‘Namak Haram Deori’, Traitor’s Gate, is the ruined gatehouse of the residence of Jafar Ali Khan (?1691-1765) in Mushidabad. It was here that William Watts (?1722-1764) brokered a deal between the East India Company and Jafar Ali Khan, whereby Jafar would betray Siraj ud-Daulah in return for the throne of Bengal. Ever since, Mir Jafar’s name has had much the same resonance as Quisling’s has in Europe. The British deposed him in 1760 in favour of his son-in-law Mir Kasim, but Jafar was restored in 1763: see Mir Kasim. Watts was granted £114,000 from the Bengal treasury and appointed Governor of Fort William on June 22nd, 1758, only to resign four days later so that Robert Clive could take over. See Robert Clive’s Vision for India.
Part 1 of 3
ALIWARDI Khan,* the Governor of Bengal, Maksudabad and Patna, having no son, and seeing that his end was fast approaching, appointed his daughter’s son as his successor, and enjoined on him the observance of two precepts. First, that he should never enter into hostilities with the English. Secondly, that he should never exalt Jafar Ali Khan to any great rank, or entrust him with such power as to involve himself in difficulty, in case of his revolt.
Siraj ud-Daulah,* however, soon forgot these precepts, and when, after the death of Aliwardi Khan, he succeeded to power, he took Jafar Ali Khan into his favour, and conferred on him a jagir,* to which he also attached a troop of horse and foot, and placed his whole army under his command. The English at Calcutta* punctually paid their annual tribute, according to the fixed rate.* But Siraj ud-Daulah, through his covetousness and pride of power, demanded an increase of tribute from them, and became openly hostile towards them. Actuated by his vanity and presumption, he suddenly attacked them in Calcutta, and having plundered their property and cash, put several of their officers to death,* and returned to Murshidabad.*
Aliwardi Khan (1671-1756), Nawab of Bengal from 1740 until his death.
Aliwardi Khan’s grandson, Siraj ud-Daulah (1733-1757), Nawab of Bengal from 1756 until his death. Most Indian princes had to make alliances against their enemies, whether domestic or European, and Siraj was not alone in making the mistake of siding with Louis XV’s France instead of the British East India Company.
A region of feudal land.
In 1691, an employee of the British East India Company, Job Charnock, won permission from Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for the English to ‘contentedly continue their trade’ at his trading post on the River Hooghly. It was from this settlement that Calcutta grew at an astonishing rate: see Job’s City of Joy.
Das’s statement that the English punctiliously paid all their taxes would not command universal acceptance today. On the one hand, Das’s chief patron was Shuja ud-Daulah (1732-1775), Nawab of Oudh and Vizier of Delhi (1754-1775), who defended Oudh manfully against both the Marathas at the Third Battle of Panipat (1761) and (unsuccessfully) the British at Buxar (1764); on the other, one does not enter into hostilities with the English.
See The Black Hole of Calcutta. On June 20th, 1756, at least a hundred European men and women, including civilians, were packed into a prison cell designed for at most three, and left there for ten hours over a sweltering Bengal night. Twenty-three came out alive, though some of these died later. It was testified by John Zephaniah Holwell, a surgeon who survived the incident, that to the best of his knowledge it was the Nawab’s men, not the Nawab himself, who had given the order.
Murshidabad, about a hundred miles further up the River Hooghly from Calcutta, was at this time the seat of the Nawabs of Bengal.
Précis
In 1756, said contemporary historian Hari Chahan Das, Siraj ud-Daulah succeeded his grandfather as Nawab of Bengal with this grandfatherly advice ringing in his ears: keep the British sweet, and do not trust Jaraf Ali Khan. But Siraj put Jafar in charge of his entire army, and then picked a fight with the East India Company at Calcutta. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
In 1762, an enormous picture of Robert Clive meeting Jafar Ali Khan after the Battle of Plassey, painted by Francis Hayman (1708-1776), went on display at Vauxhall Gardens in London. That painting is now lost, but this was Hayman’s preliminary design for it. Clive did not mind who he dealt with or what he must do to get the job done, and we may be glad of it: had Louis XV of France gained the upper hand in India (the French held Madras for a time) he might well have acquired our North American colonies, and a triumphant invasion of Great Britain would surely have followed. Nevertheless, Hari Charan Das’s tale is hardly one of those welcome moments of chivalry which light up the history of England, but a tale of greed, extortion and betrayal.
As the English had taken no heed of his movements, they could not oppose him at the time with success;* but afterwards they collected a large army, and marched boldly towards Murshidabad. They also brought over Jafar Ali Khan to their interest, upon the promise of making over the province of Bengal to him.* When their array reached within one or two marches from Murshidabad, Siraj ud-Daulah advanced to oppose them.* Jafar Ali Khan, who had the command of all his forces, wished to capture and surrender him to the English without any battle being fought; but Siraj ud-Daulah soon became acquainted with his intentions, and seeing himself in a helpless situation, secretly embarked alone in a boat and fled.
After his flight the English assigned the province of Bengal to Jafar Ali Khan, who established his rule there, and appointed his deputies in all its districts. All the property of Siraj ud-Daulah was taken and divided between him and the English.* When Siraj ud-Daulah had gone thirty kos* from Murshidabad, he stopped for a while, and ordered his servant to land in the jungle, and try to get some fire for his hukka.* Accordingly the servant disembarked, and seeing the cottage of a darwesh,* he approached it, and asked the occupant for some fire.
