Country : India
Assignment Task

 

The British - As late as 1785 the British were poorly informed about India outside Bengal and Banaras, Madras and its immediate hinterland, Bombay Island, and a few other centers. During wars with the Marathas and Mysore between 1778 and 1783, the Company's effort nearly came to grief when the fast cavalry of its enemies caught its armies badly off balance. Knowledge of the interior of the country, its manufactures, population, and agricultural statistics, remained similarly patchy, confined to Bengal and the Madras hinterland. Within a generation, all this had changed. In 1808 the Maratha ruler and general of 'predatory cavalry', Jaswant Rao Holkar, remarked on the invaders' 'practice and favorite object' of receiving 'intelligence of all occurrences and transactions in every quarter'.1

Well-informed residents and Company
new writers reported from all the major Indian courts. The army had created specialist posts and intelligence units. Surveyors and amateur ethnographers had traversed much of central India. The Company's intelligentsia had moved on from the study of classical texts and was now constructing statistical accounts of Indian agriculture, commerce, and castes. The results of this surveillance were disseminated in officially-approved journals to a more expert body of civil and military officers.

Governor-Generalship of Lord Cornwallis
From the time of the Governor-Generalship of Lord Cornwallis (1786-93) onward, the British began to close down bilateral and multilateral channels of information between the Indian powers. Cornwallis's government, for instance, discouraged the client state of Awadh from stationing news writers at the courts of its Maratha rivals
and tried to make the Nawab depend on information from British
sources.
4Later governors-general set out to cut the practical and honorific lines of communication between the Delhi court and the other Indian powers,5 so terminating the discourse on rights and duties which had informed Mughal rule. Meanwhile, the Company systematically took over Indian lines of communication and established its own. This chapter considers in greater detail the establishments of posts, runners, and news writers which formed a significant but little-studied part of the 'service economy' of eighteenth-century India. It shows how the British penetrated and suborned this system. Finally, it examines the intellectual culture of the native informants whom the British enticed, bribed, or bullied into their service.

Posts, carriers, runners, and spies
1- As with the Mughals, post and palanquin routes {dak) became the arteries of British India. Regular post, with palanquins and bearers to convey people and packages, was established between Calcutta, Patna, and Banaras by 1775. Extensions to Lucknow and Hyderabad were made in the 1780s. Communication by sea between the Presidencies was improved, especially after French privateers had been expelled from the Bay of Bengal. Elsewhere, until Wellesley's wars, the Company often continued to rely on existing establishments of Mughal origin.

2- including the Company farmed out the rights of head postmaster to wealthy men such as merchants or landowners and these maintained their own bodies of runners. The British soon began to be irked by the way in which their communications were intertwined with those of their enemies. For example, the dak on the critical route between north and south India via the Maratha-controlled town of Cuttack had been managed over many years by the family of Mahomed Waris, who were wealthy merchants and shipowners in the town of Thaumnagar.

3- The Marathas and the British both employed Mahomed Waris as postmaster in the province. During the prelude to the Mysore War of 1799, Neil Edmonstone of the Persian Department ordered him to intercept the mails of Bugaji Pandit, Maratha ambassador at Mysore. The intercepted letters included a number sent to the ambassador by the agent at Cuttak of the great Calcutta and Banaras banking firm of Manohar Das under the seal of his master.

4- This bank was critical to British financial operations across India, and the incident illustrates how difficult it still was to distinguish between friend and foe, or between the political and commercial spheres in eighteenth-century India. Unfortunately for Mahomed Waris, the banker's agent now complained to the Maratha Governor of his duplicity in manipulating a previously open system of communication in the British interest. The Governor had Mahomed Waris dragged before him and threatened to 'blow him from a gun' unless he, in turn, held up the British mail between Madras and Calcutta. For a time the Postmaster simply directed the British mail onto another route. One despatch, however, fell into the hands of the Marathas. The runner was nearly flogged to death and Mahomed Waris's property was seized by the Marathas.


5- It was incidents such as this that made the British determined to create their own daks and, wherever possible, to close down the communications of their potential rivals. As political tension rose, British residents put pressure on rulers to allow the Company to open its own daks on their territory. In December 1798, William Palmer, Resident at Pune, informed the chief minister, Nana Fadnavis, that the Governor-General wanted to speed communications between the Company's settlements' 'at this critical juncture'.

6- He proposed 'the placing of Hirkarrahs at equal stages on the road between this place [Pune] and Bombay'. When Peshwa Baji Rao refused to discuss the request for a Company dak, Palmer put it down to 'his own narrow and perverse disposition .. . rather than from any maxim or precedent of government'. Rulers, nonetheless, resisted the laying of Company daks because they feared the uses to which the British would put the information so collected. As laying a post was a prerogative of kingship,


7- they also resented the implied dilution of their own authority. Later, when the Peshwa was browbeaten into accepting the British postal system, Palmer complained that he had 'conspicuously refused me the choice of stages and prescribed them himself at great and unequal distances', threatening great delay to British communications.10 Indian rulers attempted to evade demands for regular dak, but by 1810a solid framework of communications was operating. The conquest of Mysore in 1799 allowed the British to strengthen the link between the northern and southern sectors of their power.

8- Thereafter, feeder lines were driven into frontier areas. The government's orders to Charles Metcalfe for his embassy to Kabul in 1809, for example, enjoined him to establish a dak between Delhi and Amritsar if one did not already exist and to take with him the 'requisite complement of officers and runners, securing their protection if found necessary by application to the local authorities'.


9- In order to create new routes for the regular transmission of information and personnel, the British needed to have access to the great labor force represented by the harkaras. 
Who were the harkaras of the later eighteenth century and how were they maintained? The sources reveal a hierarchy of agents from the highly educated to the lowly. Some running-spies were officials of royal households or direct dependents of magnates and British officials. Others formed 'intelligence communities' organized under headmen or merchant financiers who were employed

 

This Political Science Assignment has been solved by our Political Science Experts at UniLearnO. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment Experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.

  • Uploaded By : Roman
  • Posted on : February 15th, 2019
  • Downloads : 102

Whatsapp Tap to ChatGet instant assistance