National Archives of IndiaArchIves IN INdIA hIstorIcAl reprINts

cAleNdAr of persIAN correspoNdeNcevol. I, 1759–1767

Archives in India historical reprintscAleNdAr of persIAN correspoNdeNce

vol. II 1767–1769 vol. III 1770–1772 vol. Iv 1772–1775 vol. v 1776–1780

IMperIAl record depArtMeNt

c A l e N d A r o fpersian correspondence

Being Letters, referring mainly to Affairs in Bengal, which passed between some ofthe Company’s Servants and Indian

Rulers and Notables

vol. I, 1759–1767

With an Introduction byMuzaffar Alam • Sanjay Subrahmanyam

National Archives of IndiaArchIves IN INdIA hIstorIcAl reprINts

Archives in India Historical Reprints is a collaborative publishing effort between the National Archives of India and Primus Books.

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© Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for Introduction 2013

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. Anyperson who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 2013

Series ISBN: 978-93-80607-54-2

Vol. I ISBN: 978-93-80607-64-1

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c o N t e N t s

f o r e w o r d vii Mushirul Hasan

i n t r o d u c t i o n ixMuzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam

c A l e N d A r o f p e r s I A N c o r r e s p o N d e N c e

preface v

Introduction ix

errata xxvii

Abbreviations xxviii

calendar 1

Appendix 467

Glossary 469

Index 485

f o r e W o r d

This major project was initiated in early twentieth century and completed in 1959. The 10 volumes published as Calendar of Persian Correspondence included documents and letters, dating from 1759 to 1793, exchanged between ‘some of the [east India] Company’s servants and Indian Rulers and Notables’. An additional eleventh volume on 1794-95 appeared in 1969. Partially reprinted by the National Archives of India in 1970, this series is now being re-issued as a special edition with a substantial new ‘introduction’ written by two of India’s foremost scholars, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

I am grateful to these two eminent historians for providing new insights into the documents, but also to the publishers of the present series for their excellent job in bringing out these volumes. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff at the National Archives of India for their cooperation and support.

New Delhi Mushirul hasan

February 2013 Director General National Archives of India

I n t r o d u c t I o n

coercion, communication, and the East India company

Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam

the records of the company’s governments in India are, probably, the best historical materials in the world: there we find the reasons for every undertaking.

— j a m e s g r a n t d u f f , History of the Mahrattas 1826.

the Imperial durbar of 1911, held in delhi in december of that year, marked the accession of the forty-six-year old George V to the throne as king-emperor. unlike two earlier such events, held in 1877 and 1903, which had been attended not by the imperial rulers themselves but by their representatives (in 1877, the viceroy Lord Lytton; and in 1903, the viceroy Lord curzon and the duke of connaught, brother of Edward VII), the 1911 event was actually marked by the presence of George V and Queen Mary. It deliberately and conspicuously recovered several Mughal royal ceremonies, including not only the darb "ar form itself, but that of the jharoka darshan at the red Fort, making it clear that the British monarchy continued to see itself in some ways as the direct and legitimate successor of the Mughal dynasty in India. It was thus logical that the very same year, 1911, saw the publication of the first volume of the Calendar of Persian Correspondence, arguably the most significant publication of the period of the Imperial record department that had been founded in 1891, under G.W. Forrest. one of Forrest’s eventual successors was c.r. Wilson, who—as a later archivist of note was to state—conceived a ‘brilliant scheme, that of calendaring the entire series of Persian records, [which] was taken up by his successor, Mr. (later Sir) E. denison ross, who formulated the detailed plan for the work’.1 these records were a part of the very large corpus of ‘ancient papers’ of the East India company that

*For their invaluable help in the preparation of this introduction, thanks are due to Ananya chakravarti and Hajnalka Kovacs.

1 S.n. Sen, ‘A note on the Imperial record department’, The American Archivist, vol. 7, no. 3, 1944, pp. 153–64 (citation on p. 155).

x Introduction

had long been held in ‘various secretariat offices at Calcutta’. They included some 26,000 bound volumes, as well as 1.5 million unbound documents, making up a total of roughly 18 million folios of company-related papers in various languages. the Calendar was to present to the public a summary version of merely a part of these, namely the Persian-language ‘letters which passed between some of the [East India] company’s Servants and Indian rulers and notables’, commencing in 1759.

though initially concerned mainly with the ‘Affairs in Bengal’, the series—of which the first five volumes, covering the years to 1780, had appeared by 1930—eventually came to take into account other parts of India as well. the series was concerned therefore with the first phase of indirect rule by the British in India, that mediated by the East India company. It was a phase for which a vast quantity of English-language records obviously existed as well, and these records had been extensively used by historians of the company from the 1760s onwards. Since the company’s history from that time had been plagued not only by bitter factional infighting amongst its servants, but by quarrels with Parliament, even such records did not speak in unison. the early scandals surrounding robert clive, Henry Vansittart, Warren Hastings, and many others had, on the contrary, given rise to a very diverse body of materials, written from a variety of angles, and supporting a number of distinct positions.2 nevertheless, it was clearly the view of Wilson, denison ross, and others, that something important was to be gained by adding to this body of English-materials the considerable corpus of Persian-language correspondence as well.3 Although they may not have had a well-articulated theory of the matter, it would seem that they comprehended that a history of company rule based purely on that body’s own internal records was somehow incomplete, and skewed.

What then was this company which was still the object of so much belated attention? the English East India company, a joint-stock company bringing together interests of merchants and gentlemen, was formally founded under a charter of the English crown on the very last day of 1600 with a modest initial capital of about £68,000 and a term of fifteen years.4 It emerged after an extended period of

2 See nicholas B. dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, cambridge, Mass., 2006; robert travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal, cambridge, 2007.

3 Much of the actual work on the Persian texts appears to have been done by various other officials employed in the Record Department, such as Maulavi Zarif Muhammad, Maulavi Amjad Husain, and Maulavi Badruddin Ahmad.

4 the best analytical narrative of the early years of the company remains K.n. chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640, London, 1965. For an important reinterpretation of the company as a political as well as an economic actor, see Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India, new York, 2011. For a pithy narrative account, see P.J. Marshall, ‘the English in Asia to 1700’, in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the

Introduction xi

experimentation by the English with routes of trade to the Indian ocean, as well as some direct maritime ventures into that area that followed on Francis drake’s celebrated voyage of circumnavigation from 1577 to 1580. thus, Sir James Lancaster, who led the first ‘Separate Voyage’ on behalf of the newly formed Company in 1601 had already been in the Indian Ocean with a fleet once, from about 1591 to 1594.5 His expedition of 1601 was followed by eleven others under the regime of Separate Voyages, the last of which left England in 1612.6 From 1614, a new system of ‘Joint-Stock Voyages’ was then inaugurated, of which the first was that of Nicholas Downton, which carried on board the first official English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe. By this time, the initial monopoly and patent of fifteen years granted by Queen Elizabeth, had already been declared ‘perpetual’ by James I on the basis of a grant dated May 1609.7 over the next decades, the company—which had quickly extended its operations from East Africa and the red Sea, to India and South-East Asia, and even founded a factory in Hirado (southern Japan) in 1613—came to acquire a fair number of dispersed trading posts and fortified centres. The earliest of these forts in India was Armagon, just north of Lake Pulicat in central coromandel, which was founded as a trading outpost in 1625–6, fortified with twelve guns not long after, and eventually abandoned piecemeal in around 1638 to be replaced not long after by Fort St George in Madras (or chennai) which lay somewhat to the south.8

It is important to note that from the very outset the ‘Governor and companie of the Marchaunts of London trading into the East Indies’ (as the company is termed in its initial grant), were not at all averse in principle to combining trade with violence. This was for a number of reasons. At the very end of the fifteenth century, under the rule of Henry VII, the merchants of Bristol had been interested in the exploration of the north-eastern seaboard of America. An Italian acting under English patronage, John cabot (or Giovanni caboto) made strides in exploring newfoundland in the late

Close of the Seventeenth Century (The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1), ed. nicholas canny, oxford, 1998, pp. 264–85.

5 clements r. Markham, ed., The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Kt., to the East Indies, with Abstracts of Journals of Voyages to the East Indies during the Seventeenth Century, preserved in the India Office: And the Voyage of Captain John Knight (1606), to seek the North-West Passage, London, 1877.

6 For a recently unearthed set of documents on one of these voyages, see richmond Barbour, ‘the East India company Journal of Anthony Marlowe, 1607–1608’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2008, pp. 255–301.

7 For details, see George Birdwood and William Foster, eds., The Register of Letters of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, 1600–1619, London, 1893.

8 See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Madras, chennai and São tomé: An Irregular urban complex in South-Eastern India 1500–1800’, in Ciudades mestizas: Intercambios y continuidades en la expansión occidental, siglos XVI a XIX, ed. clara García Ayluardo and Manuel ramos Medina, Mexico city, 2001, pp. 221–39.

xii Introduction

1490s, and others periodically took up the idea in the decades that followed, often with the idea of finding a viable ‘Northwest Passage’ into the Indian Ocean.9 the far north of the Atlantic, relatively seldom frequented by Iberian mariners, did not pose a great problem in terms of competition. But real difficulties were encountered further south on account of the existence of extensive Spanish and Portuguese claims, that amounted to a virtual duopoly over maritime trade and exploration in the Atlantic as sanctioned by the treaty of tordesillas (1494) and related Papal Bulls. By the early sixteenth century, the Spaniards had established more or less regular maritime communication with the Caribbean, and this traffic became ever more intense in the 1520s and 1530s, with the Spanish conquest of first Mexico and then Peru. The Spanish Atlantic route, or Carrera de Indias, eventually largely centralized from the port of Seville, linked Spain to western Atlantic ports such as Veracruz, Havana, Portobelo, and cartagena. Less important for the greater part of the sixteenth century, but still not wholly insignificant, was Portuguese transatlantic commerce, linking the metropolis to Brazilian ports such as Salvador de Bahia. these lively trade routes were tempting targets for those excluded from the spoils of tordesillas, among whom were included some Italians like the Verrazano brothers, but also northern French corsairs (especially those from normandy), and increasingly after 1550, English privateers.

the long reign in England of Elizabeth (1558–1603), which culminated in the foundation of the English East India company, is rightly known as the golden age of such privateering enterprise. Even a rapid examination of the chief entrepreneurs in these networks shows intricate patterns of connection not only between them, but also with other more extended ventures elsewhere. thus Martin Frobisher, who was involved in various ventures in regard of the so-called ‘northwest Passage’, was tied to Humphrey Gilbert, a particularly violent actor who is well known for his brutal role in the colonization of Ireland in the sixteenth century; and both were linked in turn to the Muscovy company that had been formed—amongst other purposes—to explore possibilities of overland trade into Asia. John Hawkins, another major figure of this milieu, was a relative and sometime business associate of Francis drake. Again, Gilbert was the half-brother of Walter raleigh, still another celebrated Elizabethan with extensive privateering interests, who in turn was an associate of thomas roe with regard to projects in the caribbean.10 the one important aristocrat who was involved with the foundation of the East India company was George clifford, third Earl of cumberland, also a man with extensive privateering and trading investments, whose addiction to gambling however ensured that he lost money as rapidly as he acquired

9 James A. Williamson, The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII, cambridge, 1962; also Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, new York, 2006, pp. 171–4.

10 Kenneth r. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630, cambridge, 1984.

Introduction xiii

it. Many of the investors, as well as the captains and mariners, who were involved in the first two decades of the East India Company’s activities in Asia were thus intimately bound up with earlier privateering and raiding, as well as colonial projects in Ireland. to be sure, this cannot be said with equal certainty of all of them. one of the most prominent actors in the early history of the company, and its governor on more than one occasion between 1600 and 1621, was Sir thomas Smythe, the son of a haberdasher and an extensive investor in the East India company, as well as in Virginia, the caribbean, and the Muscovy trade. Smythe appears to be one of those upwardly-aspiring London bourgeois from a trades background, whose descendants would eventually buy themselves a position in the aristocracy.11

the major constraints that limited the recourse to violence in Asia by the East India Company in the first half-century of its existence were thus three in number, and none of them had to do with the peaceful pasts or inclinations of its employees in an Atlantic context. The first was its relative weakness with regard to its chief European rivals, namely the united dutch East India company (or Voc) founded in March 1602, but also the Portuguese Estado da Índia and its private auxiliaries.12 the second was its awareness of the difference between the Asian (and Indian ocean) context and the Atlantic one: dealing with polities such as the Mughal empire or the emerging tokugawa shogunate called for a certain degree of caution. the third was the unstable place of the company itself in the context of Britain, or even London, in turn linked to the highly volatile state of political conditions there during the entire seventeenth century. to be sure, political conditions in the netherlands in the same period were not entirely stable either, but the Voc was still able with great success to ward off any challenges to its national monopoly, and its consolidation from the chaos of the ‘pre-companies’ of the period 1595–1602 was already in itself a great triumph. disgruntled dutch investors thus had little choice but to go elsewhere, and they participated for example in the foundation of the danish company in 1616 and its functioning thereafter.13 In contrast, the Englishmen of the early ‘Separate Voyages’ were frequently and publicly at loggerheads with one another. Later, in the 1630s, the deteriorating relations between Charles I and the Company led him to first give letters of marque to some English privateers in the Indian ocean, and eventually also to allow the formation of the short-lived Courteen’s Association, which was briefly active in

11 robert Brenner, ‘the Social Basis of English commercial Expansion, 1550–1660’, Journal of Economic History, vol. 32, 1972, pp. 361–84; theodore K. rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630, cambridge, Mass., 1967.

12 For the dutch company and its early strengths, see the classic study by Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740, 2nd edn., the Hague, 1981. Also consult the recent attempt at a global synthesis in Piet Emmer and Jos Gommans, Rijk aan de rand van de wereld: De geschiedenis van Nederland overzee 1600–1800, Amsterdam, 2012.

13 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘the coromandel trade of the danish East India company, 1619–1648’, The Scandanavian Economic History Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 1989, pp. 41–56.

xiv Introduction

western Indian ports such as Karwar and rajapur.14 these rivalries, as well as the disturbed state of English markets, ensured that the company’s fortunes did not revive until the 1660s, and that its stocks were poorly subscribed in the middle decades of the century.

the quarter-century long reign of charles II, beginning in 1660, is often regarded as the moment when the Company’s fortunes first took a distinct turn for the better. As a prince in exile in France, charles and his entourage had already shown interest in Asian trade, even sending an unofficial envoy to deal with the Safavids in the 1650s.15 By the time of his accession, the East India Company’s profile in Asia had altered a good deal from what it had been 50 years earlier. In the initial phase, English hostility to the Portuguese had been considerable, and they had even briefly had an alliance with the Voc against the Iberians in the Indian ocean. this included an ill-fated attempt at cohabitation with the dutch in several fortresses that ended in bitterness and recriminations.16 From the 1630s, the company therefore sought out other means to make a space for itself in the Indian ocean world. It was clear that dutch dominance in South-East Asia was too weighty to be resisted. the Japan trade of the English too was nothing if not fragile.17 the decision that emerged was to concentrate efforts in India and in the western Indian ocean more generally. However, in this area the English had repeatedly challenged the Portuguese, fighting naval engagements off the coast of Gujarat in the 1610s and aiding Shah ‘Abbas of Iran to expel them from Hurmuz in 1622. A reversal in policy had to be envisaged. during the viceroyalty in Goa of the count of Linhares, a new entente emerged between the two, culminating with the signing of an agreement between the viceroy and William Methwold, the English company’s president of its Surat factory in 1635.18 this alliance proved crucial not only in helping the English company to consolidate in various Indian regions, but also in defining a certain style of functioning. The English ‘country trader’ now emerged as an actor side-by-side with the company, just as the Portuguese casado trader had been the counterpart and complement to the Estado da Índia.19

14 robert Ashton, ‘charles I and the city’, in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, ed. F.J. Fisher, cambridge, 1961, pp. 138–63.

