Abstract
This article broaches a simple question: Was there a politics of commerce within Bengali society in the eighteenth century, or was such politics limited to disputes between the British East India Company (EIC) and the Bengal nawabs? I begin by discussing the literature on markets in eighteenth-century Bengal and argue that the relationship between commerce and politics has been too narrowly defined in this body of work. A one-sided focus on determining the impact of the early colonial state, coupled with an uncritical acceptance of Peter Marshall’s Namierite story about the origins of the British empire, has led historians to downplay ideological conflicts within the EIC and British society. To show why these divisions matter, I build on the recent work of James Vaughn and Spencer Leonard, who have shown that between 1750 and 1770, political and ideological conflicts in both Britain and Bengal had far-reaching effects on the character of the British empire. Through an extended discussion of a dispute over market access in 1778 in the city of Calcutta, I show that petty merchants and shopkeepers often opposed arbitrary impositions by regional elites. To fully understand the motivations behind such challenges, I argue that we need to seriously consider divisions within Bengali society as well: namely, the reproduction of caste hierarchies through differential access to markets (and land).
This article broaches a simple question: Was there a politics of commerce within Bengali society in the eighteenth century, or was such politics limited to disputes between the British East India Company (EIC) and the Bengal nawabs (1704–65)? Contra all extant historical narratives, I argue that there was indeed a politics of commerce within Bengal, the significance of which we have not yet comprehended. Through an extended discussion of a conflict over market access in 1778 in the city of Calcutta, I show that petty merchants and shopkeepers often opposed arbitrary impositions by regional elites, which cannot be understood as a mere effect of colonial governance. Rather, the archive suggests that the reproduction of caste hierarchies through the enforcement of differential access to markets was a key aspect of the politics of commerce in Bengal.
In recent decades, several scholars have studied the expansion of markets and marketing networks in eighteenth-century Bengal. The relationship between commerce and politics, however, has been narrowly defined in terms of the impact of the early colonial state on the structure and norms of trade. Some historians, such as Rajat Datta and Tilottama Mukherjee, have argued that commercialisation, agrarian expansion and regional state formation were processes that continued underneath the façade of the rise of the colonial state and the decline of the Mughal Empire. 1 The actions of the EIC play a much less decisive role in these accounts compared to the works of Kumkum Chatterjee and Sudipta Sen, who draw attention to the adverse material as well as the ideological impact of the colonial state. 2
By posing the problem of commercial politics in this manner, historians end up ignoring the political and ideological conflicts within the EIC and British society. In essence, Datta, Mukherjee, Chatterjee and Sen all accept the broad contours of Peter Marshall’s Namierite story about the origins of the British Empire in Bengal. Inspired by the works of Sir Lewis Namier and Lucy Sutherland, Marshall argued in the 1970s and 1980s that the founding of the British empire in Bengal was a result of the sub-imperialism of private trade. 3 EIC servants and a sizeable number of free merchants sought to make private fortunes in the internal trade of Bengal by evading taxes due to the Bengal nawabs. They did so sometimes by force and sometimes by plying their trade in the company’s name by using the EIC’s dastaks (passes allowing duty-free trade). These passes were issued to the company as per the terms of the farman (royal order) received by the EIC from Mughal emperor Farrukh Siyar in 1717.
Although the farman allowed duty-free trade, the nawabs of Bengal insisted that only the external trade of the company and not the internal trade of its servants and free merchants would be exempt. The internal–external distinction hurt private individuals the most since the company itself did not have serious stakes in Bengal’s internal trade until the mid-1760s. The intransigence of the private traders eventually led to conflict and military victories for the EIC in 1757 and 1764 at Plassey and Baksar, respectively, and a territorial empire was formally founded in 1765. More importantly, Marshall argued that there were no ideological debates surrounding the founding and the character of the empire. In other words, it was founded by men on the spot—that is sub-imperialism—and metropolitan political actors simply accepted this as an accomplished fact. Britons and EIC servants in India agreed on the character of the empire, and discussions in Britain on the India question were simply concerned with how to best administer an empire that had already been acquired.
Marshall’s Namierite story implies that the mid-century conflicts were between a unified British nation and a unified indigenous polity. Most scholars writing about the relationship between politics and commerce in eighteenth-century Bengal accept this point, but disagreements arise vis-à-vis Marshall’s claim that the empire founded in 1765 did not have any significant immediate impact on indigenous society. Marshall does not deny that the British claim to undivided sovereignty was novel and consequential, and he acknowledges the increased hardships faced by peasants, weavers and consumers alike under the company regime, but he insists that colonial rule could not introduce anything more than superficial change until the 1830s. Establishing an empire was ‘relatively easy’, says Marshall, but ‘introducing more than superficial change into eastern India was another matter’. 4
Challenging this claim about inconsequential change and substantive continuity, Sudipta Sen draws a sharp ideological divide between the structure and norms of trade in the pre-colonial and colonial periods. 5 Sen agrees that private trade was the precipitating factor behind the mid-eighteenth–century conflicts, and he depends fundamentally on Marshall and Sukumar Bhattacharya for his narrative of how the conflict proceeded. 6 Sen is less interested in the details of the conflict, however, and much more invested in seeking its ideological dimensions. He claims that in the pre-colonial period, all trade was governed by cultural norms of prestation and that marketplaces were ‘knot(s) in the fabric of social mediation’ woven around a series of sites—such as manufacturing centres, checkpoints, granaries and so on—through which goods had to pass. 7 Sen calls these movements ‘passages of authority’ which involved the willing payment of duties and taxes in return for protection, a fact that the British failed to understand. 8
By introducing this cultural and ideological element to the story, Sen insists, contra Marshall, that the establishment of colonial rule was a major rupture. He suggests that colonial authorities, inspired by abstract principles of free trade, sought to dissociate the marketplace from the indigenous cultural and political forms in which it was embedded, and thereby convert markets into sites of pure exchange. Along with the permanent settlement of land revenue, Sen argues that the company-state also undertook a ‘permanent settlement of marketplaces’, a project that established the EIC as the sole legitimate recipient of revenue and an undivided sovereign. 9
Sen’s claims about the character and actions of the colonial state have been challenged on empirical grounds by Rajat Datta and Tilottama Mukherjee. 10 They have convincingly demonstrated that the company-state created monopolies in several sectors even as it tried to remove bottlenecks in others, and that it is incorrect to suggest that the early colonial state tried to impose principles of free trade. However, they have not adequately addressed the question of politics and ideology within Bengali society. Although they acknowledge the existence of conflicts over markets and market access, they either downplay or ignore the potential ideological dimensions of such disputes. 11 Moreover, the question of whether market conflicts had any relationship with indigenous power structures such as caste hierarchies remains underexplored as well.
This paper develops a critique of the extant literature on markets in eighteenth-century Bengal in two ways. First, it challenges the presupposition that Marshall’s Namierite story about the origins of the British empire can serve as an adequate basis for a discussion of the relationship between politics and commerce. To do so, I depend substantively on the liberal-Marxist accounts of James Vaughn and Spencer Leonard which show that the entire period from 1750 to 1770 was rife with political and ideological conflict in both Britain and Bengal, and the results of these battles had far-reaching effects on the character of the empire. 12 The colonial state that was established in 1765 was territorial and extractive, and it had major adverse effects on eastern India. This was, however, a contingent and not a predetermined outcome, a fact that is completely overlooked by the Namierite narrative.
The account of ideology in Sudipta Sen’s work is also challenged by Leonard, who insists that multiple and conflicting ideologies of commerce existed within the EIC and the British mercantile community in Bengal, and that indigenous merchants did not always unquestioningly accept the ‘obligatory features of courtly patronage’, the ‘ceremonies of commerce’ and the ‘conjunctions of religious endowment, market exchange and support of ritual elders’ that Sen insists were stable features of the pre-colonial commercial order. 13
Leonard points out that a large proportion of the trade covered by the allegedly illegal sale of dastaks was only nominally European—a point that even Marshall concedes. 14 Numerous Indian and Asian merchants benefited by plying their trade under the English flag, and it is wrong to suggest that the supposed misuse of dastaks gave British merchants a competitive advantage over their Asian counterparts. Similarly, although British private traders benefited from what was essentially a protection racket, we must also ask why Asian merchants bothered to seek such protection in the first place. The only possible answer, as Leonard rightly insists, is that local merchants preferred to pay a flat rate that ensured the regularity and security of their private property, rather than having to pay a multitude of arbitrary tolls and taxes to multiple claimants, which included landed elites and the nawab’s officers. Moreover, these taxes often went unrecorded and were merely bribes, which means that it is unfair to accuse Indian merchants of being free riders on public goods. 15
The liberal-Marxist accounts, while solidly grounded in British social and economic history, fall short of attempting to write the social history of Bengal. 16 We need such a history to show that conflicts over market access had deeper roots in indigenous power structures—such as caste—that merchants in Bengal wanted to challenge, which would imply that local actors found allies among the British private traders and free merchants to further their own political aims. Spencer Leonard, however, claims that ‘Indian merchant interests nowhere found direct political expression’. 17 I believe that such blanket claims are hasty, and scepticism about the meaning and significance of the alliance between British and Indian merchants will remain unless we offer evidence to understand the character of this alliance.
