Journey
British India — 1600 to 1947
A company chartered in 1600 to buy pepper acquired the revenues of Bengal in 1765, most of the subcontinent by 1849, and was itself abolished in 1858 in favour of the Crown. This follows the three presidency forts, the battles that turned, and the capital built eighteen years before the end.
Stops (19)
- Surat · factory 1613
The East India Company's first Indian factory, permitted by Jahangir after Thomas Best's ships beat a Portuguese squadron off Swally in 1612 and demonstrated they were worth licensing. For seventy years Surat was the Company's western headquarters, inside a Mughal port, paying Mughal customs and buying a Portuguese pass to sail.
- Fort St George, Chennai · 1640
Francis Day bought a strip of beach from the Nayaka of Poonamallee in 1639 and built the first English fortification in India on it. Fort St George is where the Company first collected revenue, minted coin and held a court, so the machinery of government appears here before there is any territory to govern.
- Bombay Castle · 1661 dowry · 1668 lease
Bombay came to Charles II in Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1661 and was leased to the Company in 1668 for ten pounds a year. The western headquarters moved here from Surat in 1687 because the harbour was defensible and the island was sovereign English soil rather than a Mughal concession.
- Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan · 1690 · Fort William 1700
Job Charnock's settlement of 1690 on three villages beside the Hooghly became the third presidency, then the capital of the whole. Fort William, rebuilt after 1756, and the field of fire cleared around it that is now the Maidan, are the shape of a garrison town that ran a subcontinent until 1911.
- Plassey (Palāśī) · 23 June 1757
Clive's nine-hundred Europeans and two thousand sepoys beat fifty thousand of Siraj ud-Daulah's men because Mir Jafar's division, bought beforehand, stood still. It was less a battle than a contract executed in the field, and it put a Company servant in a position to choose the Nawab of Bengal. It was less a battle than a contract executed in a field, and it left a Company servant choosing the Nawab of Bengal.
- Robert Clive · Plassey 1757 · diwani 1765
Clive held Arcot, arranged Plassey, and came back in 1765 to take the diwani — the right to collect Bengal's land revenue — from a Mughal emperor who had lost at Buxar. He extracted a fortune large enough for Parliament to inquire into it, told the Commons he was astonished at his own moderation, and killed himself in 1774.
- Buxar · 22 October 1764
Mir Qasim of Bengal, Shuja ud-Daulah of Awadh and the emperor Shah Alam II fought together and lost. Buxar was the real military decision, and it produced the grant of 1765 that made the Company the emperor's revenue officer for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — a legal title to rule, issued by the power being displaced.
- Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana · 4 May 1799
Tipu Sultan fell in the breach with the sword still in his hand, and Mysore was partitioned between the Company, Hyderabad and a restored Wodeyar child under a subsidiary treaty. The last south Indian state with an independent foreign policy, a navy and French allies ends here; everything afterwards is negotiated from weakness.
- Assaye · 23 September 1803
Arthur Wellesley called Assaye the hardest fighting he ever saw, Waterloo included; he lost a quarter of his force to Scindia's and the Bhonsle's French-trained artillery. The Second Anglo-Maratha War broke Maratha primacy in the Deccan, and the treaties that followed put Delhi and the emperor under Company protection. The treaties that followed put Delhi and the blind emperor Shah Alam II under Company protection.
- Chillianwala · 13 January 1849
A bloody draw against the Sikh khalsa in the Second Anglo-Sikh War, in which four British regiments lost their colours. Gujrat settled the campaign five weeks later and the Punjab was annexed in March. It is the last independent Indian state of any size to fall, and the Koh-i-Noor left with the treaty.
- James Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie · Governor-General 1848–1856
Dalhousie annexed the Punjab, Lower Burma, Nagpur, Jhansi, Satara and Oudh, and laid the first railway, the telegraph and the post. Both halves were one policy: a single administered market under a single paramount power. Every annexation supplied a grievance to the rebellion that broke out the year after he left.
- Bahādur Shāh Zafar · proclaimed May 1857
A poet of eighty-two on a Company pension, with authority over little beyond the Red Fort's walls, whom the Meerut sepoys declared emperor of Hindustan — turning a mutiny into a restoration and himself into a defendant. He was tried in his own audience hall and exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862.
- Red Fort, Delhi · 1857–1858 · 1947
The citadel of Shahjahanabad, taken by assault in September 1857, used as a barracks for ninety years, and the place where Zafar was tried, the INA officers were tried in 1945, and Nehru raised the flag in 1947. Company rule was abolished here in all but name; the Crown took over by proclamation in November 1858.
- Viceregal Lodge, Shimla · summer capital 1864–1939
For half of every year the government of India ran from a Himalayan hill station, and after 1888 from this Scottish-baronial house on Observatory Hill. The 1945 Simla Conference and the 1947 partition discussions were held in it. An empire that governed two hundred million people did so from a ridge reachable only by mule track until 1903.
- Kalka–Shimla Railway · 1903
Ninety-six kilometres, one hundred and three tunnels and eight hundred bridges to lift the summer capital's traffic from the plains to Shimla. The mountain railways are the clearest case of engineering as government: the line exists because the administration moved uphill every April, and it is now a World Heritage property.
- Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus · 1878–1887
Bori Bunder, where India's first train left for Thane in 1853, rebuilt as a Gothic cathedral to the railway with a dome, gargoyles and a statue of Progress on top. The station and the network behind it carried cotton to the mills, troops to the frontier and, eventually, everyone else.
- Cellular Jail, Andaman Islands · 1906–1938
A seven-winged radial prison a thousand miles offshore, built to hold political prisoners where nobody could hear them, with solitary cells facing the backs of other cells. Savarkar, Barin Ghose and hundreds of Ghadr and Chittagong convicts served sentences here; three wings survive as a national memorial. Savarkar, Barin Ghose and hundreds of Ghadr and Chittagong convicts served sentences here, and three of the seven wings survive as a national memorial.
- Jallianwala Bagh · 13 April 1919
Dyer marched fifty riflemen into a walled garden with one narrow entrance and fired one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into a crowd that could not leave. The official count was three hundred and seventy-nine dead. It is the moment at which constitutional agitation stopped being the main line of Indian politics.
- New Delhi, Lutyens' plan · capital 1911 · inaugurated 1931
George V announced the move from Calcutta at the 1911 durbar and Lutyens and Baker laid out an imperial city on axial sightlines below Raisina Hill. It took twenty years and was finished sixteen years before the empire it was built for ended. The Republic inherited it intact and still governs from it.