* The East India Company could not move without their inspirational general, Robert Clive, who had to be recalled from England where he was settling down with his new wife. See Blind Date. Siraj had not attempted to justify the Black Hole incident, and indeed had offered compensation, but the developing situation in The Seven Years’ War (1756-63) meant that from London’s point of view, Bengal had to be secured.
* This arrangement between the British East India Company and Jafar Ali Khan, brokered by William Watts (?1722-1764), became infamous. In India, it was because Jafar Ali Khan betrayed his Nawab. In England it was because Robert Clive, who was pressed for time, faked the signature of Vice Admiral Charles Watson (1714-1757) on a letter confirming Jafar as Nawab of Bengal in the event of a British victory. Years later, this was brought up in Parliament during an unsuccessful impeachment of Clive over his time as Governor of Bengal. Some at the East India Company hoped the shady deal with Jafar might be used to justify seizing Clive’s fantastic Indian wealth for the financially troubled Company — “without the smallest idea” as one observer drily remarked “of restoring to the injured natives of India the territories and revenues said to have been so unjustly acquired”.
* They met at Plassey (Palashi) on June 23rd, 1757. See a map of India in 1763. Plassey can be found towards the upper right, a few miles north of Calcutta at the northern tip of the Bay of Bengal. The battle pitted the Nawab’s army, backed up by the French East India Company and the Kingdom of France, against the militia of the British East India Company commanded by Clive of India. The British East India Company was a shareholder company tasked with advancing British interests overseas, empowered to act in the Crown’s name and granted what we would now dignify as a ‘peacekeeping force’. The Company enjoyed a legally-binding monopoly on British trade with India, acting as a middle-man, and its tax revenues and loans were a major source of income for the Treasury.
* This too was a bone of contention in the impeachment of Robert Clive, since he was the man who handled the English side of the division. Under Jafar’s indulgent eye, he had been led through Bengal’s treasury and invited to take whatever he pleased for his own personal use; later, he would remark that under the temptation placed before him he had shown uncommon restraint. The Company, hoping to be the beneficiaries of some kind of compensation, insinuated that he had ransacked the treasury, which with the appreciative Mir Jafar at hand was hardly necessary.
* According to Sir Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, the kos is an Indian measure of distance which the British standardised to 2 miles 4 furlongs and 183½ yards, or 2.6 miles.
* The same word as ‘hookah’, transliterated from Bengali.
* The same word as dervish, a member of a Muslim brotherhood
Précis
In due course, Das went on, the British exacted revenge on Siraj ud-Daulah, making league with the faithless Jaraf Ali Khan and marching towards Murshidabad. Siraj fled the battle and took to the jungle in a boat, not relaxing until he was some eighty miles away. He drew out a hookah, and sent his servant to get a light. (59 / 60 words)
Part Three
Siraj ud-Daulah with a lady of the court. The Nawab’s defeat at Plassey ushered in a new era of British dominance in India, in which the East India Company acted as a middle-man, buying and selling, and funding the Government through taxes and loans. It was a grossly inefficient way of doing business that invited corruption, stifling bureaucracy and crippling military overspend. “Were we to be driven out of India this day,” Edmund Burke told Parliament in 1783, “nothing would remain, to tell that it had been possessed during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ourang-outang or the tiger.” It was not until 1813, when the Company’s monopoly was ended, and free trade took its first tentative steps, that Indians began to feel some benefits. See also Britain’s Best Gift to India.
It is said that the darwesh had been a servant of Siraj ud-Daulah, and, being ignominiously turned out by him for some fault, he had become a fakir,* and taken up his abode in this jungle. When he saw the servant of Siraj ud-Daulah, with a chillam* in his hand studded with gems, he instantly recognized him, and asked him how he happened to be there. The servant, who was a simpleton, discovered the whole matter to him; and the darwesh, quietly leaving him there, went with all speed to the governor of the neighbouring town, and informed him of Siraj ud-Daulah’s arrival. As orders for capturing the Nawab had been issued by Jafar Ali Khan and the English, and the governor had received them on the same day, he immediately embarked on a boat, and, having seized the Nawab, sent him under the custody of some trusty servants to Jafar Ali Khan, who put him to death in 1757.*
Having so far gratified his ambition, Jafar Ali Khan with a settled mind devoted his attention to the management of Bengal, and took possession of all the wealth and royal equipage of Siraj ud-Daulah,* who had involved himself in this danger by not observing the wise advice of his grandfather.
The dervish had decided to live as a mendicant holy man, that is, one who survives wholly on alms.
A Hindi word for a smoker’s pipe.
Siraj was executed by Mohammad Ali Beg, at Jafar Ali Khan’s residence, on the orders of Mir Miran, Jafar’s son, on July 2nd, 1757. The dagger with which it was done is kept to this day in the Hazarduari Palace in Murshidabad, along with a Dutch-made cannon that exploded in the Battle of Plassey and killed Sajid’s right-hand-man, Mir Madan.
It was Robert Clive who ceremonially conducted Jafar to the musnud (a cushioned throne) of Bengal, a powerful symbolic gesture.
Précis
Unfortunately for the Nawab, it was a disgruntled former employee whom he asked to light his hookah, a man who had no compunction about turning Siraj in, and Jafar had no compunction about murdering him. Jafar was now the Nawab, and richly rewarded the British for making it possible. Which showed, said Das, that you should listen to your grandfather. (60 / 60 words)