It is at this level of specificity that my second critique of extant literature is located. I show that petty merchants in eighteenth-century Bengal often opposed arbitrary impositions by regional elites. I begin by narrating in detail a conflict about market access that dragged on throughout the year 1778 in the city of Calcutta and involved four key stakeholders: the company-state, two influential and wealthy landowners called Nabakrishna Deb and Madan Dutt, and a large number of shopkeepers, vendors and tahbazaris (Persian for hucksters) who chose to desert Nabakrishna’s state-backed market and set up shop on Madan Dutt’s ground. The tahbazaris, shopkeepers and many small landowners of Sutanuti had multiple complaints against Nabakrishna, but all of them were ignored by the EIC until the conflict assumed the shape of a rivalry between Dutt and Nabakrishna. In other words, the colonial state took the conflict seriously because Nabakrishna complained against Dutt, but they were not the only stakeholders.
Moreover, it is significant that in the course of the year 1778, the stakeholders in the conflict often made references to the actions of company officials and private merchants in the pre-1765 period. This gives us immensely valuable clues about how and why Indian merchants found allies among British private traders and members of the EIC’s council who opposed the aggressive monopoly interests within the company. The shopkeepers and tahbazaris, for instance, referred to the help that they received in March 1763 from Peter Amyatt, who was a senior member of the rebel council at Calcutta in the early 1760s and was killed by Mir Kasim in the monsoon of 1763. 18
With regard to the extant literature on politics and commerce, my position can thus be summarised as follows. I agree that the private trade of EIC servants and free merchants was the precipitating factor behind the mid-eighteenth–century conflicts, but I disagree with Marshall that this conflict had no political and ideological stakes. I agree with Sudipta Sen that there was a politics of commerce, but I do not believe that this politics involved a confrontation between a unified Bengal with its culturally embedded markets and a unified British nation that sought to impose radically new principles on its imperial subjects with disastrous results. I think the liberal-Marxist account has proved beyond any doubt that political and ideological conflicts in both Britain and Bengal shaped the character of the empire founded in 1765. Vaughn and Leonard’s work suggests an urgent need to move beyond binary frameworks of colonial/indigenous and/or colonial/pre-colonial.
I agree with both Sen and the liberal-Marxists that 1765 marks a rupture, but I find the latter’s explanation of the reasons behind the rupture and its significance far more convincing. The liberal-Marxists correctly emphasise that the authoritarian character of the early colonial state was a contingent outcome. However, the politics of commerce within Bengal did not come to an end with 1765 or the parliamentary inquiry into the EIC of 1767. If anything, the significance of such politics could only increase under a state that has been aptly characterised as a ‘despotism of law’. 19 I argue that there was a politics of commerce within Bengal both before and after 1765, precisely because this politics had an intrinsic relationship with caste hierarchies and the practices of exclusion that reproduced caste. With these points in mind, we can delve into the conflict of 1778.
For the Sake of That ‘Liberty of Selling’: A Subaltern Critique of Arbitrary Market Taxes
On 23 January 1778, the members of the Bengal Revenue Governor-General in Council discussed a ‘humble petition and remonstrance’ by ‘the inhabitants and landholders of the districts of Sootanuty and Baug Bazar in the town of Calcutta’. 20 They claimed to have been living in those districts since ‘time immemorial’ by virtue of pattahs (land grants) received from and periodically renewed by the East India Company. The ‘security’ and the ‘liberty of disposing’ of their property freely that they had thereby enjoyed, they claimed, had encouraged them to improve and build upon their lands. They had heard, however, that their districts were to be handed over to Raja Nabakrishna Deb (1732–97) as his talook (land owned on behalf of the state and with the responsibility of collecting taxes), which they feared would ‘tend greatly to prejudice them in the certainty of their possession’ and would ‘probably heap upon them a heap of oppressions, grievances, and extortions’. 21
The inhabitants had heard correctly. On 5 December 1777, Nabakrishna had requested the council for the rights to ‘Sootanuty, its Haut and Bazar, and Bag Bazar and its Sayr’. 22 His wish was granted on the same day. A month later, on 6 January 1778, Nabakrishna additionally asked for a sanad (a charter allowing legal establishment of markets) for the land granted to him, and once again the council, after some deliberation, acceded to his request on the same day. 23 It was further decided that no further pattahs for lands within Nabakrishna’s talook were to be granted, and an executive order issued on 16 January 1778 by Governor-General Warren Hastings informed all those concerned that the ‘Mal and Syer of village Sootalutie and Baug Bazar and Hogulkoondee’ had been granted to the ‘high and powerful Mahah Rajah Nobkissen Bahadre’. 24
There were reasons for the company’s extraordinary generosity towards Nabakrishna. Since his youth, Nabakrishna had been associated with some of the most influential officers of the company. Born in 1732 in Gobindapur village—the site of the present-day Fort William in Calcutta—Nabakrishna had a classical education, and in 1750 he began tutoring Warren Hastings in Persian. In 1756, when Hastings was the commercial agent at Murshidabad, Nabakrishna became a munshi (scribe) for the company in Calcutta, and it was the correspondence between the two men that kept the EIC abreast of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah’s movements in the capital. In 1763, Nabakrishna became a banian (trader-cum-intermediary) to one Major Adams, and in 1767, he became political banian to the company, a post he held till the end of his life. 25 By the time Hastings became Governor-General in 1772, Nabakrishna had lost some of his official influence, but he was still extremely powerful and immensely wealthy. Indeed, he claimed that he had loaned up to ₹600,000 to Robert Clive and Harry Verelst, 26 and by 1778, the year of our case, he was described as having ‘more influence than any other black fellow’. 27
In response to the January petition of the inhabitants and the landholders, the company-state simply stated that the grants to Nabakrishna ‘did not invest him with any rights or privileges or customs’ except those that the company already exercised, but this response did not satisfy the landholders. 28 On 3 April, they sent a fresh petition, which was discussed by the council on 28 April. 29 Referring to their earlier complaint, the inhabitants expressed their apprehension that perhaps ‘their cause of complaint was not clearly defined or understood’. They did not suppose that the grants made to Nabakrishna would affect their private property, but they insisted that there was a ‘very material and essential difference’ between a tahsildar or ‘mondol’ who merely collected revenue on behalf of the government, and the ‘powers and authorities exercised by a talookdar’. 30
‘By the constitution of this country’, the inhabitants continued, all zamindars and talookdars become ‘superiors or lords within their respective districts’, and they begin to wield both control over the natural resources within their jurisdictions, as well as power over ‘the persons or inhabitants residing within the same’. Thus, Nabakrishna’s assumption of the role of talookdar would mean a loss of ‘independence’ for the inhabitants. They would become ‘his vassals’ and be ‘made amenable to his private cutcherry as well in matters respecting the revenue and their cast (sic), as in many instances where differences may arise’ among themselves. And even if taxes did not increase, their mode of collection would be ‘extremely altered’, and often ‘the method of raising a tax itself is hurtful and injurious to the subject’. The inhabitants claimed that they would be liable ‘to many affronts and indignities’, which ‘it is impossible for your honour to fully comprehend the nature of, or for your petitioners to represent in the light that they feel them’. 31
The talookdar’s response to this lengthy petition was less than gracious. 32 He began by saying that the complainants must be ‘totally ignorant of the rules of the country’, even though the petitioners showed an understanding of the interdependence between social status, political power and access to economic opportunities that the company-state lacked. And indeed, Nabakrishna did not hesitate to comment on the social status of his opponents. Except Ramlochun Roy, whose father, the deceased Ramcharan Roy, ‘had always been at variance with your petitioner’, Nabakrishna claimed that ‘the other highest or principal people or Ryots of Sutta Nutty who are of a better disposition and well qualified of the rules of the country have not signed the complaint’. Nabakrishna then ended his response with a somewhat strange request. He asked to be given a ‘simple lease in English’ in perpetuity for his talook, authorising him to collect all the dues that the ryots (tenants) were supposed to pay. 33
On 9 June 1778, the council did sign and grant an ‘English deed’ to ‘Rajah Nobkissen’, making him ‘perpetual renter of the Mahal and Sayer of Sootanutty and Baug Bazar’, on condition of his paying Sicca Rupees 1237-13-10 as annual revenue to the government. 34 On the same day, the council read yet another petition by the ‘inhabitants of Soota Nutty and Baug Bazar’, which must have been sent several days earlier. 35 Referring to their petition of 3 April, the inhabitants stated that the council’s resolutions concerning their request to revoke Nabakrishna’s sanad had ‘not yet been made known’ to them. Therefore, the inhabitants requested an answer to their previous petition, and said that ‘should your resolutions upon it not afford the relief therein humbly solicited, we have further humbly to request your honour will be pleased to transit the said petition to the court of directors by the Northington now under dispatch’. 36 This petition was signed by many well-known merchants and landholders but not by Madan Dutt, with whom Nabakrishna’s conflict would soon reach fever pitch. The council, however, ignored the 9 June petition as well, and the possibility of forwarding the complaint to the Court of Directors was not even mentioned.
