At around the same time as the conflict between the British Parliament and American colonies was heating up, another affair in another corner of the world was beginning to occupy the attention of the English people, writes Mithi Mukherjee in the opening chapter of ‘ India in the Shadows of Empire: A legal and political history 1774-1950 ’ ( >www.oup.com ). “This involved the increasing financial and political influence in Parliament of the East India Company, a mercantile body that, on the basis of its trade monopoly in the East, derived from a charter from the British Parliament, had amassed enormous fortunes from India…”
Registered with the London Stock Exchange, this trading company that had also become the government in India was effectively directed by a group of jobbers and brokers, who for all practical purposes had become legislators for India, determining policies for the Company’s government on behalf of the shareholders of the company, the author narrates.
“The most important goal for this Company’s government in Bengal, in keeping with the logic of the stock exchange was to make the maximum profit from the colony in the shortest possible time. The profit from India primarily came in two forms – (1) in the form of rent collected from cultivators at high rates, and (2) in the form of profits from often unfair trade practices.”
The immediate consequences of the double squeeze on the cultivators in the form of rent and monopoly trading rights included large-scale devastation and pauperisation of the Indian peasantry, leading ultimately to famine, within the first fifteen years of the Company’s rule, she mentions.
The source of the Company’s powers was not just the charter; during the impeachment trial Warren Hastings claimed that the Company had inherited the sovereignty over Bengal through a grant of the Diwani (the right to collect revenue) from the Mughal emperor. He asserted that since this sovereignty had nothing to do with the English Parliament, it was beyond its jurisdiction and had to be exercised in accordance with Mughal laws, customs, and conventions regarding sovereignty, not with those of the English.’
Basis for an activist judiciary
The colonial government’s exercise of powers were to be restrained through the Supreme Court in Calcutta, established by Lord North’s Regulation Act of 1773. The court was to provide, as Edmund Burke had argued, ‘a strong and solid security for natives against the wrongs and oppressions of British residents in Bengal.’
The Regulating Act, as the author explains, laid the basis for an activist judiciary. She narrates that tensions emerged between the Supreme Court and the Company’s administration within a few years of the Court’s establishment, when it began to entertain suits brought by ‘natives’ against members of the provincial councils, the chief revenue and judicial bodies of the East India Company, which functioned under the authority of the Governor-General’s Council, the final court of appeal.
“Refusing to recognise the authority of the company’s judicial bodies to imprison ‘natives’ for defaults of revenue, the Court not only ordered the council to pay damages to their accusers, but even had members of the council arrested, when they failed to respond to its summons…”
Engaging account.
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