Part 2 (1/2)

For they were built by architects of the Jaina school, who were just as ready to work for their Moslem rulers as they had been to work in earlier times for their Hindu rajas. By the mere force of a civilisation in many ways superior to that of their conquerors, these builders imposed upon them, even in the very mosques which they built for them, many of the most characteristic features of Hindu architecture. To obtain, for instance, in a mosque the greater elevation required by the Mahomedans, to whom the dim twilight of a Hindu shrine is repugnant, they began by merely superimposing the shafts of two pillars, joining them together with blocks to connect the base of the upper with the capital of the lower shaft; and this feature in a less crude shape was permanently retained in the Indo-Mahomedan architecture of Gujerat.

Nowhere better than at Ahmedabad can the various stages be followed through which this adaptation of a purely Hindu style to Mahomedan purposes has pa.s.sed. It was at first somewhat violent and clumsy. The earliest mosque in Ahmedabad, that of Ahmed Shah, is practically a Hindu temple with a Mahomedan facade, and the figures of animals and of idols can still be traced on the interior pillars. The octagonal tomb of Ganj Bakhsh, the spiritual guide of Ahmed Shah, just outside the city at Sarkhij, marks an immense stride, and the adjoining mosque, of which all the pillars have the Hindu bracket capitals and all the domes are built on traditional Hindu lines, retains nevertheless its Mahomedan character. Still more wonderful is the blend achieved in the mosque and tomb of Ranee Sepree, the consort of Mahmud Bigarah, who was perhaps the most magnificent of the Mahomedan kings of Gujerat. It was completed in 1514, just a hundred years after the foundation of the Ahmed Shahi dynasty, and it shows the distance travelled in the course of one century towards something like a fusion of Hindu and Mahomedan ideals in the domain at least of architecture.

In Bij.a.pur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu art--perhaps because the great days of Bij.a.pur came after it had taken its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern India to perish by the sword of Islam. Having laid low the Hindu ”City of Victory,” the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan ”City of Victory” eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed. The Gol k.u.mbaz, the great round dome over the lofty quadrangular hall in which Sultan Mahomed Adil Shah lies under a plain slab of marble, is an almost perfect hemisphere, which encloses the largest domed s.p.a.ce in the world, and it dominates the Deccan tableland just as the dome of St.

Peter's dominates the Roman Campagna. To such heights Hindu architecture can never soar, for it eschews the arched dome; and beautiful as the Hindu cupola may be with its concentric mouldings and the superimposed circular courses horizontally raised on an octagonal architrave which rests on symmetrical groups of pillars, it cannot attain anything like the same bold span or the same lofty elevation. Have we not there a symbol of the fundamental antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan conceptions in many other domains than that of architecture? Even if the Arabs did not originate the pointed arch, it has always been one of the most beautiful and characteristic features of Mahomedan architecture.

The Hindu, on the other hand, has never built any such arch except under compulsion.

To unite India under Mahomedan rule and attempt to bridge the gulf that divided the alien race of Mahomedan conquerors from the conquered Hindus required more stedfast hands and a loftier genius than those Mahomedan _condottieri_ possessed. A new power more equal to the task was already storming at the northern gates of India. On a mound thirty-five miles north of Delhi, near the old bed of the Jumna, there still stands a small town which has thrice given its name to one of those momentous battles that decide the fate of nations. It is Panipat. There, on April 21, 1526, Baber the Lion, fourth in descent from Timur, overthrew the last of the Lodis. Like his terrible ancestor, he had fought his way down from Central Asia at the head of a great army of Tartar hors.e.m.e.n; but, unlike Timur, he fought not for mere plunder and slaughter, but for empire. He has left us in his own memoirs an incomparable picture of his remarkable and essentially human personality, and it was his statesmans.h.i.+p as much as his prowess that laid the rough foundations upon which the genius of his grandson Akbar was to rear the great fabric of the Moghul Empire as it was to stand for two centuries. Though it was at Delhi that, three days after the battle of Panipat, Baber proclaimed himself Emperor, no visible monument of his reign is to be seen there to-day. But the white marble dome and lofty walls and terraces of his son Humayun's mausoleum, raised on a lofty platform out of a sea of dark green foliage, are, next to the Kutub Minar, the most conspicuous feature in the plain of Delhi. Endowed with many brilliant and amiable qualities, Humayun was not made of the same stuff as either his father or his son. Driven out of India by the Afghans, whom Baber had defeated but not subdued, he had, it is true, in a great measure reconquered it, when a fall from the top of the terraced roof of his palace at Delhi caused his death at the early age of forty-eight. But would he have been able to retain it? He had by no means crushed the forces of rebellion which the usurper Sher Shah had united against Moghul rule, and which were still holding the field under the leaders.h.i.+p of the brilliant Hindu adventurer Hemu. Delhi itself was lost within a few months of Humayun's death, and it was again at Panipat, just thirty years after his grandfather's brilliant victory, that the boy Akbar had in his turn to fight for the empire of Hindustan. He too fought and won, and when he entered Delhi on the very next day, the empire was his to mould and to fas.h.i.+on at the promptings of his genius.

Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors before him in India, men of his own race and creed--the blood of Timur flowed in his veins--and men of other races and of other creeds. They too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had pa.s.sed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. What was the reason?

Was it not that they had established their dominion on force alone, and that when force ceased to be vitalised by their own great personalities their dominion, having struck no root in the soil, withered away and perished? Akbar, far ahead of his times, determined to try another and a better way by seeking the welfare of the populations he subdued, by dispensing equal justice to all races and creeds, by courting loyal service from Hindus as well as Mahomedans, by giving them a share on terms of complete equality in the administration of the country, by breaking down the social barriers between them, even those which hedge in the family. He was a soldier, and he knew when and how to use force, but he never used force alone. He subdued the Rajput states, but he won the allegiance of their princes and himself took a consort from among their daughters. With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East.

He created a h.o.m.ogeneous system of civil administration which our own still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively slight modifications to the present day.

Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area of India. A great stride had been made towards real unity and social fusion. Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could be no security for the future against the revival of the old and deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds. He was himself learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred books to be translated into Persian--the cultured language of his court--so that he could study them for himself; and he invited Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his presence the relative merits of their religious systems. The deserted palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with exceptional vividness the life of the splendid court over which the greatest of the Moghul Emperors--the contemporary of our own great Queen Elizabeth--presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his long reign. Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu than of Mahomedan inspiration. For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over against it, in the beautiful ”Golden House,” dwelt his Rajput consort, Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir. Nor did he forget his favourite friends and counsellors. Upon no building in Fatehpur has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and ill.u.s.trious Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to Akbar. The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation, untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar's should live. In the great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all denominations in search of religious truth. The spirit which inspired Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the ”Gate of Victory,” the lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the s.p.a.cious mosque quadrangle: ”Jesus, on whom be peace, said: 'The world is a bridge. Pa.s.s over it, but build not upon it. The world endures but an hour; spend that hour in devotion.'”

It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them, he foresaw that his life's work would a.s.suredly some day be wrecked. Did he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as n.o.ble a mind as his not proof against the overweening _hubris_ to which a despotic genius has so often succ.u.mbed? One momentous evening, in the Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the domain of faith. From claiming the right to explain away the Koran, which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating it altogether, there was but a short step. Akbar very soon took it. He promulgated a new religion, which he called the Din-i-Ilahi, and a new profession of faith, which, instead of the old Islamic formula, ”There is no G.o.d but G.o.d, and Mahomed is his prophet,” proclaimed indeed in the same words the unity of G.o.d, but declared Akbar to be the one Viceregent of G.o.d. The new religion, theistic in doctrine, not only borrowed its prayers chiefly from the Pa.r.s.ees and its ritual from the Hindus, but practically abolished all Mahomedan observances. The orthodox Mahomedans naturally held up their hands in horror, and many preferred honourable exile to conformity. But the awe which Akbar inspired, and perhaps the acknowledged elevation of his motives, generally compelled at least outward acceptance during his lifetime. His Mahomedan subjects had, moreover, to admit that his desire to conciliate Hinduism did not blind him to its most perverse features. Whilst he abolished the capitation tax on Hindus and the tax upon Hindu pilgrims, he forbade infant marriages and, short of absolute prohibition, did all he could to discountenance the self-immolation of Hindu widows. To the Brahmans especially his condemnation, both implied and explicit, of the caste system was a constant stone of offence.