Exactly when the conflict sharpened into one between Nabakrishna and Madan Dutt, we cannot be certain. Nevertheless, the first record we have of a petition, now by Nabakrishna against a landholder in Sutanuti—Madan Dutt—rather than vice versa, is from 1 September 1778. From this day until 16 December, the case was discussed concurrently in the Calcutta Committee of Revenue (CCR) and the Revenue Governor-General in Council (Rev. GGinC). Most of the relevant petitions and discussions are summarised in the 22 December proceedings of the Rev. GGinC, which makes the omission of certain petitions in the summary especially intriguing. More on that later.
On 1 September, Nabakrishna alleged to the CCR that one Purbaram Mallick had been erecting a bazar of his own in defiance of an earlier verdict by the CCR ordering its demolition. 37 In addition, Madan Dutt had also ‘within these few days past been establishing a bazar on his ground by which Sutanooty Haut and Bazar is breaking’. Citing these instances of unfair competition, Nabakrishna requested the committee to abolish Dutt’s bazar. Curiously enough, the CCR observed that ‘it does not appear from the face of the petition that Madan Dutt has established a bazar’. 38 They decided to send an official to see whether Dutt had himself created a bazar, or ‘whether the hucksters [had] themselves voluntarily erected shops, or stand upon ground the property of Madan Dutt, and whether in such case, Madan Dutt reaps any advantage therefrom’. 39 This was the first time that company officials used the term ‘hucksters’ while describing events associated with the case, thereby acknowledging that interests much wider than those of two rival landholders were actively involved in the situation.
On 25 September, the amin (official) submitted his report to the CCR. He claimed that Madan Dutt had erected a large new mud house, ‘in which the people sat, disposing of various kinds of small wares and articles’. 40 When the amin tried to break up the bazar, many shopkeepers assembled and asserted that ‘without an order of the Supreme Court of Judicature, they could not be removed’. 41 This shows that the shopkeepers and hucksters were trying to seek support from the entire range of colonial legal institutions that existed at the time. Indeed, as Peter Marshall has argued, despite the later accusations of corruption against some of its judges such as Sir Elijah Impey, the Supreme Court in Calcutta, during its brief period of existence between 1774 and 1781, did create the possibility of a more uniform (rather than racist and discriminatory) legal order by holding the EIC and its officials accountable for their actions on the basis of English common law. 42 The shopkeepers seemed to have considered this as an opportunity.
On the same day, 25 September, the CCR read a new petition from the ‘dokandars and bootick merchants’ of Calcutta. 43 The dokandars (shopkeepers) claimed that on 1 September, they had ‘remonstrated’ against ‘the extortions and oppressions of the Calcutta bazar farmers or collectors, especially of Nabakrishna’. As a result of these oppressions, they had left the company’s grounds and moved to grounds owned by Madan Dutt, to whom they paid a ‘customary rent’, which they found much cheaper. They had built houses on their rented spots for the purpose of disposing of their goods, and to maintain themselves and their families. The shopkeepers also alleged that on 13 September, Nemo Metre, a near relation of their ‘inveterate enemy Raja Nabakrishna’, had come to their bazar and beaten and ill-treated the petitioners. The shopkeepers had sent a petition on 14 September to the CCR describing the events of the previous day, but no action had been taken. 44
The same committee that was unsure on 1 September about whether Dutt had established a bazar, now suggested that the shopkeepers had been spirited into ‘the present acts of disobedience and refractoriness by Madan Dutt’, who wanted to assume an ‘independent right of establishing a bazar’. 45 The committee also asked for more concrete evidence of losses or injuries sustained by the dokandars because of Nabakrishna’s actions. The CCR concluded that the new bazar was prejudicial to Nabakrishna’s market, and that Dutt was maintaining the new site by ‘force’. The shopkeepers’ pledge of allegiance to the Supreme Court also annoyed the committee, for they observed that by doing so, the petitioners were ‘disavowing the authority of government’. 46 Really, though, all that the petitioners had done was to question what the appropriate form of government could or should have been in the province.
It is highly suggestive that although the CCR itself asked for more evidence of ‘losses or injuries’ sustained by shopkeepers at the hands of Nabakrishna, the two petitions by hucksters and dokandars—which did have substantial and relevant information about this and were discussed by the CCR on 3 November—are completely omitted from the summary of the case found in the 22 December proceedings of the Rev. GGinC. Exactly why the summary moved directly to the proceedings of the CCR from 6 November onwards may be impossible to ascertain, but perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the hucksters proudly mentioned how they were helped by Peter Amyatt, who was a private trader and a member of the ‘rebel’ council in Calcutta that opposed the EIC’s monopoly interests, and who was killed in the monsoon of 1763 by Mir Kasim. 47
On 20 October, the tahbazaris of Calcutta submitted a petition to the council which was sent to the CCR on 3 November. 48 In it, the hucksters stated that their profession was ‘selling by retail’ tobacco, betelnut, pepper, salt, greens, fruit, fish, cotton thread, piece goods, clove, vermillion and many other articles ‘at several bazars in Calcutta’, and to ‘return home in the evening with the proceeds of [their] goods’, which was ‘largely sufficient’ for the maintenance of themselves and families. ‘On former consideration of your poor petitioners’ situation’, the hucksters went on, ‘the members of [the] administration on behalf of the company as soon as [they were] invested with the zemindary of the 24 pergunnahs [in 1757] were pleased to forthwith abolish all duties, fees, customs, and taxes of every kind whatsoever on the articles your petitioners used to sell in bazars’. 49 Additionally, the company had established a customs house in Calcutta which collected fixed duties on articles of sale at the point of entry, after which the goods remained duty-free throughout the city. According to the hucksters, the list of such exempt articles included perishable items such as greens, fish and fruit, which had traditionally been subject to multiple duties.
This was not all. When faced with oppression from sepoys and others who forcibly collected duties from them, the hucksters had represented their grievances to Mr Peter Amyatt, then collector, who, on 26 March 1763, ordered guards to assist the hucksters, with instructions to protect them ‘against the extortions or oppressions of the sepoys’ in different bazars. Thirteen cowries ‘from each stand or places where the tahbazaris sold’ was fixed to pay for the guards. According to the hucksters, this practice began on 31 March 1763, and they had complied with it ever since. Of late, however, under the pretext of having to pay the guards’ wages, the farmers of the Calcutta bazars had raised ‘a tax ten times more than earlier’, or ‘rather that there is no certain rate anymore’. Especially in the ‘hauts and bazars under the farm or management of Raja Nabakrishna’, the hucksters added, his people ‘extort from your poor petitioners as much as they think proper’, and complained that ‘by his authority and unjust exertion of power’, he deprived them of ‘that liberty of selling the several articles’ they dealt in, at whichever bazar was convenient for them. As far as the hucksters were concerned, duties were being imposed on them by the ‘arbitrary will and pleasure’ of Nabakrishna ‘without the least foundation in justice’. They concluded by pleading for a return of the liberty granted to them by the government for many years. 50
On the same day, 3 November, the CCR also read a petition from the shopkeepers and dokandars of Sutanuti, in which they claimed that they were being ‘harassed’ and ‘imposed upon’ with taxes by Nabakrishna and his sepoys. This petition was also meant to serve as a response to the committee’s claim on 25 September that more ‘concrete evidence’ of losses and injuries sustained by the shopkeepers at Nabakrishna’s hands was needed. Accordingly, the shopkeepers prepared a list which compared the rates of duties as established by Peter Amyatt as collector to pay for the guards, with what was recently being collected by Nabakrishna and the other Sutanuti bazar farmers. Predictably, for no article of sale were the newer rates lower than the earlier ones, and in some cases, the duties were 5, 10 or even 15 times higher. For example, whereas the duty on all articles had earlier been set at 0 panas, 3 gandas and 1 cowry (or 13 cowries, just as the hucksters had stated in their petition), it had become 12 gandas (or 48 cowries) for fish, and 2 panas, 8 gandas and 3 cowries (or 195 cowries) for salt in the recent collections. 51 Citing these injustices, the shopkeepers concluded their petition with a request to be granted the right to establish their own bazar. 52
The Supreme Council, however, had no intention of allowing the shopkeepers to do so. On 6 November, it was provisionally decided that Dutt’s bazar would be abolished, but Dutt and the merchants on his ground were given a chance to respond. This could have been because Dutt had some influence among EIC officials, or because the council believed that the case deserved further scrutiny. The council sent a letter to the CCR on 6 November, in which they recommended that the committee ‘summon Madan Dutt to shew cause why you shall not proceed to the abolition of the bazars erected by him, and if he can produce no authority for them, they must be abolished’. 53 On 11 November, the CCR issued summons for both Madan Dutt and Nabakrishna Deb and asked them to produce witnesses. 54
What followed in the proceedings of the Calcutta Committee during the next month or so is remarkable for the rare insights it provides into the thoughts and aspirations of Bengal’s poorest commercial classes. Since the proceedings were often long and tedious, it is easier to grasp how things unfolded if we focus on the key arguments made by the different stakeholders, of which there were four: Nabakrishna, Madan Dutt, the shopkeepers, vendors and tahbazaris in Dutt’s rival market, and the EIC. What emerges from a close reading of the statements made by each party is the difficulty of even defining a bazar, and the impossibility of justifying a decision about a new problem on the basis of old norms.
Nabakrishna’s argument was straightforward. Dutt’s market needed to be destroyed for two reasons: It was illegal because Dutt did not have a sanad, and it was prejudicial to an existing market. As Nabakrishna never tired of emphasising, it had never been the ‘custom’ of the country to allow new markets that prejudiced established ones. While this was clear enough, a legal battle required Nabakrishna to produce witnesses, and their testimony did not always help his cause. On the first question, of whether Madan Dutt’s bazar had injured Nabakrishna’s, the latter’s witnesses were usually emphatic. Nyan Sircar, examined on 18 November, claimed that Dutt’s bazar had destroyed Nabakrishna’s bazar by drawing away all the latter’s shopkeepers. 55
According to Sircar, before the erection of Dutt’s bazar, there were only some golahs (warehouses) and timber on the spot, but no shops or dwelling houses. Now, a bazar with 150–250 shops was held daily, and the periodic haut (retail market) was held on Thursdays and Sundays, when 350–400 shops and ‘a great concourse of people’ could be seen. Sircar claimed that the haut was especially prejudicial to Nabakrishna, because the latter’s haut was held on the same days. Similarly, when Rashbehari Nath, who testified on 19 November, was asked whether, after the establishment of Dutt’s bazar, he had ‘observed the same resort of people at Rajah Nobkissen’s bazar and haut as formerly’, he asserted that the old bazar had been ‘deserted’ and that ‘there has been a much less resort of people there and at the haut than before’. 56
The deeper question put to all of Nabakrishna’s witnesses, however, was how they knew that Madan Dutt had indeed established a bazar. That this question was necessary at all was due to the brilliant defence strategy adopted by Dutt’s lawyer Debcharan Bose. When asked at the very beginning of the proceedings on 18 November to explain by what right or authority Madan Dutt had established a market, Bose shifted the burden of proof onto the committee. He claimed that Dutt had once had some ground near Kidderpore ganj (a wholesale market), which he then exchanged for some ground near his house in Sutanuti. 57 There were already some shops on the ground when Dutt acquired it, and all he had done subsequently, according to Bose, was to rent out more of the ground to several persons from whom he received a ground rent. Bose insisted that Dutt collected ‘no duties on things bought or sold’ which were ‘necessary to constitute a bazar’ and that it was the custom in Calcutta for a person to let his ground as he pleased. Pressed further about whether the rent on Dutt’s ground was the same as the rent on grounds where there were no shops, Bose responded that it was customary in Calcutta for a man to receive as much rent as he could get. 58
Some of Bose’s answers may appear to be cheeky and evasive, but his distinction between rent and duties managed to find a chink in Nabakrishna’s (and the state’s) armour. For if it could be argued that there was no rival bazar to begin with, then the question of its abolition could not arise. In making such an argument, Dutt and his lawyer were trying to force the long-standing practice of collecting excessive duties to find new means of justifying itself. As we shall see, no new justification was found, and the final decision to abolish Dutt’s bazar was quite arbitrary. The committee debated how to define a bazar throughout the proceedings, and even at the end, the presiding officials were not sure whether they were doing the right thing.
When Debcharan Bose cross-examined Nabakrishna’s witnesses about how they knew that Dutt had indeed established a bazar, their responses were inconclusive. Nyan Sircar claimed, without further elaboration, that Dutt’s bazar was conducted in a manner similar to other markets. The testimony of Rammohan Das on 19 November was longer but still only hearsay. He told the committee that when he sent his aide Bishenram Ghoshal to Dutt’s bazar to collect the ‘customary 10 cowries’ that the pundits of Calcutta received from ‘each dokan’ in the bazars of Calcutta, the sircars (accountants) at the bazar reassured Bishenram that they would pay the charity when they collected duties. 59 When Debcharan asked Rammohan the names of the sircars to whom Bishenram had spoken, however, Rammohan pleaded ignorance. 60 At Debcharan’s request, the committee summoned Bishenram, but he never found the time to testify.
More importantly, even Nabakrishna’s witnesses agreed that Madan Dutt collected no duties, and that this attracted many sellers to his ground. On 19 November, Debcharan Bose asked Rashbehari Nath whether Dutt received the dam (a duty in money on each shop) or the tolah (a duty in kind on the articles of sale). The response was: ‘The people say he receives neither.’ 61 On the same day, Soodam Ghosh asserted that business was carried out in Dutt’s ground as in other markets, except that no duty was collected. 62 When Debcharan asked why there were sircars at the spot if no duties were collected, Soodam said that the sircars were helping the large number of sellers to find proper places for setting up their stalls, and in general regulating the traffic on the ground. 63 Jadunandan, also questioned on 19 November, insisted that people resorted to Madan Dutt’s new bazar instead of Nabakrishna’s bazars because no duty was collected in the former. 64 The novelty of what was happening on Dutt’s ground escaped no one.
