A Company Army of 7,072 Won at Buxar in October 1764, and Within the Year the Mughal Emperor Signed Over the Revenue of Bengal

Major Hector Munro took 7,072 men into the battle near Buxar on 23 October 1764, by his own return, and Arthur Broome’s 1850 history of the Bengal Army counts 847 of them killed or wounded. The army that came out against him was between 40,000 and 60,000 strong, in Broome’s estimate. Less than ten months later the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II issued a firman (an imperial order) giving the East India Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the right to collect the revenue of three provinces.

The date needs a note. Broome and G. B. Malleson have the two armies sight each other on 22 October and fight on the 23rd, as do Buckland’s Dictionary of Indian Biography and the historian Sonal Singh. Banglapedia gives the 22nd as the day of the battle, and the World History Encyclopedia gives 22 to 23 October. This article uses the 23rd for the fighting.

A nawab the Company made, and a massacre at Patna

Mir Qasim became nawab of Bengal on 27 September 1760, according to Buckland. The Company put him there in place of his father-in-law Mir Jafar, the nawab it had installed after Plassey. The break came over trade. According to Banglapedia, Mir Qasim tried to stop Company servants misusing a Mughal farman of 1717 and selling dastaks, free passes that let traders skip internal customs duties, and wanted to govern without the Company’s interference.

War followed in 1763. Buckland records Company victories over his army at Katwa on 19 July, at Gheria on 1 August and at Udwanala, and Banglapedia counts four pitched battles that summer. Leaving Monghyr, Mir Qasim had the English prisoners at Patna killed on 5 October 1763, which Buckland counts as 50 gentlemen and 100 others.

Refuge came in Awadh from Shuja-ud-Daula, the nawab-wazir (the Mughal empire’s chief minister, who also ruled Awadh). The wandering emperor Shah Alam II joined them, Banglapedia says. For Shuja’s help Mir Qasim agreed to pay eleven lakh rupees a month once the army crossed the Ganges, Malleson writes (a lakh is 100,000), and by 7 March 1764 the allied army was at Banaras.

Thirty men blown from guns, six weeks before the battle

The army Munro joined on 13 August 1764 had already mutinied twice that year, Malleson writes, because Mir Jafar had promised the troops a donation that the Calcutta Council withheld. European soldiers refused orders in January, and some 300 crossed the Karmanasa river, the border of Bihar. Most turned back, but 173 reached Shuja’s service, only three of them English and nearly all the rest French. Sepoys, the Indian soldiers the Company paid and drilled, turned out in protest on 13 February.

The worst case came on 8 September, when the 9th battalion, Captain Galliez’s, the oldest sepoy corps in the Company’s service, mutinied at Manjee. The men declared they would serve no longer because promises had been broken, Broome says, and shut up their European officers, whom they released the next day. A detachment of Marines and a second sepoy battalion reached Manjee on 11 September, and the mutineers surrendered.

Brought to Chapra, they faced Munro on a parade ground with his troops drawn up around them. The battalion’s commander picked out ringleaders, and Munro chose 24 of them for a court-martial of native officers. The General Order of 13 September 1764, which Broome prints, sentenced them to be put to death by being “blown away from the guns.”

Among the condemned, four grenadiers stepped forward as the first four were tied to the guns, and claimed the place of honour their company had always held in the field. The request was granted. The officers of the loyal sepoy battalions then told Munro their men would not let the executions go on. Next Munro had the artillery load with grape, put the Marines and European grenadiers on either side, ordered the sepoys to ground arms, and told the Europeans and gunners to fire on anyone who refused. Sixteen more were blown away. The last four were taken to Moniah and killed in front of two battalions that had shown signs of mutiny, and six sepoys of other corps died the same way at Bankipore. That makes 30 in all, by Broome’s count.

In Broome’s judgment the example ended the spirit of insubordination in the native army. William Pinch of Wesleyan University describes this run-up to Buxar as the first recorded use of the punishment in the Company’s army, and says British writers later called it an old Mughal practice. The Company used it again in 1857, as the British revenge for the rising shows.

