Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India

Over the long eighteenth century, the British imperial state emerged as a precocious example of a 'fiscal-military' regime, mobilizing people and money on an unprecedented scale to fight its European and global wars.¹ The growing power of the British state and empire relied on symbolic and rhetorical capital as well as coercive technologies, and the idea of Britishness itself became an important tool in mobilizing support for the state's militaristic goals.² Even the dead were not immune to the ideological force field of militant nationalism. Indeed, official notions of Britishness in the eighteenth century were preoccupied as much with dead heroes as with living ones. The deaths of General Wolfe at Quebec or Nelson at Trafalgar were only the most famous among a macabre procession of great death scenes that came to symbolize the sacrificial heroism of the nation, and especially its officer classes. From the Seven Years War to the Napoleonic War, Westminster Abbey and St Paul's were transformed by a forest of elaborate tombs into schools for imperial warrior-statesmen and generals.

This article explores changes in the British way of death—in particular, monuments and burial grounds—in a vital outpost of eighteenth-century imperialism, the eastern Indian city of Calcutta (contemporary Kolkata). It argues that monuments to the dead became important tools for projecting British power in India, as Calcutta was transformed from a vulnerable commercial enclave into the capital of a vast British-Indian empire.³ The city of Calcutta was itself a significant engine of British imperialism in Asia. Founded at the end of the seventeenth century, it soon overtook Madras to become the most commercially valuable of all the British East India Company's settlements in India.⁴ The Company invested heavily in eastern-Indian textiles, especially cotton, and also in fortifications for the rapidly expanding city. As wealthy Indians were drawn to Calcutta's markets, so the nawabs of Bengal, provincial rulers upriver at Murshidabad, cast an increasingly wary and jealous eye on the English Company's populous settlement. The Company destroyed the independent power of the nawabs in wars of the 1750s and 1760s, drawing on the abundant resources of its headquarters in Calcutta. Thereafter Calcutta was restyled as the political capital of Bengal, and then (after parliamentary acts of 1773 and 1784) as the capital of the whole of 'British India'.⁵

Calcutta's journey from a few villages of huts to a 'city of palaces' was startling and swift, and by 1800 Calcutta was one of the largest cities in Asia and the world.⁶ British death monuments were at the time, and remain today, one of the most striking and remarked-on architectural features of this phase in Calcutta's history. The prominence of monuments and burial grounds arose from a confluence of factors, not least the persistence of very high mortality among a transient British population which never rose above a few thousand in this period. Historians of medicine have warned against anachronistically projecting nineteenth-century fears about tropical climates back into earlier periods. Eighteenth-century writers were often relatively optimistic about the potential for European bodies to adapt to the 'Asiatic' climate.⁷ Yet the sense of Calcutta as a dangerous place for Europeans, because of disease as well as potential invaders, was ubiquitous in European writings in the eighteenth century. For much of Calcutta's early history British fears that their small community of settlers could be entirely destroyed by diseases or hostile armies appeared very real.

If this fear might have encouraged the British in Calcutta to keep their dead out of sight and out of mind, other factors pushed them to turn the potential weak point of high mortality into a symbolic resource. Tombs were a useful medium for the new city to borrow prestigious metropolitan and imperial styles, whether from the Mughals in the early period, or from the British capital of London later on. The Company did not easily shed its habits of commercial parsimony and spent relatively little of its money on major 'public' buildings, other...