The Anarchy: The relentless rise of the East India Company – William Dalrymple Bloomsbury; Rs.511; Pages 397 If there is a deep antagonism to capitalism within the collective psyche of Indians, it can be traced back to the corporate excess, exploitation and pillage of this landmass by the London-based East India Company (EIC) — undoubtedly the most powerful multinational in world history — in the last and fading years of the Mughal Empire. The rise of EIC, which received a wide-ranging royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I for “trade to the East Indies” on December 31, 1600, into the mightiest corporation in global history that in its heyday commanded an army of 200,000 men and ruled over 300 million Indians — “a state in the guise of a merchant”— is brilliantly recounted in this page-turning historical narrative. It reads like a novel, and is certain to prompt right-thinking citizens towards the conclusion that we have not learned sufficient lessons from the mercenary and mendacious rule of the EIC and its successor, the British Crown. They ruled for almost 200 years over India which until the 18th century was the world’s richest and most prosperous region after imperial China. It’s important to note that the British arrived in India not as marauding conquerors but as humble petitioners anxious to trade with Mughal India “which was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing… and in many ways was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the world’s leader in manufactured textiles,” writes William Dalrymple, the widely read Indophile author who has written over a dozen deeply-researched historical narratives of Mughal India: White Mughals (2002), The Last Mughal (2006), Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009), City of Djinns (1993) among other tomes. The merchants of EIC came to India merely to trade in commodities — fine muslin, silk, indigo and spices — load their ships and sell these luxuries back home profitably. The first “man of quality” sent by King James I of England to petition Emperor Jehangir for grant of a trading licence to the company was Sir Thomas Roe who arrived in India in 1615, but was given short shrift by the great Mughal. Nevertheless, Roe stuck around for three years living in slummy conditions before he was given permission to build a factory in Surat, Gujarat. That was the start of a Mughal-EIC relationship during which the Brits learned to do business in India. “Over the next 200 years, it (the company) would slowly learn to operate skilfully within the Mughal system, and do so in the Mughal idiom, with its officials learning good Persian, correct court etiquette, the art of bribing the right official and in time out-manoeuvring all their rivals — Portugese, Dutch and French — for imperial favour,” writes Dalrymple. Although in recent times several well-researched and anguished accounts of British atrocities in the Indian subcontinent have been written — notably An Era of Darkness by politician-writer Shashi Tharoor — it’s also important to bear…
