G. B. Malleson

“ He had bent all his hopes on Law of Lauriston, nephew of the famous Scotch financier, and who commanded the French troops before Trichinopoli. He leant, however, on a reed, on which, when a man leaneth, it pierces his hand. As a soldier under command Law was excellent. As a Commander-in-chief he was pitiable, dreading responsibility, timid, nervous, wanting in every quality of a general. At the moment Dupleix did not know this. He had seen Law fight well and gallantly at the siege of Pondicherry: he had known him full of self-confidence, and he had believed him capable of great things. ”

“ His toleration was so absolute, his trust, once given, so thorough, his principles so large and so generous, that, despite the prejudices of their birth, their religion, their surroundings, they yielded to the fascination. And when, in return, Akbar asked them to renounce one long-standing prejudice which went counter to the great principle which they recognised as the corner-stone of the new system, the prejudice which taught them to regard other men, because they were not Hindus, as impure and unclean, they all, with one marked exception, gave way. ”

“ Hannibal caused unrest to Rome for nearly a quarter of a century; Wellington drove the French from Portugal and Spain. The achievement of Clive was more splendid than any one of these. He founded for this little island in the Atlantic a magnificent empire; an empire famous in antiquity, renowned since the time of Alexander, whose greatest sovereign had been the contemporary of Queen Elizabeth, more enlightened than any of her predecessors, more tolerant, a more far-sighted statesman even than she. He was, according to Lord Stanhope, emphatically 'a great man.' But he was more than a great man. ”

“ The accident which deprived Humáyún of his life before the second battle of Pánípat had bestowed upon the young Akbar, then a boy of fourteen, the succession to the empire of Bábar, was, then, in every sense, fortunate for Hindustán. Humáyún, during his long absence, his many years of striving with fortune, had learnt nothing and had forgotten nothing. The boy who succeeded him, and who, although of tender years, had already had as many adventures, had seen as many vicissitudes of fortune, as would fill the life of an ordinary man, was untried. ”

“ No administration surpasses, in the strength of will of the administrator, in excellence of design, in thoroughness of purpose, and, as far as his masters would permit, in thoroughness of action, his second administration of Bengal. No general who ever fought displayed greater calmness in danger, more coolness of brain, than did Clive at Káveripák, at Samiáveram, at Calcutta, when, on the fog rising, he found himself enveloped by the Súbahdár's army, 40,000 strong. ”

“ The several races recognised that during his reign of forty-nine years India was free from foreign invasion; that he subjugated all adversaries within, some by force of arms, some by means more peaceful, and that he preferred the latter method. 'The whole length and breadth of the land,' wrote Muhammad Amín after his death, 'was firmly and righteously governed. All people of every description and station came to his court, and universal peace being established among all classes, men of every sect dwelt secure under his protection.' Such was Akbar the ruler. ”

“ For not only did the English use the authority they possessed to the great impoverishment of the soil, but they gave to their friends and dependents licences exempting from the payment of duty in such profusion, that the people of Bengal and Bihár suffered to an extent such as, in the present day, can with difficulty be credited. Never, on the one side, was there so insatiable a determination to become rich, no matter what misery might be thereby caused to others; never, on the other, a more honest endeavour, by sacrifices of any kind, to escape the ruin caused by such cruel exactions. ”

“ The dominant religion should not be, as long as he was its interpreter, the religion of the sword. It should carry, on the contrary, a healing influence throughout India; should wipe away reminiscences of persecution, and proclaiming liberty of conscience, should practise the most perfect toleration. When this change had been generally recognised Akbar would then appeal to the princes and peoples of India to acknowledge the suzerainty of the one prince who would protect and yet not persecute. ”

“ Clive had returned to Calcutta, May 24, absolute master of the situation. He had probed to the bottom the character of the Súbahdár, and had realized that so long as he himself should remain in India, and Mír Jafar on the masnad, the English need fear no attack. But, in the East, one man's life, especially life of a usurper, is never secure. In those days the risks he incurred were infinitely greater than they are now. Clive had noted the ill-disguised impatience of several of the powerful nobles, more especially that of Míran, the son, and of Mír Kásim, the son-in-law, of the Súbahdár. ”

