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chapter 5 From the Mughal empire to the British empire 1. While in Indian nationalist history writing, Polashi is often used as a marker of South Asian ignominy, this representation of Polashi is less helpful from the...

chapter 5 From the Mughal empire to the British empire 1. While in Indian nationalist history writing, Polashi is often used as a marker of South Asian ignominy, this representation of Polashi is less helpful from the perspective of Bangladesh history. Explain On a fine June day in 1757 thousands of men were fighting in a mango orchard close to the border of present-day Bangladesh. This battle became famous as a turning-point in the history of South Asia. It took place in the small village of Polashi (‘Plassey’, palāsi), and the encounter estab- lished the British East India Company as the new territorial overlord over Bengal. Within a century this trading conglomerate would capture practically all of South Asia. Historians have often described the Battle of Polashi as the beginning of British colonial rule in South Asia, a rule that would last till 1947. In many ways Polashi is a useful marker of change. It brought to an end a style of government that the Mughal state had introduced some 150 years previously. British rule introduced new ideas, arrangements and coercions that would shake Bengal’s society profoundly. But these changes did not occur all at once, nor were they clustered tightly around the year 1757. In Indian nationalist history writing, Polashi is often used as a marker of South Asian ignominy, when foreigners took control of the state and a colonial system of exploitation took effect. According to this narrative, it took an anti-colonial struggle to remove this blot on the national escutcheon: the colonial state was dismantled and sovereign power returned to indigenous rulers in 1947. From the perspective of Bangladesh history, however, this representation of Polashi is less helpful. First, in the delta foreign rule long preceded the British conquest. Here the Mughal empire, centred in far-off Delhi, had taken control in 1612 after many battles with local opponents. The delta became one of the Mughals’ conquered dependencies, a source of large amounts of tax and loot. In other words, before the British rose to power in Bengal, its inhabitants had long been accustomed to a mulcting administration dominated by foreign officials. Second, Bangladesh historians emphasise that colonial rule did not come to an end when the British retreated in 1947: those who ruled the delta as part of the post-1947 state of Pakistan should also be 49  50 A History of Bangladesh considered as foreign colonialists. The Pakistan state was dominated by West Pakistani interests to such an extent that it led to a war of secession in the delta that created Bangladesh in 1971. The post-1971 state elite in Bangladesh are doubtless indigenous but according to many observers hardly sovereign, being very largely dependent for their survival on donations and direction from abroad. What ended at the Battle of Polashi, then, was not indigenous rule in the Bengal delta but the ancien régime of the Mughal state. Polashi marks the beginning of European colonial rule in Bangladesh. European colonialism ceased in 1947 but it was followed by Pakistani colonial rule (1947–71), and one way of describing the period since 1971 is as a period of neo-colonial domination. 2. Briefly discuss the reasons of the earlier attempts by the Mughals to conquer Bengal. the mughal inheritance When the first European adventurers arrived in the Bengal delta, they were bystanders who witnessed a turbulent process of state fragmentation. They saw how the delta was entering one of its periods of chaotic warfare as the Mughal state made many unsuccessful attempts to expand from its heartland in northern India into the riverine region of Bengal.1 In 1538 the regional Husain Shahi state collapsed, and for a brief moment the Mughal emperor Humayun held its capital, Gaur. Soon, however, his army was defeated and he had to retreat to the west. Then followed a period in which numerous local chiefs and landholders (collectively known as the Baro Bhuiya (bāra bhũiyā), or ‘twelve chiefs’) controlled smaller parts of the delta. These were mostly Afghan and Bengali Hindu grandees, some from old ruling families and others new power grabbers. They formed anti- Mughal groupings and resisted renewed Mughal attempts to annex Bengal. The Mughals intensified their forays after they won an important battle in 1576, but it took their armies and flotillas another forty years to overcome intense resistance in the central and southern delta, a region they referred to as Bhati. Finally, in 1610, the Mughal governor fought his way east to Dhaka, which he fortified and renamed Jahangirnagar after the Mughal emperor Jahangir (Map 5.1).2 He made it the capital of Bengal, mainly because it was best positioned to suppress resistance in the delta and to check the growing power of the Portuguese and Arakanese in the south- east. By 1612 he had subdued the local chiefs and reduced them to land- holders acknowledging Mughal suzerainty. The Mughal state now covered the territory of Bangladesh, with the exception of the south-eastern region of Chittagong (held by the Arakanese and Portuguese till 1666) and the Chittagong Hills (independent chiefdoms).  