15 Laurence Lockhart, ‘the diplomatic Missions of Henry Bard, Viscount Bellomont, to Persia and India’, Iran, vol. 4, 1966, pp. 97–104.

16 d.K. Bassett, ‘the “Amboyna Massacre” of 1623’, Journal of Southeast Asian History, vol. 1, no. 2, 1960, pp. 1–19.

17 derek Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, new Haven, 1990.

18 on Linhares’s administration, and his compromise with Methwold, see Anthony r. disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century, cambridge, Mass., 1978.

19 d.K. Bassett, ‘British “country” trade and Local trade networks in the thai and Malay States, c. 1680–1770’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 1989, pp. 625–43; also, the

Introduction xv

Further, as they had been progressively edged out of South-East Asian markets by the dutch in the 1620s, the English had to give up any designs over a large share of the high-value spices or even pepper that was brought back to Europe. Making the best of a bad job, they sought increasingly to find a market in Europe for Indian cotton textiles, which the Portuguese had already begun to explore in the closing years of the sixteenth century. Initially, the Indian cottons they purchased were either from Surat and its environs, or from the central and northern coromandel coast. However, as the seventeenth century wore on, the English also grew increasingly interested in trade in orissa, Bengal, and Bihar, and after founding a factory at Patna in the 1620s, extended their trading interests to Pipli, Balasore, and Hughli. thus, by about 1660, they were represented in all the major coastal trading regions of India, with the exception of Kerala, where they still struggled to find a proper foothold. If this meant, as in the case of Madras, extensive dealings with regional powers such as the nayakas who derived from the remnants of the Vijayanagara dispensation, it also implied extensive dealings with the Mughals and their provincial administration in Gujarat and Bengal. However, despite extensive ex post facto colonial mythmaking (especially concerning the alleged role of the surgeon Gabriel Boughton), it is clear that the company in the seventeenth century was neither in a position to request extensive concessions of the Mughals, nor did it receive any in fact.20 A number of farm"ans were indeed obtained right from the time of Jahangir, but these remained limited in their scope and content. Though lower-level Mughal officials often sought either to accommodate or to impede the English, depending on the concrete situation and the incentives on offer, the East India company remained throughout the seventeenth century a poor second to the far more powerful and prosperous dutch.21

earlier account by Serafin D. Quiason, English Country Trade with the Philippines, 1644–1765, Quezon city, 1966.

20 Numerically, the most significant number of farm"ans were apparently obtained by richard davidge, the company’s chief factor at Agra, who was sent to Shahjahanabad-delhi in the second half of 1650, and claimed to have obtained at least four (and even a possible fifth). See the letter from the Surat President Thomas Merry and Council to the Company, dated 24 october 1650, in The English Factories in India, 1646–1650, ed. William Foster, oxford, 1914, pp. 320–2. For the Persian texts of these farm"ans, see: British Library, Add. Mss. 24039, fl. 4; and National Archives of India, New Delhi, Pers. Misc. A-V. Also see Davidge’s own letter from Shahjahanabad, dated 14 december 1650, in Foster, ed., English Factories, pp. 334–6.

21 For an interesting (if problematic) attempt to interpret this relationship within a paradigm of ‘cooperation’ as much as hostility, see Farhat Hasan, ‘Conflict and Cooperation in Anglo-Mughal trade relations during the reign of Aurangzeb’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 34, no. 4, 1991, pp. 351–60. Hasan tends to overestimate the significance of the English and underestimate the dutch, a characteristically backward reading from the mid-eighteenth century.

xvi Introduction

It took the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its extended aftermath to finally put the English company on a sound footing, a prelude to the aggressive posture it was to then adopt in India in the course of the eighteenth century.22 the 1680s had seen a revival of the earlier rivalry with the dutch company, and ugly disputes had broken out regarding dutch ambitions concerning the port of Banten in western Java as well as Masulipatnam. the period from 1688 to 1690 then saw a futile armed conflict between the English Company and the Mughal empire of Aurangzeb, largely provoked by the belligerence of Sir Josiah child.23 child could hardly have chosen a worse moment to pick such a fight, for in the years 1686–7 the Mughals completed their conquest of the sultanates of Bijapur and Golkonda, and thus emerged as a major power in the southern peninsula. not just Surat and Hughli, but Masulipatnam and Madras were thus now located in areas where Mughal governors were the chief administrative interlocutors of the English company’s factors. Even Bombay, which the company and crown had acquired from the Portuguese through the marriage negotiations in the 1660s of charles II with catherine of Braganza, was now that much more proximate to the Mughal frontier.24 though English company observers of the time insisted, like many other European analysts, that the Mughal empire was actually a fragile entity and that the imminent demise of Aurangzeb would be the occasion for an unpleasant power-struggle, the continued territorial expansion of the Mughal juggernaut in the 1680s could only have provoked unease. only the Marathas seemed to stand between the Mughals and domination over the entire length of the peninsula.

the expulsion from England of James II, and the accession to the throne of his dutch son-in-law William III and his daughter Mary in 1688–9, corresponded broadly with Sir Josiah child’s war on the Mughals. In its immediate aftermath, the Glorious revolution did not favour the company. child himself had been close to James II, and the company was thus investigated by a parliamentary committee which suspected it of being both tory and Jacobite. After many mutual recriminations had been exchanged, a ‘new company’ eventually emerged to rival the old one in September 1698, with backing from the new political dispensation. Strenuous efforts now had to be put into place to reconcile the claims and interests of the two, and these included the sending to India of Sir William Norris as the first official English ambassador since

22 See Jonathan I. Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact, cambridge, 1991; and more recently, Steven c.A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, new Haven, 2009.

23 I. Bruce Watson, ‘Fortifications and the “Idea” of Force in Early English East India company relations with India’, Past and Present, no. 88, 1980, pp. 70–87.

24 Glenn J. Ames, ‘the role of religion in the transfer and rise of Bombay, c. 1661–1687’, The Historical Journal, vol. 46, no. 2, 2003, pp. 317–40.

Introduction xvii

Sir thomas roe in the 1610s.25 Matters between the two companies would only be settled at long last in 1709. But norris’s embassy, even if it was broadly unsuccessful, was still instructive for the English. He set sail from Plymouth in January 1699 and arrived in Madras in September of the same year. though he was poorly received by the English governor there (a symptom of the tensions within the English establishment), norris decided to press on towards the deccan where Aurangzeb was to be found in his ongoing campaigns. to this end, he made his way to the port of Masulipatnam but remained stranded there for nearly a whole year. thereafter, he thought it wiser to accede to the deccan via Surat. In 1701, he eventually made his way to the imperial camp at Panhala, but by the time he arrived there, his credibility had been compromised both by the machinations of the old company and by his reputation with his own employers for extravagance. norris eventually left for England in 1702, but died on shipboard while returning home.

norris’s embassy was the subject of a great deal of barely concealed mockery at the time. the Venetian doctor and chronicler nicolò Manuzzi is one of those who is quite unsparing in his views of him. At one point, he notes that norris was unable even to have the Mughal faujd"ar at Masulipatnam obey the royal orders (or hasb-ul-hukm) granting him passage into the deccan and was forced to sell off all his horses and pack-animals to pay claims that he owed considerable duties. ‘this has caused him considerable loss through the great expense incurred’, wrote Manuzzi, ‘the whole of which was thrown away.’ Later, he notes that on arriving at the Mughal camp in 1701, norris attempted to play off the new company against the old company, asserting that ‘the pirates who, during seventeen years past, have captured many merchant vessels belonging to Surat, used ships belonging to the old company’, but was then unable to prove this claim. to be sure, he ‘made a great show, and his expenses were extraordinary’, to the point that ‘the nickname “King of England” [was] given him by the common people in the army’. But norris was apparently ill-advised regarding the functioning of the Mughal court, so that he was left waiting for weeks and even months on end for his various requests to be answered. Further, he was unable to give a clear explanation to the Mughals of political developments in Europe, including what the precise status of William III in regard to the netherlands and England was, as well as his relative rank and place in comparison to that of Louis XIV. At least some of those in the Mughal court appeared to be dismayingly well-informed regarding the ins and outs of high European politics, and these included a certain Kifayat Khan,

25 See the discussion in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Frank Submissions: the company and the Mughals between Sir thomas roe and Sir William norris’, in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and nigel rigby, Woodbridge, 2002, pp. 69–96. For the primary sources on the norris embassy, see Harihar das, The Norris Embassy to Aurangzeb (1699–1702), ed. S.c. Sarkar, calcutta, 1959.

xviii Introduction

apparently a ‘great friend’ of Manuzzi, who ‘speaks Portuguese fairly well, and both speaks and writes Latin to perfection’.26

Nevertheless, the English made an astonishingly quick recovery from this fiasco. As noted above, by 1709, matters between the new and old companies had at last been resolved. In the aftermath of Josiah child’s war, the project of a new and more defensible settlement in Bengal was broached, and this was calcutta, founded in the early 1690s near the major port-city of Hughli (known to the Portuguese as Porto Pequeno or Golim). Here, as appropriate in the context of the Glorious revolution, the new fort was given the name of Fort William. Its official founder Job Charnock, an old India hand with extensive experience of trade in Hughli, Qasimbazar, and Patna, seems to have acted in part on his own initiative rather than orders from London; his activities were considerably aided, and perhaps even guided, by Armenian intermediaries who were familiar both with European mercantile culture and Mughal court-practices.27 Fort St George in Madras had meanwhile grown steadily in size and mercantile wealth through the middle decades of the seventeenth century, and was at this time undoubtedly the leading English trading settlement in India. Finally, Bombay, acquired by the crown and then given over to the company in the 1660s, also came to have a small artillery fortress (or Bombay castle) built under Gerald Aungier, and its fortifications were steadily expanded so that by the 1710s, it was a fully defensible centre.28 In 1686, the company decided to move its centre in western India from Surat to Bombay, making the former subordinate to the latter, and this was effected over the next few years. thus, by the time of norris’s embassy, there existed the kernel of the system of three Presidencies based at Madras, Bombay, and calcutta.

one of the motors of the company’s resilience in the early eighteenth century was undoubtedly the rather unique relationship between company trade, and private or ‘country’ trade. In this matter, the English made a quite distinct institutional choice from the dutch, whose company jealously guarded its trading privileges and frowned upon the trade of private dutchmen in the Indian ocean. (only in a brief phase in the mid-seventeenth century did the Voc have a policy of limited encouragement to the trade of so-called vrijburgers.) As a consequence, the dutch inadvertently fomented a curious form of employee corruption; being obliged to conceal their illegal private trade, the factors of the Voc systematically ‘cooked their books’, and both undersold

26 nicolò Manuzzi [Manucci], Mogul India, 1653–1708, or Storia do Mogor, trans. William Irvine, 4 vols., repr., delhi, 1990, vol. 3, pp. 285–8.

27 See the interesting essay by Farhat Hasan, ‘Indigenous cooperation and the Birth of a colonial city: calcutta, c. 1698–1750’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 65–82, which does not however develop the Armenian connection. We are grateful to Kapil raj for drawing our attention to this aspect of the early history of calcutta.

28 Samuel t. Sheppard, ed., Bombay in the Days of Queen Anne: Being an Account of the Settlement written by John Burnell, London, 1933.

Introduction xix

imported products and overpriced their purchases in their Indian factories, usually in collusion with their Indian brokers (or makelaars). this problem had reached endemic proportions already by the closing decades of the seventeenth century, and was only to grow graver thereafter.29 In contrast, as early as the 1620s and 1630s, high English Company officials such as William Methwold in Masulipatnam and Surat were known for their extensive private trade, to which the company just turned a blind eye. With the foundation of Fort St George and its consolidation in the 1650s and 1660s, these practices developed into an elaborate system. on the one hand, English company presidents and members of the council made use of official privileges in their relations with weavers and other producers. on the other, they developed extensive relations with the so-called ‘country traders’, private Englishmen who had very often been Company employees for a time. A figure such as Thomas Bowrey, who has left us extensive papers from his trade around the Bay of Bengal, is emblematic of such private shipowning merchants in the 1670s and 1680s, interested in textiles, spices, and even elephants.30 But we also know now, thanks to detailed research into the private papers of some of these traders, that they had significant links with England and the Atlantic economy more generally. Many acted as commission agents for principals in England, purchasing diamonds in the deccan, and sending them back on company ships.31 one of the more visible actors in the matter was a certain robert Freeman, who spent roughly two decades in India between 1668 and 1689, especially on the coromandel coast. Initially an employee of the company, he was removed from its service for embezzlement, but then emerged in the 1680s as a leading shipowning merchant, largely acting as an agent for others—both in company service and outside of it. though Freeman eventually could not himself amass a great fortune, some others in his broad network did.

It could therefore be argued that the English network of Indian ocean trade by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was deliberately built on a set of legal and institutional ambiguities. there was an enormous grey area between the sphere of the company and that of the private trader. the company itself had a significant overlap with the state, and indeed the very charter of the Company was constructed so that the crown had farmed out certain state-like functions—signing treaties, waging war on sea and on land, building fortresses, even managing some

29 See Ashin das Gupta, ‘Pieter Phoonsen of Surat, c. 1730–1740’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 1988, pp. 551–60.

30 thomas Bowrey, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679, ed. r.c. temple, cambridge, 1905; r.c. temple, ed., The Papers of Thomas Bowrey, 1669–1713, discovered in 1913 by John Humphreys, London, 1927.

31 See Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London, 1660–1740, copenhagen, 2005; also the earlier work by Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade, new York, 1978.

xx Introduction

revenue-resources—to this hybrid entity. It is of course the case that the company could not act with total impunity or autonomy in respect of broader state policy. But the complex forms of articulation meant that initiatives could come as much from the periphery as from the centre. the court of directors in London was thus often frustrated by its inability to control its employees in Asia, and the length of the cycle of communications did not facilitate notions of a proper hierarchy of command. the functioning of the Atlantic colonies of the English already left a good deal to be desired in this matter, but east of the cape of Good Hope matters were exacerbated even further. A clear instance of this is provided to us by the scandal around the White brothers, Samuel and George, a cause célèbre of the late 1680s and early 1690s. Samuel White was initially a company employee in Madras in around 1675, but then made his way to the eastern seaboard of the Bay of Bengal to join his brother George, who was already a private trader there.32 the Whites’ network of contacts, which extended to Banten and the ports of the Malay peninsula, eventually enabled them to establish themselves in the western thai port of Mergui, where Samuel White managed to have himself named sh"ahbandar by the thai ruler narai. Between the late 1670s and late 1680s, and until his hasty departure for England in 1688, White ran a curious enterprise, as trader, tax-collector, political entrepreneur, and corsair. He attacked and plundered ships belonging to Golkonda merchants, as well as Armenians, and even other English private traders. The Company was eventually enraged by all this, and first pursued military action against him in thailand, and then legal action even after his return to England. In spite of this, Samuel White died in 1689 without facing significant legal consequences, and his brother George managed in the 1690s to stave off the company quite successfully, given that it was on the defensive anyway because of the new political context.