“ In the seventh year of his reign, he being then in the twenty-first year of his life, Akbar abolished the practice, heretofore prevailing, by which the troops of the conqueror were permitted to forcibly sell or keep in slavery the wives, children, and dependants of the conquered. Whatever might be the delinquencies of an enemy, his children and the people belonging to him were, according to the proclamation of the sovereign, to be free to go as they pleased to their own houses, or to the houses of their relatives. No one, great or small, was to be made a slave. ”

“ As Bussy with a force of French troops was to remain with him as his protector, it seemed as though French influence was destined to remain predominant in Southern India.
And so but for one man it would have remained, increasing its strength until its roots had spread far and wide below the surface. This, we believe, is the true lesson of the early part of this biography. It was one man's genius which, meeting the French on the ground of their own selection, seized their idea, made it his own, and worked it to their destruction. It was Clive who hoisted Dupleix with his own petard. ”

“ By the rivals whom he had overthrown and by the children of the soil, Bábar was alike regarded as a conqueror, and as nothing more. A man of remarkable ability, who had spent all his life in arms, he was really an adventurer, though a brilliant adventurer, who, soaring above his contemporaries in genius, taught in the rough school of adversity, had beheld from his eyrie at Kábul the distracted condition of fertile Hindustán, and had dashed down upon her plains with a force that was irresistible. ”

“ The army of Chánda Sáhib, doubled up by the terrible blow struck in the very centre of his possessions, still indeed held the position before Trichinopoli, but, from an enemy confident, boastful, certain of ultimate success, he had become an enemy timid, irresolute, doubtful of the issue, shrinking from his own shadow. The prestige gained by the young Englishman paralyzed his vitality. ”

“ It is impossible to understand the character of Akbar without referring to them somewhat minutely. Akbar did not suddenly imbibe those principles of toleration and of equal government for all, the enforcement of which marks an important era in the history of India. For the first twenty years of his reign he had to conquer to maintain his power. With the representatives of dispossessed dynasties in Bengal, in Behar, in Orissa, in Western India, including Gujarát and Khándesh, ready to seize an opportunity, to sit still was to invite attack. ”

“ Few men who had to meet on their front a dangerous invasion, would have dared to despatch, to a distant point, the troops he had raised to repel that invasion, remaining himself to meet it from resources he would improvise. But, without a moment's hesitation or a solitary misgiving, Clive recognized that the opportunity had come to him to complete the work he had begun, six years before, in Southern India; that a chance presented itself to transfer the great influence exercised by Bussy at the court of the Súbahdár of the Deccan to his own nation. ”

“ There never has flourished in India a more generous encourager of the real thing. In this respect the present rulers of India might profit by his example. One of the men whose knowledge of history was the most extensive in that age, and who possessed great talents and a searching mind, was Khán-í-Ázam Mírzá, son of his favourite nurse. For a long time this man held fast to the orthodox profession of faith, ridiculing the 'new religion' of Akbar, and especially ridiculing Faizí and Abulfazl, to whom he applied nicknames expressing his sense of their pretensions. ”

“ Formidable as was the situation no living man was so well qualified to deal with it as was Clive. In the hour of danger he soared above his fellows. The danger here was greater than the danger of Arcot; than at the surprises of Káveripák and of Samiáveram; than during the hour of doubt at Plassey. His opponents were his own men—men whom he had led to victory. They possessed all the fortified places, the guns, the material of war. From the frontier came rumours of the advance of a Maráthá army, 60,000 strong, to wrest Allahábád and Karra from his hand. ”

“ On all the questions which have affected mankind in all ages, and which affect them still, the questions of religion, of civil polity, of the administration of justice, he had an open mind, absolutely free from prejudice, eager to receive impressions. Born and bred a Muhammadan, he nevertheless consorted freely and on equal terms with the followers of Buddha, of Bráhma, of Zoroaster, and of Jesus. It has been charged against him that in his later years he disliked learned men, and even drove them from his court. ”

“ Up to the year 1757 the unwarlike inhabitants of Bengal had been the prey of the Mughal or the Maráthá. But in 1765, so far as could be judged, neither was to be feared. The Maráthá power had suffered in 1761, on the field of Pánípat, near Delhi, one of the most crushing defeats ever inflicted on a people, and Clive had no power of divining that the genius of a young member of one of their ruling families, who escaped wounded from the field, would, in a few years, raise the Maráthá power to more than its pristine greatness. As for the Mughal, his power was gone for ever ”

