Warren Hastings. Image courtesy
Wikimedia Commons/National Portrait Gallery
The supporters of Edmund Burke’s impeachment of Warren Hastings belonged to two broad categories. The first were genuine believers of Burke — the fanboys and loyalists. The second were the die-hard and long-time haters of the East India Company. The chief source of their ire was the thorough vulgarisation that its officials and agents had sullied the British society with. The second category — of EIC haters — merits deeper examination.
From Robert Clive onwards, these English Nabobs had not only burgeoned their private fortunes on an unprecedented scale but were flaunting their purloined continental goodies with impunity. These had become a standing mockery of the British society. Wherever ordinary British citizens looked, the teeming parade of India-looted wealth assaulted their faces and corroded their dearly-cherished morals. Clive’s diamond-studded house jeered the British nation by its mere presence. A broken column hitched onto an EIC building in Leadenhall Street was originally a part of a palace in Bengal.
If this was not enough, this obscene class of the nouveau riche also had the temerity to place advertisements in papers declaring their intent to buy their way into Parliament. An ad dated 17 February 1774 in The Public Advertiser offered?2,500 for an “Honourable Seat.”
Writing in the 19th century, Macaulay unsparingly assesses the whole scenario in his biographical essay on Clive: “[They] had sprung from obscurity…they acquired great wealth…they exhibited it insolently…they spent it extravagantly… [which] raised the price of everything in their neighbourhoods, from fresh eggs to rotten boroughs… their liveries outshone those of dukes…their carriages were finer than the Lord Mayor [of London]…the examples of their large and ill governed households corrupted half the servants in the country… with all their magnificence, [they] could not catch the tone of good society…they were still low men…”
The laundry list of the practical sins of these English Nabobs encompassed everyone’s fury. In Macaulay’s acerbic pen, “Methodists and libertines, philosophers and buffoons, were for once on the same side. “So were playwrights and novelists: “If any of our readers will take the trouble to search in the dusty recesses of circulating libraries for some novel published sixty years ago, the chance is that the villain or sub-villain of the story will prove to be a savage old Nabob, with an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver, and a worse heart.”
But Macaulay was merely borrowing from the lived experiences described by Englishmen who had inhabited that era of ill-gotten opulence, a phenomenon that peaked in Macaulay’s time.
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Here is Horace Walpole, for example, writing a letter to his friend Horace Mann in 1761 — just four years after the fateful Battle of Palashi: “The dearness of everything is enormous and intolerable. The country is so rich that it makes everybody poor…unless…my Lord Clive send(s) over diamonds enough for current coin, I do not see how one shall be able to purchase necessaries… [Britain] beats Rome in…extravagance; and Spain in avarice and cruelty.”
The condensed essence of all these condemnations was straightforward: the British empire had enlarged private fortunes while simultaneously destabilising the nation. To invoke TW Nechtman once more, “Those same fortunes were turning young Britons into Nabobs, and the fear was that Nabobs would not only upset the social order but would buy their way into the nation’s political institutions.” But this purchase of political power and influence was also impelled by a keen self-awareness on the part of the Nabobs themselves: they were fabulously, grotesquely wealthy but they were also social pariahs. The taint of their low birth never left them.
And it was precisely this vulnerability that both Burke and the supporters of Warren Hastings’ impeachment aimed their guns at.
If political activism, journalism and pamphleteering were the most visible and popular outlets for rallying support for the impeachment of Hastings as the arch-villain of all that was rotten with the Company, a highly acerbic form of support also emerged from the community of artists, engravers and painters.
Leading the charge was the talented painter, satirist and caricaturist, James Gillray. Arguably, few artists have mounted such feral assaults via brush, colour and canvas against Warren Hastings as Gillray. A study of his overall body of work — a prolific output of about 1,600 paintings in a career spanning less than three decades–is also a study of a pivotal juncture in the history of Indo-British encounters seen from English eyes.
But in our limited context, we can consider just a few slices which depict how Gillray pictured Warren Hastings as the toxic chemical that had thoroughly corroded Britain. His caricatures show how this single man had held the British royalty itself in his thrall. On the broader canvas of history, these pictures also reveal how England itself regarded the East India Company, an area which is mostly neglected or downplayed or overlooked in popular Indian narratives of British colonial history.
[To be continued]
The author is the founder and chief editor, The Dharma Dispatch. Views expressed are personal.
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