If White recalls some of the caribbean buccaneers of the mid-seventeenth century, such as Henry Morgan, his actions also point the way to how difficult it was in the Indian ocean context to distinguish the various levels of English activity. Faced with the annoyance of the Sultan of Golkonda or his courtiers, the English factors at Masulipatnam and their superiors in Madras tried in vain to explain that while Samuel White had indeed been one of them, he was now operating on his own, or perhaps in collusion with others in thailand. Again, the dramatic upsurge in the 1690s of English (as well as Scottish) piracy in the waters between Madagascar and the red Sea was difficult to explain away to the Indian interlocutors of the Company. The most famous of these pirates, the dundee-born William Kidd, was a sometime employee of the crown, but this did not prevent him from capturing the Armenian ship, the Kedah Merchant and looting it. He, like many others, had connections with English officials both in the metropolis, and in the caribbean, and even in new England. Henry Every

32 Stern, The Company-State, pp. 76–80, 146–7; Mentz, English Gentleman Merchant at Work, pp. 225–9.

Introduction xxi

(or Avery), who captured the Mughal ships Fath Muhammad and Ganj-i Sawai in mid-1695, was only slightly less ambiguous in his relations to the ostensibly respectable end of English overseas enterprise, and the same could be said of others like Edward coates, robert culliford, and thomas tew, men who transgressed, were at times punished severely, but more often than not returned to some form of respectability.33 the process by which all this came about was a matter that William norris, among others, found problematic to explain when he was cross-questioned by high Mughal officials in 1701.

The first clear hints of English territorial expansion in India can be traced to the 1730s, in the context of their coromandel establishments. But some warning signs had already appeared in the preceding decades, especially following the protracted succession struggle for the Mughal throne that had ensued on the death of Aurangzeb in early March 1707. Their early confrontations with first Da’ud Khan Panni and then Sa‘adatullah Khan, the senior Mughal officials who held charge of the Karnatak Payanghat region, were not notably successful. But they showed their belligerence further south, around Fort St david in Kadalur, where they were beginning to feel their oats with the Bundela rajput notable whom the Mughals had placed in administrative charge of the region, Sarup Singh. In 1704, the English factors accused him of trying to divert the course of the river away from their settlement, and made a show of force against him. then, in 1710, some Mughal revenue-farmers who were in arrears fled to Fort St David; the English refused to hand them over, and Sarup Singh retaliated by seizing hold of two Englishmen. the English company professed outrage at this, and their anger was possibly further fuelled by the fact that the former deputy governor of their fort, Gabriel roberts, had in fact stood security for the revenue-farmers—another example of the promiscuous mixing of private trade and official functioning. The Company therefore sent out a punitive expedition into the country, suffered some minor losses of its own, but caused enormous damage. As roberts’s successor, raworth (who was not long after to rebel himself, and desert to the French after being accused of massive embezzlement), would write in late october 1711: ‘Wee must Indeed owne there is no [...] express order for commencing a Warr or Plundering the country & destroying that vast quantity of Grain but the Gentlemen concerned desire you’ll be pleas’d to consider that as they were oblig’d in duty they acquainted their superiors at Fort St George of every pace they tooke.’ He did however confess to a certain excess: ‘But the destruction of 50, or 60,000 Pagodas worth of

33 For the company’s deep ambivalence with regard to this piracy, see Philip J. Stern, ‘ “A Politie of civill & Military Power”: Political thought and the Late Seventeenth-century Foundations of the East India company-State’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2008, pp. 253–83; also donald r. Burgess Jr., ‘Piracy in the Public Sphere: the Henry Every trials and the Battle for Meaning in Seventeenth-century Print culture’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 887–913.

xxii Introduction

Graine, about 52 Villages & townes among which was his [Sarup Singh’s] favourite towne Yembollam and Killing the Pandarum [priest] there are things which really makes his demands carry too much justice with them.’34

In the two decades that followed, the English government at Madras engaged in periodic jousting with Sa‘adatullah Khan and his subordinates, especially in the vicinity of their chief settlement. But it was his death in 1732 that opened up an entirely new set of possibilities. over the next decade, the Mughal niz"amat in the Arcot region remained unstable, despite the periodic direct and indirect intervention of forces from Hyderabad. during the government of richard Benyon (1735–44), the English negotiated not only with Hyderabad and Arcot for greater influence, but also with a number of important Maratha sard"ars such as Murarirao Ghorpade, who cast a heavy shadow over the Karnatak Payanghat. Since these expansionary ambitions were shared by the chief French actors in the region, mainly operating out of Pondicherry, a complex multi-cornered conflict was the consequence. The protracted Arcot ‘succession dispute’ which occupied much of the 1730s and 1740s was therefore the first real occasion for the East India Company to attempt to play a significant role in Indian interior politics.35 neither the English nor the French mobilized enormous forces in the first instance; rather each disposed of limited sepoy armies and hoped to use European-style infantry warfare to their advantage against opponents who were more adept at deploying cavalry. In this conflict, the French periodically appeared to have gained the upper hand, for example in the second half of the 1740s when their maritime forces under La Bourdonnais even seized Madras for a time. In the final analysis, however, the English company was the real winner. By the mid-1740s, their preferred candidate at Arcot, Anwar-ud-din Khan of Gopamau, had been installed rather than the alternatives supported by the French; and even if he was killed in battle in 1749, it was his son Muhammad ‘Ali Walajah who took his place to form a stable dispensation. English influence came to extend deeper and deeper into the Arcot court, and they also managed over time to gain the upper hand over the Maratha rajas of Tanjavur using a mixture of military and financial means, some official and some private.

It was from this position of growing confidence and strength that the Company embarked on its celebrated Bengal adventure of 1757. Its forces were led there by Robert Clive, who had cut his teeth in the Karnatak wars and been briefly captured

34 records of Fort St George, Letters to Fort St. George, 1711, p. 114, robert raworth and council at Fort St david, 25 october 1711, to Edward Harrison etc. at Fort St George. For the larger context of this quarrel, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics, new York, 2012, pp. 339–95.

35 there is a substantial, but largely dated, literature on the Arcot issue. See Henry H. dodwell, Dupleix and Clive: The Beginning of Empire, London, 1920, and the more recent narrative in n.S. ramaswami, Political History of Carnatic under the Nawabs, new delhi, 1984.

Introduction xxiii

when La Bourdonnais had seized Madras in 1746.36 to be sure, other factors—both local and larger ones—must be taken into account to account for the enigmatic events of Bengal. the public humiliation of the Mughals by nadir Shah in 1739–40 had made it amply clear to several of the European powers that the imperial centre was no longer a real player in the affairs of the provinces; in more senses than one, the coast was clear.37 As in the Karnatak, British motives in Bengal always mixed the public and the private. Company officials more often than not had financial and other dealings with both local merchants and bankers like the well known Jagat Seths, and with private English traders with their own complex designs and interests. the events surrounding the Battle of Palashi (Plassey) in June 1757 have been analysed by a number of historians, both modern and antiquated, as have the larger train of events leading up to it.38 there was clearly no blueprint of conquest, even if the British did not stumble upon Bengal as Hernán cortés may be thought to have stumbled upon Mexico-Tenochtitlán in 1519. Nor indeed can we define a simple line of teleology that will carry us from the foundation of the company in 1600 to 1757. But the conquest of Bengal, and then progressively of much of the rest of India from 1757 to 1820, was obviously no absent-minded act either. It was for that reason that it was defended so strenuously both then, in the eighteenth century, and then into the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries. At the same time, it required a rather odd two-faced actor—neither fish nor fowl—to carry it out. It may not be too much to suggest that the peculiar structure of the English company—less centralized than the dutch and thus more structurally prone to acts of ‘sub-imperialism’—gave it the edge it required to carry out this conquest. this conquest was done while the company, we may recall, had increasingly begun to portray itself not as a coporate entity but as an anthropomorphized one, an Indo-Persian creature called Kampani Bah"adur.

II

this takes us logically to a second question, namely the nature of the lines of communication between the English East India company and Indian society. this is not a new question, but it is not one that has been adequately explored either.

36 For an old fashioned narrative, see G.W. Forrest, ‘the Siege of Madras in 1746 and the Action of La Bourdonnais’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd series, vol. 2, 1908, pp. 189–234; more recently, Philippe Haudrère, La Bourdonnais: Marin et aventurier, Paris, 1992.

37 Manjusha Kuruppath, ‘casting despots in dutch drama: the case of nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2011, pp. 241–86. For a classic statement, see William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs; particularly respecting the Present State of Bengal and its Dependencies, 2nd edn., London, 1772.

38 For the most recent reconsideration, see Partha chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, Princeton, 2012.

xxiv Introduction

compressed conquest narratives such as that of the Spaniards in Mexico or even Afonso de Albuquerque in Goa can make do with rudimentary forms of intermediation: the role played by la Malinche between cortés and the Mexica, or of the freebooter timoja between Albuquerque, Vijayanagara, and the ‘Adil Shahis in the case of Goa. obviously, we will have to do rather better in the case of the East India company and India, where a century and a half of cohabitation preceded actual conquest. this is even more the case because the ten massive volumes of the Calendar of Persian Correspondence, to which our text acts in part as a new introduction, were prepared and published under the aegis of the Imperial records department of the government of British India, and deal with the circumstances and processes under which the East India company consolidated its hold upon Bengal in the eighteenth century following the Battle of Plassey. of course, the volumes themselves were conceived to serve a more or less explicit teleology, in which contemporary colonial rule was the inevitable historical result of these processes. Admittedly, after the end of colonial rule and in light of the advances in South Asian historiography, such a teleology is untenable on both political and intellectual grounds. Yet, by its very nature, this collection invites the historian of South Asia to reconsider questions of long-standing historiographical concern, many of which were intertwined with the colonial project itself.

Before the English established themselves along the shores of the Indian ocean in the course of the seventeenth century, they had been preceded by other Europeans, whose experience had a significant effect on their own. These other Europeans included the Italians, and to a very limited degree the French, but the most significant presence was that of the Iberian powers. When the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean at the close of the fifteenth century, they encountered a situation of far greater linguistic complexity than they could possibly have imagined. they themselves were obviously capable of communicating as a collectivity at the very least in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, and they had also taken the precaution of bringing along some Arabic speakers with them (though this was usually the Arabic of north Africa and not that of the eastern Mediterranean). these languages served them well enough at the start, especially in their written forms; much of the early written communication they had in both East Africa and western India seems to have been in Arabic. Very quickly however, other languages became necessary, notably Malayalam for dealings in Kerala, Persian for a wide swathe of the western Indian ocean, and Malay (written in Arabic script naturally) for dealings in South-East Asia. Arabic, Persian, and Malay remained the vehicular or principal languages for them in the decades that followed, though they eventually added first Chinese and then, to an extent, Japanese to these. to be sure, by the mid-sixteenth century, some Portuguese also came to acquire other Asian languages depending on the needs, and circumstances, and these ranged from tamil, telugu, and Sanskrit, to Konkani and Marathi in India, to thai, Khmer, and Burmese, and much beyond. Missionaries, for example, might need to learn a relatively localized language if it were indispensable for their ends. By 1600, it is highly probable

Introduction xxv

that someone or other in the official or missionary establishment of Portuguese Asia had a certain level of proficiency in one of thirty Asian languages, a vast change from the case in 1500.

We know this because of the collections in archives of dictionaries and glossaries, as well as letters, treatises, and other documents many of which are linguistically hybrid. the chief single collection of letters in this respect is the Cartas Orientais in the Lisbon national Archives, or torre do tombo, which contains close to a hundred letters in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and ottoman turkish, but other letters in these languages as well as Malay and chinese can equally be found dispersed across a variety of collections. From the late sixteenth century, the Goa archives also contain a significant number of letters from the so-called reis vizinhos (or ‘neighbouring kings’) of the Portuguese State of the Indies, in Persian, Marathi, and Kannada. In contrast, the letters in the Cartas Orientais are very largely from the sixteenth century, that is to say from the initial period of contact when the Portuguese, and their interlocutors were only beginning to establish what would later be stable conventions for communication. the Jesuit historian Georg Schurhammer in 1968 published an extensive list of these ‘oriental letters’ from the first half of the sixteenth century. Including all letters written by the Asian and East African interlocutors of the Portuguese, even those for which only the Portuguese version or translation existed, he accumulated a list of some 334 documents from this period.39 this long essay-cum-catalogue was followed by a far deeper and more analytical work by Jean Aubin, which—though it limited itself to the documents in Persian and Arabic from the Indian ocean—carefully edited, translated, and published a certain number of these letters.40 In turn, some other historians (including the present authors) have subsequently edited and translated further letters from the same collection, largely having to do with Gujarat, the Persian Gulf, and Melaka.41

A brief re-examination of some of the letters published by Aubin already makes clear some of the difficulties posed by this type of correspondence. The first of these chronologically is a letter written in Arabic in September 1508 by Khwaja ‘Ata Sultani, the waz$ır of the Persian Gulf state of Hurmuz to Afonso de Albuquerque, who was yet to assume the post of governor of the Portuguese Estado da Índia. Albuquerque

39 Georg Schurhammer, ‘Orientalische Briefe aus der Zeit des Hl. Franz Xaver (1500–1552)’, Euntes docete, vol. 21, 1968, pp. 255–301.

40 Jean Aubin, ‘Les documents arabes, persans, et turcs de la torre do tombo’, in Le Latin et l’Astrolabe: Recherches sur le Portugal de la Renaissance, son expansion en Asie et les relations internationales, vol. 2, ed. Françoise Aubin, Paris, 2000, pp. 417–52.

41 dejanirah couto, ‘trois documents sur une demande de secours ormouzi à la Porte ottomane’, Anais de História de Além-Mar, vol. 3, 2002, pp. 469–93; Jorge M. dos Santos Alves and nader nasiri-Moghaddam, ‘une lettre en persan de 1519 sur la situation à Malacca’, Archipel, no. 75, 2008, pp. 145–66; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, pp. 79–87.

xxvi Introduction

had attempted in the previous year on his own initiative to seize control of Hurmuz, but was obliged to abandon his attempt since the other captains under his command would not agree with him. By the time of his return to Hurmuz in late 1508, Khwaja ‘Ata had taken the precaution of contacting his hierarchical superior, the viceroy dom Francisco de Almeida. In this letter, he thus plays one off against the other. the letter runs as follows:

He [In His name]Great captain Afonso de Albuquerque, know that the envoy of dom Francisco the viceroy came to us from cochin, and he brought a letter on which there is the seal of Portugal. the letter with the seal is addressed to us, and also there is a letter for you and for the captains who are with you. Look at it. the original is for you. We know what it contains. read the letter of your sultan. Listen and take the proper path. If you come [to us], you will see the seal of your sultan of Portugal. Let the captains come near the shore, so that we can send the envoy from Portugal to you and the seal that is on the letter addressed to us, you will see it. the prisoners who were with you, and whom you sent to the lord of cochin, [namely] nakhuda ‘Ali Mubariz and his companions, have been sent back to us and he treated them well. Know this. Salutations.42

the letter is written in a fair hand, but as Aubin notes it was certainly dictated and not written by Khwaja ‘Ata himself. It is characterized moreover (to quote the French scholar) by its strange informality, and ‘confused and dialectal style’, perhaps owing to the fact that Khwaja ‘Ata was an eunuch of Bengali origin. Albuquerque is addressed by name, and also as the n "akhuda kab $ır; and the term ‘viceroy’ is not translated (say) as n"a’ib but simply rendered as ab"u zurray from the Portuguese vice-rei or visorei. Interestingly, we have a sixteenth-century translation into Portuguese of this letter, which we may also translate quite literally, to obtain a sense of the distinction between original and contemporary rendering:

captain-Major Afonso de Albuquerque. You should know that a messenger from dom Francisco, the viceroy at cochin, came here, and brought a letter with his sign, written to you, and that letter is with you, and written to you and to all the captains who have come with you and principally to you. And I know what is in it; so read it, listen to it, and obey it, [for] it has the seal of the King of Portugal. Send one of your people ashore, and he will see the letter with the seal of the King of Portugal, and the messenger who brought it. And the captives whom you had who you sent to cochin, negodaquiçar and his companions, were all sent to me and they are with me.43

42 Arquivo nacional da torre do tombo, Lisbon, cartas orientais, no. 10; text and French translation in Aubin, ‘Les documents arabes, persans, et turcs’, pp. 424–5.

