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Updated: June 7, 2025
The triumph of La Bourdonnais aroused, however, not the admiration but the jealousy of Dupleix. Out of La Bourdonnais's very victory the cunning of Dupleix discovered a means to humiliate his rival. The vague schemes which he had formed for the authority of France, and for his influence in India, did not at all jump with the restoration of Madras, once conquered, to the English.
This government, therefore, was disputed between Mahommed Ali Khan, appointed by the legal viceroy Nazirzing, supported by the English company, and Chunda Saib, nominated by the usurper Muzapherzing, and protected by Dupleix, who commanded at Pondicherry. Muzapherzing did not long survive his usurpation.
In India, likewise, the French were too enterprising to be good neighbors. Under the leadership of a wonderfully able governor-general, Dupleix, who was appointed in 1741, they were prospering and were extending their influence in the effete empire of the Great Mogul.
Disorder was at its height in the Company's affairs; the vast enterprises commenced by Dupleix required success and conquests, but they had been abandoned since his recall, not without having ingulfed, together with his private fortune, a portion of the Company's resources.
The Great Mogul, nominal sovereign of all the states of India, confined himself to selling to all the pretenders decrees of investiture, without taking any other part in the contest. Dupleix, on the contrary, engaged in it ardently. He took sides in the Deccan for Murzapha Jung, and in the Carnatic for Tchunda Sahib against their rivals supported by the English.
"Never was so grand a fellow as this Bussy," he wrote. The ministers and the Company cared little for the grandeur of Bussy or of Dupleix; what they sought was a dastardly security, incessantly troubled by the enterprises of the politician and the soldier. The tone of England was more haughty than ever, in consequence of Clive's successes. The recall of Dupleix was determined upon.
Dupleix himself commanded the French batteries; on the 6th of October he was wounded, and his place on the ramparts was taken by Madame Dupleix, seconded by her future son-in-law, M. de Bussy-Castelnau, Dupleix's military lieutenant, animated by the same zeal for the greatness of France.
It had been the ambition of Montcalm to connect the French stations on Lake Erie with the forts of Louisiana; but that warrior-statesman in the West, as his kindred spirit, Dupleix, in the East, had fallen on the evil days of Louis XV., when valour and merit in the French colonies were sacrificed to the pleasures and parasites of Versailles. The natural result followed.
The French have been especially fervent in these denunciations. It is a fact, however, that the French saw nothing wrong in subduing India until all their own plans to that end had utterly failed. The device originated with them, but the English applied it. Dupleix planned for France what Clive executed for England.
Nothing, indeed, could have saved us. "Muzaffar Jung and Chunda Sahib, however, disregarding the plan which Dupleix had marked out for them, resolved, before marching on Trichinopoli, to conquer Tanjore, which is the richest city in Southern India.
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