Indian History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Indian History’
The Sultan of Aceh in northern Sumatra welcomed his guests from Christian England with an unexpected gesture of friendship.
In 1601, Sir James Lancaster set out in four ships for India and the Far East, seeking trading partners for England on behalf Queen Elizabeth I and the newly-formed East India Company. He visited the Kingdom of Achin (Aceh) in the north of Sumatra the following year, where the Sultan was graciously pleased to receive this emissary from a backward, cold and infidel land far, far away.
Thomas Pitt’s tenure as Governor of Madras was regarded as a golden age, but what he is remembered for is his diamond.
The East India Company was founded late in the reign of Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) to explore the possibilities of overseas trade. By the 1670s, the Company had secured a legal monopoly on English trade in India, but some free spirits chose to go into business for themselves. In 1926, a historian modestly calling himself ‘an Indian Mahomedan’ told us about one of them: Thomas Pitt.
Edmund Burke tore into the directors of the East India Company, accusing them of doing less for the country than India’s mediaeval conquerors.
In 1783, Edmund Burke urged the House of Commons to strip the East India Company of its administration of India, arguing that the Mughal Emperors and other foreign conquerors had done more for the people than the Company seemed likely to do. His blistering attack on the Company’s record repays reading, as it applies just as well to modern aid programmes, interventions and regime changes.
After the East India Company quieted the Maratha Confederacy in 1805, Harsukh Rai looked forward to a new era of good government.
After the Second Maratha War (1803-1805), the East India Company had complete control over the Maratha Confederacy, an alliance of kingdoms in modern-day Maharashtra. Much has since been written in criticism of the English in India, but little of it cuts to the heart, or (as he might put it) mantles the English cheek with the blush of shame, quite like Harsukh Rai’s guileless optimism.
After its prime minister signed the Maratha Confederacy over to the East India Company, the member states rose up in a body.
In 1796, Baji Rao II became Peshwa (prime Minister) of the Maratha Confederacy. When Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, one of the Confederacy’s four kingdoms, learnt that Baji Rao was behind the murder of a relative, he thrashed him at the Battle of Poona in 1802; but Baji Rao exacted spectacular retribution by signing the whole Maratha territory over to the East India Company. Holkar did not leave it there.
Hannah Mullens describes her battle to reach out to wealthy Indian ladies with nothing to do, nothing to think about and nowhere to go.
From the 1850s, Calcutta-born Hannah Mullens (1826–1861) travelled all over India trying to bring literacy, self-respect and spiritual consolation into the dreary leisure of zenanas, the cloistered women’s quarters of well-to-do Indian families. The following account is taken from a letter she wrote from Nagercoil on India’s southernmost tip, then in the Kingdom of Travancore.