Great as was his genius and admirable as were many of his inst.i.tutions, Akbar, to use a homely phrase, fell between two stools to the ground. He himself ceased to be a Mahomedan without becoming a Hindu, whilst the great bulk at least of his subjects still remained at bottom Mahomedans and Hindus as before. Neither community was ripe for an eclectic creed based only upon sweet reasonableness and lofty ethical conceptions. His son and successor, Jehanghir, at once reverted to Mahomedan orthodoxy, but the reaction only became militant when Aurungzeb succeeded Shah Jehan. The profound incompatibility between Islam and Hinduism rea.s.serted itself in him with a bitterness which the growing menace of the rising power of the Hindu Mahrattas probably helped to intensify.

The reimposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus destroyed the last vestige of the great work of conciliation to which Akbar had vainly applied all his brilliant energies. Like Fatehpur Sikri itself, which for lack of water he had been compelled to abandon within fifteen years of its construction, it was a magnificent failure, and it was perhaps bound in his time to be a failure.

Aurungzeb was the first of the Moghuls to reside in the Mahomedan atmosphere of Delhi throughout his long reign. But, begun in usurpation at the cost of his own father, it ended in misery and gloom. His sons had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth of the new Mahratta power, to which s.h.i.+vaji had not unsuccessfully attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous Peac.o.c.k Throne. Then the Afghans again broke through the northern pa.s.ses. Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani carry fire and sword through Northern India. One service, however, the Afghan rendered. From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely closed in upon Delhi. Another great battle was fought at Panipat between the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army.

The Mahrattas endured a crus.h.i.+ng defeat, which, together with treachery within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.

For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was progressing apace. Of all those who had followed in the wake of the Portuguese--Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British--the British alone had come to stay. After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection, and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India Company, already a power in the land. Well for him had he remained there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one faction and then by another. Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, ”If a paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here”; and when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers. He was already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer in Lord Lake, who had routed the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between Humayun's tomb and the river Jumna. Then, perhaps for the first time in her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had pa.s.sed into the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the n.o.blest of Akbar's dreams.

But throughout all those centuries of Mahomedan domination the enduring power of Hinduism had bent without ever breaking to the storm, even in Northern India, where it was exposed to the full blast of successive tempests. Many of its branches withered or were ruthlessly lopped off, but its roots were too firmly and too deeply embedded in the soil to be fatally injured. It continued indeed to throw off fresh shoots. The same process of adaptation, a.s.similation, and absorption, which had been going on for centuries before the Mahomedan conquest, without ever being permanently or even very deeply affected by the vicissitudes of Indian political history, went on throughout all the centuries of Mahomedan domination. Whilst millions of Hindus were, it is true, being forcibly converted to Islam, Hinduism, making good its losses to a great extent by the complete elimination of Buddhism, and by permeating the Dravidian races of Southern India, continued its own social and religious evolution. It was, in fact, after the tide of Mahomedan conquest had set in that Hindu theology put on fresh forms of interpretation. The rivalry between the cults of s.h.i.+va and of Vishnu became more acute, and many of the Dharmashastras and Puranas were recast and elaborated by s.h.i.+vaite and Vishnuite writers respectively in the form in which we now know them, thus affording contemporary and graphic pictures of the persistency of Hindu life and manners after India had lost all political independence. It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most popular of Hindu G.o.ds, and the divine love, of which he was at first the personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their origin from the ancient ideas of s.e.xual dualism immanent in some of the Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of the great G.o.ds into the Sakti wors.h.i.+p of the female principle, often with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both. Possibly as a result of closer contact with primitive Dravidian religions, or of such wild lawlessness as followed the barbarous devastation wrought by Timur, the blood even of human victims flowed more freely before the altars of the Mahamatri, the great G.o.ddesses personified in Kali and Durga. The wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds a.s.sumed a more terrific and orgiastic character. _Sati_ was more frequently practised. Many of the most splendid and, at the present day, most famous temples--amongst others that of Jaganath at Puri--were founded during that period. The custom, in itself very ancient, of religious pilgrimages to celebrated shrines and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant Mahomedans. Caste, which was as foreign to Islam as to Christianity, but nevertheless retained its hold upon Indian converts to Islam as it has also in later times upon Indian converts to the Christian creeds, tended to harden still further; for caste has ever been the keystone of Hinduism, and, as Mahomedan power gradually waned, Hinduism rea.s.serted itself in a spirit of both religious and national rebellion against Mahomedan domination.

