CHAPTER XI

THE GOVERNOR-GENERALSHIP OF WARREN HASTINGS

(1774-1785)

SECTION I. The Rohilla War (1774).

WARREN HASTINGS did not take his seat as first Governor-General in India until 1774; but from 1772, when he went to Calcutta as Governor of the Bengal Presidency, until his final departure in the spring of 1785, the whole course and character of Anglo-Indian history bear the impress of his personality, and are connected with his name.

At the time of his taking office the power of the Marathas, which had been accumulating for a hundred years, was threatening every prince and State in India from the Sutlej river southward to Cape Comorin. The shattering overthrow that they had suffered at Pániput in 1761 had expelled them from the Punjab. Yet in western India they were supreme; in Rajputana and central India they plundered and ransomed at their leisure, and they were incessantly making predatory excursions north-eastward into the fertile plains watered by the Ganges and the Jumna, to harry the lands of the Oudh Vizier, of Rohilcund, and of the Mahomedan chiefships about Delhi, Agra, and Allahabad. Although the Maratha armies subsisted by freebooting, and their leaders were rough uneducated captains whose business it was to levy contributions and seize terri

tory, their civil administration, especially the whole
collection of revenue in conquered lands, was managed
by Brahmins, by far the ablest class of officials then
existing in India. The Maratha tactics were to overrun
a country with swarms of light horsemen, harassing and
exhausting their opponents, exacting heavy contributions
if they retired, or rackrenting the land scientifically if
they settled down on it. By this combination of skilful
irregularity in war and methodical absorption of a coun-
try's wealth the leaders were able to keep on foot great
roving armies, which were the terror of every other
Indian power. The unwieldy State of Hyderabad, not-
withstanding its size, was no match for them; they were
too numerous and active even for such an eminent pro-
fessor of their own predatory science as Hyder Ali of
Mysore; and they descended annually, like a chronic
plague, upon the Rohillas and the Oudh Vizier, who
could barely hold against them the large provinces that
they had secured out of the partition of the Empire.
Everything pointed to the Marathas as destined to be
the foremost rivals of the English in the impending
contest for ascendancy. And in fact no native power
other than the Marathas did oppose any solid resistance
to the spread of our dominion in upper India, until the
Sikhs, long afterwards, crossed the Sutlej in 1845.

When Warren Hastings assumed the government of Bengal in 1772, the different Maratha chiefs were just beginning to found separate rulerships, without abandoning their confederacy under the Peshwa. And from 1774, during the whole of his Governor-Generalship, the state and course of the East India Company's foreign affairs were governed principally by our varying relations with these chiefs. Hastings found that a Maratha army had made its annual irruption into the

districts north-west of Bengal, where the emperor Shah Alam, who had been living at Allahabad on the revenues assigned to him by Clive in 1765, solicited and obtained their assistance towards recovering his capital. Under their patronage he had been replaced on his throne in 1771, but the Marathas treated his kingship as a mere pageant, using his name as a pretext for seizing more districts, and leaving him almost destitute in the midst of a plentiful camp. They were now swarming about the north country and rapidly gaining the upper hand of all the Mahomedan princes. What concerned the English more particularly, was that they were demanding, in the emperor's name, surrender of the districts of Kora and Allahabad which had been made over to him by Lord Clive in 1765, when the Diwáni of Bengal was granted to the Company. For since these districts bordered on Bengal as well as on Oudh, their occupation by the Marathas would have been equally fatal to the security of both territories.

On the northern frontier of Oudh, in the angle between the line of the Himalayas and the Upper Ganges, lay the country possessed by the Rohilla Afghans. This was a chiefship established about twenty-five years previously by an adventurer of reputed Afghan parentage, who had asserted his independence of the Moghul empire during the confusion caused by Ahmed Shah's earlier descent upon India. It was now under a confederacy of which Háfiz Rehmat Khan was the leader, and it formed an important section of the general line of defence against the Marathas, who had broken through in 1771 and now reappeared in 1772. As Oudh covered the open side of Bengal, Rohilcund covered the exposed frontier of Oudh; so when the Rohillas implored the Vizier to succour them, the

Vizier, fearing for his own dominions, asked the English to co-operate against the common enemy. The Calcutta Government sent up an English Brigade under Sir Robert Barker, instructing him to make a demonstration in support of the Vizier, and to act generally on his side in any negotiations. A treaty was arranged between the Vizier and the Rohillas, and attested by the English commander, whereby the Vizier agreed to drive off the Marathas on payment by the Rohillas of a stipulated subsidy. The Marathas soon afterwards retired of their own accord into quarters for the rainy season; but early in 1773 they again menaced Rohilcund, and this time the combined forces of Oudh, the Rohillas, and the English marched against them. When they had been compelled to withdraw the Vizier demanded payment of his subsidy, but Háfiz Rehmat Khan, the principal Rohilla chief, sent evasive answers; whereupon the Vizier addressed himself to the English, whose commander had attested, though he had in no way guaranteed, the engagement.

Out of these transactions arose the Rohilla War, which brought down such violent obloquy and so much loose parliamentary invective upon Hastings, against whom it has always been charged as a dark political crime. The whole situation was overspread by a network of transparent intrigue. The Vizier suspected that the Rohilla chiefs, who were a band of Afghan usurpers in an imperial province, might on emergency join the Marathas against him; nor indeed was there any particular reason why they should not do so, since the Vizier himself had been seriously meditating over a proposal from the Marathas that he should join them in an attack upon the Rohillas, and in making a partition of their country. But he was wise enough to see that

by joining a band of robbers to plunder his neighbour's house he would bring them the sooner to his own door; and on the whole he thought the safer step would be an alliance with the English, whose troops would make him sure of success in the field, and whose avowed interest lay in strengthening him as a barrier against the Marathas. The Vizier, therefore, at an interview with the Governor-General at Benares in 1773, desired the assistance of an English force to put him in possession of Rohilcund, alleging that the Rohillas had broken their treaty by withholding from him the subsidy, and promising liberal payment for the service. To this proposition Hastings, after some deliberation and hesitation on both sides, finally consented. Our ally,' he wrote to his Council, 'would obtain by this acquisition a complete compact State shut in effectually from foreign invasions by the Ganges, while he would remain equally accessible to our forces either for hostility or protection. It would give him wealth, of which we shall partake, and give him security without any dangerous increase of power; . . . by bringing his frontier nearer to the Marathas, for whom singly he is no match, it would render him more dependent on us and connect the union more firmly between us.' Accordingly the united forces invaded Rohilcund in the spring of 1774; the Rohillas, who were well led and fought bravely, would soon have disposed of the Vizier's army, but they could not stand against the English troops, and after some gallant charges they were defeated. Háfiz Rehmat Khan was killed fighting courageously at the head of his men, and the short-lived power of the Afghan confederacy was utterly broken. Rohilcund was annexed to the possessions of the Vizier, who thereby acquired the country lying east of the