Clan Munro · 1764
Hector Munro at Buxar
On the morning of the twenty-third of October 1764, on the open ground at the village of Buxar in northern Bihar, in northern India, Major Sir Hector Munro of Novar, in command of an East India Company army of about seven thousand sepoys and one British battalion, met the combined forces of three Indian rulers (Mir Qasim, the deposed Nawab of Bengal; Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh; and Shah Alam II, the Mughal Emperor in Delhi) at about forty thousand. The action lasted about three hours. The Bengal sepoys under Munro's tactical handling broke the centre of the allied line by a bayonet charge through the morning mist; Shah Alam was captured; Mir Qasim and Shuja-ud-Daula withdrew up the Ganges. The Treaty of Allahabad of August 1765, signed by Robert Clive on the Company's side and the captive Mughal emperor on the other, granted to the East India Company the *diwani* (the right to collect the land-revenue) of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the richest province of the Mughal Empire. Buxar is, by the reckoning of every historian of the British Empire from Clive's day to ours, the battle that converted the East India Company from a trading entity into a territorial power, and is the operational moment at which the Company became the de facto government of one-fifth of the population of the world. Munro himself, born at Novar in Easter Ross in 1726, would return to Scotland a wealthy man in 1765 and sit as Member of Parliament for Inverness Burghs from 1768 to 1801. The Buxar action made the Highland Scots military presence in India a fixture of the Company's administration for the next century.
It is a quarter past nine on the morning of the twenty-third of October 1764, on the rising ground above the river-bank at Buxar, on the southern Ganges plain in Bihar, in the long brown light of the Indian late autumn. He is thirty-eight years old. He is Major Sir Hector Munro of Novar, born in 1726 to George Munro, fourth of Novar in Easter Ross, schooled at the Royal Academy at Inverness, in command of the Company's Bengal Army on this morning by the seniority that has fallen to him since the death three months ago of John Carnac at the camp at Patna.
On the field below him, on the southern bank of the Ganges, the allied army of three Indian sovereigns has formed up: about thirty-two thousand cavalry and infantry of Awadh and Bengal under Shuja-ud-Daula, Mir Qasim, and the imperial guard of Shah Alam II of Delhi. The numerical balance is six to one against him. Munro has, on the rising ground, seven thousand Bengal sepoys, one British infantry battalion (the 96th of Foot), six guns of light artillery, and nothing else.
He thinks: the line will hold for the volley. The line will not hold against repeated cavalry charges if the cavalry have the initiative.
He thinks: Shuja-ud-Daula's centre is the Mughal imperial line under the emperor's standard. The centre is the political pivot of the army. If the centre breaks, the wings withdraw because they have no political reason to stand.
He thinks: the Bengal sepoys have been with me since Patna. The Bengal sepoys have, by the Patna mutiny of August, the question of whether they will charge. The charge today is what answers the question.
He thinks: if the charge breaks the centre we have the diwani of Bengal in Calcutta within the year. If the charge does not break the centre, the Company is at the rivers' edge by Christmas and back to the bay of Bengal by Easter.
He gives the order to advance at twenty past nine. The Bengal sepoys, in three lines, with the British battalion on the right of the line, march down off the rising ground at the formal pace, halt at one hundred yards, fire the volley into the Mughal centre, fix bayonets, and go in at the run. The centre breaks at the bayonet contact within four minutes. Shah Alam, in the imperial chair behind the broken line, surrenders to a havildar of the third Bengal regiment without resistance. The wings of Awadh and Bengal, by their own private calculation of the political situation, withdraw up the river by midday.
About six thousand allied dead are left on the field. About eight hundred Company dead. Shah Alam was held in honourable confinement at Allahabad for the next three years. By the Treaty of Allahabad of the twelfth of August 1765, the East India Company received the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the right to collect the land-revenue of an area roughly equivalent to modern Bangladesh and the eastern half of north India, with a population of about thirty million. The annual revenue at the time of the grant was about three million pounds. By the reckoning of the modern economic historians (Tirthankar Roy, Maddison), the diwani converted the East India Company from a trading concern with a margin in the low hundreds of thousands of pounds into a territorial state with a tax-base larger than that of contemporary Britain. The Company became the de facto government of an Indian dominion. The British state nationalised the Company's territorial holdings under the Government of India Act of 1858 in the wake of the Mutiny.
Hector Munro went home to Scotland in 1765 a wealthy man, sat as a Member of Parliament for Inverness Burghs from 1768 to 1801, served briefly in the second Maratha war of 1779 (where he was held responsible by some at the time for the disaster at Pollilur in 1780), and died at Novar in 1805, seventy-eight years old. His descendants in Easter Ross sold Novar in the 1980s; the house is now a private property and the mausoleum in the woods above it is, by appointment, open to family visitors. The Buxar field is in the modern district of Bihar; a Indian state monument, put up in 1971, marks the line of the Mughal centre. The Treaty of Allahabad, in the original Persian and English, is in the National Archives of India in New Delhi.