Company rule in India

• 1. Introduction

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  Company rule in India describes one of history's most improbable transformations: a trading outfit founded in 1600 as The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies grew, over the course of roughly a century and a half, into the effective government of the Indian subcontinent. At its height, the East India Company commanded armies that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, collected revenue from tens of millions of people, and administered justice across a territory spanning thousands of miles. None of this was obvious from the beginning. When the Company first established a factory in Masulipatnam in 1611, it was one of several European enterprises jostling for position alongside the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish. The question this documentary asks is how a commercial venture became a colonial state, and what that state actually meant for the people living under it.

• 2. From Merchants to Rulers

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  Bombay island came to the Company in 1668 by an unusual route: it had been gifted to England as part of the dowry when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II, and the Company then leased it from the Crown. That episode captures how the Company's territorial expansion was rarely the product of a single grand plan. Footholds accumulated through war, marriage, diplomacy, and purchase.

  The battle that changed everything was fought at Plassey in 1757. Robert Clive led the Company's forces against the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, whose defeat was followed by the installation of Mir Jafar, a figure backed by the Company. Seven years later, the Battle of Buxar in Bihar forced Emperor Shah Alam II to appoint the Company as the diwan, the official revenue collector, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. By 1773, the Company was the de facto ruler of large areas of the Lower Gangetic Plain.

  The Anglo-Mysore Wars, fought between 1766 and 1799, and the Anglo-Maratha Wars, which stretched from 1772 to 1818, brought vast territories south of the Sutlej river under Company control. With the final defeat of the Marathas, no native power any longer posed a serious military threat. The Company pursued two parallel strategies from that point: outright annexation of states, and subsidiary alliances that left Indian rulers with limited internal autonomy in exchange for acknowledging Company supremacy. The allied princes of the early 19th century, the Hindu maharajas and Muslim nawabs bound by these subsidiary agreements, still collectively governed roughly two-thirds of India.

• 3. The Revenue Machine

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  Before 1765, Bengal's revenue system rested on zamindars, landholders who collected rent from peasant cultivators and passed most of it to the Mughal state. When the Company won the diwani after the Battle of Buxar, it inherited this system but lacked administrators who understood it. Tax collection was farmed out to local agents, and the consequences were severe. A famine that struck Bengal in 1769-70 may have killed between seven and ten million people, between a quarter and a third of the presidency's population. The Company provided little relief through reduced taxation or direct aid. The cultural memory of that disaster was still raw a century later, when the Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee made the famine the subject of his novel Anandamath.

  In 1772, Warren Hastings moved revenue collection back under Company control, establishing a Board of Revenue in Calcutta and Patna. The system evolved through several stages until 1793, when Governor-General Lord Cornwallis introduced the Permanent Settlement. Under its terms, rajas and taluqdars were recognised as zamindars who would collect rent from peasants and deliver revenue to the Company at a fixed rate in perpetuity. In Bengal, that fixed rate amounted to three million pounds at 1789-90 prices, reportedly twenty per cent higher than the revenue demand before 1757.

  The expectations behind the settlement were not realised. Zamindars frequently could not meet the demands; by one estimate, up to one-third of their lands were auctioned during the first two decades after the settlement. The new owners were often Brahmin and Kayastha employees of the Company who had prospered under the new system. Peasants bore increased burdens, and forced labour grew more common as cash crops were cultivated to meet Company demands.

  In southern India, a different model emerged. Thomas Munro, who would later become Governor of Madras, promoted the ryotwari system, in which the government settled revenue directly with individual peasant farmers rather than through landlord intermediaries. Grounded partly in David Ricardo's Law of Rent and shaped by the utilitarian economist James Mill, who formulated Indian revenue policy between 1819 and 1830, the system assessed each plot by soil quality and fixed taxes for periods of twenty or thirty years. Even so, revenue agents for the Company were found in the 1850s to be using torture to meet collection targets, a scandal that exposed the gap between the system's theoretical ideals and its practical operation.

• 4. An Army of Sepoys

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  Warren Hastings, when he became the first Governor-General in 1772, made rapid expansion of the Bengal army one of his first priorities. Soldiers from Bengal who had fought against the Company at Plassey were now considered suspect. Hastings instead recruited from eastern Awadh and the lands around Banaras, drawing on the high-caste rural Hindus known as Purbiyas, a Hindi word meaning "easterners". Rajput and Brahmin soldiers from this region had served Mughal armies for two hundred years before the Company continued the practice.