His witnesses, however, did say something that could go in Nabakrishna’s favour: Their testimony suggested that not all of the vendors in Dutt’s market were dokandars with ‘fixed’ shops, and that there were some who only came during the day and sold their wares in temporary stalls. Nyan Sircar’s claim on 18 November that a periodic haut was held at Dutt’s ground on Thursdays and Sundays indicated as much. Sircar also clarified that his estimate of 350 or 400 shops on those days included all the temporary stalls that were carried away when the haut broke up. Other testimonies such as that of Rashbehari Nath on 19 November, as well as the list prepared by Jadunandan and Soodam Ghosh, also suggested a similar combination of permanent shops and temporary sellers in the open air. These claims were important because they could potentially shake the foundation of Debcharan Bose’s argument. If there were people who came to Dutt’s ground during the day and left in the evening, they must have been paying a daily fee or duty—rather than a monthly or yearly rent—in return for the licence of selling. 65
Nevertheless, all of Bose and Dutt’s witnesses stuck to their strategic arguments. Perhaps the most remarkable was Kebleram, who testified on 19 November. When asked whose servant he was, he responded swiftly: ‘I am no person’s servant, I keep a shop on some ground in Sootanuty belonging to Madan Dutt.’ 66 He added that all of the sellers on Dutt’s ground, including himself, only paid ground rent, and that no duty was collected from the shopkeepers, nor were any considerations paid for the erection of dokans. Trying to bring home his point, he added that ‘where the people pay daily for selling their goods, those places are called hauts and bazars, but where no duty is collected, nor any daily consideration paid for having shops or stalls, those places are not called bazars or hauts’. When pushed on the issue of fixed shops versus temporary sellers, he insisted that the houses on Dutt’s ground were made of straw and hence ‘not removable’, and that only those who had hired ground but ‘not yet built houses’ were still setting up shops in the ‘open air’. Apparently, Madan Dutt gave pats (pattahs) to the shopkeepers to grant them the legal status of ryots, and when asked whether this practice was prevalent anywhere else, Kebleram insisted that it was also done in Boro Bazar and Nabakrishna’s own bazar! 67
On 24 November, Gokul Dutt testified that even articles of daily consumption such as fish were sold by ‘persons who have fixed shops’, and not by tahbazaris, who usually visited bazars occasionally, and paid ‘a daily consideration for their liberty of selling’. 68 Madan Dutt did not collect any duties except the annual ground rent for the shops. Gokul Dutt claimed that he only paid ₹9 per annum as rent, and that there were already 60 permanent shops at the ground with many more on the way. Two more witnesses, named Niloo Coyal and Ojooderam, backed up Gokul Dutt’s testimony on the same day. 69
Some of Debcharan Bose’s witnesses were so confident of the righteousness of their actions that they did not even feel the need to deny that there was a new bazar. Sukhdev, appearing on 21 November, informed the committee that he had been a tobacco seller ‘in the Rajah’s haut’ before moving to Madan Dutt’s ground. 70 He agreed that Dutt had indeed established a new bazar on his land which earlier had only ‘a few moodee’s shops’, but he refused to view that fact as a problem. Sukhdev claimed that he, along with 20 other tobacco sellers, had left Nabakrishna’s bazar when the latter demanded an increased duty of ₹232 a year, whereas he only had to pay ₹12 per annum as ground rent to Madan Dutt. 71
When asked whether Nabakrishna’s bazar had not suffered as a result, Sukhdev raised a pointed question of his own: ‘The Rajah has let the farm this year at an increased rent, what loss can the departure of 20 shopkeepers occasion?’ He also refused to be held responsible for explaining why Dutt’s bazar had at least 60 to 70 sellers (by his own estimate) if only 20 had left Nabakrishna’s. He responded that he preferred to attend to his own business, and ‘never asked from whence they came’. Like his fellow rebels, Sukhdev pointed out the absence of the dam and tolah at Dutt’s market and emphasised that about 20 or 30 people were still selling their goods ‘in the open air’, but only because they had not yet erected houses. When asked to name people whose families resided permanently on Dutt’s ground, Sukhdev referred the committee to ‘Panchu Kolu and a carpenter’. 72
It was difficult for the CCR to navigate this thicket of evidence. It seems that quite early on, they had eliminated the possibility of proving the illegality of Dutt’s claim to the land. Surely, if that easy resolution had been available, the committee would have availed themselves of the lifeline. Instead, the committee tried very hard to find inconsistencies in the testimonies of Debcharan Bose and his witnesses. Detailed and tiresome questions about whether the vendors really resided in their premises on Dutt’s ground, whether they went home to their families in the evenings, and whether any selling occurred in the open air were put to each witness, sometimes multiple times. For if it could somehow be proved that the majority of sellers on Dutt’s land were tahbazaris, his bazar could be abolished without hesitation.
To their dismay, however, the committee came to realise that only a minority of sellers were still selling in the open air, and that the tendency over time was for all sellers to build fixed shops. On 24 November, the committee deputed an officer named Mahadeen to ‘ascertain the facts relative to the bazar established by Madan Dutt’. 73 He testified on 15 December and reported that on the first day that he visited Dutt’s ground, he saw about 20 shops of greens ‘without doors’, but that such articles were also being sold within the houses. Fish, which was usually sold in the open air, was being sold indoors. Mahadeen went back the next day and saw only 16 shops in the open air, and four new shops. On his final visit the day after, Mahadeen saw that all the shops which had formerly been without doors had been moved inside the new houses. Debcharan’s witnesses were not lying. 74
On 15 December, it was decided that members of the CCR would give their opinions on the next day about whether Madan Dutt had erected a bazar, and if so, whether there was any reason it should not be abolished. The recorded minutes of 16 December are remarkable for their sharp insights and honesty. Henry Vansittart, who spoke first, was perhaps the most eloquent. He recognised, more clearly than anyone else involved in the proceedings, that the conflict was one between right and right. Referring first to the right of the state to collect and farm out revenue, he asserted that ‘to deny the right of government to establish public bazars, is to deprive it of part of the resources which qualify it to perform the functions of supremacy’. Moreover, ‘to deny the exclusive privilege of public bazars, is to frustrate the right of Government and to commit injustice towards the talookdar or farmer to whom the faith of government is pledged and who is promoting in a subordinate capacity the public good’. He was also convinced that Nabakrishna’s bazars had lost people to Madan Dutt’s and that the same people who earlier patronised Nabakrishna now frequented Dutt’s ground, which had been ‘so effectually appropriated to the same purposes as to render the other useless’. 75
To his credit, however, Vansittart recognised that Madan Dutt’s right to dispose of his property as he pleased could not simply be ignored. The council member sought to distinguish between dwelling houses and markets, and he began by admitting that the tenant of a house has the right to set up a shop there and maintain himself by sales. Moreover, three or four such dwelling houses at a particular location would go unnoticed. But, thundered Vansittart, should an individual ‘encourage the tenants of public bazars to relinquish the protection of government and place them under his patronage’, and should he ‘charge them with house rents that will be proportionably enhanced, as the bazar flourishes, will the government tamely suffer such an injury, alarming in its immediate consequences, and more dangerous in its future?’ 76
While not denying the truth of Debcharan Bose’s assertion that a ‘person has the right to let his ground for the most he can’, Vansittart argued that if such bazars were ‘tolerated’, then the public bazars would be deserted and their revenue entirely lost, and the inhabitants left at the mercy of the proprietors of the ground. 77 He seems to have forgotten, however, that market taxes were also ‘proportionably enhanced’ to a much greater extent by Nabakrishna as the volume of sales increased in his bazar, which is clear from the testimony of Sukhdev the tobacco seller. The very definition of the tolah as a levy on the type and volume of articles sold would have ensured such enhancement in any case.
Eventually, Vansittart could not justify the abolition of Madan Dutt’s bazar based on any principle, whether past or present. The past was nebulous, and in the present, the problem was merely one of degree (the number of dwelling houses converted into shops) and not one of kind. Vansittart concluded that Madan Dutt had indeed established a bazar, but because the ‘evasion’ was new, it should be represented to the Governor-General and the council, so that they may be apprised of the practice, and decide on the fact themselves. 78 Similarly, although he believed that Madan Dutt had not shown sufficient cause for why his bazar should not be abolished, Vansittart hedged his bets and said that ‘perhaps it may be found proper to abolish it under some limitations’. 79 The hesitation was a result of Vansittart’s apprehension that his decision was not based on principles, but rather on a consequentialist argument about the results that would follow from allowing people to fully exercise their property rights.
Other committee members were equally unsure about the correct course of action, and most of them suggested the adoption of certain ‘limitations’ in the abolition. The CCR sent a letter to the Supreme Council on 16 December itself in which the committee confessed that despite its best efforts, it had been unable to draw the line between tahbazaris and fixed shopkeepers with the ‘clearness and precision’ that they wished for, because most of the articles sold in Dutt’s bazar were ‘common between them’. Had they been able to draw this line sharply, their difficulty would be removed. The committee also realised that if they were to order the abolition of the entirety of Dutt’s bazar, the ‘execution might perhaps extend too far’, because the permanent dwelling houses of the shopkeepers would also be destroyed. The latter would, in effect, get evicted from their homes, and the ‘right of coercion by government’ on this count was unclear to the committee. On the other hand, although the government could use force against the tahbazaris, if only the few remaining open-air stalls were abolished, the abolition would probably be incomplete, neither ‘conformable to the spirit’ of the Governor-General’s instructions, nor adequate to the ‘hopes of redress’ Nabakrishna had entertained’. Hence, they thought it ‘prudent’ to refer the case back to the Supreme Council. 80
The CCR had rather astutely recognised that the problem it faced was new and concerned many stakeholders in indigenous society. The committee’s words, however, seem to have fallen on deaf ears. On 22 December, when the members of the Supreme Council convened, they did not discuss the matter any further, and all members were asked to give their opinion on whether the abolition should go ahead, and if so, to what extent. Mr Wheeler refused to give any opinion, and Mr Francis simply affirmed the provisional decision made on 6 November to abolish. 81 Mr Barwell, though, said that either Dutt’s market would have to be abolished, or public licences would have to be given to anyone who wished to start a bazar on their land. 82 Since the latter solution would not satisfy men like Nabakrishna, it was not considered seriously.
The council concluded, rather indecisively, that Dutt’s bazar would be abolished, but that the exact process to be observed, and the ‘warrants to be given to the person or persons who may have the execution of this order’ would have to be acquired from the Commissioner of Law Suits. In its letter to the CCR dated 8 January 1779, the council bluntly informed the committee of its decision to abolish the bazar erected by Madan Dutt. 83 The company ultimately decided to grant pride of place to the state’s right to collect and farm out revenue, even at the cost of preventing holders of property from freely disposing of their property. Property was thus destroyed in the name of property.