43 Brás [Afonso] de Albuquerque, Commentarios de Afonso Dalboquerque capitão geral e governador da Índia (…), Lisbon, 1557, fol. lxxxvii. (a). the letter does not appear in subsequent editions of the text and their reprints.

Introduction xxvii

this translation quite closely approximates many—but not all—elements of ours in more or less the same sequence. the name of the chief prisoner sent back from cochin is rendered as nakhuda Qaisar. Some small details are left out, such as the fact that the cochin ruler (s"ahib al-K"uj $ı) had treated them well. But what is of interest is how, already at this early date, new hybrid terms such as ab"u zurray have begun to enter the vocabulary. they would be followed in the Persian correspondence of the 1530s by such other terms as kapt"an-m "ur for ‘captain-major’ and warand "ul a‘zam for ‘Great Governor’. the exchange of letters immediately following this one is also interesting. Albuquerque attempted in these to question the authenticity of the Portuguese letters he was sent from Hurmuz, claiming for example that the wax on one of the seals looked suspicious. Khwaja ‘Ata responded indignantly that he would never have forged a letter from the viceroy, and that Albuquerque was merely using this as an excuse to be a ‘traitor to the King of Portugal’ (har"am-khw"ar-i p"adsh"ah-i Burtuk"al, which the contemporary Portuguese translation baldly renders as tu es tredor a el Rey de Portugal). Besides, he pointed out that the letters carried the signatures of the Portuguese viceroy and the official secretary (naw $ısinda). He also suggested that the translator or ‘reader (khw"ananda)’ whom Albuquerque employed to deal with Persian and Arabic correspondence was incompetent, and had created pointless confusion. this may have been a reference to a certain Gaspar rodrigues, who is mentioned in Portuguese chronicles as the lingua or interpreter, and who appears in Khwaja ‘Ata’s own letters with the title of kalamch$ı.

the place of these linguas in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese Asia has attracted some welcome attention in recent years. Schematically, we may distinguish different types of linguas, corresponding to particular periods and regions but also to changing situations in regard to diplomacy. In the early years of Almeida and Albuquerque, several converted Jews played this role, of whom the most celebrated are Gaspar da Gama and Francisco de Albuquerque.44 their familiarity with the romance languages—Portuguese, castilian, and Italian—and with Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, was the result of their diverse commercial and political experience in both the Mediterranean and the western Indian ocean. though these Jewish interpreters never disappeared over the sixteenth century, with the passage of time a more complex figure of the interpreter-cum-renegade emerges in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, of whom a good early example is João de Borba, a Portuguese who flirted with Islam and played a role in the Husain Shahi Sultanate of Bengal around 1520. to these we can add cases of Muslims of north African, Indian, or Iranian origin, who often converted and became bilingual, and even some who were allowed to inhabit the fringes of the Portuguese empire without actually converting from Islam. As we enter

44 For an overview, see dejanirah couto, ‘the role of Interpreters, or Linguas, in the Portuguese Empire during the Sixteenth century’, e-Journal of Portuguese History, vol. 1, no. 2, 2003.

xxviii Introduction

the later decades of the sixteenth century, however, new figures and groups enter the lists. these include Armenians, who were used by the Portuguese viceroys and governors in regard to the Indo-Persian world; those missionaries who acquired Asian languages and were then willing to aid the Estado in matters of diplomacy; a variety of members of convert communities, who were often acculturated through their contact with the same missionaries; and finally figures of mixed descent, or mestiços, the offspring of the alliances between Portuguese men and Asian women, and who retained something of both cultures. this last category appear sometimes in Portuguese writings by 1600 under the denomination of topasses, itself an adaptation of the term dubh"ash$ı or dub "ash$ı, meaning bilingual.

the central problem posed by the term lingua is however that it covered both written and oral functions. Many of those who claimed this role were really oral interpreters, who could carry messages, or intervene in conversations with ambassadors or envoys, but could not necessarily read or translate diplomatic missives. By 1600, we can imagine that the body of such orally bilingual or trilingual characters was not negligible in size. However, there was some distance between them and those who were able to handle written materials, especially the often codified and formulaic language of diplomatic correspondence. the following perspicacious remarks of Aubin are worth citing on the question:

It is interesting to compare the [Persian and Arabic] originals to the Portuguese translations of the period, which are obviously uneven, in accordance with the quality of the translator or the importance given to the subject at hand. More often than not, we are dealing with adapted or summarized versions rather than a literal rendering of the content (and it seems that this was particularly the case with the translations done in Portugal, which have a poorer grasp of the text or a more careless attitude to being faithful to what is set out when compared to those done on the spot in the East).45

nonetheless, a marked evolution is visible by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with the emergence in Goa of veritable dynasties of interpreters, who were very often Saraswat Brahmins who had converted to catholicism. often using the surname Sinai (from Shenvi), the precursor of these Saraswats was a figure like Krishna, a well known go-between figure of the decades leading from the 1520s to the 1540s both in dealings in Goa itself, and in the diplomatic negotiations with the ‘Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur, the closest neighbours of Portuguese Goa. Such interpreter dynasties, which have been recently studied by Jorge Flores, primarily worked across three languages: Portuguese, Persian, Marathi, and at times they also worked with Kannada. Some of their members grew close to the great Portuguese

45 Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, vol. 2, p. 420.

Introduction xxix

families that dominated the post of viceroy in these years, such as the Gamas or the noronhas.46

the European latecomers to Asia, such as the English and the dutch, potentially had the advantage of being able to benefit from the rich Portuguese experience of diplomacy and translation after the 1490s.47 But the early realities were rather more uncomfortable than that. For instance, the English Muscovy company sought in the early 1560s to open diplomatic relations with Safavid Iran, sending the merchant Anthony Jenkinson overland via russia to Qazwin in 1562. But Jenkinson was given a somewhat peculiar letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Safavid monarch in English, with copies in Hebrew and Italian, addressed to the ‘Great Sophie [Sufi] of Persia’, and treating him as the ‘Emperour of the Persian, Medes, Parthians, Hyrcanes, carmanarians, Margians, of the people on this side, and beyond the river of tygris, and of all men, and nations, between the caspian sea, and the gulph of Persia’. the letter ended with the warm sentiment that ‘neither the earth, the seas, nor the heavens, have so much force to separate us, as the godly disposition of naturall humanitie, and mutuall benevolence, have to joyne us strongly together’.48 Still Jenkinson’s experience in Iran turned out in reality to be a somewhat fraught one. He arrived at a moment when the Safavids and the ottomans were preparing to make peace after long hostilities, and the Qazwin court was not that concerned with an obscure trading partner from the far north-west. Further, he was profoundly destabilized when he was treated in the Safavid court with the Persian term g"awur, which he himself paraphrased as ‘unbeliever, and uncleane: [they] esteeming all to bee infidels and Pagans which doe not believe as they doe, in their false filthie prophets Mahomet and Murtezallie’. His description of a rather disastrous interview with Shah tahmasp in late november 1562 is worth recalling. Jenkinson began by delivering Queen Elizabeth’s letter and announcing that he ‘was of the famous citie of London within the noble realme of England’. His purpose, he apparently declared, was ‘to repaire and traffique within his [tahmasp’s] dominions … to the honour of both princes, the mutual commoditie of both realms, and wealth of the subjects’. But the fact that the letter was in three

46 Jorge Flores, ‘How cosmopolitan were the Hindu Interpreters of Early Modern Goa?’, paper presented to a conference on Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern World: The Case of South Asia (16th–18th centuries). Sources, Itineraries, Languages, cEIAS, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 24–5 May 2012. For an earlier analysis, see Jorge Flores, ‘Firangist"an e Hindust"an: O Estado da Índia e os confins meridionais do Império Mogol (1572–1636)’, Ph.D. dissertation, universidade nova de Lisboa, 2004, pp. 488–510.

47 It is less clear to what extent they were familiar with the specifics of Venetian dealings with, for example, the ottomans and Safavids, which could also have been useful to them. See, for example, Guglielmo Berchet, La Repubblica di Venezia e la Persia, turin, 1865; and E. natalie rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul, Ithaca, nY, 2012.

48 E. delmar Morgan and c.H. coote, eds., Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and Other Englishmen, London, 1886, pp. 112–14.

xxx Introduction

unfamiliar languages—none of them Persian, ottoman turkish, or Arabic—apparently did not please the Shah. the exchange then continued as follows:

then he questioned with me of the state of our countries, and of the power of the Emperour of Almaine, King Philip, and the great turke, and which of them was of most power: whom I answered to his contentation, not dispraysing the great turke, their late concluded friendship considered. then he reasoned with me much of religion, demaunding whether I were a Gower, that is to say, an unbeleever, or a Muselman, that is of Mahomets lawe. unto whom I answered, that I was neither unbeleever nor Mahometan, but a christian. What is that, sayd hee unto the king of Georgians sonne, who being a Christian was fled unto the sayd Sophie, and hee answered that a Christian was he that beleeveth in Jesus Christus, affirming him to bee the sonne of God, and the greatest prophet: doest thou believe so sayd the Sophie unto mee: Yea that I doe sayd I: oh thou unbeleever sayd he, we have no neede to have friendship with the unbeleevers, and so willed mee to depart. I being glad thereof did reverence and went my way.49

If indeed some version of this conversation took place, and was not simply a figment of Jenkinson’s imagination, we must ask ourselves what its linguistic registers could have been. In all likelihood, the Shah would have spoken in Persian or turkish, while Jenkinson could only have acceded to his remarks through a translator; and it seems probable that Portuguese would have played a role in the proceedings. At any rate, we gather that in March 1563, Jenkinson was allowed at last to depart from Qazwin after the intervention of some of the influential members of the court, who were favourable to trade and afraid that ‘there would few straungers resort into his countrey’, had ensured that he was treated with some degree of courtesy. Further English trade missions to Iran then followed in the 1560s, notably those of Arthur Edwards and thomas Bannister, which eventually resulted in a partial thawing and the grant by Shah tahmasp of some farm"ans for trade, which were ‘all written in Azure and gold letters, and delivered unto the Lord Keeper of the Sophie his great seale’. However, there remains the question of whether such diplomatic documents were actually translated in Elizabethan England. It is unclear who could have read and interpreted them, since it is unlikely that any Persian-speaking merchants were resident in London at this time. Still, none of these ventures resulted in profits of any significance, and the death of Shah Tahmasp in 1576 seems to have dampened English enthusiasm. A letter written by Queen Elizabeth to Shah Muhammad Khudabanda in 1579 attempting to pursue relations was apparently unable to reach its intended destination.

the founding of the East India company in 1600 had of course been preceded by further English contacts with the Persian-speaking world, including Mughal India. These contacts were the affair of figures like Ralph Fitch, William Leedes, and John

49 Morgan and coote, eds., Early Voyages and Travels by Anthony Jenkinson, pp. 145–7.

Introduction xxxi

newberry. All were associated with the English Levant company, and were part of an exploratory venture that set out via the eastern Mediterranean and Aleppo to Baghdad and Basra in 1583. Arriving in the Portuguese fort of Hurmuz, the Englishmen were arrested and transported to Goa, from where they managed to leave thanks to the intervention of an influential English Jesuit, Thomas Stevens. Fitch and the others were eventually to make their way to Akbar’s court in Agra, where they went their separate ways: newberry attempted to return to England and died soon after, and the jeweller William Leedes was employed by the Mughals; Fitch himself pushed on via Allahabad down the Gangetic valley to Bengal, then to Burma, and eventually even made his way as far as Melaka in 1588. He would then return using the familiar Portuguese routes to cochin, Goa, and Hurmuz, travel overland to Aleppo, and gradually make his way back to London in 1591. Since a very large part of his itinerary was conducted using Portuguese networks, it is obvious that there was a great deal of continuity between his perception of the trading networks and high political culture of Asia and what the Portuguese saw of the same. The advice he gave to the fledgling East India company, which consulted him after his return to England, must have been conceived in those very terms.50

It is interesting to analyse the diplomatic skills and resources available to the first generation of East India company servants who dealt with the Mughals. From their past in the Atlantic, especially in their raids on the caribbean ports, many brought a smattering of castilian or Portuguese. others who had been engaged with the Levant company had some grasp of ottoman turkish, or more rarely of Arabic. these were precisely the sorts of skills that Fitch and his companions had possessed, and they were usually oral rather than written. the complicated and eventually fruitless negotiations of Sir thomas roe’s embassy in the 1610s proved how inadequate such resources in fact were. the more enigmatic case of the company employee William Hawkins, who spent some two-and-a-half years between April 1609 and november 1611 at the Mughal court in Agra, married an Armenian bride, and claimed to be able to communicate with Jahangir after a fashion in turkish, also suggested that the cultural frontier of Persian was one that needed eventually to be crossed.51 We are aware that company employees were also concerned with the fact that, in the absence of Persian skills of their own, their dependence on Jesuit intermediation with the Mughals in this early phase was excessive. Therefore, we see the first signs already in the 1610s of efforts in this direction; for example, we possess the glossary and workbook that the minor artist and company employee robert Hughes (d. 1623), used while at Jahangir’s court in Ajmer in the period to learn the rudiments of Persian from

50 J. Horton ryley, ed., Ralph Fitch, England’s Pioneer to India and Burma: His Companions and Contemporaries, with his Remarkable Narrative told in his own Words, London, 1899.

