Number of words: 733

The year 1803 thus marked a critical moment in India’s colonial history in that it finally gave the British a decisive military advantage over the Marathas. Here at last was a golden opportunity to enhance the value of the Company’s Bengal monopoly by annihilating the Malwa opium industry! As instructed by Lord Wellesley, the Company’s Bombay officials quickly issued orders banning the export of opium from Bombay and prohibiting the cultivation of poppies on its newly annexed territories.

But this was easier said than done. Even after their defeat, the Maratha states were by no means crippled: they still controlled large tracts of land and continued to maintain formidable armies. They were thus powerful enough to make it unfeasible for the Company to think of incorporating their realms into the territories that it administered directly. Instead, the Company opted to place them under a form of indirect rule, whereby the colonial regime maintained overall control or did not involve itself in administrative, financial and Judicial matters, this meant that it had no direct control over patterns of cultivation, since it did not collect revenues. For the mercantile networks of the region this was a boon, for it provided them enough cover to continue to trade in opium and send caravans clandestinely to the ports along the coast, from where the drug could be whisked away to Southeast Asia and China. When the British tried to stop the flow out of one port, the merchants merely switched directions and sent their produce to another.

The predicament the East India Company now faced was one that had also bedevilled its rival, the Dutch VOC, in the preceding century, when it sought to impose monopolies on spices like cloves and nutmeg. The trouble with trying to monopolize a botanical commodity is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrict a species to any determinate region, especially if those plants also happen to generate huge profits. The Dutch, in the eighteenth century, had tried to restrict the cultivation of clove and nutmeg trees to certain specifically designated islands. However, the policy was undermined not only by indigenous resistance, but also by the trees themselves. they grew in such abundance in the forests of Maluku that they were impossible to extirpate.” A similar scenario unfolded in western and central India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with the Company trying to force treaties banning poppy cultivation on indigenous states. A key figure in the implementation of this policy was another Wellesley, Gerald, son of the (by then) former Governor General, and nephew of the Iron Duke. He spent several years living in Indore, where he had three children with a local woman whose name was recorded as ‘Culoo’.

During his stay in Indore, where he was the British representative (Resident), Wellesley held protracted negotiations with the ruling Holkars and other princely families, offering them compensation in exchange for signing treaties that banned the opium trade. Many of the princes had no alternative but to sign, though the most powerful of them, the Maharaja of Gwalior, flatly refused. But the Holkars of Indore, like some of the other royals, chose the path of least resistance and signed a treaty that was quite unequivocal in its language: it gave the British the power to stop and appropriate any opium herein prohibited which they may discover ‘passing to and fro in the Maharajah’s territories.’

The severity of the treaty’s tone actually masked a very weak hand: Wellesley simply did not have the personnel to keep track of all the opium that was ‘passing to and fro in the Maharajah’s territories’. Nor did the Maharaja, or any of his fellow princes, have any intention of enforcing the treaty: they not only allowed the trade to continue more or less unhindered, but also conspired with mercantile networks to keep it hidden from the British.

As for the merchants of Malwa, the drug had become a major source of revenue for them by this time. Their profits from other goods had been eroded because of competition from the British, so opium, correspondingly, had become crucial to their fortunes. So, despite the Company’s best efforts at suppressing the cultivation of poppies, the crop continued to flourish in regions not directly administered by the British.

Excerpted from Pages 105 to 107 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh