The BBC has at times a fascination with India and almost every few months it seems a BBC television crew is in Calcutta. Notably Rick Stein has been there, and Ian Hislop began a Great Railway Journey at the Calcutta Club. One of my favourite programmes on India was Alexander Frater’s Monsoon where he ended up in Cherrapunji, reputedly the wettest place on earth. For me it invoked memories of Assam where I spent a monsoon as a child. I much enjoyed Brian Cox’s Jute Journey where he focussed on the Dundee Scots who made their working lives in Bengal managing jute factories. Recently Anita Rani drove around in India on Four Wheels. There have been some TV misses as well: Paul Merton in India and Caroline Quentin: A Passage Through India come to mind although these weren’t BBC productions. Nevertheless I did look forward to The Birth of Empire.Sitting down to watch this two-partner presented by Dan Snow I waited for my first cliché and sure enough it came: “The Jewel in the Crown”. It is always remarkable that a small European country of 4 million people managed to colonise an entire sub-continent then of 190 million and producing perhaps one quarter of the world’s output.
The facts of the East India Company are well-known: a joint stock company given a monopoly by the English Crown to pursue trade in India at the start of the seventeenth century. Company employees find cloth, spices, tea, diamonds, pearls and pepper on the Coromandel Coast near modern day Chennai (Madras) after setting up a trading post in 1639. Ships journey to and from India, trade increases, the company makes vast profits, and consolidates its positions. More trading posts are created, there were 22 in the eighteenth century, with new warehouses and citadels, and the foundations of Bombay and Calcutta created. The East India Company and not the British government is the sovereign power, forging agreements with the local princes, overseeing justice, raising taxes, and maintaining probably what was then the largest standing army in the world.
Fabrics in particular are the major commodity comprising 60% of the Company’s revenues. And the Company begins to practice the concept of listening to the English customer who prize hand printed chintzes, and their brilliant and fasted colours. The initial period saw the beginning of a hot drink culture, tea and coffee, and the influence of spices, which of course leads to the situation today when chicken tikka Masala is almost an indigenous UK invention. Calcutta becomes the centre of British India and remains so till 1911 when the Bengalis are agitating for independence.
The programmes have a strong focus on the East India Company employees who arrive in India, with jobs oiled by nepotism and corruption – plus ca change in India today. The employees were allowed to engage in private trading which made many of them enormously rich by contemporary standards.
But while great wealth was a possibility the risks were high. Huge numbers died because of the heat and diseases like dysentery and malaria. In one year one-third of the Europeans in Calcutta during monsoon perished. Snow spends some time at the Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta. The Company sent out wine which was supplemented by local brews of toddy and arak. It was discovered that quinine which was soon used to make tonic for gin and tonic mitigated the chances of catching malaria. Soon hard-drinking together with gambling and brawling became the norms of behaviour.
What exasperated the authorities in London was the numbers of employees who had “gone native” and taken up with local women often setting up households with multiple women. There were also relationships with the daughters of Portuguese traders and missionaries. But efforts to limit these relationships by sending out British women ended in failure.
The East India Company was very skilled in playing off one group of Indians against each other, and would only engage in battle if absolutely necessary. At the Battle of Plassey, which sealed the preminence of the Company, Clive was outnumbered 10 to 1, but won the battle thanks to local traitors. There were relatively few British soldiers supplemented by local volunteers who were trained in British methods.
Despite some employees having gone “native” the Company was at times surprisingly callous about the demands of the various religions. The Mutiny of 1857, known as the First War of Independence in India, was sparked by rumours that pig fat and cow fat, respectively anathema to Muslim and Hindu soldiers, were used as grease in gun cartridges. The rumours, whether true or not, managed to unite Muslims and Hindus against the British. With brutality and horrors committed by both sides, the revolt was eventually put down.
The Mutiny of 1857 sparked widescale changes with overall control of India passing to the Crown. Reforms prompted by Macaulay sought to Anglicise the native population and he defeated proposals to maintain an Asiatic approach. The object was to create “Indians in colour and blood, but English in taste, opinion, morals and intellect.” To exemplify this Snow visits La Martiniere School in Calcutta and talked to students who suggest that they only speak English most of the time. Macaulay also proposed the creation of a professional well educated Indian Civil Service, initially of Britons only, to run the administration, and a UK based legal system.
What Snow fails to mention is that while 1857 saw the beginning of the Anglicisation process it was probably also the start of more entrenched British attitudes, with more white women coming out to India thus limiting inter-racial relationships, and the development of a British cultural, moral and racial superiority mindset. Many of the earlier settlers recognised a unique and compelling culture within India, and that appeared to have been forgotten later.
The East India Company was seen as the exemplar of the modern multi-national corporation maintaining control from long-distance, with shares issued in London, an accounting system, and rules of corporate governance. Comparisons with modern day companies might have been instructive.
Dan Snow was an engaging presenter who looked to have done his background research, but I do have the feeling he is more of a military historian which is where he made his name. At times the programme moved back and forth to the UK, with contributions from academic talking heads and visits to sites in London such as warehouses and the Lloyds Building.
The two hours went quickly but I felt there were issues and themes that could have been explored further. First the question of why the UK was in a position to dominate a large alien country, particularly in an era when other European countries were looking to develop their own colonies. Some comparisons with other European countries such as France and the Netherlands, which had their own East India Companies, might have been apposite. Could India in other circumstances have been divided into British, and larger Francophone, Dutch and Lussophone zones as Africa was? There were French and Portuguese enclaves but they were relatively small and ultimately never a serious threat to British hegemony in India.
Were the British more benign than say the French, or the Spanish as colonialists? I might contend that apart from the Mutiny and isolated incidents such as the Amritsar Massacre there was little overt brutality.
The lives of Indians in this period and their interactions with the East India Company were almost completely ignored. In addition the long term effects on India after 1857 were glossed over. Was India a better place following the rule of the Company and the British Raj? There is the implication that India has benefitted enormously from exposure to the English language both as a unifying force and as a driver to enable global trade. If English were not an option then perhaps Hindi might be more widely spoken. Amongst the elite knowledge of near perfect idiomatic English is almost a given. Anecdotally if one approaches a hotel reception and speaks in a language other than English the reply will invariably be in English. And, for example, interviews during the Indian Premier cricket League are almost always in English. But whether fluency in English has been an enabler to world trade and soft power is difficult to assess. Japan, South Korea and China have, for example, not found trading difficult despite poor language skills although that is changing. One very rarely finds Indian diplomats making statements about world affairs. Fluency in English amongst the elite may hinder the domestic economy as many, including my father, and for example many Indian students and businessmen in the US, find it easy to leave India and take up new roles. But despite the position of the English language India has still not achieved any real impact in world trade except in some industries like software.
While The Birth of Empire was a compelling narrative it would have benefitted from greater exposition and analysis. Most of the background on the Company could have been compressed into an hour giving sufficient time to explore other issues.
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