51 richmond Barbour, ‘Power and distant display: Early English “Ambassadors” in Moghul India’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 61, nos. 3–4, 1998, pp. 343–68.

xxxii Introduction

an Armenian teacher by the name of tumajan.52 the manuscript work, about 90 folios long, includes a Persian version of the Lord’s Prayer, a short outline of Persian grammar, and then a vocabulary with English words, Persian equivalents transliterated into roman script, and then in Persian script.53 Again, in 1624, we learn of an Englishman (whose name is unfortunately not communicated to us), who contacted the French entrepreneur Augustin de Beaulieu in rome, and offered his services to open French trade with the Mughals. this man, writes Beaulieu, ‘has been employed by the company of England in the court of the said Prince [Jahangir], where he remained for about two years and was very well-known there, even by the Great Mughal, with whom he had the honour of speaking several times’; he then adds that ‘he is English by nation, and has seen a great deal, and travelled in the Indies by sea and by land, he speaks good Persian (parle bon persan) and will provide you an opening for the traffic in silks of the said country’.54 In a similar vein, by the 1620s, the first factors of the dutch East India company in Agra such as Francisco Pelsaert obvious came to have a reasonable level of comprehension of Persian.55 the collection of the factor Wollebrandt Geleynssen de Jongh in the late 1630s contains a ‘letter-book with diverse received and dispatched letters and formannen, written in Persian and translated into dutch’, making it clear that by this time the dutch factors operating in Gujarat and Hindustan had the means to deal with Persian correspondence with imperial and provincial officials.56

In the course of the seventeenth century, all the other Europeans—the English, the dutch, and later the French—joined the Portuguese in having a translating staff available to them in their factories for their incoming and outgoing correspondence. these men ranged over the scribal hierarchy, from lowly copyists to powerful men like the Armenian go-between Alexandre de l’Estoile, who the French company sent in 1699 to Burhanpur to negotiate with Aurangzeb’s court. de l’Estoile was the third generation of a dynasty that had served the French in this role, and he obviously had

52 Susan Stronge, “‘Far from the Arte of Painting”: An English Amateur Artist at the court of Jahangir’, in Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton, ed. rosemary crill, Susan Stronge and Andrew Topsfield, London, 2004, pp. 129–37.

53 Bodleian Library, oxford, Bodl. or. 492 (Sachau-Ethé no. 1915). 54 Anne Lombard-Jourdan, ‘À propos d’Augustin de Beaulieu: Quelques documents

inédits’, Archipel, no. 56, 1998, pp. 145–56, citation on p. 150. 55 on Pelsaert, see d.H.A. Kolff and H.W. van Santen, eds., De Geschriften van Francisco

Pelsaert over Mughal Indië, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie, the Hague, 1979. 56 nationaal Archief, the Hague, 1.10.30 collectie Geleynssen de Jongh, nr. 100,

‘Briefboek van verscheyde soo becoomen als versonde brieven als formannen int Persiaens geschreven ende int nederlands getranslateert begonnen anno 1639 in Agra’. on this interesting figure, see Hans W. van Santen, VOC-dienaar in India: Geleynssen de Jongh in het land van de Groot-Mogol, Franeker, 2001.

Introduction xxxiii

a degree of autonomy that was not afforded to the simple translator.57 the proliferation of this type of personnel, who would generically have been known as munsh$ıs in northern India and as karanams (or other similar terms) in the southern factories of the Companies, can be verified through an examination of factory payrolls, and similar documents. It is obvious that elaborate distinctions existed between them, in terms of functions as well as status. the simple scribe or copyist, or the translator of elementary documents for day-to-day use was not at all the same as the great merchant-broker, often with social pretensions of an elevated variety. But the terminology in use was often blurred, as we see from the quite promiscuous use of a word like banian in northern and eastern India and dub"ash$ı in the ports of the coromandel coast.58 Initially used even for humble, half-caste translators and go-betweens, by the mid-eighteenth century, the term dub "ash $ı or dub "ash was being used in Madras or Pondicherry to designate powerful magnate figures such as Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709–61), who even had encomia composed for himself in telugu and Sanskrit.59 one of his roles was to be the factotum and go-between to the French governor Joseph-François dupleix, but he also had a significant number of other social roles, and was one of the notable bourgeois pillars of the Pondicherry society of his time.

the question of the place of networks of communication in the transition to the colonial period is thus a complex one, which requires further thought and analysis. the employees and factors of the East India company were never entirely able to free themselves from the suspicion that even as they were exploiting the resources of the Indian subcontinent, they themselves were the dupes of those on whom they depended for information and knowledge. they never quite mastered the typical scribal scripts, such as shikasta (used for Persian) or modi (used for Marathi), or the accounting practices on which both their public administration and their private profiteering depended.60 the image that was often cited in testimony—of a company structure that was undermined and hollowed out by scribal ‘termites’ from the inside—was one

57 See Anne Kroell, ‘Alexandre de Lestoille, dernier agent de la compagnie royale des Indes en Perse’, Moyen-Orient et Océan Indien, no. 1, 1984, pp. 65–72.

58 Susan neild-Basu, ‘the dubashes of Madras’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1984, pp. 1–31. Peter J. Marshall, ‘Masters and Banians in Eighteenth-century calcutta’, in The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia before Dominion, ed. Blair B. Kling and M.n. Pearson, Honolulu, 1979, pp. 191–213.

59 david Shulman, ‘cowherd or King? the Sanskrit Biography of Ananda ranga Pillai’, in Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History, ed. david Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, delhi, 2004, pp. 175–202; r. Alalasundaram, The Colonial World of Ananda Ranga Pillai, 1736–61, Pondicherry, 1998.

60 on these issues, also see the important essay by Bernard S. cohn, ‘the command of Language and the Language of command’, in cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, ed. nicholas B. dirks, Princeton, 1996, pp. 16–56. cohn’s own interesting, but somewhat problematic, discussion of the place of Persian may be found on pp. 16–25.

xxxiv Introduction

that reflected this situation of paranoia and dependence.61 Yet communication was a necessity, and it did happen on a pragmatic and day-to-day basis. We see this in the accumulating ‘country correspondence’ of all the presidency capitals from the late seventeenth century onwards, which was conducted in a variety of languages, but especially in Persian and Marathi. We find important traces of it in the exceptional career of a company servant like James Fraser (1713–54), who had managed by about 1740 to build a significant collection of Persian texts on history, poetry, and other subjects while working in Surat and the surrounding region.62 We discern it equally in other forms of document, be it the Mayor’s court records of Madras and calcutta, or the notarial records of Pondicherry, where Indian and European mercantile and fiscal interests came together and, at times, collided violently. the Calendar of Persian Correspondence presents us with a further opportunity to look into such materials.

III

In the following pages, we will turn from the long-term view that has been our central preoccupation so far, in order to address some questions and issues that pertain to the very first years of Company rule, roughly 1757 to 1772, covered in some of the initial volumes of the Calendar. the period represented a very critical phase of later Mughal history, when the court that was afflicted with several daunting problems eventually lost even the thin veneer that remained of its earlier aura. A century and a half after the arrival of the English and dutch companies in Indian waters, the splendid political theatre at the imperial centre of Jahangir’s or Shahjahan’s rule was simply no longer possible. the contentious nature in political succession in the post-Aurangzeb period had witnessed the rise of new elites from eastern India, most prominently the Sayyid brothers who functioned as kingmakers in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. When the emperor Muhammad Shah finally established a reign of some stability in the 1720s, it was only at the cost of a complete purge of this political class, a matter which appeared to drain all his political will and energy, ushering in an essentially

61 See Bhavani raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chicago, 2012; this work nuances and modifies the earlier view in Robert Eric Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India, oxford, 1965.

62 See A Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Persic, Arabic, and Sanskerrit Languages Collected in the East by James Fraser, London, 1742. Fraser studied Persian in Surat with a certain Mulla Fakhr-ud-din, and then in Khambayat with Shaikh Muhammad Murad.

Introduction xxxv

stagnant period for Mughal rule. In this context, the Mughal empire was ill-equipped to deal with the burgeoning ambitions of various new groups.63

In particular, the rise of new polities at the provincial and sub-imperial level in the post-Aurangzeb period had underlined the inability of the imperial centre to prevent the devolution of power. this included groups which had traditionally existed uncomfortably and often conflictually at the outer edges of the Mughal fold, such as the Sikhs, the Jats and, most importantly, the Marathas. However, it also included those whom the Mughal system had been unable to either mollify or maintain within its control, such as provincial functionaries whose increasing desire for autonomy led to the rise of such semi-independent polities as in Awadh and Bengal. Hyderabad, founded by the great turani noble nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah who had left delhi in disgust at the perceived denigration of the position of the traditional nobility at the court, represented another variation on this theme. Externally too, the eighteenth century witnessed the humiliation of the Mughal empire, as the Iranian ruler nadir Shah defeated them in battle in the late 1730s and then sacked the imperial capital. Moreover, the power of the European companies, chief among them the English East India company, had grown unchecked, unlike the earlier period where Shahjahan or Aurangzeb had periodically stifled their power through attacks on the ports in which they had found a foothold.

It was in this milieu that the East India company won its decisive victory at Plassey in June 1757, an outcome which had possibly surprised the victors as much as the vanquished. nonetheless, the defeat of nawwab Siraj-ud-daula’s alliance allowed the company not only to install Mir Ja‘far as the new puppet nawwab, but also to eliminate the French as a significant force in Bengal, a result which must be read at least partially in light of the Seven Years’ War. Mir Ja‘far quickly signed over the zam$ınd"ar$ı rights to significant swathes of land to the Company but also confirmed a large compensation to them for the losses allegedly sustained in the conflict.

the documents in this collection date from the period immediately after this new phase in the company’s history in India, representing a radical expansion of its political activity much beyond that envisioned by the court of directors in London. In its new role, the company was even more than before a player across practically the whole chessboard of subcontinental politics and its correspondence reflects this fact. It was, therefore, aware of incipient changes at the Mughal centre: the Mughal prince ‘Ali Gauhar, still living in self-imposed exile from delhi in an attempt to escape the clutches of the minister and kingmaker Ghazi-ud-din Khan, wished to make good on his patent for the s"ubad"ar$ı of Bihar province and press into the east. While his coalition was rendered toothless by robert clive’s deft co-option of the powerful governor of

63 For the events of this period, see Satish chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740, 4th edn, delhi, 2002; and Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748, delhi, 1986.

xxxvi Introduction

Allahabad Muhammad Quli Khan, Mir Ja‘far—who was now pressured on the one hand by the company to oppose his advance, and on the other by Ghazi-ud-din to capture the prince and send him as prisoner to delhi—again faced the consequences of his complete reliance upon the company to defend his territories. the prince’s ultimate failure on this occasion, however, did not show the company’s strength alone; it must be seen in the context of larger developments in northern India.64 We may note the circumstances in which the prince fled to the east. The turmoil in the Mughal court in 1740s and 1750s can be linked in part to external challenges, notably by the Abdalis who had succeeded nadir Shah and emerged as a great power in the north-west. the stirrings of Sikh unrest also continued in the period in the Punjab. Further, the nawwabs of Awadh, now largely centring their operations at Faizabad, emerged with ever greater power and autonomy during the reign of Shuja‘-ud-daula.65 However, none of these powers was able to make a significant direct impact on what had been the eastern end of the Mughal empire, where the company’s power was to remain largely unchallenged. When Mir Ja‘far, timidly attempting to eke out some space for political autonomy, refused to grant further concessions to the company, his political days were numbered and he was deposed. An abortive attempt by him to use the dutch as a counter-weight to the company failed when the latter won another decisive victory at the Battle of chinsura in 1759, thus leaving the company with no serious European rivals in Bengal.

It is notable moreover that when the fugitive Mughal prince ‘Ali Gauhar eventually rose to the throne in Allahabad as Shah ‘Alam II, in the face of opposition from the delhi faction, it was very largely because of the company’s support. to be sure, the prince also received some support from the nawwab of Awadh, but this was perhaps of lesser importance. At this time, the company’s appetite for revenue and territory was proving insatiable. thus, very soon after the deposition of Mir Ja‘far in Bengal, when his son-in-law Mir Qasim struck a deal with the company to grant them rights over Burdwan, Midnapur, and chittagong, he realized that for all his political manoeuvring, he was caught between Scylla and charybdis. the newly crowned ‘Ali Gauhar, or Shah ‘Alam, posed a threat to him not so much for his military ambitions in Bengal, but because of the attractions his new status held for the company in seeking an alliance with him. the political theatre of the Mughal court, however subdued, was still not quite over: the symbolic importance of the title of the emperor can be seen perhaps in the fact that Mir Qasim even attempted unsuccessfully to prevent the company from recognizing Shah ‘Alam.

64 See Kalikinkar datta, Shah Alam II and the East India Company, calcutta, 1965; for a contemporary narrative account, see W. Francklin, The History of the Reign of Shah-Aulum, the present emperor of Hindustaun, 1st edn., London, 1798, repr. Lucknow, 1973.

65 Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, The First Two Nawabs of Awadh, 2nd edn, Agra, 1954; idem, Shuja-ud-daulah, 2nd edn., 2 vols., Agra, 1961–74.

Introduction xxxvii

Mir Qasim’s attempted reprieve thus turned upon political manoeuvres related to the symbolic capital still invested in the seat of the Mughal empire. However, far to the north-west, Ahmad Shah Abdali, no longer distracted by interference from the Persian front after the assassination of nadir Shah, and seeking to beat back the perceived threat of the Marathas from the deccan, sent word to Shah ‘Alam to come to take his rightful place in Delhi. Mir Qasim’s own mounting difficulties with the company were those that any subordinate ally might have faced, namely the fact that the company and its servants were constantly undermining his revenue-base. In the late 1710s, the company had received a farm"an from the emperor Farrukhsiyar in regard to dastaks, or passes, for privileged trade in the Gangetic valley.66 now, they increasingly began to expand the use of these passes, offering them promiscuously to others and thus eventually provoking a confrontation with Mir Qasim. this armed conflict began with Mir Qasim’s attack on the Company’s establishment in Patna in 1763, and eventually reached a climax at the Battle of Baksar in october 1764, when the joint armies of Mir Qasim, Shah ‘Alam II, and Shuja‘-ud-daula, were defeated by the Company. Mir Qasim then fled to northern India, where he attempted to build alliances with the Marathas and even Abdali (details of which can be found in the letters of the Persian Correspondence).

The intricacies of the elite politics of these fifteen years in northern India are formidable. Besides the nawwabs of Bengal and Awadh, and the emperor in delhi, an increasingly significant role is played by the Marathas, whose inroads took them as far as the Punjab, and a fragile alliance with some of the Sikh rulers of the area. Even after their defeat at Panipat in January 1761 by an alliance of Ahmad Shah Abdali and his rohila and other auxiliaries, in which they suffered enormous losses, many of the great Maratha sard "ars continued to be a formidable power. After Ahmad Shah’s death in 1773, at the very close of the period surveyed here, his son timur Shah was thus eventually obliged to limit his territorial ambitions. on the other hand, some of the Afghan chiefs who had been allied with the Abdalis, managed as part of the same process to consolidate their newly-founded principalities, encouraged in this process by the delhi court-faction leader Ghazi-ud-din Khan. We can thus observe through the prism of this correspondence that Abdali’s invasion and the subsequent defeat of the Marathas at Panipat did not in fact restore the Mughal emperor to a position of genuine political pre-eminence. However, it did definitively stymie the possibility for the emergence of an independent Maratha empire, unencumbered by symbolic subordination to the Mughals. In Bengal, this had immediate consequences: the company pressured Mir Qasim to invade cuttack, not only as revenge for the Maratha

66 Sukumar Bhattacharya, The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal from 1704 to 1740, London, 1954; Peter J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century, oxford, 1976.

xxxviii Introduction

governor of that place invading Bengal to enforce his tributary claims to chauth, but also in view of the weakened condition of the Marathas after their defeat at Panipat.