“ The very expressions used by the natives of India at the present day show how this thought runs through their imaginations. To them the man in authority, the supreme wielder of power, sits in the place of God. His fiat means to them weal or woe, happiness or misery. On days of ceremony, then, they expect that this all-powerful being shall display the ensigns of royalty, shall surround himself with the pomp and glitter which betoken state. Akbar thoroughly understood this and acted accordingly. ”

“ To most men, in fact to all but a very few men, in England and in France, India was a terra incognita whither a certain few repaired young, and whence they returned, in the prime of their manhood, rich, and often with a great reputation. Why was it that such men were at once subjected to the vilest persecution? The fact that they were so is incontestable. Clive himself and Warren Hastings, whose reputation has recently been splendidly vindicated by two great Englishmen,1 are cases in point in England; Dupleix and La Bourdonnais and Lally, in France. It is the saddest of sad stories ”

“ It was to a great extent upon her advice that he had acted in dealing with Bairám. She had a splendid provision in the palace, and Akbar had provided handsomely for her sons. The eldest of these, however, fired with jealousy at the elevation of men whose equal or superior he considered himself to be, and goaded probably by men of a like nature to his own, assassinated the Prime Minister as he was sitting in his public office; then, trusting to the favour which Akbar had always displayed towards his family and himself, went and stood at the door of the harem. ”

“ It is impossible not to feel sympathy for the youthful prince, surrounded by traitors, his one true adherent killed. Scarcely had Mír Jafar quitted him when there came to him another traitor, Rájá Duláb Rám, who commanded the army corps nearest to the position he had taken. The Rájá found his master in a state of great agitation. The English were showing themselves in the open; his own men were giving way; hope was vanishing quickly. Instead of encouraging the Súbahdár to fight it out, the treacherous Rájá gave fuel to his fears, told him the day was lost, and urged him to flee to Murshidábád. ”

“ It is not easy for a young boy to shake off all at once the influence of a great general under whom he had been placed to learn his trade, and possibly Akbar, though he did not approve many of the acts authorised in his name by his Atálik, did not feel himself strong enough to throw off the yoke. But the removal by the strong hand of men whom Akbar liked, but who had incurred without reason the enmity of Bairám, gradually estranged the heart of the sovereign from his too autocratic minister. ”

“ Born a soldier, for, without a military education of any sort or much conversing with any of the profession, from his judgement and good sense, he led an army like an experienced officer and a brave soldier, with a prudence that certainly warranted success. ”

“ Thus a faith based on some elementary principles traced itself on the mirror of his heart, and as the result of all the influences which were brought to bear on his Majesty, there grew, gradually as the outline on a stone, the conviction on his heart that there were sensible men in all religions, and abstemious thinkers, and men endowed with miraculous powers, among all nations. If some true knowledge were thus everywhere to be found, why should truth be confined to one religion, or to a creed like Islám, which was comparatively new, and scarcely a thousand years old ”

“ The one blot minute investigation had been able to find in his career was the treatment of Aminchand. But Aminchand was a blackmailer who had threatened to betray a state-secret of enormous importance unless he were paid a sum out of all proportion to the services he rendered. Such a man deserves no commiseration. His treachery, if Clive had refused to subscribe to his terms, would have involved the death of thousands, and might have driven the English out of Bengal. Clive fought him with the same Asiatic weapon Aminchand had levelled against himself, and beat him. ”

“ But he had not counted sufficiently on the love of rule indwelling in the hearts of men who have once ruled. He had not been long at Agra, then, before the dispossessed lordlings of the province began to raise forces, and to harass the country. Determined to nip the evil in the bud, Akbar prepared a second expedition to Western India, and despatching his army in advance, set out, one Sunday morning in September, riding on a swift dromedary, to join it. Without drawing rein, he rode seventy miles to Toda, nearly midway between Jaipur and Ajmere. ”