  These soldiers eventually made up as much as eighty per cent of the Bengal army. The Company worked to accommodate their religious requirements: soldiers dined in separate facilities, overseas service considered polluting to high-caste Hindus was not required of them, and Hindu festivals received official recognition. Yet this accommodation created a structural fragility. The Company was vulnerable to protest or mutiny whenever sepoys felt their religious prerogatives had been violated.

  By 1806, the combined strength of the three presidency armies stood at 154,500, making them among the largest standing armies in the world. The Bengal sepoys were known beyond India. In Maharashtra and in Java, they were regarded, in the words of a contemporary account, as the embodiment of demonic forces and sometimes of antique warrior heroes. Indian rulers began dressing their own forces in red serge jackets, the sepoy uniform, as if to capture some of that quality.

  The Indian rebellion of 1857 shattered the Bengal army almost entirely. Many sepoys had been unsettled by the Company's annexation of Oudh the previous year, which cost landed men among them their privileges in the Oudh courts. Resentment also grew from expectations that soldiers would serve in unfamiliar regions like Burma without the extra remuneration previously paid for such service. The Bombay and Madras armies stayed loyal, as did the Punjab Irregular Force, which played an active role in suppressing the revolt. The rebellion ended with a complete reorganisation of the Indian army in 1858 under the new British Raj.

• 5. Trade and Its Distortions

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  After 1765, once the Company could draw on Bengal's land revenues to purchase goods, it largely stopped shipping gold and silver to India. The effect was felt almost immediately: between 1760 and 1800, Bengal's money supply shrank substantially. Local mints were closed, exchange rates fixed, and coinage standardised. These measures, intended to impose order, paradoxically deepened an economic downturn.

  The transformation of India's export profile over the following decades was stark. In the 1750s, fine cotton and silk travelled from India to markets in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and India received payment in bullion. By the second quarter of the 19th century, raw materials had taken over: raw cotton, opium, and indigo now made up the bulk of India's exports. Meanwhile, British cotton manufacturers lobbied for access to Indian markets. Starting in the 1830s, British textiles flooded those markets, with the value of textile imports rising from five million two hundred thousand pounds in 1850 to eighteen million four hundred thousand pounds in 1896.

  Opium became central to the Company's China trade. Demand for Chinese tea had grown sharply in Britain, but moving bullion from Britain to pay for it was unattractive. Opium, grown across India and in high demand in Qing China despite an official ban, offered a solution. The Company fought the First Opium War to enforce access to Chinese ports, and under the Treaty of Nanjing gained entry to Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, and Ningbo, along with the cession of Hong Kong to the Crown. By the end of the second quarter of the 19th century, opium constituted forty per cent of India's exports.

  Indigo dye followed a more turbulent path. In 1788, the Company offered advances to ten British planters to grow indigo, and European demand in the early 19th century was strong, driven partly by the popularity of blue clothing and military uniforms. Market crashes in 1827 and 1847 hit planters and peasant cultivators hard. The Indigo rebellion of 1859-60 in Bengal ended production there. In Bihar, however, indigo cultivation continued into the 20th century, and the Champaran district became the site of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's first major campaign of non-violent resistance against British rule in 1917.

• 6. Governing Through Law

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  Before the Company gained control of Bengal, justice in that region rested with the Nawab of Bengal himself, who as the chief law officer attended personally to capital cases at his headquarters in Murshidabad. His deputy handled the next tier of cases, and a hierarchy of local officials managed ordinary lawsuits. In rural areas, zamindars administered justice with minimal oversight, obliged only to report capital sentences to the Nawab.

  The Company's first charter provision for courts came in 1683, when Charles II granted it the power to establish courts of judicature consisting of a lawyer and two merchants. In 1726, Mayor's Courts were added in Fort William, Madras, and Bombay, handling disputes between Europeans and allowing appeals to the King-in-Council for amounts above four thousand rupees. This patchwork thickened after the Battle of Buxar, when the Company acquired civil jurisdiction over Bengal alongside its revenue rights.

  Warren Hastings overhauled the system after arriving as Governor-General. Civil courts were established in each district, presided over by European judges assisted by Hindu pandits and Muslim qazis to interpret customary law. The Regulating Act 1773 then created a Supreme Court in Calcutta consisting of one Chief Justice and three puisne judges, all barristers. The Supreme Court operated under English law; the Company's Sadr Adālats operated under equity, local custom, and Company regulations. Predictably, these parallel systems clashed repeatedly.