If, as these documents amply suggest, the logic of empire provided one set of parameters in defining Bengal as a political space, mercantile machinations provided the other. one of the many reasons Mir Qasim eventually balked at the expedition against cuttack was its prohibitive cost, not only because of the reparations the company demanded for defending the territory but also because of its systematic dismantling of official revenue-extraction channels. The Company’s policy with regard to dastaks, as we have noted briefly above, encouraged rampant smuggling and private duty-free trade among not only the company’s servants but native traders too. Moreover, the company’s activity often displaced native traders, thus reducing the revenue-base of the nawwab. When it became clear that the company was also angling to receive the diw"an$ı, or revenue-collection rights of Bengal, directly from the emperor, Mir Qasim attempted to redress the imbalance by abolishing all duties, thus placing his own subjects on the same footing as the company. the company responded by deposing him and re-installing Mir Ja‘far, who inherited the same impossible situation. As he complained in a letter to the Board in September 1764:

Merchants refuse to pay the customary duties under cover of the protection of English factories. the gum"ashtahs of the company have forcibly taken possession of villages and force tobacco and other goods upon the ta‘lluqd"ars and ryots, whereby the country is desolated and a very heavy loss falls upon the sark"ar. the agents of several Englishmen everywhere buy and sell rice and other grains in the markets and granaries of Bengal, whereby the faujd "ars and other officers are prevented from sending grain to the army […]. The sepoys who are sent from the factories into different parts of the country to hear complaints, desolate the villages and put the ryots to flight by their oppressions, whereby His Excellency’s revenues are greatly injured. the poor of the country who used always to deal in salt, betelnut, tobacco, etc., have now been deprived of their daily bread by the trade of the Europeans.67

So, it is important to underline that the company acted on the one hand as a mercantile entity but, on the other hand, it also continued to have clear and expansive political ambitions; moreover, these ambitions were articulated in a specifically northern Indian idiom. Thus, even as they strengthened their financial position in Bengal, they continued their attempts to co-opt the Mughal emperor in order to consolidate the political standing which underlay their financial success. After the defeat of his ally and supporter Shuja‘-ud-daula at Baksar, and the increasing and consequent subordination of Awadh to the company, Shah ‘Alam found himself with few other suitable allies, since the company’s other European rivals had been largely eliminated by then and the Marathas were dubious allies at best. He thus accepted

67 See Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. 3, Introduction, p. xi. the full letter from Mir Ja‘far itself is calendared in vol. 1, pp. 337–8, as no. 2410.

Introduction xxxix

English protection, perhaps hoping, just as he had hoped before in the case of Abdali, that this strategic realignment would eventually lead to the restoration of past Mughal glory. though these dreams were quickly dashed, with Shah ‘Alam eventually being forced into a position even less favourable than that of the Awadh rulers, the company for its part succeeded in its ambitions of becoming a prominent member of the Mughal political structure, securing the diw"an$ı of Bengal in 1765. Yet, the struggles over the control of the emperor were not at an end. In early 1767, Abdali again invaded. this time, Panipat was not to be repeated: the Sikhs, allied to the Marathas, contented themselves by attacking the flank of his war-party and Abdali sought alliances with the Afghan chieftains of northern India, as well as the emperor and his waz$ır. All except the emperor sent envoys or wak$ıls to the Afghan lord; Shah ‘Alam hesitated, torn between the short-term benefits of Company protection and the long-term hope that his co-religionist would restore his throne to its traditional pre-eminence. the company in its turn viewed the Afghan interloper with suspicion and sought to prevent the Emperor and his waz$ır from joining the alliance, encouraging instead a counter-alliance of Jats, rohillas, and Marathas.68

Abdali’s campaign eventually failed, in part because of its inability to co-opt the emperor, and also because of the rooted resistance of a number of the Sikh polities that had emerged to prominence by that time.69 the company, meanwhile, tightened its stranglehold upon Shah ‘Alam, using his waz$ır to prevent him from returning to delhi, as they foresaw that once out of their protection, he would be vulnerable to capture by the Marathas who, despite the break-up of their confederacy in 1761, were still formidable opponents. Moreover, by 1770 the Marathas had begun a new push to the north, taking on the Jats and the rohillas in attempting to force the emperor to leave Allahabad and come to delhi under their protection and control, so that in his name they could force their various rivals to submit to their authority. Yet, the remarkable feature of this period was that the person of the emperor, or rather control over him, continued to be a much sought-after political prize. one may speculate that it was precisely the precarious balance between these different warring factions that made it necessary to seek some form of external political authority, in this case the grand old tradition of the Mughal empire represented in the sadly reduced form of the emperor Shah ‘Alam. Alternatively, it may have been that a very different imagining of political power and territoriality was now at stake for these players, in which the ultimate goal was not the dynastic take-over of the Mughal empire itself. rather, these various locally-based polities sought not only autonomy from the Mughal centre but eventually to expand within certain sub-imperial parameters. these parameters may

68 For a contemporary view of these processes, see François-Xavier Wendel, Les mémoires de Wendel sur les J"at, les Path"an, et les Sikh, ed. Jean deloche, Paris, 1979.

69 Purnima dhavan, When Sparrows became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699–1799, new York, 2011.

xl Introduction

have been defined by the administrative provinces of the Mughal system as in the case of the company in Bengal, or by other considerations, as in the case of the Marathas for whom, for example, Benares exerted an inexorable attraction as a centre for religious and political authority regardless of its actual physical separation from their traditional homeland.

In any case, the Maratha campaign found some success in that they eventually wrested control of delhi, causing the emperor to march to the capital from Allahabad. Such was the situation that the waz$ır and the company even suspected Shah ‘Alam himself of engineering a Maratha takeover of delhi in order to provide for himself an irrefutable political justification for leaving Company protection. On 26 November 1771, the emperor, accompanied by Madhoji Shinde, marched to Delhi, fulfilling the company’s worst fears. the Marathas thus recovered to an extent in the decade after Panipat to pose threat to the company, though not with a king from their own ilk; rather, they now escorted the Mughal emperor, and established themselves as the powers behind the Mughal throne, notwithstanding the company’s ambitions and opposition.70 this was naturally seen as a threat not only by the ambitious rohila chiefs to the east of delhi, but by many other Muslim ashraf groups as well.

the documents resumed in the Calendar, far from recapitulating a Eurocentric and historically dubious political topos of oriental despotism, rather encourage us to reconsider the nature of the Mughal imperial dispensation in the Age of the company. While they undoubtedly highlight the de facto devolution of imperial power, they also intriguingly bring out the long-lived symbolic capital of Mughal political authority. concomitantly, they invite us to place the company not at the beginning of a teleology of British colonial rule but rather to view the company in part as a political actor of the same ilk as many others in this period of north Indian history. Even the early years of Warren Hastings whose appointment marked a major transformation in the company’s regime were to an extent within the Mughal imperial framework. But there was also a clear difference, for example, between the political careers of the company and the Marathas. this was not due to some essential or civilizational distinction, but rather because of the relative willingness of the former to eventually expand its territorial and political ambitions beyond the sub-imperial level, and thus to pursue its interests unencumbered by the burden of Mughal political tradition.

IV

In this final section, we return briefly to a technical question regarding the nature of the documents in the Calendar of Persian Correspondence. the very nature of a ‘calendar’

70 on the relationship between Shinde and Shah ‘Alam, see the mocking views of a contemporary observer in Kunwar Prem Kishor Firaqi, Waq"a’i‘-i ‘Ālam Sh"ahī, ed. Imtiyaz ‘Ali Khan ‘Arshi, rampur, 1949.

Introduction xli

is to resume, and in this process it is inevitable that a large part of the flavour of the document, as well as some of its content, might come to be lost. contemporary translations of some of these letters are to be found in former governor Henry Vansittart’s extensive apologia, Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal from the Year 1760 to 1764, along with many English documents of the same period; others can be found for example in publications by H.H. Wilson, or in James Long’s Selections from the Unpublished Records, which appeared in the mid-nineteenth century.71 We may also note a particular difficulty: as pointed out by E. Denison Ross in his preface, the early part of the Calendar ‘is based entirely on documents written in the English language’, whose originals have been lost. He adds that ‘the earliest documents in Persian date from 1766 and these are copies: the earliest originals date from 1778’. Still, in order to allow the reader some of the flavour of these materials, we present our own translations of some letters from the period, followed by the Persian texts.72 We hope thereby to further pique the interest of scholars, and encourage them not merely to use this Calendar, but eventually to use it as an aid to explore the very large corpus of Persian documents of this period themselves, both in the national Archives of India and elsewhere. the letters that we reproduce and translate here are taken from the Persian manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (MS. Supplément Persan 478; Blochet catalogue 710). Some of these letters may also be found in other collections, such as the British Library, Add. 5634, Add. 6592, and Add. 7052, or in archives in Patna and Kolkata.

71 Henry Vansittart, A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal, from the year 1760, to the year 1764, 3 vols., London, 1766; James Long, Selections from Unpublished Records of Government for the years 1748–1767 inclusive relating mainly to the Social Condition of Bengal, with a Map of Calcutta in 1784, calcutta, 1869. Some letters were published in the original with a translation by John Shakespear in H.H. Wilson, ‘documents Illustrative of the occurrences in Bengal, in the time of the Nawábs Mír Jaffier and Kásim Alí Khán’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 13, 1832, pp. 115–45.

72 A presentation of some Persian texts and translations was made in the early nineteenth century in charles Stewart, Original Persian Letters and Other Documents, with facsimiles, London, 1825. But that work, also called Insh"a’-yi Jadīd, draws on a variety of genres, of which few are the political correspondence of the type in this calendar.

contEMPorArY docuMEntS, tEXtS, And trAnSLAtIonS

1. [F.1A] tHE MArAtHA KInG’S ordEr 1. [f. 1a] The Maratha King's Order

!"#$ %&'&( ) *+,$ %&'&( ) -"./&'&( ) 0123/&'&( ) 45.6&( )758"95'&( )1:5.35(; .<:"' 75=67>3$? 76@/ 1<5AB 83/)7C5( #2D &AE"F ) &A6.5 #"%G; 1,+"H I<5=3/ 9$ 0' #/' @J"'#69K L3M"'; N26 OPQ;."&( #EK; %O"R %&'45S 4EK; 9T"' 9T5R; 1+B #ET5R; 1:5'&.$ -+B %'.$; L2CU N35G; '&.$ 758" V+/ W 1+>$ ) OX<C$; @Y$? '#Z &0 1[Y"\ 1<5AB #6&R 1Y5'F ."&I5( .3]M"R ) 7^585( _26V"R 16@<K ) 13X"' _/G. #6&R 4P/=` &=D V/1K #3/G %'L5G O5AU .5G 4,2D LTC$.

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2. [ff. 4b, 5a] Letter of the Governor of Fort William to Mir Qasim

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(1) An Eighteenth-century Maratha decree (Hasb-ul-Hukm), f. 1a.

May it be known to the s"ubad "ars, qil‘ad"ars, faujd "ars, zam$ınd"ars, merchants, moneylenders (s"ahuk"ars), mah"ajans, and all the residents of the countries of Hindustan, they being between fear and hope (bain al-khauf wa al-raj "a ), that of the monies belonging to the Mah"ar"aja who is honourable, gracious, mature in wisdom, young in fortune, claimant to the crown and throne which conquers the whole country and gifts it away [to others], whose stature is as high as the heavens, and is the refuge of the world, [namely] raja Sahu—may God keep his power and country forever—one-quarter of the

Introduction xliii

revenues of these countries have been bestowed upon and approved for the expenses of lion-like young warriors; and this slave of the exalted court has been deputed to carry out this service.

this is written in accordance with the high-statured command [of the raja], that they carry the carpet of obedience and submission upon their shoulders and enter the circle of unquestioning loyalty and devotion, and in all honesty and rectitude, indicate to my agents in every district wherefrom this one-fourth of revenue should come. In this way, their life, property and dignity will remain safe and secure. otherwise, they may expect the victorious army to raze in a moment the entire country to the ground in such a manner that not a single trace of the population will be found [thereafter] and men, women, and children, captured and slaughtered in the hands of [soldiers] bearing arrows and spears will be completely destroyed.

If they deviate from the path of obedience, thinking in their arrogance that the [Mughal] emperor will help them, they will taste the sherbet of death and see the consequences. Several times [in the past] the country of Gujarat and Malwa, nay even several districts and the forts of the rajas of Hind, have been trampled under the hooves of the horses of the victorious army. Shuja‘at ‘Ali Khan in Gujarat and raja Girdhar in Malwa, along with their huge armies and innumerable weapons, came to contend [with us]; they could not bear the power of the victorious army. In the blink of an eye they all were eventually captured and slaughtered. What revenge and what compensation could come from your emperor from Akbarabad, which they had thought to be an impregnable fort? the fort there is nothing more than an ordinary wall. With the force of thundering battering rams and fire-hurling cannons, I will destroy the stones of that fort so that they will blow away like the cotton of a cotton-carder and will be destroyed completely and become extinct.

[Editorial Note: this is an example of the Maratha use of Mughal rhetoric, demonstrating the sort of arrogance on their part which other actors in the eighteenth century complained about. It is especially interesting in light of the later rescue (or, if one prefers, capture) of the figure of the emperor by the Marathas.]

xliv Introduction

1. [f. 1a] The Maratha King's Order

!"#$ %&'&( ) *+,$ %&'&( ) -"./&'&( ) 0123/&'&( ) 45.6&( )758"95'&( )1:5.35(; .<:"' 75=67>3$? 76@/ 1<5AB 83/)7C5( #2D &AE"F ) &A6.5 #"%G; 1,+"H I<5=3/ 9$ 0' #/' @J"'#69K L3M"'; N26 OPQ;."&( #EK; %O"R %&'45S 4EK; 9T"' 9T5R; 1+B #ET5R; 1:5'&.$ -+B %'.$; L2CU N35G; '&.$ 758" V+/ W 1+>$ ) OX<C$; @Y$? '#Z &0 1[Y"\ 1<5AB #6&R 1Y5'F ."&I5( .3]M"R ) 7^585( _26V"R 16@<K ) 13X"' _/G. #6&R 4P/=` &=D V/1K #3/G %'L5G O5AU .5G 4,2D LTC$.

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2. [ff. 4b, 5a] Letter of the Governor of Fort William to Mir Qasim

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3. [ff. 6a-7a] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

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2. [FF.4B, 5A] LEttEr oF tHE GoVErnor oF Fort WILLIAM to MIr QASIM

(2) Letter from the East India company’s Governor, Henry Vansittart, to the nawwab of Bengal, ff. 4b-5a.

o kind, merciful, high-statured Majesty, kind to brothers and sincere friends, may you remain protected (sal"amat)….

[First three lines of conventional compliments omitted]

It was agreed with reference to the internal trade in salt, tobacco, betel-nut and dried fish, that they could be bought in this country from the different places where they are for sale. the cess upon purchase was stipulated to be nine per cent. However, the faujd "ars and ‘ "amils have not taken this agreement into account. they are creating

Introduction xlv

obstacles in all matters pertaining to trade. In matters of sale and purchase, etc., relating to the company, they are assessing tax even on purchases of cloth, etc., in the name of company and under the seal of the company, over which there is no cess according to the dastak. ram Kant Haldar, the agent of the special trade of Your Excellency, who is posted in Shantipur, sent some foot-soldiers (piy "ada) with Shaikh Haibat Allah, the ‘"amil of that area, and disregarding the dastak of the company, collected rs. 110 forcibly as cess. Khwaja Iskatik via Khwaja Waris, the agent of Your Excellency ("an mehrab"an), who is posted in Jahangirnagar [dhaka], had sent twenty-seven bolts (ganth) of cloth out of a total of thirty, and was to send the remainder later. Muhammad ‘Ali Beg, tahs $ıld "ar, created a hindrance and captured all the cloth, demanding a cess upon it. Strict instructions regarding this were issued to all the ‘"amils and the faujd "ars that they should not without any reason or rhyme impose the cess. I have come to know [of your instruction], and the translations of the letters of the agents were also brought to my notice.

o kind friend (mushf $ıq "a), the reason for this problem and dispute is those businessmen and merchants whose names are already registered and who have always paid the cess. these days Your Grace is purchasing goods through them. Because of this reason, your ‘"amils do not know whether this merchandise is yours or of these merchants (sard"ars). By the grace of God, the agent and koth$ı are present everywhere. Why do you not purchase the goods in the koth$ı itself through your own agent? If the transactions are made through your own agents at the koth$ı, then there will be no possibility of the other merchants having a share over that, and thus there would never arise any dispute amongst the people. Because you are purchasing merchandise from these businessmen and because the cess was collected from them, but is realized now on these transactions, the problem arose. therefore, please pay attention to this and see that the transactions of the goods [for you] are not made through ordinary merchants, so that no reason for mutual dispute and discord arises. What more can I write [about this]?