Colonial Governance or Caste Conflict? The Politics of Commerce in Bengal
To the best of my knowledge, Kaustubh Mani Sengupta’s paper in this journal is the only full-length study of the conflict narrated above. Sengupta argues that the dispute was primarily one between the two rival landowners Nabakrishna Deb and Madan Dutt. The company-state had to intervene when the matter got out of hand, and the colonial records are useful mainly to understand the modalities of colonial governance. According to Sengupta, the key question in the conflict was whether the company-state or individual landowners had the right to collect taxes, and the entire debate about whether Madan Dutt had really established a bazar can be interpreted as an attempt by the EIC to delineate the limits of landowners’ rights and secure its own revenue base. 84
Sengupta’s emphasis on colonial governance is important, but like Sudipta Sen he adopts a binary approach to the politics of commerce in eighteenth-century Bengal. This means that he overlooks the political content of the actions of the tahbazaris, shopkeepers and smaller landowners of Sutanuti. To recognise the historiographical significance of the actions of this group of stakeholders, we must contextualise the conflict within the eighteenth-century social history of both Britain and Bengal. The remarkable expansion of private trade in early eighteenth-century Bengal, for instance, occurred against the backdrop of rule by a Whig oligarchy in Britain, which was consolidated in 1714. This regime shifted the burden of taxation away from the landed elites towards Britain’s expanding commercial and manufacturing sectors, and the EIC propped up this system with its monopoly profits. From the 1720s to the 1750s, the EIC acted as a bulwark of the oligarchic order, and precisely during this period, the total tonnage of British private trading in Bengal tripled. 85
Between 1717 and 1757, whenever the Bengal nawabs objected to the allegedly illegal sale of dastaks to Indian merchants by British private traders, high-ranking company officials in both London and Bengal supported the nawab. The company deplored the sale of its dearly bought dastaks to Indian merchants, since that did not enhance the EIC’s monopoly profits. In other words, the interests of private traders within the EIC, let alone those of free merchants outside the company, never coincided with the monopoly interests of the EIC. Under pressure from both the nawabs and the upper echelons of the EIC, private traders in most settlements in Bengal capitulated. On the eve of the Battle of Plassey in 1757, it was only Calcutta that continued to hold firm on the issues of free inland trade, the sale of dastaks, and the shielding of the nawab’s subjects against oppression and extortion. The uncompromising attitude of Calcutta’s private traders forced Siraj-ud-Daulah to sack the city in 1756.
The first half of the eighteenth century also witnessed a disintegration of the Mughal empire, which had consequences for the politics of commerce in Bengal. Although Bengal’s economy was quite vibrant during this period as compared to other regions of the subcontinent, the resurgence of regionalism led to a worsening of the treatment of merchants and made it increasingly difficult to trade across political frontiers. 86 Once the empire ceased to be a united whole, all of the independent regional kingdoms levied separate duties on the passage of goods through their dominions, which was especially harmful for Bengal’s trade with upper India. 87 Moreover, within Bengal, the nawab’s officers often charged three, five, or even ten times more than the established duties at toll stations along riverine trade routes. 88 Even in Surat, in western India, where Mughal power was still strong, the early eighteenth century witnessed an increase in the frequency with which mercantile groups came into conflict with the state. 89 These facts indicate that Indian merchants had genuine reasons for allying with British private traders in the immediate pre-Plassey period.
Events in the immediate post-Plassey period (1757–65) also need to be viewed through a wider, global lens because South Asia was a key theatre in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) between Britain and France. In the context of the war, three political projects emerged in Bengal and Britain vis-à-vis the question of what the future character of the British presence in Bengal should be. The first project was supported by the commercially expansionist private traders in Bengal and by an increasingly radicalised bourgeoisie in Britain, who, under the leadership of the ‘great commoner’ William Pitt, sought to extend Britain’s commercial empire of liberty in Bengal. The second project was one of establishing a territorial, extractive empire, which was supported by Robert Clive and EIC servants loyal to him, and eventually by the majority of the political elites in Britain. The final project sought a return to the status quo antebellum and was associated with the EIC director Laurence Sulivan (1758–64) and his ally Henry Vansittart who governed Bengal during 1759–64. The Sulivan–Vansittart circle sought to integrate the commercial privileges and territorial gains won in the Seven Years’ War into the EIC’s long-standing monopoly trading networks.
In 1757, the radicals allied with Clive, because they feared that an alliance between the nawab and French absolutism would threaten the very existence of British commerce in Bengal. After Plassey, and certainly by the early 1760s, the difference between these two visions of empire became clear. 90 The removal of Mir Jafar as nawab and his replacement with Mir Kasim in 1760 was done by Henry Vansittart without informing the Calcutta council, most of whose members supported the creation of an open-ended commercial order in Bengal. The details of how this was done and how Vansittart’s deal with Kasim only led to benefits for the EIC at the expense of private trade were laid out clearly in a letter of 1762 by the council members themselves. 91 Despite their misgivings, the council initially fought for Kasim against the Mughal prince (soon to adopt the title of Emperor Shah Alam II) when he attacked Bihar in 1759–60. In January 1761, the British defeated the French at Pondicherry and Shah Alam II at Gaya, while the Afghans defeated the Marathas in the Third Battle of Panipat. This meant that the crisis of political authority was felt throughout the subcontinent, because neither the Afghans nor the Mughals nor the Marathas had achieved paramountcy.
The British military triumphs of January 1761 were overseen by William Pitt who was still Prime Minister. In October 1761, however, Pitt left office, because the difference between the radically commercial and territorially aggressive visions of empire had become clear, causing strains in the fragile alliance that had developed during the heyday of the war (1757–60). 92 In this context, between February 1761 and May 1765, a fierce battle raged in eastern India between the monopoly interests within the EIC and the coalition of private traders led by the rebel or maverick council at Calcutta. The latter group—made up of EIC officials who sought to use the 1757 and 1761 victories in the service of commerce free from arbitrary impositions—managed to build a broad coalition made up of Indian, Arab, Chinese and Armenian merchants and bankers, the Indian manufacturers whose products the company servants and their commercial allies sold in Indian and other Asian markets, and, most crucially, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II himself.
Against the wishes of Sulivan and Vansittart, who supported Mir Kasim and wanted to install him as an independent nawab who would crush private trade, the rebel council and royal troops (led by Sir Eyre Coote) welcomed Shah Alam II into their camp in February 1761. To overcome the crisis of political authority in India, the maverick council decided to march to Delhi in Shah Alam II’s name, and to defeat all those—including Mir Kasim and the nawab of Awadh Shuja-ud-Daulah—who refused to acknowledge the emperor as their sovereign. The Battle of Baksar in 1764, therefore, was not a unified nationalist opposition against foreign rule, but one where British troops fought in the name of an Indian sovereign against regional adventurers who sought to secede from their emperor. By re-establishing the Mughal empire along radically commercial lines, the council in Calcutta hoped to achieve a second Glorious Revolution, laying the foundation for a new Mughal empire of liberty, a natural partner in a certain British Crown. In such an empire, both the Hanoverian and the Timurid Crowns would represent a new revolutionary sovereignty, so that there could arise no question of divided allegiances. 93
The council came very close to realising its aims, and the eventual failure was deeply tied to contingent political failures in Britain, where a new Toryism led by Prime Minister George Grenville (who also imposed the Stamp Act on the Atlantic colonies) and supported by Robert Clive, managed to capture the East India House in 1764. 94 Instead of marching the British army to Delhi and proclaiming Shah Alam II as the emperor, the alliance between the monopoly interests within the company and the new Tories withdrew into Bengal in August 1765, but not before it had acquired the diwani for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa from the emperor. With an extractive empire thus established, a systematic assault on all ties between Asian and British private traders was begun. Duties were re-introduced across the board, and monopoly farms on key commodities such as salt, betelnut and tobacco were created in 1765. At the same time, the revenue collected in Bengal was used to pay for the EIC’s investment, that is, its procurement of manufactures from the province. In effect, trade was made free for a monopoly company, and private trade was absorbed within the monopoly system.
