acquired by means incompatible with the peace of the country, and their duty to the Company.

Equally blamable were they who, acknowledging they had no right to it, and sensible of the ill consequences resulting from assuming it, have, nevertheless, carried on this trade, and used the authority of the Company to obtain, by a treaty exacted by violence, a sanction for a trade to enrich themselves, without the least regard or advantage to the Company, whose forces they employed to protect them in it. ...

All barriers being thus broken down between the English and the country government, and every thing out of its proper channel, we are at a loss how to prescribe means to restore order from this confusion; and being deprived of that confidence which we hoped we might have placed in our servants, who appear to have been the actors in these strange scenes, we can only say, that we rely on the zeal and abilities of Lord Clive, and the gentlemen of the Select Committee, to remedy these evils. We hope they will restore our reputation among the country powers, and convince them of our abhorrence of oppression and rapaciousness.

(Malcolm, Life of Clive, ii. 347.)

24. CLIVE'S VIEW OF THE ABUSES

I shall only say, that such a scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption, and extortion was never seen or heard of in any country but Bengal; nor such and so many fortunes acquired in so unjust and rapacious a manner. The three provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, producing a clear revenue of £3,000,000 sterling, have been under the absolute management of the Company's servants, ever since Mir Jafar's restoration to the subaship; and they have, both civil and military, exacted and levied contributions from every man of power and consequence, from the Nawab down to the lowest zemindar.

The trade has been carried on by free merchants, acting as gomastas to the Company's servants, who, under the sanction of their names, have committed actions which make the name of the English stink in the nostrils of a Hindu or a Mussulman; and the Company's servants themselves have interfered with the revenues of the Nawab, turned out and put in the officers of the government at pleasure, and made every one pay for their preferment. (Malcolm, Life of Clive, ii. 379.)

CHAPTER III

DUAL GOVERNMENT

1765-1772

IN 1765 Clive returned to Bengal to deal with the anarchy described in the last chapter. His view of the problem is set forth in No. 25. He did not wish fundamentally to alter the anomalous position of the Company in Bengal, but only to render it more secure by increasing the dependence of the Nawab, and by pursuing a moderate policy which would not "give umbrage." But "the greatest difficulty," he thought, would be to prevent the Company's servants from misusing their position. In this he failed, partly because the Directors refused to accept his proposal (No. 31) that the monopoly of salt should be taken over, and its profits divided among the servants, as the price of a restriction of their private trade; partly because he did not yet see that they must be made directly responsible for the prosperity of the country before they would cease to abuse their power. He had abandoned the point of view expressed in his letter to Pitt, and now held that no more direct territorial responsibility should be assumed.

Hence Clive made a far from logical use of the excellent opportunity open to him in 1765. When he arrived in India he found Mir Kasim deposed, Mir Jafar dead, and a boy-Nawab, Najm-uddaula, on the throne of Bengal. The Nawab-Vizier of Oudh, as a result of the Battle of Buxar, was absolutely at the mercy of the English; and the Mogul, Shah Alam, who was homeless and resourceless, and had been since 1761

practically a prisoner of his nominal vassal the Nawab-Vizier, was eager to put himself under the protection of the English, and ready to use his nominally supreme power to regularise any arrangement that might be made. Accordingly, a treaty settlement was made which materially strengthened the Company's position. By a grant of the Mogul (No. 26) the Company received the diwani, or right of collecting the revenues, of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa. The Company thus in theory became the Mogul's revenue-agent for these provinces, paying him a lump sum of £260,000 per annum. As the diwani, by Indian tradition, usually carried with it a share of civil jurisdiction, this might have meant the assumption of direct responsibility for at least one aspect of the government. But since Clive was not ready for this, the arrangement provided that the nizamat, or control of military and police jurisdiction, should remain in the hands of the Nawab, who was to be paid out of the revenues a fixed sum to cover expenses (No. 27). As the Nawab was a minor, he was provided with a Naib Nazim, or deputy, nominated by the Company. This was a noble of Bengal, Mahomed Reza Khan, who continued to hold the office until 1772. Even the direct collection of the revenues, and still more the civil jurisdiction associated with it, were not undertaken by the Company; but under its supervision these functions were entrusted to two Naib-Diwans, Mahomed Reza Khan for Bengal, Raja Shitab Rai for Behar. They sat, not at Calcutta, but at Murshidabad and Patna respectively. Thus, though the assumption of the diwani is important as marking the formal recognition of the English position in Bengal, it left that position still very anomalous. The actual conduct of government was still left in the hands of Indian administrators at a distance from the Company's headquarters, though under the Company's control. And as these officials were even more open to illegitimate pressure, and even less able to restrain the misconduct of the Company's servants, than Mir Jafar or Mir Kasim had been, the new system of Dual Government brought no improvement at all. The establishment

