Chapter 6

Debi Sing was one of those who in the early stages of the English power in Bengal attached himself to those natives who then stood high in office. He courted Mahomed Reza Khân, a Mussulman of the highest rank, of the tribe of Koreish, whom I have already mentioned, then at the head of the revenue, and now at the head of the criminal justice of Bengal, with all the supple assiduity of which those who possess no valuable art or useful talent are commonly complete masters. Possessing large funds, acquired by his apprenticeship and novitiate in the lowest frauds, he was enabled to lend to this then powerful man, in the several emergencies of his variable fortune, very large sums of money. This great man had been brought down by Mr. Hastings, under the orders of the Court of Directors, upon a cruel charge, to Calcutta. He was accused of many crimes, and acquitted, 220,000_l._ in debt: that is to say, as soon as he was a great debtor, he ceased to be a great criminal.

Debi Sing obtained by his services no slight influence over Mahomed Reza Khân, a person of a character very different from his.

From that connection he was appointed to the farm of the revenue, and inclusively of the government of Purneah, a province of very great extent, and then in a state of no inconsiderable opulence. In this office he exerted his talents with so much vigor and industry that in a very short time the province was half depopulated and totally ruined.

The farm, on the expiration of his lease, was taken by a set of adventurers in this kind of traffic from Calcutta. But when the new undertakers came to survey the object of their future operations and future profits, they were so shocked at the hideous and squalid scenes of misery and desolation that glared upon them in every quarter, that they instantly fled out of the country, and thought themselves but too happy to be permitted, on the payment of a penalty of twelve thousand pounds, to be released from their engagements.

To give in a few words as clear an idea as I am able to give of the immense volume which might be composed of the vexations, violence, and rapine of that tyrannical administration, the territorial revenue of Purneah, which had been let to Debi Sing at the rate of 160,000_l._ sterling a year, was with difficulty leased for a yearly sum under 90,000_l._, and with all rigor of exaction produced in effect little more than 60,000_l._, falling greatly below one half of its original estimate: so entirely did the administration of Debi Sing exhaust all the resources of the province; so totally did his baleful influence blast the very hope and spring of all future revenue.

The administration of Debi Sing was too notoriously destructive not to cause a general clamor. It was impossible that it should be passed over without animadversion. Accordingly, in the month of September, 1772, Mr. Hastings, then at the head of the Committee of Circuit, removed him for maladministration; and he has since publicly declared on record that he knew him to be capable of all the most horrid and atrocious crimes that can be imputed to man.

This brand, however, was only a mark for Mr. Hastings to find him out hereafter in the crowd, to identify him for his own, and to call him forth into action, when his virtues should be sufficiently matured for the services in which he afterwards employed him, through his instruments, Mr. Anderson and Gunga Govind Sing. In the mean time he left Debi Sing to the direction of his own good genius.

Debi Sing was stigmatized in the Company's records, his reputation was gone, but his funds were safe. In the arrangement made by Mr. Hastings, in the year 1773, by which Provincial Councils were formed, Debi Sing became deputy-steward, or secretary, (soon in effect and influence principal steward,) to the Provincial Council of Moorshedabad, the seat of the old government, and the first province of the kingdom; and to his charge were committed various extensive and populous provinces, yielding an annual revenue of one hundred and twenty lacs of rupees, or 1,500,000_l._ This division of Provincial Council included Rungpore, Edrackpore, and others, where he obtained such a knowledge of their resources as subsequently to get possession of them.

Debi Sing found this administration composed mostly of young men, dissipated and fond of pleasure, as is usual at that time of life, but desirous of reconciling those pleasures, which usually consume wealth, with the means of making a great and speedy fortune,--at once eager candidates for opulence, and perfect novices in all the roads that lead to it. Debi Sing commiserated their youth and inexperience, and took upon him to be their guide.