The most permanent, or at least the most signal, mark which Mahomedan ascendancy has left upon Hinduism has been to accentuate the inferiority of woman by her close confinement--of which there are few traces in earlier times--within the zenana, possibly in the first instance a precautionary measure for her protection against the l.u.s.t of the Mahomedan conquerors. Her seclusion still const.i.tutes one of the greatest obstacles to Indian social and religious reform. For, as custom requires an Indian girl to be shut up in the zenana at the very age when her education, except in quite elementary schools, should commence, the women of India, even in the cla.s.ses in which the men of India have been drawn into the orbit by Western education, have until recently remained and still for the most part remain untouched by it, and their innate conservatism clings to social traditions and religious superst.i.tions of which their male belongings have already been taught to recognise the evils. In this respect Mahomedan domination has helped to strengthen the forces of resistance inherent to Hinduism.

On the other hand, Mahomedan domination has left behind it a deep line of religious cleavage, deepest in the north, which was the seat of Mahomedan power, but extending to almost every part of India. Sixty-six millions of Indians out of three hundred millions are still Mahomedans, and though time has in a large measure effaced the racial differences between the original Mahomedan conquerors and the indigenous populations converted to their creed, the religious antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, though occasionally and temporarily sunk in a sense of common hostility to alien rulers who are neither Mahomedans nor Hindus, is still one of the most potent factors not only in the social but in the political life of India, both indelibly moulded from times immemorial by the supreme force of religion. We have a pale reflection of that sort of antagonism at our own doors in the bitterness between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster. All over India, Mahomedans and Hindus alike remember the centuries of Mahomedan domination, the latter with the bitterness bred of the long oppression that struck down their G.o.ds and mutilated their shrines, the former with the unquenched pride and unquenchable hope of a fierce faith which will yet, they believe, make the whole world subject to Allah, the one G.o.d, and Mahomed, his one Prophet.

CHAPTER IV

BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

The basic fact which has governed the whole evolution of British rule in India is that we went there in the first instance as traders, and not as conquerors. For trade meant co-operation. There could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom into the Orient, our forefathers determined to emulate the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese and open up new ocean highways to the remote markets credited with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them indefinitely. The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen Elizabeth's charter first established three hundred years ago a few precarious settlements on the far-flung sh.o.r.es of a then almost unknown continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an emba.s.sy to court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of their power. Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians who flocked to their ”factories.” At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention in the internal affairs of India. Nor was it till, in the course of the great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only alternative to the greater danger of French dominion. It was the French challenge to Britain's position all over the world far more than any deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement, until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.

But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of almost constant co-operation between British and Indians. The East India Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force, its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops. At Pla.s.sey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company's forces, formed only a t.i.the numerically of the victorious armies that fought under Clive and Munro. The traditions of loyal comrades.h.i.+p between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day, with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulers.h.i.+p of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring, wherever circ.u.mstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.

In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British Government and the British people to control the methods by which British dominion was to be exercised and maintained. So when the British in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers, they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. Those conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to influence also the att.i.tude of the British people towards the alien races brought under their sway. The motives which prompted English colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. All were impelled primarily by the desire to attain wealth.

But whilst our compet.i.tors never got much beyond that stage, and for the most part imagined that the only way to attain wealth was by a crude exploitation of subject countries and peoples, the British were saved from similar short-sightedness by the very different spirit with which the development of their own national inst.i.tutions had imbued their rulers at home. By the middle of the eighteenth century a British Government had a very different sense of its responsibilities to the British people for the welfare of the nation as a whole from that which any continental ruler had been taught to entertain in regard to his own people. That sense of responsibility the British Government and the British people applied in a modified form to the administration of their Indian possessions.

So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the sh.o.r.es of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple.

The three ”Presidents” who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction. But matters a.s.sumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking abundant t.i.the of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend financial and military a.s.sistance in order to rescue the East India Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India. The grant of the _Diwani_ to the Company by the t.i.tular Emperor of Delhi gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change. The magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the Company's coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable advances in order to replenish them, and the splendour of the fortunes ama.s.sed by many of the Company's servants who returned from India to spend them in ostentatious luxury and in political intrigue at home, combined with the brilliant achievements of British arms on Indian soil to focus public attention on Indian affairs. They became one of the live issues of British party politics.