Clive’s room above the Delhi Gate, among the ruins of the old fort of Arcot on the banks of Palar river in the city in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India. His feat of military daring helped the British to shift the balance of power in India away from the Kingdom of France. That benefited India because for all its faults Georgian England was more socially and economically liberal than France was; it benefited Britain even more, because Indian ties of trade, culture and family have kept us from being trapped inside Europe.
Part 1 of 2
CLIVE had received secret intelligence of the design, had made his arrangements, and, exhausted by fatigue, had thrown himself on his bed.* He was awakened by the alarm, and was instantly at his post. The enemy advanced, driving before them elephants whose foreheads were armed with iron plates. It was expected that the gates would yield to the shock of these living battering rams. But the huge beasts no sooner felt the English musket-balls than they turned round, and rushed furiously away, trampling on the multitude that had urged them forward.
A raft was launched on the water which filled one part of the ditch. Clive, perceiving that his gunners at that post did not understand their business, took the management of a piece of artillery himself, and cleared the raft in a few minutes. Where the moat was dry, the assailants mounted with great boldness; but they were received with a fire so heavy, and so well directed, that it soon quelled the courage even of fanaticism and of intoxication.*
This was on November 13th, 1751. The siege had begun on September 23rd. Clive was just twenty-five at the time, and had gone out to India as a lowly clerk with a reputation for indiscipline. See Clive of India. For a map of India, see A map of British India in 1760, with the Nizam’s Dominion, just west of Madras, in green.
Macaulay states that Rajah’s men had taken narcotics to embolden them to fight. As for the charge of fanaticism, these events fell out around the time of the commemoration called Ashura, on the 10th day of Muharram, which remembers the death of Husayn ibn Ali, Mohammad’s grandson. Muharram is second only to Ramadan in the Islamic year, and Ashura is observed with particularly poignant devotion.
Part Two
The Rock Fortress in Tiruchirapalli, known to the British as Trichinopoly, in Tamil Nadu, India. Clive occupied Arcot (without bloodshed or looting) in order to draw Chunda Sahib off Trichinopoly where Madras’s preferred candidate as ruler of the Carnatic, Mohammad Ali, was holed up. The plan worked, and Trichinopoly was relieved in April 1752. Thereafter, the British East India Company gradually became the all but exclusive European trading partner to India’s princes.
THE rear ranks of the English kept the front ranks supplied with a constant succession of loaded muskets, and every shot told on the living mass below. After three desperate onsets, the besiegers retired behind the ditch. The struggle lasted about an hour. Four hundred of the assailants fell. The garrison lost only five or six men. The besieged passed an anxious night, looking for a renewal of the attack. But when day broke the enemy were no more to be seen.
The news was received at Fort St George with transports of joy and pride.* Clive was justly regarded as a man equal to any command. Two hundred English soldiers and seven hundred sepoys were sent to him, and with this force he instantly commenced offensive operations. He took the fort of Timery, effected a junction with a division of Morari Row’s army,* and hastened by forced marches to attack Rajah Sahib, who was at the head of about five thousand men, of whom three hundred were French.* The action was sharp, but Clive gained a complete victory.*
Fort St George was the headquarters of the British East India Company in Madras (Chennai), a government-backed trading agency empowered to raise its own militia. India was at this time not governed by London; that would come in 1857.
Morari Row was a Mahratta chieftain hired by the British.
The struggle for India was to a great degree about the imperial ambitions of France: for fifty years, France had been threatening to conquer Europe, Britain included, and now Louis XV was turning his eyes towards North America. War eventually broke out in 1756, and Clive played a key role in it. See The Seven Years’ War.
Clive’s plan had been to distract Chunda Sahib from his siege of Trichinopoly (Tiruchirapalli), which was by this time the last stronghold of Madras’s preferred candidate as ruler of the Carnatic, Mohammad Ali. Trichinopoly was relieved in April 1752. Chunda Sahib surrendered to the Mahratta, who (at the instigation of Mohammad Ali, Macaulay guessed) executed him on June 14th; the French forces surrendered on the same day.
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