There is a revenue in that country, raised by a tax more productive than laudable. It is an imposition on public prostitutes, a duty upon the societies of dancing-girls,--those seminaries from which Mr. Hastings has selected an administrator of justice and governor of kingdoms. Debi Sing thought it expedient to farm this tax,--not only because he neglected no sort of gain, but because he regarded it as no contemptible means of power and influence. Accordingly, in plain terms, he opened a legal brothel, out of which he carefully reserved (you may be sure) the very flower of his collection for the entertainment of his young superiors: ladies recommended not only by personal merit, but, according to the Eastern custom, by sweet and enticing names which he had given them. For, if they were to be translated, they would sound,--Riches of my Life, Wealth of my Soul, Treasure of Perfection, Diamond of Splendor, Pearl of Price, Ruby of Pure Blood, and other metaphorical descriptions, that, calling up dissonant passions to enhance the value of the general harmony, heightened the attractions of love with the allurements of avarice. A moving seraglio of these ladies always attended his progress, and were always brought to the splendid and multiplied entertainments with which he regaled his Council. In these festivities, whilst his guests were engaged with the seductions of beauty, the intoxications of the most delicious wines of France, and the voluptuous vapor of perfumed India smoke, uniting the vivid satisfactions of Europe with the torpid blandishments of Asia, the great magician himself, chaste in the midst of dissoluteness, sober in the centre of debauch, vigilant in the lap of negligence and oblivion, attended with an eagle's eye the moment for thrusting in business, and at such times was able to carry without difficulty points of shameful enormity, which at other hours he would not so much as have dared to mention to his employers, young men rather careless and inexperienced than intentionally corrupt. Not satisfied with being pander to their pleasures, he anticipated and was purveyor to their wants, and supplied them with a constant command of money; and by these means he reigned with an uncontrolled dominion over the province and over its governors.

For you are to understand that in many things we are very much misinformed with regard to the true seat of power in India. Whilst we were proudly calling India a British government, it was in substance a government of the lowest, basest, and most flagitious of the native rabble, to whom the far greater part of the English who figured in employment and station had from their earliest youth been slaves and instruments. Banians had anticipated the period of their power in premature advances of money, and have ever after obtained the entire dominion over their nominal masters.

By these various ways and means Debi Sing contrived to add job to job, employment to employment, and to hold, besides the farms of two very considerable districts, various trusts in the revenue,--sometimes openly appearing, sometimes hid two or three deep in false names, emerging into light or shrouding himself in darkness, as successful or defeated crimes rendered him bold or cautious. Every one of these trusts was marked with its own fraud; and for one of those frauds, committed by him in another name, by which he became deeply in balance to the revenue, he was publicly whipped _by proxy_.

All this while Mr. Hastings kept his eye upon him, and attended to his progress. But as he rose in Mr. Hastings's opinion, he fell in that of his immediate employers. By degrees, as reason prevailed, and the fumes of pleasure evaporated, the Provincial Council emerged from their first dependence, and, finding nothing but infamy attending the councils and services of such a man, resolved to dismiss him. In this strait and crisis of his power the artist turned himself into all shapes. He offered great sums individually, he offered them collectively, and at last put a _carte blanche_ on the table,--all to no purpose. "What are you?--stones? Have I not men to deal with? Will flesh and blood refuse me?"

When Debi Sing found that the Council had entirely escaped, and were proof against his offers, he left them with a sullen and menacing silence. He applied where he had good intelligence that these offers would be well received, and that he should at once be revenged of the Council, and obtain all the ends which through them he had sought in vain.

Without hesitation or scruple Mr. Hastings sold a set of innocent officers,--sold his fellow-servants of the Company, entitled by every duty to his protection,--sold English subjects, recommended by every tie of national sympathy,--sold the honor of the British government itself,--without charge, without complaint, without allegation of crime in conduct, or of insufficiency in talents: he sold them to the most known and abandoned character which the rank servitude of that clime produces. For _him_ he entirely broke and quashed the Council of Moorshedabad, which had been the settled government for twelve years, (a long period in the changeful history of India,)--at a time, too, when it had acquired a great degree of consistency, an official experience, a knowledge and habit of business, and was making full amends for early errors.

For now Mr. Hastings, having buried Colonel Monson and General Clavering, and having shaken off Mr. Francis, who retired half dead from office, began at length to respire; he found elbow-room once more to display his genuine nature and disposition, and to make amends in a riot and debauch of peculation for the forced abstinence to which he was reduced during the usurped dominion of honor and integrity.

It was not enough that the English were thus sacrificed to the revenge of Debi Sing. It was necessary to deliver over the natives to his avarice. By the intervention of bribe-brokerage he united the two great rivals in iniquity, who before, from an emulation of crimes, were enemies to each other,--Gunga Govind Sing and Debi Sing. He negotiated the bribe and the farm of the latter through the former; and Debi Sing was invested in farm for two years with the three provinces of Dinagepore, Edrackpore, and Rungpore,--territories making together a tract of land superior in dimensions to the northern counties of England, Yorkshire included.