In 1767, the British Parliament conducted an inquiry which broached the possibility of completely abolishing the EIC. 95 Led by William Pitt (now the Earl of Chatham), who had returned as Prime Minister in July 1766, radicals in Britain and private traders dismissed from Bengal by Clive—such as John Johnstone—sought to bring the company’s affairs into the public domain. They believed that by doing so, the integral role played by royal troops in acquiring the EIC’s Indian possessions, the inadequacy of the company’s trade for stimulating manufactures in either Bengal or Britain and the constitutionally questionable actions of Clive’s second government in Bengal would become clear to the public. Johnstone and others hoped that people would thereby be convinced of the need to expropriate the EIC and to extend the protection of British law and the Crown to all of Bengal’s inhabitants. Eventually, this project also failed, and it marked a point of no return in British imperial history as far as the India question was concerned. 96
When Clive left Bengal for the second time, in 1767, he was succeeded by Harry Verelst, and when the latter’s governorship ended in late 1769, Bengal was teetering on the brink of a devastating famine. Political failures in Britain had immense consequences in Bengal. In marked contrast to 1767, the discussions surrounding the inquiry of 1772–73 and the passing of the Regulating Act in 1773 were tame affairs. Lord North’s ministry reinforced the new Tory order, which can be discerned from the fact that the infamous Tea Act, which sought to keep the North American colonies a captive market for the EIC’s unsold stock of tea, was also passed in 1773. 97 The Regulating Act did not create any legislation that was hostile to the company and the question of the latter’s abolition simply did not arise. Regarding the 1773 Act, the Earl of Chatham said: ‘the spirit which actuates various public bodies and connexions of men presents the last symptoms of a decaying state’. He noted that ‘the hearts and good affections of Bengal are of more worth than all the profits of ruinous and odious monopolies’, and restated his remedy: ‘I would…open again to the natives and other eastern merchants the inland trade of Bengal, and abolish all monopolies on the company’s account; which now operate to the unjust exclusion of an oppressed people’. 98
In 1778, therefore, Bengal was ruled by a highly monopolistic and authoritarian colonial state intent on extracting revenue. War with the French erupted again in 1778, and this had repercussions in Mysore and Pondicherry in southern India. In 1777, a new agrarian revenue settlement was passed in Bengal, and market taxes were also an important albeit less lucrative source of revenue. 99 It is against this background of extraction and monopoly control that the events of 1778 must be situated. From my perspective, the actions of the EIC and Nabakrishna Deb are easily explained: They both insisted on the state’s right to revenue and the right of local persons of authority to share in that revenue. Madan Dutt certainly benefited from shopkeepers flocking to his ground, but he could never have sustained it without the support of the tahbazaris and dokandars. It is the actions of this group of stakeholders that are the most worthy of analysis as political acts.
We cannot know for sure who came up with the idea that distinguishing between rent and duties would enable a refutation of Nabakrishna’s claim that Madan Dutt had founded an illegal bazar. Perhaps Dutt did so himself, for entirely selfish reasons. But the shopkeepers stuck to their strategic arguments, and I postulate this was a deeply political act. They were forcing the state and Nabakrishna to find new means of justifying the imposition of arbitrary taxes. The shopkeepers preferred to go to Dutt’s ground because they found the rent that they paid to him much cheaper. There can be little doubt, therefore, that there was a politics of commerce within Bengal in the eighteenth century, and it involved challenges to arbitrary taxation.
Moreover—and this is crucial—the colonial archive itself offers evidence that those who challenged arbitrary taxation often sought and received help from British private traders who opposed the EIC’s aggressive monopoly. As discussed above, in the petition submitted on 20 October 1778, the tahbazaris of Calcutta pointed to the abolition of all duties in Calcutta in March 1763, as well as additional support for the hucksters in the form of guards, by the collector Peter Amyatt, who was a senior maverick councillor. Similarly, on 3 November 1778, the CCR read a petition from the shopkeepers of Sutanuti, which compared the rates of duties as established by Peter Amyatt with what was recently being collected by Nabakrishna and the other Sutanuti bazar farmers. Predictably, the newer rates were always higher than the flat rate of 13 cowries per stand set by Amyatt, and sometimes the new duties were 5, 10, or even 15 times higher.
These petitions show that the alliance between the poorest commercial classes of Bengal and the maverick councillors is not a fantasy; it was very real and had tangible effects. It is also highly significant that both these petitions—of 20 October by the tahbazaris and 3 November by the shopkeepers—were not included in the summary of the 1778 case that can be found in the 22 December Proceedings of the Revenue Governor-General in Council. Why were they omitted? Was it because of Amyatt’s position as a maverick councillor, and because the extractive company-state in 1778 wanted to distance itself from the legacy of the mavericks? We will never know for sure, but we are obliged to ask given what the tahbazaris and shopkeepers claimed. The lesson, I believe, is that the colonial archive was itself politically constituted, and we cannot hope to understand this process if we ignore the ideological conflicts leading up to the founding of the empire in 1765.
The question that follows from all this is whether the politics of commerce and the defiant actions of the tahbazaris can be grounded in the histories of indigenous power structures. Although any answer to this question can only be tentative at present, I believe that caste hierarchies were implicated in commercial politics. For instance, we know that Nabakrishna Deb was a kayastha, which was one of the three elite castes of medieval Bengal along with the brahmans and the vaidyas. Deb wielded substantial social authority on matters of caste, and his tendency to act in authoritative and extractive ways was also recognised by less sympathetic British officials soon after our case. In July 1782, for instance, Samuel Charters, a member of the Committee of Revenue, wrote that Nabakrishna’s two-year tenure (1780–82) as sazawal (collector) of the large Burdwan zamindari had been ‘excessively violent’, and that the inhabitants had ‘in general been taxed by him to an extraordinary degree and far beyond their engagements’. 100
Madan Dutt’s caste status is not entirely clear. Some scholars have suggested that he belonged to the Subarnabaniks, who had a low ritual ranking. 101 Kaustubh Sengupta, on the other hand, implies that Dutt might have been a kayastha. 102 Either way, Dutt had amassed quite a bit of wealth by collaborating with private British merchants in the country trade, which allowed him to lead a social faction (dal) in Calcutta that cut across castes and rivalled another faction led by Nabakrishna. 103 The 1778 case dragged on for as long as it did, therefore, because Dutt was not a pushover. Indeed, in Bengal the kayasthas were second only to brahmans in ritual ranking. Kumkum Chatterjee’s detailed analysis of caste genealogies and Nagendranath Basu’s intriguing narratives based on those genealogies tell us a lot about how brahmans and kayasthas sought to maintain their economic, social and cultural power in medieval Bengal. 104 The hubris of power in Nabakrishna’s behaviour is clear from the sources, and Madan Dutt did also wield some of his own.
Dutt’s social status, however, cannot explain the sustained actions of the tahbazaris and shopkeepers over several months. The question is this: Who were the hucksters in social and economic terms? Neither colonial sources nor any of the caste genealogies pertaining to the kayasthas and brahmans tell us, because that was not their concern. Kaustubh Sengupta, who does recognise the caste dimension of the rivalry between Nabakrishna and Madan Dutt and acknowledges that market control in eighteenth-century Bengal had a relationship with existing social and political hierarchies, nevertheless avoids the question of whether the caste status of those who engaged in retail trade mattered vis-à-vis their ability to access markets. 105 While it is difficult to answer this question with absolute certainty, it is possible to proffer an informed opinion.
Recall that in their petition of 20 October, the hucksters mentioned that their profession was to sell daily necessities by retail, and they also implied that many of them visited Calcutta from the neighbouring 24 parganas. We know from a late sixteenth-century text, Mukundaram Chakravarti’s Chandimangal, that it was lowly and often untouchable castes such as the Chandalas, the Doms, and the Baitis who sold fruits (bought with credit!), baskets (which they wove themselves) and other daily necessities in the retail market. 106 Moreover, we know that historically, groups on the fringes of the agrarian order have been ranked the lowest in the caste hierarchy, and Calcutta and its surrounding areas remained precisely such a marginal region until the seventeenth century.