Thirteen days on the road to Buxar

Orders to advance went out on 6 October, and Munro marched from Bankipur on the 9th with nearly 900 Europeans, eight battalions of sepoys and a thousand Mughal horse, by Malleson’s count. Champion’s detachment joined him at the ford of Kulvarghat on the Son river on the 10th, and the enemy force guarding it fell back.

The advance guard was ambushed on 13 October beyond the Bonass stream. Four quartermaster sergeants, ten or twelve European troopers and about 60 Mughal horse were killed or badly wounded, Broome counts, while Malleson says 72. The guard was strengthened after that, and each evening the troops practised forming the oblong square they used on the 23rd.

Arriving on the plain of Buxar at about nine on the morning of 22 October, Munro found Shuja’s army drawn up three miles off in front of its earthworks. The two sides watched each other for more than an hour, and Shuja withdrew behind his lines. A council of war decided to rest on the 23rd and attack on the 24th.

Inside Shuja’s camp, Sumroo had already taken Mir Qasim’s trained brigades over to the nawab-wazir, Broome says. Released on 22 October, Mir Qasim left the camp on a lame elephant.

The morning of the battle

Shuja moved first. His army came out of its entrenchments soon after daybreak on 23 October, while Champion’s detachment was still digging false approaches. The Company’s army stood in two lines forming an oblong, with Marines and European detachments in the centre of the front line, sepoy battalions on the flanks, and 28 guns spread between them. By Munro’s return the force was 857 Europeans, 5,297 sepoys and 918 Mughal horse.

The allied centre held the brigades of Sumroo and Madoc, eight battalions of drilled sepoys with field guns worked by Europeans. Behni Bahadur’s division held the allied left, at the fort and village of Buxar on the Ganges. Raja Balwant Singh of Banaras with his troops, Rohilla horse, and about 5,000 Durrani cavalry held the right. Heavier guns on Shuja’s side opened first.

The Durrani horse swung round the marsh, took the Company’s baggage and charged the rear line again and again. The rear line met them with grape and musketry. Lieutenant Nicoll, on Munro’s order, took a village on the right at the point of the bayonet, and the right wing then went at the grove beyond it with orders to use only the bayonet. A cavalry commander charged the left wing from the marsh and was shot down, and Broome says his men broke after that. Riding to the head of his troops, Munro took off his hat and gave three cheers.

Three powder magazines and several ammunition carts went up on Shuja’s orders. After crossing the Torah stream with his regular brigades, his money and his jewels, he had the bridge of boats destroyed, which cut off the rear of his own army and the camp followers. Several thousand people drowned or were smothered in the mud as the rest struggled over, Broome says. An Indian chronicler quoted by Malleson says the bodies formed a bridge 300 yards long. Meanwhile Behni Bahadur’s men at the fort had dismounted and had not heard that the main body was beaten, and they fled when Company sepoys appeared among them.

What the sources do not agree on

The Company’s strength comes from Munro’s own return, which Broome reports, and the allied strength is an estimate in every account. Broome gives 40,000 to 60,000. Malleson has Shuja with about 40,000, at least a third of them trained. Cartwright, in the World History Encyclopedia, says the allied force may have numbered around 50,000, and adds that some historians put Munro’s force at about 4,200 and others at roughly 900 Europeans and 7,000 sepoys.

Losses are also uncertain. Broome’s total is 847 killed and wounded, 101 of them Europeans, though his figures for the separate units do not quite add up to it. Of the other side he writes that upwards of 2,000 lay dead on the field, and he guesses that twice as many again died in the stream and the pursuit. Perhaps 5,000 allied soldiers died, Cartwright writes, and he gives around 2,000 as the lower estimate.

The emperor’s role is disputed. Camped across the Torah stream, Shah Alam took no part in the fighting, according to Broome. Malleson calls him virtually a state prisoner of Shuja’s, lending the cause only the weight of his title. To Cartwright, by contrast, the emperor ordered the attack.