From the Mughal empire to the British empire 51 A S S A M Brahmaputra (Jamuna) Gaur Ganges (Padma) Dhaka a hn (Jahangirnagar) Murshidabad g Me T R I PU R A xPolashi (Plassey) Jessore Kolkata (Calcutta) Chittagong 0 km 100 Bay of Bengal ARAKAN Map 5.1. Bengal in the Mughal period. 3. Outline the basic structure of government in Bengal during the Mughal period. Thus began about a century of Mughal rule in the delta. In Bengal the structure of government was less uniform than in the Mughal heartland in north and central India. Rather than introducing a relatively integrated political system, the new rulers imposed a layer of centralised authority over quite disparate forms of local control. As a result, outside the urban areas local lords of varying grandeur were in charge of law and order. In many parts of the delta these lords – known to the Mughal state as zamindars (jamindār or jamidār) – remained semi-independent. They constituted ‘a secular aristocracy – separated from the masses of the 52 A History of Bangladesh population by their military and political power and an appropriate life-style. It was an aristocracy open to the successful adventurer.’3 They coexisted with appointed imperial officials who were from outside Bengal and who did not settle in Bengal. The main task of these officials was to ensure a steady flow of tax revenues to the imperial court in Delhi. To the people of the Bengal delta, this was the new dispensation’s most important activity. The top revenue official in charge of the province of Bengal was the diwan, appointed by the Mughal emperor himself. Whenever the Mughals conquered an area in the delta, they set up several outposts with a garrison (thānā) to enforce the peace. Once this was achieved, the area was incorporated into the territorial system of Mughal administration in which a province (subā) consisted of a number of regions (sarkār), each comprising several subdivisions (parganā). The smallest territorial unit was the ‘revenue village’ or mouza (maujā), on which tax assessments were fixed. Three of these old terms are still in daily use in Bangladesh: shorkar (sarkār) now means the government, thana (thānā) a police station and mouza (maujā) retains its old meaning of revenue village. Today many family names in Bangladesh – for example Sarkar, Khan, Choudhuri and Talukdar – are derived from titles that refer to positions in the Mughal landholding aristocracy. The Mughal conquest brought Bengal devastation and brutality. Recurring military campaigns by both imperial forces and local rebels relied on scorched-earth tactics, killing, plunder and rape, for example during the Mughal campaign to subdue the town of Jessore.4 After the establishment of Mughal rule, many parts of Bengal became more peaceful but rebellions continued to occur. In addition, Arakanese and Portuguese invaders marauded the coastal areas. According to one con- temporary writer, Shihabuddin Talish, they took away no less than 42,000 slaves from various Bengal districts to Chittagong between 1621 and 1624 (Plate 5.1; see box ‘Alaol, the translator-poet’)5. To Mughal officials Bengal remained throughout ‘a “hell full of bread,” a place of exile for incompetent officers and, in the declining days of the grand empire, a milch cow to suckle the famished army and administration of the whole subcontinent’.6 On the other hand, however, the Mughal conquest eventually brought political unification to the delta, a more regulated system of surplus extraction and a relaxation of the constant fighting. More peaceful conditions led to an expansion of agricultural cultivation and to more agrarian and industrial prosperity (see box ‘Poor and rich’). Bengal’s political centre of gravity shifted east to the Dhaka region, which flourished and attracted traders as never before.  From the Mughal empire to the British empire 53 Plate 5.1. Arakanese raiders selling slaves from the Bengal delta to Dutch traders at Pipli (now in India) in the 1660s (detail).7 Alaol, the translator-poet The early seventeenth century was definitely not a safe time to travel the coastal waters of Bengal. One boy who learned this lesson the hard way was Alaol. He was born in Jalalpur village (Faridpur district) in 1607, the son of an official serving a local ruler.8 One day, when he and his father were travelling by boat to Chittagong, Portuguese and Arakanese pirates inter- cepted them. The attack left Alaol wounded and his father dead. The pirates took Alaol away and he ended up in Arakan, where he was put to work as a bodyguard or cavalry soldier. Alaol was no ordinary slave, however. He was well educated and knew