The beginnings of human settlement in what eventually came to be known as Calcutta can be roughly dated to the sixteenth century, 107 when the village of Kalikata gradually became a seat of residence, while Sutanuti became a fledgling centre of industry, especially of cotton textiles. 108 Gobindapur village, where Nabakrishna was born, was granted to one Gobindasarana Datta by the Mughals sometime in the late sixteenth century, and it later became the third village, along with Sutanuti and Kalikata, which formed the town of Calcutta. 109 Kalikata became a mahal (spatial unit for revenue administration) for the first time in the 1580s under the Mughals. 110
Before the arrival of the British in 1690, however, none of the traditional upper castes except for a few kayastha zamindars resided in these villages. 111 Once the port of Saptagram in western Bengal lost its importance due to silting, middling groups such as the weaver-cum-merchant castes of Basaks and Seths did move to Gobindapur to set up a new trading base. 112 They set up bazars and orchards, and financed the digging of canals to create inland trading routes. 113 But the majority of the population in these villages was made up of lower-caste groups such as Pods, Jalias and Bagdis, who had traditionally been fishermen, hunters and the like. 114 There is also likely to have been some Chandalas and Doms, since we know that even in the nineteenth century, these castes—along with middling castes such as Kaivartas and a sizeable number of poor Muslims—had a major presence in the 24 parganas beyond the southern and northern limits of Calcutta, and they often came into the city to sell forest products, baskets and other items as petty merchants. 115 In the eighteenth century, there was massive land reclamation and agrarian expansion in the 24 parganas, and this process had a symbiotic relationship with the existence of Calcutta and its markets. 116
Finally, the colonial archive itself provides important clues. For example, the fact that two of Madan Dutt’s key witnesses—Kebleram and Sukhdev—did not have last names worth mentioning or recording, suggests that they were lower caste. Recall also, that the first question put to Kebleram was about whose servant he was. His low social status and possible servitude were etched onto his name and physical appearance, which makes his proud and defiant responses even more remarkable. The caste dimension of the conflict can also be seen in the 3 April petition of the inhabitants of Sutanuti discussed above, wherein they claimed that Nabakrishna’s assumption of the role of talookdar would mean a loss of independence and revenue for them, and that they would be disrespected on the basis of their caste. In his response to this petition, Nabakrishna denigrated his opponents on the basis of their social status, calling them ‘ignorant’ and stating that most of the ‘highest’ ryots with a ‘better’ disposition did not petition against him. All of this evidence suggests that the most important political actors in 1778 belonged to lower and middling castes, and could not have been elite in either social or economic terms.
We should not be very surprised by the imbrication of caste and market access in eighteenth-century Bengal. After all, when a caste order was first consolidated in large parts of eastern and southern India during the early medieval period (c. 600–1200
Although we do not know as much as we would like to about the relationship between caste and market taxation in the eighteenth century, we know that zamindars considered their right to levy taxes an expression of their sovereignty, 121 and the majority of zamindars belonged to the upper castes. 122 Even Rajat Datta, who did not use caste as an analytical category in his work, conceded that the sphere of exchange reflected ‘prevailing social inequalities’. 123 Indeed, landed elites were the ones who frustrated the EIC’s limited attempts in 1773 to free the grain market from tolls and duties. Finally, we also know that market taxes remained an important aspect of caste-based hierarchies long after 1778. Even in the 1930s and 1940s, the Namasudras and the Rajbansis organised agitations against hat-tola (market tolls) extracted by upper-caste landlords and moneylenders, although a small elite had emerged within those groups as well. 124 It might be said, therefore, that while much more research on the role of caste in the politics of commerce in eighteenth-century Bengal is needed, there can be little doubt that such a role existed.
To conclude, I want to briefly pre-empt two possible forms of scepticism to my arguments. First, it may be asked why the evidence in the colonial archive is so sparse concerning both caste and challenges to arbitrary taxation. This is an important but misdirected question. The reason why caste does not feature directly in commercial records has to do with the structure and intentions of the colonial state. The company-state misrecognised caste as a purely religious and not a political institution, a point of view that Nicholas Dirks rightly criticised some years ago. 125 It was not as if the colonial state did not think caste was important, but it relegated caste to the domains of custom, marriage and inheritance of property. Moreover, to formalise Hindu law in these spheres, the state depended on brahman pandits, thereby ensuring that an upper-caste perspective was enshrined as law. Colonial officials, intent on extracting revenue at all costs, did not bother to investigate the caste dimension of market access and market control, but that does not mean that we should also give up on such an endeavour. If we do, our understanding of the politics of commerce and caste will be severely impoverished.
Similarly, challenges to taxation do not appear in the archive as often as they should because the state did not investigate each instance of market conflict as carefully as it did in Calcutta in 1778. This is not an excuse, because the fact of similar conflicts is incontrovertible. The archive is replete with evidence of new markets being founded without the knowledge of the government, and merchants being attracted to these spots because the duties were lower. In many cases, the matter was resolved by force, either by the aggrieved zamindar or talookdar himself, or with the support of the company-state. 126 Even scholars who downplay the potential ideological dimensions of such conflicts acknowledge that repeat offenders who started illegal markets were often imprisoned. 127 There can be no doubt, therefore, that whatever our judgement is about such acts, they were political acts.
Scholars often suggest that such conflicts were not ideological because the law was unambiguous: Merchants could go to whichever market they wanted as long as that market paid revenue to the government. 128 But the question is, how much revenue? For what purpose? And at what cost to the profitability of small-scale traders and retailers? The evidence in the 1778 conflict clearly shows that the tahbazaris did not want to piggyback on public goods. They paid rent to Madan Dutt, and in 1763, they had agreed to Peter Amyatt’s proposal to pay 13 cowries per stand to cover the salaries of guards who protected them. What they cared about was the security of their private property, which they wanted to dispose of freely. From their perspective, Nabakrishna was exercising an unjust and arbitrary property right over the disposal of their property.
While we have details for the 1778 case, how much do we know about the numerous other conflicts that occurred during the 1770s and 1780s? In most cases, not much, because the state made off-hand and ad hoc decisions without investigating. All it cared about was its revenue. Given the present state of our knowledge, we need to comb the archive thoroughly to find more details for other instances of market conflict, but the 1778 case clearly shows that we cannot dismiss the desertion of certain markets by petty traders as merely opportunistic acts. If the migration of peasants from one zamindari to another in the face of oppressive taxation can be seen as a political act, I see no reason why the actions of tahbazaris and shopkeepers should not be accorded the same respect. 129
A second form of scepticism is likely to be directed at my claim about political alliances across national and ethnic lines. From the vantage point of the present, such scepticism is understandable, but it is deeply ahistorical. In the eighteenth century, lines of division in South Asia were not always along ethnic or even religious lines. When the Marathas plundered and raided Bengal in the 1740s, no Hindu zamindar in Bengal showed any sympathy for them on religious grounds. Similarly, an Anglo-Bania commercial order did exist in Bengal between roughly 1700 and 1765. For instance, in going through the list of dadni merchants (those who took advances from the European companies and then acquired raw silk, piece goods and calicoes from the interior), Rila Mukherjee found that multiple caste groups not traditionally associated with commerce had worked for the EIC between 1701 and 1750. 130 Thus, upper castes such as brahmans, kayasthas and vaidyas, middling groups such as Aguris, Tantis, Kaivartas and Telis, and even the lowly Matias (a sub-caste of the Bagdis in Bengal) all had representatives in the list of dadni merchants.
Commercial development in Britain had of course proceeded much further than in Bengal and north India, but the social and political problems were remarkably similar in both regions. Just like new Toryism in Britain was a reaction to a perceived threat from below, Persianate elites in South Asia also harboured fears about the rapid advancement of the lower orders. As Sudipta Sen has noted, aristocrats (shurafā) who served the Mughal imperial regime always distinguished themselves sharply from the lowly (jalīl) who had to fend for their necessities in the marketplace and through hard labour. 131
Similarly, taxation (along with representation) was a major issue in Britain. The mid-eighteenth–century radicals who supported the great commoner William Pitt were upset about the imbalance in taxation which favoured the landed elites at the expense of the commercial classes, who were burdened with numerous customs and excise taxes. Additionally, the fact that tax offenders were not allowed a jury trial was a major bone of contention. 132 The despotism of the Bengal nawabs—especially Mir Kasim—was therefore a familiar despotism for the private traders and maverick councillors. Moreover, it is often forgotten that much before the ‘drain of wealth’ became a conceptual bedrock of Indian nationalism, the mavericks opposed the use of Bengal’s revenues for the investment of the company, because they viewed it as a drain of resources that could be used for both commercial and military purposes in Bengal. 133
Nevertheless, the best evidence for an alliance between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ comes from Robert Clive, the great architect of the extractive empire in Bengal. As is well known, Clive was a strong believer in traditional hierarchies, whether in Britain or Bengal. He had a deep suspicion of the free play of private interests in a commercial society, and hence he did not want either a commercial order or an English legal system in Bengal. Between May and September 1765, when he had to fight a hard battle with the remaining maverick councillors—especially John Johnstone—to realise his vision of a territorial empire, Clive made some extremely significant comments. He said that he opposed free trade because if it was allowed, then every ‘Servant and Free Merchant’ would correspond with whoever they pleased. It was the cause of a ‘forward Spirit of Independency’, an ‘independent Way of thinking and acting’ and an ‘independent and licentious Spirit’. Clive lamented that by settling in India, many Britons had become Indians themselves, and all the barriers between the English and the country government had broken down. Worst of all, however, was the fact that ‘a combination between the blacks and whites’ had emerged to ‘divide all the revenues of the Company between them’. 134 As far as the ideological origins of the British empire and the non-racial alliances that constituted politics in mid-eighteenth–century Bengal are concerned, this is the most transparent evidence that any historian can muster.