12 BENGALI LITERATURE servants of the Company, abroad with a nominal salary, were coming home laden with such colossal fortune, often acquired with no clean hand, that the ‘Indian Nabob’ became a scandalously proverbial term. Every vice which is the offspring of unlimited authority and insatiable avarice, flourished unchecked. ‘The papers relating to the conduct of the Company’s servants and their underlings on the whole question of internal trade, of receiving presents, The conduct of the 200 other corrupt and _ pernicious Company’s servants. practices, remain as an indelible blot in the early records of the Company’s history.! It is not easy to imagine today what suffering this meant to the country. The anarchical state in which the provinces were placed not only contributed powerfully to its impoverishment but it absolutely দস meant to dissolved the government of the country so far as the protection of the people was concerned. The truculent Mohammedan or the Mahratta was, in his day, a tyrant from fitful caprice, from lax police and unchecked violence. But the cold calculating Anglo-Indian was a tyrant from prescience, and his tyranny, with his superior shrewdness and power of organisation, was a system in itself, which extending, as it did, to every village market and every manufacturer’s , loom, touched the trades, the occupations, and the lives of the people very closely.2 His commercial cupidity, ‘under
‘See, for instance, Director’s Letter, dated Feb. 8, 1764 (quoted in
the Second Report of the Select Committee, 1772); Clive’s Letter to
the Directors, dated Sep. 30,1765 (Third Rep. 1773, App. pp. 391-98,
Mir Kasim’s Letter, dated March 26, 1762; also ibid, dated May, 1762;
Hastings’ Letters to the Governor, dated May 13 and 26, 1762 ; ibid, dated
April 25, 1762; Vansittart, op, cit. ii. pp. 80-81, iii. 74, iii. 3881 ; Verelst, op.
cit. p.8 and p. 46 et seq; Account of Gray, Resident at Maldah, quoted
in Verelst, p. 49; Bolt, Considerations etc., p. 191-194; Mill, History,
Bk iv. pp. 327-338, also p. 392 et seq; Seir Mutaqherin iii. sec. xiv,
esp. p. 201 et seq.
2 Vansittart’s Letter to the Proprietors of India Stock, 1767, pp. 88,
89, 98, quoted in Mill, op. cit. iii. p. 431 footnote.