[Editorial Note: This document is interesting in the context of semi-official trade in Bengal in this period, which had given rise to mutual distrust and suspicion. We see a high Company official’s perspective on the matter. Henry Vansittart (1732–70) was a merchant of dutch origin, who joined the company at the age of thirteen, and served in Madras. He was then President of the council and Governor of Fort William from 1760 to 1764, succeeding robert clive.]

xlvi Introduction

3. [FF. 6A-7A] LEttEr oF MIr QASIM to tHE GoVErnor oF Fort WILLIAM

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3. [ff. 6a-7a] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

IPQ N6)&I$? .35v O5AU 126 *57` O+U V5( #35H L"'I6 !5@c

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0=5%G n$y

4. [ff. 7a-8b] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

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3. [ff. 6a-7a] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

IPQ N6)&I$? .35v O5AU 126 *57` O+U V5( #35H L"'I6 !5@c

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Introduction xlvii

(3) Letter of Mir Qasim ‘Ali Khan to the Governor of the company, nawwab Shams ud-daula Henry Vansittart, ff. 6a–7a.

I received your letter of 26th of the month of rajab, which gladdened my heart […].It was written that in regard to the siege of Cuttack, it was the benefit of this

humble person that you had in mind, not the good of the company. Earlier, it had been written that the expenses of the army of the company would come from the treasury of this humble person. now, from your letter written in [all] sincerity, you think that I am unhappy with this arrangement, and for this reason, it being a wasteful expense for the sark"ar and considered improper for the company, an end has been put to it. However, if there is any need, and if I require the services of the English army, it will [apparently] be provided. It has now been quite a while that the province of cuttack had fallen out of the control of the niz"amat into Maratha hands. now there is a fresh intervention needed in the matter and whatever expenses the company will incur in Bengal in this connection, I will undertake to cover. And whatever had occurred before this agreement regarding the niz"amat should also be remembered, which is as follows: that in the areas connected to the naww "ab$ı, wherever any zam$ınd"ar or others create mischief, the army of the company will come to the aid of the naww"ab$ı for their chastisement.

o kind friend, from the beginning until now, at what time has this humble servant uttered a word or written something which has given you the impression that I do not consider these tasks as being for my benefit, but [only] for the benefit of the company? Why then are you writing such a letter to me? God is my witness that from the very beginning, in the heart of this humble servant, there has been the belief that whatever work or deed you have done or dealt with is exclusively for my benefit, and that I have not felt any resentment in my heart. You know well the meanness and the low mentality of the Hindi [Mughal] army, [and] that from the time of the past emperors and the governors, they have not performed their duties for their master adequately. It was stated that from the income and expenses of cuttack, if and when it came back into [our] possession (mud"akhalat), five to six lakhs of rupees would be given over. now, in this matter, huge amounts of money from my own household (kh"ana-i khud) have to be spent. For this reason, there is now hesitation in this matter. And where has the s"uba of Bengal been under the full control of the niz"amat that you are raising the issue of cuttack being out of the jurisdiction of the niz"amat? nawwab Mir Muhammad Ja‘far Khan had handed over to the Marathas the district of Birbhum and other areas in the neighbourhood to a distance of ten miles (panj karoh), and the back-pay of the army amounted to two crores of rupees. the kind of lack of administration and the variety of problems that emerged in those days is not hidden from you. When this humble servant accepted the niz "amat, I had thought that something substantial would come of this. I did not know that in the house of Ja‘far ‘Ali Khan, all that would be available would be the sum of 40,000 rupees. It was only because of attention and help from you ("an-s"ahib), that the Marathas were expelled

xlviii Introduction

from Birbhum and other areas of Bengal and ‘Azimabad [Patna]; and having expelled them, control over Bihar and Bengal was established, and the debt owed to the army was [thus] reduced. this was all possible through your kindness and help and not because of the Hindi [Mughal] army which was already there in the time of Mir Muhammad Ja‘far Khan. My pen is incapable of expressing in how many ways you and the English army have aided this humble servant. My heart is aware that if you had not bestowed your attention [on me], such a good and efficient administration would never have been possible. Instead, things would have become worse than what they had been in the time of Mir Muhammad Ja‘far Khan. [nonetheless] this humble servant is in a kind of dilemma, that the same mutasadd $ıs and mah"ajans who in the time of the earlier governors would have arranged 10-20 lakhs of rupees and done the work of the niz"amat are now unwilling to pay to me even 2,000 rupees. Above all, it is necessary for me to remit the treasury to the imperial centre and also arrange the payment of salaries to the soldiers. thus I can barely express to you the kind of anxiety that I am facing. Janko nayak, the wak$ıl of Janoji the Maratha, has been sent with a response. Please find out and write how much would be required for the monthly expenses of the company’s army that will be sent to cuttack. If it is possible, I will certainly try to arrange it. In case of my inability to carry it out, I will certainly inform you; because the rule of my faith makes it [next-to] impossible to deviate from what has been agreed. Whatever you write in this matter, I will do accordingly. What more [can I write]?

[Editorial Note: this letter clearly emerged in the context of the company’s offer to help Mir Qasim to help re-establish naww "ab$ı authority in cuttack immediately after he was raised to power. It gives us an insight into Mir Qasim’s understanding of his problems. the Maratha ruler referred to is Janoji Bhonsle of nagpur; cuttack at this time was under the control of his subordinate Shiv Bhat Santra, apparently a Gosain by origin. For an edited version of this letter with a rather confused English translation, see H.H. Wilson, ‘documents Illustrative of the occurrences in Bengal’, pp. 124–30. the Wilson version of the text is however slightly more complete than that in the Paris manuscript.]

Introduction xlix

4. [FF. 7A-8B] LEttEr oF MIr QASIM to tHE GoVErnor oF Fort WILLIAM

95' IX51K *t"\ 96%G #"%; 1U %&IbK 9$ n2rR #/7K V"&8/ o1/. 1,+"H It"% 9$ e26 &0 n:Q 8r&' ')N2$ &0 V5I$? .,k6 O+U V5( #6 IE"&8/ o1/. 1[‹ #C".$ ) &1/&% o( !5@c e32` '& &0 #26#:"H )e26G #/' 75VC$; %' !"#$? #3]5A$ ) OX2` o#5% 1/&V+K I<"%G; ) &0 %=D 7^5G 4Ek2ç @5!Q _/G. &=3:<$ #/7C]26Œ o( 1Tk} &7K; I$ &0 &1/&% -"S 83/R. 0=6& 9$ &=3:5 Ir% I"&v 126 1[</ .,k6 V5( 8` #"%I/ ) o( 1Tk} 86L"I$ ) #:6 O3"&( 9$ %7C]26R ) &1/&% #6 &@P6 ) -"S &@P6 &0 &-"&S &I]6=rR -61"%G &I/; V51$ '& n$ =5'& 9$ #6 0#5( 4"&I/ o)'%y %\ &0=D 1,3U oL5G &L6 1:6#5IÅ _6=ç 1Y6)F &@"&\ &@P6 I<U #"%; &=D */' &ICX5H ) #:C6Œ 95'85R &=D .5Ic #".:U #X:"' I<U '72/; #+>$ #3btK &@"&\ 126 1[</ .,k6 V5( #/46 12T/. ) &@P6 %' OMc @5AK 1E<Y$ L6-C5' &7K 9$ 1CY/=5( 75#} I5&IY5F ) 1:5.35( 9$ #"*K I5l<5( N2T2D %G ) #2bK AB ')N2$ %&%G 95'')&‘Å IX51K 1U 96%I/; @5d %' %&%( %) 8r&' ')N2$ &0=D .5Ic nT` N"_U 1U I<5=3/. ) O{)G &=D Vr&I$ #[J"' )&d &'75\ %&_CD ) f+c 43E"&G? 7^5G %&%( €6)'. %'=D !"'h I["R 9$ 4T"=z ) 9/)'h85 d@} &7K 45 n3/ _6~ %8/. &A[5\ 9$ .3>" I5=B )92Q .5I".Å 168C$ '& ."&v %&%G 'VYK 96%G _/; V6‡ %'158$? -"S 9<^3U 9$ #„6F 9CB ')&I$ V"&8/ _/ n$ */' V"&8/ #"% &'*5H #5=/ -61"% 9$ oI6& %'=5-C$ &L6 O:/G #6&Œ V"% V"&8/ %=/; &AtC$ &0 &IM5H o( V"&8/ 9"_2/; ) %' !"'h O/H O:/G #6&R &0 *6&'%&% 4k5)h #,<Q o)'%( &0 o‘2D &=<5( #26)( &7K. %'=D 15%G *b<U 9$ #6 I]5'I/ #/&( 1".c #,<Q o)'%G _"%.

0=5%G n$y

4. [ff. 7a-8b] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

IPQ N6)&I$? .35v O5AU #]"'I6 !5@c

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0=5%G n$y

4. [ff. 7a-8b] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

IPQ N6)&I$? .35v O5AU #]"'I6 !5@c

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) 86L5G #E5f6 4"%% 1X586 1C[P} &7K 9$ &L6 %) n:5' !/ L"'G &0 #6&%'&( 1Tk} f+t2/G _"%; &AtC$ V"&83/ %&%. Nê #6&R n$ n:5' ) N3Ž Ik6 L"'G 1EkU %&_C$ _"%y ) 4PY26 7M5( 73]$ n2bKy &=D .5Ic %' *+,$ O<Q I/&%. 7ttz &=D 9$ 1bC6 1a9"' #5 &=D .5Ic 76&76 #<E5AkK %'N2z o1/G; #/L"=2:5 1U I<5=/ ) #5 1E5Ak5( &=D .5Ic 16&7{h %&'%; #M5R 9$ =B '*,$ 9k5=K 1U 93/; %) !/ 16%H 4+3]$ 4,2D 1U I<5=/; )oIŠ$ #o( 1:6#5( 1U I"=b3/ 1[‹ %')• &7K. &=D .5Ic V"v 4[P2} I<"%G 9$ %' *+,$? 1"I]26 L"'G85 1k6)'G? &I]6=rR I2bC3/. 45 9$ !5@t5( 9"IbQ O/&AK &=D 1,3U I>6%G o%H &0 oIM5 IE"&83/ -67K ) ')R 95pv '& 725G IE"&83/ 75VK; &=D .5Ic 4{g *+,$ 86Lr IE"&8/ %&%. 0=6&9$ 1T5' &A2$ &16)0 &=D &4:5H I<"% ) o( 1:6#5( #<".c I"_C$? &)_5( #U 4[P2} #6&R 4{g %&%( *+,$ &'*5H 1U -615=3/. ')0 %=]6 &L6 #3"=b3/ 9$ 9bU O{*$ %&' #5 L"'G %' %=6G =5 #["=+Å &@P6 &7K ) &@P6 1E5Aç 9<^3U &7K; _5=/ 9$ o( 1Tk} oI6& #5)' %&_C$ &0=D .5Ic #/1X3$ _"I/ ) #6&R 4{g %&%( o( &'*5H -615=3/. 0=5%G n$ #6f6&0%y

5. [ff. 8b-9b] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

IPQ N6)&I$? .35v O5AU #]"'I6 !5@c

16*"H V51$? &4[5% _<51$ _/G #"% 9$ Ir% &@P6 O6€<3/&( V"&83/ #"% 9$ #E{F I<5‘U &'&%G %&'I/ 9$ 15#2D &=D .5Ic ) 76%&'&( I5V"_U #:` '7/. %'=D 1,3U 4k[‰ #>5' #6%G o( 1CE+Q '& #br&R )&*,U #675I/.

!5@c 1D; %'=D 1P/1$ oIŠ$ &@P6 #P+` 1U o'% V"v e"' #5=/ 96% 9$ &0 45'=EU 9$ &=D .5Ic &0&( 1:6#5( *"\ ) O:/ 96%G ) #3/)#bK I<"%G &0oIM5 O50H &=D !"v _/G &7K; L58U #6V{F o( &0 =B o%H ) 76%&' ) 7^58U ) 9TCU ) &.35j 1C,+P$? o( 1:6#5( 1C,6” I]TC$. ) I$ #6&R -615=T5h ) #:6=5h 1,<"AU 1[5d4U 9$ #C3E"&G 9<^3U 1P6' I<"%G #5_2/G &7K; =B N25%G -67C5%G #+>$ 1„+} &0&( %7K #6%&' _/G; ) %' 82“ 1P/1$? o( 1[5dh V„U #5( 1:6#5( I3"_C$.

4. [ff. 7a-8b] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

!"#$ %&'()* +,#- .#/0 12&34%5 67&

189:; <=#>'?* @89(A& B(AC <DE* B($4 F#GHC %EC IJ?KJ 12;(L%; @2A0%M N#O,3 12;#& +;3%P.<Q#R STG/; 4 '4%T; #EU>%VQ

l Introduction

(4) Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Bengal, ff. 7a-8b (apparently dated 26 March 1762).

Your letter of the 17th of Sha‘ban [1175 H.] arrived and I have come to know the good news of your wellbeing and my heart was gladdened. You wrote that Mr. Ellis sought a letter from Maharaja Ballab, the deputy in ‘Azimabad, in the name of Sujan Singh, qil‘ad"ar of Munger, and [Ballab], considering himself the deputy of this humble servant, wrote and handed over the letter. the said qil‘ad"ar did not allow the sergeant (sarjan) to enter the fort to investigate the matter of the white men (gora-h"a), and for this reason he became the cause of a conflict. [You ask that] an order (parw "ana) to investigate the matter of the white men in that fort should be sent to the qil‘ad"ar. And in case their presence in the fort is proven, Sujan Singh should be admonished.

o kind friend, all that you have written is true. But since the time when I took over the matter of the niz"amat, I have done careful investigations and have found out that some English s"ahibs are against me. the country is not under my control. I could not discover the reason for their lack of support for me, but you, kind friend, will know it. the reason of my not being in control of the country is as follows. From the koth$ı of calcutta to Qasimbazar, from ‘Azimabad to Jahangirnagar, all sard"ars, agents, and other officials posted therein, in each district of the niz"amat including the areas of all ‘uhdad"ar$ıs, ij"arad "ar$ıs, zam$ınd"ar$ıs, and ta‘alluqd"ar$ıs, have raised the flag of the Company and do not allow any power to my ‘"amils. In addition, these agents and other officials, in each mahal, in each ganj, in each pargana, in each village, are making transactions and trading in oil, fish, straw and bamboo, rice, shali and betel-nut. Holding the dastak of the company in their hands, they all consider themselves no less than the company. In such a situation, the power of this humble servant has never existed and will never exist until my dying breath. But I did believe that you, kind friend, in this particular case, would listen to the plea of my petitioners, and that whatever deviation from the rule (bid‘at) by the said agents they would bring to your noble notice, you would censure and correct. now, having received your letters twice, it has become clear to me that whatever I write to you is presented to you as false, and that whatever the s"ahibs, with the intention of humiliating me and creating distrust in me, write about me you believe. I cannot help it (mahall-i n"ach"ar$ıst).

