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Updated: May 24, 2025
It has been the fashion indeed to fix on the year 1765, the year in which the Mogul issued a commission authorising the Company to administer the revenues of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, as the precise date of the accession of this singular body to sovereignty. I am utterly at a loss to understand why this epoch should be selected. Long before 1765 the Company had the reality of political power.
Clive had returned from England; freed henceforth from the influence, the intrigues, and the indomitable energy of Dupleix, he had soon made himself master of the whole of Bengal, he had even driven the French from Chandernuggur; Bussy had been unable to check his successes; he avenged himself by wresting away from the English all their agencies on the coast of Orissa, and closing against them the road between the Coromandel coast and Bengal.
The numbers who die in their long pilgrimages, either through want or fatigue, or from dysenteries and fevers caught by lying out, and want of accommodation, is incredible. I only mention one idol, the famous Juggernaut in Orissa, to which twelve or thirteen pilgrimages are made every year.
In all rainless countries, artificial irrigation is the first law of nature, it is self-preservation; but, even in countries where the rainfall can be depended upon with tolerable certainty, irrigation should never be neglected; one dry season in a tropical country may produce a famine, the results of which may be terrible, as instanced lately by the unfortunate calamity in Orissa.
The king, advanced to Kondapalle, took the place after a three months' siege, and captured therein a wife and son of the king of Orissa. The unhappy fate of the latter is told in the chronicle. Thence he marched to Rajahmundry and halted six months. Peace was made shortly after, and Krishna Deva married a daughter of the Orissan king.
As to their other powers, the Company derives them from the Mogul empire by various charters from that crown, and from the great magistrates of that crown, and particularly by the Mogul charter of 1765, by which they obtained the dewanny, that is, the office of lord high-steward, of the kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa.
There on the next day he was joined by Mir Jafar, the latter not altogether at ease as to the reception he might meet with after his somewhat ambiguous attitude both before and during the engagement; but Clive at once reassured him, and saluted him as the Nawab of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, advising him to proceed at once to Murshidabad, to secure the person of Suraj ud Daulah and prevent the place being plundered.
He took the first propitious occasion to rebel, and two years later was defeated in a great battle by the Mughal general. He was taken prisoner, and in punishment of his treason his head was severed from his body on the field of battle. For some time, however, Bengal and Orissa continued to require great vigilance and prompt action on the part of the Mughal administrators.
I have therefore already published grammars of three of them; namely, the Sanskrit, the Bengali, and the Mahratta. To these I have resolved to add grammars of the Telinga, Kurnata, Orissa, Punjabi, Kashmeeri, Goojarati, Nepalese, and Assam languages. Two of these are now in the press, and I hope to have two or three more of them out by the end of the next year.
The exception to the general prosperity was caused by a terrible famine and pestilence in Western India, the effects of which were most severely felt. Grain rose to a fabulous price, 'and horses and cows had to feed upon the bark of trees. The famine and pestilence lasted six months. The early part of the following year, 1575, was occupied with the pursuit of Dáúd and the conquest of Orissa.
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