To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle on the full swing of his genius, he removed all the restraints which had been framed to give an ostensible credit, to give some show of official order, to the plans of revenue administration framed from time to time in Bengal. An officer, called a _dewan_, had been established in the provinces, expressly as a check on the person who should act as farmer-general. This office he conferred along with that of farmer-general on Debi Sing, in order that Debi might become an effectual check upon Sing; and thus these provinces, without inspection, without control, without law, and without magistrates, were delivered over by Mr. Hastings, bound hand and foot, to the discretion of the man whom he had before recorded as the destroyer of Purneah, and capable of every the most atrocious wickedness that could be imputed to man.

Fatally for the natives of India, every wild project and every corrupt sale of Mr. Hastings, and those whose example he followed, is covered with a pretended increase of revenue to the Company. Mr. Hastings would not pocket his bribe of 40,000_l._ for himself without letting the Company in as a sharer and accomplice. For the province of Rungpore, the object to which I mean in this instance to confine your attention, 7,000_l._ a year was added. But lest this avowed increase of rent should seem to lead to oppression, great and religious care was taken in the covenant so stipulated with Debi Sing, that _this_ increase should not arise from any additional assessment whatsoever on the country, but solely from improvements in the cultivation, and the encouragement to be given to the landholder and husbandman. But as Mr. Hastings's bribe, of a far greater sum, was not guarded by any such provision, it was left to the discretion of the donor in what manner he was to indemnify himself for it.

Debi Sing fixed the seat of his authority at Dinagepore, where, as soon as he arrived, he did not lose a moment in doing his duty. If Mr. Hastings can forget his covenant, you may easily believe that Debi Sing had not a more correct memory; and accordingly, as soon as he came into the province, he instantly broke every covenant which he had entered into as a restraint on his avarice, rapacity, and tyranny, which, from the highest of the nobility and gentry to the lowest husbandmen, were afterwards exercised, with a stern and unrelenting impartiality, upon the whole people. For, notwithstanding the province before Debi Sing's lease was, from various causes, in a state of declension, and in balance for the revenue of the preceding year, at his very first entrance into office he forced from the zemindars or landed gentry an enormous increase of their tribute. They refused compliance. On this refusal he threw the whole body of zemindars into prison, and thus in bonds and fetters compelled them to sign their own ruin by an increase of rent which they knew they could never realize. Having thus gotten them under, he added exaction to exaction, so that every day announced some new and varied demand, until, exhausted by these oppressions, they were brought to the extremity to which he meant to drive them, the sale of their lands.

The lands held by the zemindars of that country are of many descriptions. The first and most general are those that pay revenue; the others are of the nature of demesne lands, which are free, and pay no rent to government. The latter are for the immediate support of the zemindars and their families,--as from the former they derive their influence, authority, and the means of upholding their dignity. The lands of the former description were immediately attached, sequestered, and sold for the most trifling consideration. The rent-free lands, the best and richest lands of the whole province, were sold,--sold for--what do your Lordships think? They were sold for less than one year's purchase,--at less than one year's purchase, at the most underrated value; so that the fee-simple of an English acre of rent-free land sold at the rate of seven or eight shillings. Such a sale, on such terms, strongly indicated the purchaser. And how did it turn out in fact? The purchaser was the very agent and instrument of Mr. Hastings, Debi Sing himself. He made the exaction; he forced the sale; he reduced the rate; and he became the purchaser at less than one year's purchase, and paid with the very money which he had extorted from the miserable vendors.

When he had thus sold and separated these lands, he united the whole body of them, amounting to about 7,000_l._ sterling a year (but, according to the rate of money and living in that country, equivalent to a rental in England of 30,000_l._ a year); and then having raised in the new letting, as on the sale he had fraudulently reduced those lands, he reserved them as an estate for himself, or to whomsoever resembling himself Mr. Hastings should order them to be disposed.

The lands, thus sold for next to nothing, left of course the late landholder still in debt. The failure of fund, the rigorous exaction of debt, and the multiplication of new arbitrary taxes next carried off the goods.

