The two-faced governors of Empire

Governors of Empire: The East India Company’s Chief Functionaries in India

by Amar Farooqui

Published by Penguin Allen Lane

304 pages ₹699

 

Hindsight is history’s oldest liar, for it flattens accident into destiny, chance into design, until the past looks as if it could have unfolded only one way. The British Empire, that period without which modern India and the world can’t be understood, wears this same false inevitability. 

Long before India was the jewel in the crown, there was a slow, arduous, uncertain road, shaped as much by accident as by ambition. That is the road Amar Farooqui retraces in Governors of Empire: The East India Company’s Chief Functionaries in India.  

 

It began, unglamorously with failure. The first English voyages to India ended for want of knowledge of the sea routes. A Dutchman attached to Goa’s archbishopric, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, changed that with a three-part account, Itinerario, whose spread meant “colonization [of Asian people] was speeded up by the information it disseminated”. The governors-general who loom so large in Indian history were, back in Britain, barely footnotes (only Cornwallis and Wellesley managed some success after their return; the rest fought, and mostly lost, a battle for relevance). It’s natural, then, that Dalhousie wrote of a potential posting: “If I go to Madras, who at the end of five years, when I return, will know my name?” Even though revered in India, their lower-class origins made them objects of ridicule in Britain. 

So who exactly were these men, revered on one shore and forgotten on the other? Mr Farooqui studies these chief functionaries who ruled the East India Company’s (EIC’s) territories over two and a half centuries. As he writes, “Governors-general were products of British society, and their eventual destination was Britain. They had no long-term stakes in India, and embarked on their homeward journey the moment their tenures ended.” 

Where better to start than with the man whose legend still overshadows the truth. Robert Clive joined the Company right at its tipping point, poised to expand beyond its then-limited territories. But tales of Clive’s wisdom and valour — that persist to this date — were largely fabricated and exaggerated by a friend’s writing. It’s just one of many such corrections Mr Farooqui makes, consistently filtering the plausible from the popular. It “is incorrect to suppose (...) that the vast distance which separated company officials posted in India from headquarters in London, provided them with the opportunity to act independently.” Every action was scrutinised. “They might appear to be larger-than-life figures,” but “hardly any freedom was allowed.” 

Or take the Thuggee cult, a subject much written about and even more fantasised over, most famously in Philip Meadows Taylor’s 19th-century bestseller Confessions of a Thug, which Queen Victoria was among the readers of and which is remembered as one of the Empire’s most dramatic pieces of ethnographic fiction. Yet Mr Farooqui finds no solid ground beneath:.“An elaborate story about thugs was put into circulation” without proper inquiry or evidence. One suspect’s “testimony was considered to be of no value by the sessions court, and later by the Nizamat Adalat, due to its lack of consistency”. Even so, by the early 1830s, a major operation for the elimination of thuggee was launched, “the colonial stereotype of the thug” so entrenched that some depictions were “so bizarre as to be understood only in terms of an Orientalist fantasy”. 

Almost as soon as the EIC settled in the subcontinent, it needed its subjects legible. Legibility required division, and hence the two major religions were lumped into distinct buckets — Mughals cast as invaders, the British as benevolent saviours — an image that persists today. The law formalised the division. “The colonial state claimed that, in dispensing justice, it was adhering to the laws of the Muslims and the Hindus… [and] the laws were assembled and codified in accordance with the perceptions of senior officials about definite texts as sources.” What followed was inevitable as “customary rules and diverse local practices of communities were ignored as the British imposed their interpretations, thereby modifying law and jurisprudence”. 

The machinery remained the same, whether it was religious codes or a revolt. Consider Bibighar, Kanpur, during the 1857 Revolt, where colonial powers went beyond imposing their interpretations, ensuring no other version remained. Mr Farooqui notes how “it is unlikely that the history of this tragic incident can ever be recovered since all that we have is highly prejudiced, often hysterical, colonial narratives of it. Any narrative that undermined the official colonial version of the incident was systematically suppressed”.  

Hindsight may make the Empire seem monolithic, but Mr Farooqui’s Governors of Empire dismantles that illusion. These men’s ambitions never truly left Britain — peerages desired, elections contested, reputations retrieved, retirements arranged, estates built. India may have been the means, but England remained the end. Strip away all the flags and the treaties, and all that remains is much simpler, much stranger: An empire run by men already halfway home.

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor. @aroomofwords