Hector Munro at Buxar

Empires are not always founded by men who set out to found them. More often they are founded by a junior officer on a foreign river-bank, given a command he did not seek, on a morning he did not choose, with the wrong number of men for the work in hand. The decision he takes in the next quarter of an hour will be read, two centuries later, as the moment a trading company became a state. He himself, on the rising ground above the Ganges, is thinking only about the line, the volley, and whether the sepoys will go in at the run.

THE HOUSE OF NOVAR

Hector Munro was born at Novar in Easter Ross in 1726, second son of George Munro, fourth of Novar, of a Highland house that had backed the Hanoverian side in the late troubles and was therefore on the right side of the ledger when the Company began recruiting officers from the north of Scotland. He went out east on the standard track of his class and country: an ensigncy bought, a passage to Bombay, the slow grind up through the Company's Madras and Bengal establishments. By 1764 he was thirty-eight, a major by seniority, and in command of the Bengal Army by the accident that John Carnac had died at Patna three months earlier. The Company at this date held three coastal trading factories and a precarious foothold in Bengal won by Clive at Plassey seven years before. It did not yet hold a province. It did not yet collect a land-revenue. It was, in its own books and in its own self-understanding, a merchant house with a private army for the protection of its warehouses.

THE RIVER AT BUXAR

The army had come up the Ganges from Patna in the cool weeks of October, marching in the long brown light of the north Indian late autumn, the river on its left, the dust rising from the column and settling on the men's coats by mid-afternoon. On the twenty-second the advance guard sighted the allied camp at the village of Buxar, on the southern bank, in what is now western Bihar. The numbers were known: about forty thousand horse and foot of three sovereigns. Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, commanded the right with the cavalry of his own state. Mir Qasim, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, held a portion of the centre with the remnant of the Bengal artillery he had trained on European lines and which had so badly used the Company at Patna the previous year. Behind the centre, in the imperial chair under the umbrella of state, sat Shah Alam II, Mughal Emperor at Delhi, the man in whose name, in legal theory, the whole subcontinent was still governed. Against this Munro had seven thousand sepoys of the Bengal establishment, one British battalion of the 96th of Foot, and six light guns. The balance was six to one. The mist came off the river before dawn and lay in the low ground until past nine.

A QUARTER PAST NINE

He sat his horse on the rising ground and worked the field through the glass. The line of the allied centre under the imperial standard was the political fact of the morning, and a political fact, he understood, was a structural fact: an army held together by the presence of a sovereign breaks when the sovereign is taken away from it. The wings would not stand for a centre that had gone. They had no reason to. They had come because the emperor had come. The sepoys behind him had been with the Company since Patna and had, in August, mutinied for arrears and been brought back to the colours by his own order that twenty-four of the ringleaders be blown from the muzzles of the guns, an order he had given in writing and watched carried out. The question of whether the Bengal sepoys would now charge at the muzzle of a Mughal line under their own emperor's standard was the question of the morning. The charge was what would answer the question. If the line broke at the bayonet contact, the Company would have the revenue of Bengal in Calcutta within the year. If the line held, the Company would be at the rivers' edge by Christmas and back to the bay of Bengal by Easter, and the trading houses at Fort William would, in his own working phrase, sleep in their cotton godowns for another generation. He gave the order to advance at twenty past nine.

THE BAYONET CONTACT

The sepoys came down off the rising ground in three lines at the formal pace, the British battalion on the right of the line, the colours uncased, the drums beating. They halted at one hundred yards. They fired the volley into the Mughal centre. They fixed bayonets. They went in at the run. The centre broke at the bayonet contact within four minutes. The Mughal artillery, masked by its own infantry, fired once and was overrun. Shah Alam, in the imperial chair behind the broken line, surrendered to a havildar of the third Bengal regiment without resistance and was conducted, with the courtesy due to his rank, to Munro's tent on the rising ground. The wings, by their own private calculation of the political situation, withdrew up the river by midday. About six thousand allied dead lay on the field. About eight hundred Company dead. The whole action had lasted, by the regimental watches, a little under three hours.

THE EMPEROR IN THE TENT

Inside the tent on the rising ground, in the heavy heat of the late forenoon, the Mughal Emperor of Delhi sat on a camp chair and was offered, by an aide of Munro's, a cup of water from a brass jug. He was forty-six years old. He was the direct lineal descendant, in the male line, of Babur, Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb. He had ruled, in the legal theory of Hindustan, since 1760. He had, on this morning, ruled nothing for some hours. He understood, as a man of his education understood, that the legal theory of Hindustan and the actual government of Hindustan had just been separated from each other by a Scotch major on a river-bank, and that the legal theory would now sit in a tent at the disposal of the actual government until such time as the actual government chose to settle the question on paper. He drank the water. He waited for the terms.

THE TREATY

The terms were settled the following August at Allahabad, by Robert Clive on the Company's side and the captive emperor on the other, in the document which is in the National Archives of India in New Delhi, in Persian and in English, signed and sealed. By the treaty of the twelfth of August 1765, the East India Company received the diwani, the right to collect the land-revenue, of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the richest province of the Mughal Empire, a territory roughly equivalent to modern Bangladesh and the eastern half of north India, with a population of about thirty million and an annual revenue at the time of the grant of about three million pounds sterling, a tax-base larger than that of contemporary Britain. The Company, which had gone into the morning at Buxar as a trading concern with a margin in the low hundreds of thousands of pounds, came out of the following August as the de facto government of one-fifth of the population of the world. The British state nationalised the territorial holdings of the Company under the Government of India Act of 1858, ninety-three years and one Mutiny later. The line, on a long view, runs from the rising ground at Buxar to the partition of Bengal in 1947, and every Highland regimental headstone between the Sutlej and Rangoon stands on the consequence.

THE RETURN

Hector Munro went home to Scotland in 1765 a wealthy man, sat as Member of Parliament for Inverness Burghs from 1768 to 1801, was sent out again to command in the second Mysore war in 1780 where he was held responsible by some at the time for the disaster at Pollilur, and died at Novar in 1805, seventy-eight years old. The Highland Scots military presence in India, which the Buxar action made a fixture of the Company's administration, ran for another hundred years and put more sons of Easter Ross into Indian graves than the parish registers of Easter Ross have ever quite accounted for. The hinge moments of empire are seldom struck by the great names of the heroic age; they are struck by a major from a parish nobody outside Inverness has ever heard of, on a foreign morning, by an order given at twenty past nine. The Buxar field today is in the modern district of Bihar; a state monument put up in 1971 marks the line of the Mughal centre. Above Novar in Easter Ross, in the woods on the brae, the Munro mausoleum stands among the beeches, locked, opened by appointment for family visitors, the iron of the door dark with a Highland rain that has been falling on it for two hundred years.