There is a circumstance attending this business which will call for your Lordships' pity. Most of the landholders or zemindars in that country happened at that time to be women. The sex there is in a state certainly resembling imprisonment, but guarded as a sacred treasure with all possible attention and respect. None of the coarse male hands of the law can reach them; but they have a custom, very cautiously used in all good governments there, of employing female bailiffs or sergeants in the execution of the law, where that sex is concerned. Guards, therefore, surrounded the houses; and then female sergeants and bailiffs entered into the habitations of these female zemindars, and held their goods and persons in execution,--nothing being left but what was daily threatened, their life and honor. The landholders, even women of eminent rank and condition, (for such the greatest part of the zemindars then were,) fled from the ancient seats of their ancestors, and left their miserable followers and servants, who in that country are infinitely numerous, without protection and without bread. The monthly instalment of Mr. Hastings's bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the vitals of the people.

The zemindars, before their own flight, had the mortification to see all the lands assigned to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of violence and fraud where their demesne possessions and their goods had been before made away with. Even the lands and funds set aside for their funeral ceremonies, in which they hoped to find an end to their miseries, and some indemnity of imagination for all the substantial sufferings of their lives,--even the very feeble consolations of death, were, by the same rigid hand of tyranny,--a tyranny more consuming than the funeral pile, more greedy than the grave, and more inexorable than death itself,--seized and taken to make good the honor of corruption and the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or his instruments.

Thus it fared with the better and middling orders of the people. Were the lower, the more industrious, spared? Alas! as their situation was far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary. To afford your Lordships some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr. Hastings's hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing. Debi Sing, when he was charged with a fraudulent sale of the ornaments of gold and silver of women, who, according to the modes of that country, had starved themselves to decorate their unhappy persons, argued on the improbability of this part of the charge in these very words.

"It is notorious," says he, "that poverty generally prevails amongst the husbandmen of Rungpore, more perhaps than in any other parts of the country. They are seldom possessed of any property, except at the time they reap their harvest; and at others barely procure their subsistence. And this is the cause that such numbers of them were swept away by the famine. Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses only a handful of straw, the sale of a _thousand_ of which would not perhaps produce twenty shillings."

These were the opulent people from whose superfluities Mr. Hastings was to obtain a gift of 40,000_l._, over and above a large increase of rent, over and above the exactions by which the farmer must reimburse himself for the advance of the money by which he must obtain the natural profit of the farm as well as supply the peculium of his own avarice.

Therefore your Lordships will not be surprised at the consequences. All this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more than the whole of their substance or possible acquisition.

Over and above this, there was no mode of extortion, which the inventive imagination of rapacity could contrive, that was not contrived, and was not put in practice. On its own day your Lordships will hear, with astonishment, detestation, and horror, the detail of these tyrannous inventions; and it will appear that the aggregate of these superadded demands amounted to as great a sum as the whole of the compulsory rent on which they were piled.

The country being in many parts left wholly waste and in all parts considerably depopulated by the first rigors, the full rate of the district was exacted from the miserable survivors. Their burdens were increased, as their fellow-laborers, to whose joint efforts they were to owe the means of payment, diminished. Driven to make payments beyond all possible calculation, previous to receipts and above their means, in a very short time they fell into the hands of usurers.

The usurers, who under such a government held their own funds by a precarious tenure, and were to lend to those whose substance was still more precarious, to the natural hardness and austerity of that race of men had additional motives to extortion, and made their terms accordingly. And what were the terms these poor people were obliged to consent to, to answer the bribes and peshcush paid to Mr. Hastings?--five, ten, twenty, forty per cent? No! at an interest of six hundred per cent per annum, payable by the day! A tiller of land to pay six hundred per cent to discharge the demands of government! What exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of wretchedness and misery? Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted, overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the fifth part of its usual value. The crop was then gone, but the debt remained. An universal treasury extent and process of execution followed on the cattle and stock, and was enforced with more or less rigor in every quarter. We have it in evidence, that in those sales five cows were sold for not more than seven or eight shillings. All other things were depreciated in the same proportion. The sale of the instruments of husbandry succeeded to that of the corn and stock. Instances there are, where, all other things failing, the farmers were dragged from the court to their houses, in order to see them first plundered, and then burnt down before their faces. It was not a rigorous collection of revenue, it was a savage war made upon the country.

The peasants were left little else than their families and their bodies. The families were disposed of. It is a known observation, that those who have the fewest of all other worldly enjoyments are the most tenderly attached to their children and wives. The most tender of parents sold their children at market. The most fondly jealous of husbands sold their wives. The tyranny of Mr. Hastings extinguished every sentiment of father, son, brother, and husband!

I come now to the last stage of their miseries. Everything visible and vendible was seized and sold. Nothing but the bodies remained.