When the above-mentioned Maharaja [allegedly] gave the letter [to Mr Ellis], at that time this humble servant was camping at a distance of four to six miles (do seh karoh) from ‘Azimabad. While I was present, [how could] he give the letter without consulting me? Furthermore, he flatly denies that he gave the letter. From the letter of the Maharaja that I forwarded to you, this must have been clear to you. If he wrote the letter and is lying to me, it does cause a rupture in our relations. Justice then demands that I punish him adequately (saz"a-yi w"aqi‘$ı ) so that nobody in future causes such a rupture. How can you imagine that Sujan Singh would allow anyone to enter the fort? there is a huge difference between a delegation of the company and the

Introduction li

arrival of a single sergeant. As a matter of fact, because of the absence of any difference between me and the company army, and because the fort belongs to you as well as to me, the white men would never be kept in there. And what power does Sujan Singh have that he would keep them in the fort without informing me? And what purpose of mine would be accomplished by capturing and keeping four or five whites in the fort, which causes mistrust and ill-feeling between us friends? All the more as in my heart your love is so fully established that I know that if I asked even for two to four hundred white brothers, you would certainly send them. then, for what reason would I hide four or five white men? What is the fault of Sujan Singh? I didn’t allow the sergeant to enter the fort, because the above-mentioned Mister [Ellis] who went there is totally against me, speaks ill of me, and is in correspondence with my opponents. Instead of sending a letter (ruq‘a), he deployed two hundred tilangis, and whatever he writes to you is absolutely false. I have verified it fully; there are no white defectors (mafr"ur) in the fort. until the council members do justice to this matter and send a man there, to find out the truth and colour the face of the liar black, I will not conduct a fresh investigation. the reason [for this stand of mine] is that simply because this fellow is casting this aspersion upon me today, you write asking to make a search inside the fort based on his letter without your [own independent] investigation. If he writes tomorrow that an ‘il"aqad "ar or a white man is with me in my residence or mansion, and that I am hostile to the company, perhaps you will accept that, will lose trust in me, and will write asking for my palace to be searched too.

[Editorial Note: this fascinating letter shows Mir Qasim’s frustration at the ways in which private actors, drawing upon the authority of the company, undermined his own power and jurisdiction as well as his assertion of control over the administrative system and trust in his officials. There is an interesting critique of the Company’s administration, which is over-willing, in his opinion, to trust in the unsubstantiated claims of its own agents like William Ellis, the Agent at Patna. In tone, this is in sharp contrast to the previous letter, where Mir Qasim adopts a conciliatory and almost obsequious stance with regard to the company. A somewhat different translation of this letter appears in Vansittart, Narrative of Transactions, vol. 2, pp. 1–6.]

lii Introduction

5. [FF. 8B-9B] LEttEr oF MIr QASIM to tHE GoVErnor oF Fort WILLIAM

1:6#5I5; 86L5G &0 f6F &=D .5Ic @69CU 9$ 1".c 4E5Aç &f"&' %)7CU ) O:"% #5_/; #X:"' I672/G. Nê #5=/ %'=5-K 9$ %' 1M+ê ) Ir% &@P6 n]"I$ .5R L3M5=z 9bU V+Q &I/&0 O6” L" 4"&I/ #"%y ) &f"&' 76%&'&( o( !5@c &=D &7K 9$ V+Q %' 1+B &=D .5Ic &I/&VC$; 'O5=5 '& 45'S 1U 933/ ) 9<6 #6 7t>Å 95'85R &=D .5Ic #bC$ 16%15( &=D .5Ic '& #U o#6) ) #U @61K 1U I<5=3/. ) &0 76@/ 83/)7C5( 45 9+>C$ ')&%&' VkK ) 7t>Å &=D .5Ic _/G &I/; ) %' 86 N6L3$ ) 86 %G; %G %G #2bK #2bK 9"4:Å I" &@/&q *5=` 96%G ) IT5( ) .:3/G85 ) %7CB 9<^3U #6N5 ) I<"% 75VC$ #5p=K ) &€6&' 'O5=5 ) #2"N5'=5( )e26G 16%H 1+>U .:/ #+2è %&'I/. ) o( !5@c 9$ N2z &0=D #35#6 4k[‰ 9TC2:5 %7C>5h &0 1:6 V"% %'7K 96%G -67C5%G #"%I/; &=D .5Ic %' 86 n"925h -67C5%G #"%. 16%15( &I]6=rR o( %7C>5h '& 86Lr 13X"' I<U %&'I/; #+>$ #r% ) #bK 1bC,/ _/G &=D .5Ic '& #U @61K 75VC3/ ) 1U 750I/. ) &=D 9"4:2:5R I" &@/&q #6N5 75VC$ 95'85‘U 9$ .5'R 96%G &I/ I5H o( L58U %' 9<^3U IT32/G. ) 86 L<5_C$? #3]5AU %' 86 9"4:U 83]51$ o'& LTC$ V"% '& 9` &0 9<^3U I<U %&I/; ) %' 86 N6L3$ ) 86 %G ) 86 9"4:U I<B ) 7^5'R ) ')eD 0'% ) #6IŽ ) 95G ) #5Iê ) 158U ) 45h ) &%'m ) n23U ) 43t59" ) N+^Q ) N2{1"\ ) &-2"( V6=/ ) -6)VK 1U I<5=3/. ) 7"&R &=D #b25' n2r85 &7K 9$ 45 n3/ I5H o( I"_C$ _"% ) I"_C3z #,2/ &0 1357c &7K. ) &1"&\ ) &.35j 'O5=5 ) #2"N5'=5( )e26G #r)' 1U L26I/ ) #M5R *2<K =B ')N2$ N" ')N2$ 1U %83/ ) 15\ =B ')N2$ '& &0 '&G .t6 ) 4,/R #P2<K N3Ž ')N2$ p1$ %&'Œ 'O5=5 )e26G 1U I<5=3/. ) &751U 9$ %' 7695' 15A]a&'R !/ ')N2$ 1U I<5=/ &)'& #6&R N3Ž ')N2$ 1U #3/I/ ) -J2[K 1U 933/; ) o%H &=D .5Ic '& O<Q I<U %83/. @5d *6=c n:5' ) N5IY/ 9"4:Å I" &@/&q %' 1[5\ 1C,+P$ &=D .5Ic 1P6' ) *5=` _/G &7K. ) %' 86 9"4:U oIP/' 83]51$ N6%&0R ) &=a& '75IU #5@"&\ e6#5 ) 'O5=5 &7K 9$ 45 n3/ _6~ %8/. O51{( 86 1>5( &0 O<+/&'R #50 15I/G &I/.

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6. [ff. 33b-34a] Special Letter (shuqqa) of the Emperor

!"#$% & !'#() "*+,)- ./0) & .1#") "23()- 45&6 7#ˆ &AE5ˆ #T<"\ .{=Q O"&fç N5%_58U 1,r0 ) 1t58U #"%G #/&I3/.

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5. [ff. 8b-9b] Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of Fort William

IPQ N6)&I$? .35v O5AU #]"'I6 !5@c

16*"H V51$? &4[5% _<51$ _/G #"% 9$ Ir% &@P6 O6€<3/&( V"&83/ #"% 9$ #E{F I<5‘U &'&%G %&'I/ 9$ 15#2D &=D .5Ic ) 76%&'&( I5V"_U #:` '7/. %'=D 1,3U 4k[‰ #>5' #6%G o( 1CE+Q '& #br&R )&*,U #675I/.

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Introduction liii

(5) Letter of Mir Qasim to the Governor of the East India company, Henry Vansittart, ff. 8b-9b (received in May 1762).

Your letter gladdened my heart. You wrote in that letter that here in my presence, there are some petitioners (‘arzmand"an) who intend to create discontent between myself and the [English] sard"ars, and that you wanted me to investigate this so that the disturbers receive proper punishment. o my dear s"ahib, please consider carefully whatever I write [below] in this regard. From the date when the agreement between my part and your kind self took place, arrangements were made accordingly. After that I came here, and from then onwards there has never been any interference in [matters] pertaining to your men, sard"ars, sip"ah$ıs, boats, and goods. nor for customary dues has any piy"ada been sent to the districts that are earmarked for the remuneration (tankhw "ah) of the company. Instead, I have been completely hands-off and have written not a single letter regarding any matter of those districts. o kind sir, in this situation, when from this side there has not occurred any act which could be contrary to the norms and conduct of our friendship and contract, you should consider the reason why in my assembly there could be room for anyone to interfere and create discord. [on the contrary] the behaviour of your sard"ars is [as follows]. they have created disturbances in my country, they plunder the subjects (ri‘"ay"a ) and having girded their loins they have decided to disrupt my tasks (k"arh"a-yi $ın j"anib). they insult and humiliate my people, and from the frontier of Hindustan up to calcutta, they denigrate me and insult me. In each pargana and each village, they have established ten to twenty [illegitimate] koth$ıs and having established over them their standards and insignia, they are fully engaged in torturing and inflicting damages on the subjects and traders.

the letter that your kind self had earlier sent under your seal (dastak) regarding an investigation into the boats, and which I circulated in each chauk$ı, the English people refused to acknowledge it. Instead, they were intent upon violently humiliating me and conspired against me. I have never heard from the company about the work that they are trying to pursue in these newly established koth$ıs. Further, the Bengalis posted within these koth$ıs have raised a commotion and each of them considers himself to be no less than the company. In every pargana, in every village, in every koth$ı [there is] unrestricted trade in salt, betel-nut, ghee, rice, straw, bamboo, fish, gunny (t"at), ginger, sugar, tobacco, chillies (pilpil), turmeric (p$ıl"a m"ul), opium, and many other things which I do not think it appropriate to write here. they forcibly take the goods and commodities of the subjects and [indigenous] traders, paying just a quarter-rupee for goods which are worth one rupee and taking five rupees when they should only take one rupee. People who pay hundred rupees as revenues are imprisoned and humiliated for the sake of five rupees (wa as"am$ı kih dar sark"ar m"alguz"ar$ı-yi sad r"upiya m$ı num"ayad, "u r"a bar "a’i panj r"upiya m$ı bandand wa faz$ıhat m$ı kunand), and my people are obstructed from their duties. At the moment, about four to five hundred new koth$ıs have been erected in the districts belonging to me, and in every koth $ı I cannot recount how many tortures and how much mischief they inflict upon the subjects and poor

liv Introduction

people. All the ‘"amils are prevented from working and due to all these innovations and the [resulting] absence of revenue-collection and obstruction in the work of our chauk$ıd"ars, there has been a loss of some twenty to twenty-five lakhs of rupees in our treasury. In this case, how can I perform my duties and how can I send the emperor his due from Bengal, and how can I discharge the necessary expenditures for the soldiers and so on and so forth?

In dinajpur pargana, I sent ram nath Bhaduri as ‘ "amil. Where there had previously been one koth$ı, there are now twenty koth$ıs in a single ganj. My ‘"amil has sent me a report of the number of koth$ıs, listing the names of the agents, which I am forwarding to you unchanged. Please read it. Each koth$ı is independent there and each wants the ‘"amil to sit idly and [even] wants to evict him. therefore, please consider my concerns immediately regarding the fact that the company is now involved in trading goods like straw and bamboo, over which it previously had no jurisdiction. Further, those commodities and districts which I have given to the company are useless (ch$ıze k"ar nam$ı d"arad) [to me]. now, unavoidably, in this way, those districts which from your side came into our jurisdiction have also been rendered useless. Whatever I had agreed to with God’s grace, there has not been, nor is, nor will there be any failing. then, why do these English lords annul my efforts (subuk wa khaf $ıf m$ı s"azand)? And why do they tolerate my continued losses? do concern yourself with these matters at once so that no further negligence occurs, since this is the cause of the decline of the management of the administration and of my own total ruin (nuqs"an-i tam"amtar). What more can I write beyond this? May the days of our unity and success continue forever.

[Editorial Note: this is a much sharper critique of the circumstances in which Mir Qasim was trapped. Again, a translation appears in Vansittart, Narrative of Transactions, vol. 2, pp. 98-102. the Persian text, with a few errors, and another translation appear in H.H. Wilson, ‘documents Illustrative of the occurrences in Bengal’, pp. 133–8.]

Introduction lv

6. [FF. 33B-34A] SPEcIAL LEttEr (SHUQQA) oF tHE EMPEror

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6. [ff. 33b-34a] Special Letter (shuqqa) of the Emperor

!"#$% & !'#() "*+,)- ./0) & .1#") "23()- 45&6 7#ˆ &AE5ˆ #T<"\ .{=Q O"&fç N5%_58U 1,r0 ) 1t58U #"%G #/&I3/.

(6) Shuqqa-i kh"ass (special letter) of Shah ‘Alam to the governor of the East India company, f. 33b-34a.

o high noble endowed with an exalted and valiant stature, most special amongst special servants of mine, who has been honoured and privileged with the highest of imperial graces, may you know: I am thankful and grateful to God that Shuja‘-ud-daula has met with a resounding defeat at the hands of the English community who are in my service and are undoubtedly the well-wishers of my power. He has received the appropriate punishment and revenge for his deeds and acts. Since this victory was manifested as a sign of divine help and is due to the effort of the fortunate warriors ( gh"az$ıs), I considered it in reality to be my own victory, and I [therefore] prostrated to perform thanks to the court of God the Great who is kind to all, who has endowed you, devoted servant of mine, and the whole English community with blessings and fortune.

In keeping with the letter of my special servant, raja Shitab rai, I have now moved my standards in the direction of the capital; and whatever resentment that I bore for Shuja‘-ud-daula will be made clear by the raja to you, o my special servant, and well-wisher of [my] state. At present, and until I receive the reply to this shuqqa, I

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will remain in the neighbourhood of Benares in accordance with the request of the agents of the raja. Write to me about whatever is good and useful for the company and the English community; it will be carried out accordingly by this exalted and august person. Act on imperial matters according to the stipulated agreement. You will come to know the details from raja Shitab rai. You will receive from rai Suchit rai and Khayali ram, the agents of the said raja, the gifts and graces that I have sent for you. Endowed with these gifts and having performed prostrations of gratitude to God, and having paid due respect to [our] imperial grace, keep making full efforts for the benefit of the people. consider me attentive to your fortunate condition, and in a ceaseless manner keep sending letters with favourable accounts of yourself to this illumined person of mine.

[Editorial Note: this quite comical shuqqa sent after the Battle of Baksar in late october 1764 is a very revealing comment on the position of the emperor Shah ‘Alam II in this period.]

plate 1. nAI, new delhi, Foreign department, Persian, 1790, letter no. 46, from Madhoji Sindhia to Lord cornwallis.

lviii Introduction

plate 2. nAI, new delhi, Foreign department, Persian, 1790, letter no. 50, from Shah ‘Alam II to Lord cornwallis.