THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUGHAL EMPIREHaider had been a general in the service of the maharaja of Mysore,
whose throne he usurped in 1761. Within a very short time he had
practically subjected the whole of southern India. His swift light cavalry
was a formidable force. This upstart was the first Indian ruler who was
ready and able to learn from the Europeans. He employed several French
officers, built up a strong modern infantry of his own and carefully
avoided facing the British infantry with his cavalry units. He also organised
a disciplined administration, cancelled all fiefs and paid his officers regular
salaries. The horses of the cavalry were also bought and maintained at the
government’s expense—they were not the property of the individual
horsemen, as in other Indian armies. Haider even thought of taking care of
the wounded soldiers and established a medical service in his army.
Had this able man entered into an alliance with Madhav Rao, they
could have jointly defeated the British; instead, they continued fighting one
another. In 1767 Madhev won a decisive battle against Haider; in the same
year the British and their ally, the nizam of Hyderabad, confronted Haider.
The nizam left the British in the lurch on the battlefield, and from 1767 to
1769 Haider fought several pitched battles against the British. He even
threatened to attack Madras and forced the British to sign a peace treaty
which was very much in his favour.
It seemed that the British had met a challenger who would put them to a
severe test. Their position in India was not very favourable around 1770.
Corrupt cliques were ruling the roost in Calcutta and Madras. The
governor of Madras, Lord Pigot, who had tried to put an end to corruption
there, had been arrested by his own officers and languished in jail, where
he died in 1776. With such a chaotic state of affairs a determined Indian
ruler could still have broken the British ring around India.
The British, however, were favoured by events. The great Peshwa,
Madhav Rao, died in 1772, and Raghunath—as anxious as ever to succeed
to this high office—entered into an alliance with the British and thereby
split the Maratha forces so deeply that they could no longer hope to win
supremacy in India. At the same time the British got a new leader who was
going to dominate the Indian political scene for more than a decade:
Warren Hastings became governor of Bengal in 1771, and governor
general in India in 1774.
Warren Hastings: architect of an empireWarren Hastings was the main architect of the British empire in India. He
was not a warrior, but a great diplomat and a competent administrator. He
was only seven years junior to Clive, whose political views he shared.
Whereas Clive was daring and ambitious and had once aimed at a seat in
Parliament and then received a commission as a lieutenant colonel,
Hastings had patiently risen step by step in the East India Company’s