Under ten months from battlefield to firman

A letter from Shah Alam reached Munro the day after the battle, Broome records, congratulating him and saying the emperor had been a prisoner in Shuja’s hands. Later, at a meeting, the emperor offered to hand over Shuja’s dominions and the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa on whatever terms the Company chose. The major answered that he had no authority to agree. Orders from Calcutta reached him on 19 November, and a treaty with the emperor was signed on 25 November 1764 under a royal salute.

The Calcutta Council, Broome adds, did not take up the emperor’s offer of the governorship of the three provinces. It put Najm-ud-Daula, Mir Jafar’s son, on the throne instead, under a treaty its president and council signed on 20 February 1765. Awadh had been overrun by March, Malleson writes, and Shuja had put himself at the Company’s mercy.

Robert Clive arrived from England to negotiate. The firman, which the Company’s own translation dates 12 August 1765, grants “the Dewannee of the provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa” to the Company “as a free gift.” The Company is to stand security for 26 lakh rupees a year, paid by the nawab, as the emperor’s revenue. Whatever remains after that sum and the cost of the nizamat, the province’s civil administration under the nawab, goes to the Company, because, the text says, the Company “are obliged to keep up a large army” for the provinces’ defence. The grant runs “from generation to generation, for ever and ever.”

Clive and Carnac signed a separate treaty with Shuja at Allahabad on 16 August. Under it Shuja was to pay the Company 50 lakh rupees within 13 months, and to shelter neither Mir Qasim nor Sumroo, whom the treaty calls the assassin of the English. Shah Alam kept Kora and part of Allahabad. The Company gained the right to trade duty free across Shuja’s dominions, and held Chunar fort until the money was paid.

Singh points out in Social Scientist that when the emperor made the grant he controlled none of the three provinces. Bengal and Bihar had been independent since the 1740s, Singh writes, and the Marathas held Orissa.

Why some historians rank Buxar above Plassey

Writing in the 1880s, Malleson said Baksar “takes rank amongst the most decisive battles ever fought.” He credited Major Adams’s campaign of 1763 with giving the three provinces to the English, and saw Buxar as the battle that moved the Company’s frontier to Allahabad and bound the rulers of Awadh to it.

For Banglapedia, Buxar was “a decisive battle” that “riveted the shackles of company rule upon Bengal.” Before it, the entry says, the Company’s power was “fortuitous and hedged with doubt.” Afterward it was “unchallenged and about to receive imperial recognition.” Cartwright concludes that the foundations of the Company’s empire were laid at Plassey and, above all, at Buxar.

None of the three spells out a single reason, but the facts they give point one way. At Plassey, as the earlier tuput article sets out, Mir Jafar’s troops stood aside. The Company at Buxar beat an army with drilled brigades and the Nawab of Awadh’s own cavalry, and a signed imperial grant followed within the year. Singh’s article warns that the immediate effects of that grant are easy to lose in the larger story of British conquest.

What the grant did to the revenue

The result, in Banglapedia’s summary, was that the Company now collected Bengal’s revenue directly, controlled the province’s finances and army, and left administration to the nawab’s officials, who had the responsibility but not the means. The entry puts it in one line: “the British now had the power without responsibility.”

Writing to the Court of Directors on 30 September 1765, the Select Committee in Fort William said it had settled 53 lakh rupees a year on the nawab, and a footnote in the printed letter puts the 26 lakh owed to the emperor at £325,000. Banglapedia’s entry on the diwani gives the same two sums and says the surplus was the Company’s profit. The Revenue Department took over three sepoy battalions to guard the districts and collect the money, Broome records.

How the revenue was then used to buy Bengal’s own goods for export is told in how Britain drained India. The Select Committee’s letter made its case for the diwani in these words: “All revolutions must henceforward be at an end, as there will be no fund for secret services.”