“ Mír Kásim had coveted the succession vacant by the death of Míran. He had divined the plans of the English; he hated them as the enemies of the race of conquerors who had ruled Bengal and its people for centuries. He despised them as venal: and he had resolved to use them for his own advantage. He had brought with him a bag full of promises, and, though nominally the representative of Mír Jafar, had come resolved to work for his own interests.
Admitted into the secret deliberations of the Council, Mír Kásim soon realized that, with the single exception of Major Calliaud, he could buy them all. ”

“ They recognised in Akbar the founder of a set of principles such as had never been heard before in India. In his eyes merit was merit, whether evinced by a Hindu prince or by an Uzbek Musalmán. The race and creed of the meritorious man barred neither his employment in high positions nor his rise to honour. Hence, men like Bhagwán Dás, Mán Singh, Todar Mall, and others, found that they enjoyed a consideration under this Muhammadan sovereign far greater and wider-reaching than that which would have accrued to them as independent rulers of their ancestral dominions. ”

“ What a great thing this much-abused 'prestige' is in India was illustrated by the fact that the minds of the native princes and peoples all over the southern part of the peninsula turned to Clive as to a master whom they would follow to the death. He inverted the positions of the two nations, confounded by his brilliant action the schemes of Dupleix, and, very soon afterwards, was able to impose his will, representing the will of the English nation, upon all the native princes who ruled or reigned in the territories of Haidarábád and the Karnátik. ”

“ Akbar was a very magnificent sovereign. Though simple in his habits, he recognised, as the greatest of British Viceroys recognised after him, that show is a main element in the governing of an Eastern people. It is necessary to strike the eye, to let the subjects see the very majesty of power, the 'pomp and circumstance' attending the being whose nod indicates authority, who is to them the personified concentration on earth of the attributes of the Almighty. ”

“ Already he had begun to feel that such a footing was impossible so long as Siráj-ud-daulá remained ruler of the three provinces. As time went on the idea gathered strength, receiving daily, as it did, fresh vitality from the discovery that among the many noblemen and wealthy merchants who surrounded the Súbahdár there were many ready to betray him, to play into his own hand, to combine with himself as against a common foe. ”

“ His reflective mind, therefore, was unwilling from the outset to accept the theory that because he, the conqueror, the ruler, happened to be born a Muhammadan, therefore Muhammadanism was true for all mankind. Gradually his thoughts found words in the utterance: 'Why should I claim to guide men before I myself am guided;' and, as he listened to other doctrines and other creeds, his honest doubts became confirmed, and, noting daily the bitter narrowness of sectarianism, no matter of what form of religion, he became more and more wedded to the principle of toleration for all. ”

“ The reports from Calcutta showed that the combined avarice, greed, misgovernment, and tyranny of the civil authorities left by Clive in Calcutta had produced a general uprising; had almost undone the great work Clive had accomplished; that there was no one on the spot who could be trusted to restore order; but that unless such a task were committed to a competent man, the possessions of the Company in Bengal would be in the greatest danger. This intelligence caused a panic in the India House. Instinctively the name of Clive came uppermost to every lip. ”

“ And now, at the close of 1556, the empire won and lost and won again was in the hands of a boy, reared in the school of adversity and trial, one month over fourteen years.1 Pánípat had given him India. Young as he was, he had seen much of affairs. He had been constantly consulted by his father: he had undergone a practical military education under Bairám, the first commander of the day: he had governed the Punjab for over six months. But it was as an administrator as well as a conqueror that he was now about to be tried. ”

“ There the French had placed, concealed from view, their battery of nine guns and a portion of their best men. About a hundred yards to the right of the road, also looking eastwards, was a dry watercourse, along the bed of which troops could march, sheltered, to a great extent, from hostile fire. In this were massed the rest of the infantry, native and European. The cavalry was in the rear, hidden by the grove, ready to be launched on the enemy when they should reach the ground between the watercourse and the grove. The men were on the alert, expecting Clive. ”

“ The Muhammadans were not only conquerors, but conquerors who had spread their religion by the sword. The scorn and contempt with which the more zealous among them regarded the religion of the Hindus and those who professed it may be traced in every page of the writings of Badauní, one of the contemporary historians of the period. Nor was that scorn confined solely to the Hindu religion. It extended to every other form of worship and to every other doctrine save that professed by the followers of Muhammad.
Akbar was born in that creed. ”