  Hastings complicated the situation further by appointing Sir Elijah Impey, his old schoolmate from Winchester, to head the Company's civil appeal court, a move that had to be undone in 1781 by parliamentary intervention through the Declaration Act 1781. That act exempted the executive branch from Supreme Court jurisdiction and prohibited the Supreme Court from interfering in revenue matters. The Supreme Courts in Madras and Bombay were established considerably later, in 1801 and 1823 respectively. The judicial structure the Company built survived it, with the next major overhaul coming only in 1861.

• 7. Education and Its Battles

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  Warren Hastings founded the Madrasa 'Aliya in Calcutta in 1781, an institution for the study of Arabic, Persian, and Islamic law. That act reflected a broader policy in the late 18th century of accommodation toward Indian cultures, driven in part by the belief that the Company was heir to a great empire and should support the learning of its subjects. In 1784, William Jones, a puisne judge in the new Supreme Court of Bengal, founded the Asiatick Society in Calcutta and soon advanced his thesis on the common origin of Indo-European languages. Lord Cornwallis's administration sponsored the Benares Sanskrit College in Varanasi in 1791, and the College of Fort William followed in Calcutta in 1800 under Lord Wellesley.

  Those who held this view were called Orientalists. They were opposed by Anglicists, who argued that Indian education should be conducted in English and aimed at transmitting what they considered modern Western knowledge. Charles Grant, Chairman of the East India Company, was a prominent Anglicist who supported state-sponsored education in India two decades before a comparable system existed in Britain. His close allies included William Wilberforce, the abolitionist member of Parliament, and Sir John Shore, who served as Governor-General from 1793 to 1797.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education of 1835 crystallised the Anglicist position and shaped policy well into the following century. Persian was abolished as the official language of Company administration and courts by 1837. The Education Dispatch of 1854, sent by Sir Charles Wood, the President of the Board of Control, to Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, laid out a comprehensive plan that included universities in each presidency town, teacher-training schools, expanded vernacular schools for villages, and a system of grants for private schools. The University of Calcutta opened in January 1857, the University of Bombay in June of that year, and the University of Madras in September 1857. By 1861, some 230,000 students were attending public educational institutions across the four provinces, with over five thousand primary schools and 142 secondary schools established.

• 8. Wire, Post, and Collapse

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  Before 1837, the Company's territories had no public postal service open to ordinary people. Courier routes connected major towns to their respective presidency governments, but private individuals were only sparingly allowed access on payment. Act XVII of 1837 changed that, establishing a public post and opening post offices in principal towns. The charge for a letter from Calcutta to Bombay was one rupee; to Agra, twelve annas for each tola of weight.

  The Indian Postal Act of 1854 reformed the system again, introducing postage stamps and fixing rates by weight rather than distance. The lowest inland rate fell to half an anna per tola, a substantial reduction from earlier charges. By 1861, nearly 43 million letters and over four and a half million newspapers were being delivered annually through 889 post offices.

  Electric telegraphy arrived on a timeline set largely by one man. W. B. O'Shaughnessy, a professor of chemistry at the Calcutta Medical College, received permission in 1851 to run a trial line from Calcutta to Diamond Harbour along the Hooghly River. His receiver was a galvanoscope of his own design, built in India. The experiment was deemed a success by 1852, and Lord Dalhousie pressed the Company's Court of Directors for permission to build lines stretching from Calcutta to Agra, Agra to Bombay, Agra to Peshawar, and Bombay to Madras, covering in all over 3,050 miles across forty-one offices. By February 1855, all proposed lines were in operation. By 1857, the network had grown to 4,555 miles and sixty-two offices, reaching as far as the hill station of Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills.

  When the Indian rebellion broke out in 1857, rebel forces destroyed more than seven hundred miles of telegraph lines, mostly in the North-Western Provinces. The Company used the surviving lines to warn outposts of approaching disturbances. When the rebellion ended, not only were the destroyed lines rebuilt, but the network was expanded by another 2,000 miles. The rebellion also ended the Company itself: the Government of India Act 1858 dissolved it, transferring authority over India directly to the British Crown. The infrastructure the Company left behind, in wire and road and rail and brick, outlasted the institution that built it.