bad examples they have grown callous, Rapacious and Luxurious beyond Conception …’

  At about this time a Nawab of Bengal, Mir Kasim, was writing to the Governor to describe what it meant for an Indian to be on the receiving end of this philosophy. ‘And this is the way your Gentlemen behave; they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, injure and disgrace my servants … Setting up the colours and showing the passes of the Company, they use their utmost endeavours to oppress the peasants, merchants and other people of the country … In every village and every factory they buy and sell salt, betel-nut, rice, straw, bamboos, fish, gunnies, ginger, sugar, tobacco, opium and many other things … They forcibly take away the goods of the peasants, merchants etc. for a fourth part of their value, and by ways of violence and oppressions they oblige the peasants to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee, and for the sale of five rupees they bind and disgrace a man who pays a hundred rupees in land-tax; and they allow not any authority to my servants …’ There were good men in the Company service prepared to back all that to the hilt.

  Calcutta was beginning to thrive on this creed and its expatriates were beginning to make themselves at home. They had built St Anne’s Church in 1709, they had completed the Fort in 1712, they had made George Pomfret the District Grand Master of the Freemasons in 1728 and their ‘Star of the East’ was to be the oldest Lodge outside England. They were to open their first theatre, in Lalbazar, in 1745. They had sent a deputation to Delhi, led by the merchant John Surman, to buy up another thirty-eight villages, including Howrah across the river; and, remembering two excellent precedents, they had not forgotten to include Dr Hamilton in the party. They were in luck once more, for the Emperor was thinking of marriage but had a troublesome swelling in the groin. Surgeon Hamilton worked wonders, like Dr Boughton before him, and in due course, when both treatment and marriage had been proven, the villages were made available for Calcutta’s first suburban development.

  If there was already looting and corruption by the British on a growing scale, there was even more deeply established rapacity and greed by a line of Mogul Emperors in the capital and their placemen in the country. The Emperor and his senior ministers could be wonderfully accommodating if the foreigners presented them with chiming clocks, China screens, pieces of ambergris, Persian horses or plain rupees; but if a Bengali peasant fell behind with his rent, his zamindari landlord was quite liable to stitch him up in a pair of baggy pantaloons with two or three half-wild cats for company. And after Aurangzeb died in 1707, the Empire was in such a chaos of mismanagement that the English and the French were presented with perfect conditions for their fight to take the upper hand in India. Lord Macaulay, who was to know Calcutta well in the nineteenth century, is not always to be trusted for anything except a faultless ear for colourful English prose, but his summary of the four decades after Aurangzeb also rings true. ‘A succession of nominal sovereigns, sunk in indolence and debauchery, sauntered away life in secluded palaces, chewing bang, fondling concubines, and listening to buffoons. A succession of ferocious invaders descended through the western passes to prey on the defenceless wealth of Hindostan … and every corner of the wide Empire learned to tremble at the mighty name of the Marathas … Wherever their kettle-drums were heard, the peasant threw his bag of rice on his shoulder, hid his small savings in his girdle, and fled with his wife and children to the mountains or the jungles, to the milder neighbourhood of the hyena and the tiger.’

  It was the threat of assault by these invaders that had an alarmed Company finding Rs 25,000 for the excavation of the Mahratta Ditch in Calcutta in 1742. The English town was now a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, with a Black Town of natives, four miles in circumference beyond it. There were 400,000 people of both races living here and in outlying villages, and with nearly fifty vessels a year coming into the Hooghly, trade in Calcutta would soon be worth £1 million per annum. It was well worth Rs 25,000 spent on extra defences. So the Ditch was started in a great arc round the Company property, but after three miles had been dug the threat of the Mahrattas receded and it was never finished. Calcutta could sit back again and, always keeping a weather eye cocked for the gentlemen just upstream at Chandernagore, wait for the next blood-stirring thing to happen.

  It started to happen almost at once with the French and English going to war, but that was at home, and ships moved slowly, and the news didn’t reach India for ages. When the despatches arrived, the Governor of the French East India Company, Dupleix, made his first move for the mastery of Southern India, a thousand miles away. There followed a long, untidy, intermittent campaign, with the French manipulating one puppet prince, Chanda Sahib, and the English another, Mohammed Ali. And Robert Clive, his book-keeping abandoned, his commission as a Company soldier taken up, his age not yet being twenty-six, discovered and established his
military genius, marched on the village of Arcot in terrible conditions, held it under siege for fifty-three days in worse, effectively ended Dupleix’s career, and went home to England to enjoy the applause. And that, for the time being, was that;

  Calcutta had watched this at a distance, sharpening meanwhile its own primary instincts for trade, not war, welcoming the attention of the native princelings, who were increasingly minded to use its security as a bank. The latest batch of Company recruits from England had included a Junior Writer called Warren Hastings, who was beginning to struggle along in the Writers’ Building on £5 a year. Roger Drake had been made Governor at thirty and was otherwise engaged in the affairs of the Masonic Lodge. One of his Members in Council was John Zephaniah Holwell, magistrate and another Mason. Some distance from the city, the Company outpost at Kasimbazar was under the management of Mr W. Watts, but he was best known for his recent marriage to a very remarkable lady.