Bengali, Persian, Sanskrit and Hindi. Training in music was also part of his upbringing. These skills allowed him to leave menial work behind him: he was given a job as a music teacher and began to be known as a poet and 54 A History of Bangladesh songwriter. Soon Magan Thakur, an important poet-courtier at Arakan’s royal court, took him under his wing and Alaol’s career flourished. The Arakan court was a cosmopolitan place. Its power was rapidly expanding and slave raids on coastal Bengal were an important strategy for acquiring much-needed skilled labour. In addition, the court attracted numerous mercenaries, notably Christians and Muslims, to man its naval forces. As a result, the court became a cultural melting pot. It upheld the royal traditions of the Buddhist courts of South-east Asia but it also embraced the aristocratic traditions of the Muslim courts of Bengal. These circum- stances guaranteed that Alaol’s skills were appreciated. Alaol wrote a treatise on music and composed songs in one of Arakan’s court languages, Bengali, and then set to work to translate literary works into Bengali. Around 1650 he translated and adapted Padmavati, a romantic poem, originally in Hindi, about the doomed love of a Delhi sultan for a Sri Lankan princess. Later on he specialised in translations of Persian romantic tales. Written in a courtly and elegant style and embellished with his own songs, his works gave Bengali poetry and music a new direction. Poor and rich There were great differences in wealth among the residents of the Bengal delta. The poor dressed in loincloths and saris made of coarse cotton or jute. They lived on a diet of rice, salt, vegetables and lentils, supplemented with some fish and milk. If they ate meat at all, it was likely to be chicken, mongoose, lizard, duck or porcupine (Plates 5.2 and 5.3).9 The rich wore elaborate clothes of fine cotton or silk, shoes, golden ornaments and precious stones. Their refined food included many varieties of fish, fowl, meat and vegetables, as well as milk-based sweets (Plates 5.4 and 5.5). The Mughal government actively encouraged European trade, mainly because it yielded the imperial exchequer a handsome income from duties. At the same time the Mughal elite consumed a large array of goods from the Bengal delta. In addition to rice, textiles, sugar and salt, the delta sent to the Mughal court fragrant aloe wood and timber from Mymensingh, Sylhet and Chittagong; elephants and buffaloes from Jessore, Khulna, Barisal and Chittagong; eunuchs from Rangpur and Sylhet; betelnut and long pepper from Rajshahi and Bogra; horses from Rangpur and Bhutan; lac from the Sundarbans; and talking birds from various Bengal forests.10  From the Mughal empire to the British empire 55 Plate 5.3. A fisherman. Plate 5.2. A fish seller.11 Plate 5.4. A woman of distinction.12 Plate 5.5. A man of distinction. 56 A History of Bangladesh 4. Relate the emergence of Nawab and the battle of Buxar in 1764. the fading of the mughals After 1700 the influence of the Mughal imperial court over Bengal declined rapidly. A new diwan (top revenue official) by the name of Murshid Quli Khan presided over a peaceful transition to independence from Delhi and his successors would style themselves nawabs (nabāb), or independent princes. He moved the provincial capital from Dhaka to Murshidabad and reformed revenue collection. By 1713 the posting of officials from Delhi stopped as the Mughal empire descended into disorder. Although Bengal was nominally still a province, it became independent under the nawabs, who were a non-Bengali dynasty. The last nawab of Bengal, Sirajuddaula, attempted to block unauthorised trade from the region. This led to repeated confrontations with British traders and his ultimate defeat at Polashi in 1757.13 After further clashes, notably the battle of Buxar in 1764, the British controlled not only the Bengal delta but also large swathes of land in the Ganges valley to the west. Now a European trading corporation, the British East India Company, came to rule one of the most prosperous regions of Asia. Formally the Company became the diwan of Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa) but in reality it was wholly free from Mughal interference. It was a highly lucrative position. The Company could now marginalise European and Asian competitors in Bengal, exert much greater control over the pro- ducers of vital trade goods and benefit from Bengal’s well-organised system of land taxation. For the British the victory at Polashi marked not just the fact that it gained commercial, military and administrative control of an area much larger than Britain; it meant the beginning of empire. They used Bengal’s riches to conquer the rest of India and other parts of Asia. For the people of Bengal the British victory at Polashi meant not just the emergence of yet another foreign overlord. It meant the beginning of European domination, new forms of capitalist exploit- ation, a racially ordered society and profound cultural change.