of this absurd system is a sign of the Company's unwillingness to recognise that it had ceased to be a mere trading body, and become a ruling power.

Besides the regular tribute of £260,000 (which was a pure windfall, for he had drawn no tribute from Bengal for many years) the Mogul was also given the rich inter-fluvial districts of Allahabad and Kora, which were taken from Oudh. Exiled from Delhi, he took up his abode at Allahabad for the next six years. Here he was in close touch with the English, and practically became their puppet, as he had earlier been the puppet of Oudh and later became the puppet of the Mahrattas. His firmans, or decrees, for what they were worth, were at the disposal of the English, and in this year he granted deeds regularising their possession of the Northern Sarkars and the power of their vassal-Nawab in the Carnatic.

The settlement of 1765 was completed by an important treaty with the great state of Oudh (No. 28), whose Nawab (titular Vizier of the Mogul since 1761) practically became a dependent of the Company. Henceforth it was a matter of fixed policy to maintain a close alliance with Oudh, which was useful as a bulwark against the threatening power of the Mahrattas.

In England the aspect of the arrangement of 1765 which attracted most attention was the immense wealth which the Company was expected to derive from the revenues of Bengal, estimated at £3,000,000 per annum. Some, among whom was Pitt, held that the Crown should take over the governmental authority which the Company had now assumed; but this view was held by few, and the first intervention of Parliament in the affairs of the Company, in 1767, took the form merely of a demand for a share of the plunder, to the extent of £400,000 per annum (No. 29).

The Dual System was a complete failure from the outset, and its failure is illustrated in Nos. 32, 33. In the first place the abuses of private trade reached a greater height than ever (No. 32). In the second place, the demands of the Company for increase of revenue led to gross oppression of the peasantry.

The main source of revenue was the tax on, or rent of, land. All land in India was regarded as belonging to the State, and all occupiers of land were required to pay a sort of rent, roughly estimated at one-fourth to one-half of the produce. The collection of these revenues was entrusted usually to officials called zemindars, who, though theoretically removable, had in most cases become hereditary, and in some districts represented ancient princely families. The zemindar customarily acted as a kind of magistrate for his district. He paid an annual composition for the land-revenues of his district, which was fixed by assessment at varying intervals, and kept the profits; the actual cultivators were thus left much at his mercy, unless the supreme government and its courts were strong and active, which could not be the case under Dual Government. Powerful zemindars often paid very little, especially if the government was too weak to force them, or could be bribed to let them off lightly. When the Company found its revenues shrinking, and demanded increase from the Indian revenue officers, the result was severe oppression in some districts, the whole burden of which fell upon the peasantry. Some account of these evils is given in No. 33, a report from Richard Becher, a servant of the Company. It is worth noting that Becher praises the revenue administration of Burdwan, one of the districts which had been under the more direct control of the Company since 1760. This suggests that the Company's servants were not incapable of bringing about an improvement when responsibility was imposed upon them.

As a result of Becher's report, the Company decided in 1769 to institute English" Supravisors" of the revenues, one being appointed for each of the twenty or thirty districts into which Bengal was divided (No. 34). The instructions to these officers show a sense of the need for careful enquiry into, and consideration of, local conditions; they also show a genuine desire for justice and fair treatment of the cultivators. The "Supravisors" were not merely to see that the Company got the maximum of revenue: they were also