“…The company now controlled the eastern Gangetic plain from Banares to Calcutta. In the following year, 1765, the Mughal emperor appointed the East India Company his diwan (or chief financial manager) of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, thereby enabling it to collect revenue on his behalf. Known as the Treaty of Allahabad, this arrangement has been called “the truly inaugural moment of the Raj’. The company’s accession to diwani, Ranajit Guha says…”brought together in one single instance all the three fundamental aspects of colonialism in our subcontinent, namely, its origin in an act of force, its exploitation of the primary produce of the land as the very basis of a colonial economy, and its need to give force and exploitation the appearance of legality.”
There is to this inaugural moment of the Raj, as there was sometimes to the Raj itself, a touch of farce. When, thirty years later, the painter Benjamin West depicted the treaty—Lord Clive receiving from the Moghul the Grant of the Duanney—he showed the Mughal emperor Shah Alam in an imperial setting, seated under a canopy on a raised throne, from where he hands Clive a rolled document. There are elephants in the background and in the foreground attendants. Clive’s party, consisting of six Englishmen, is shown to the left of the canvas. Some of the Englishmen appear to be talking in whispers to each other, as do some of the Indians. The reality was quite different: Clive actually received ‘the Duanney’ in his tent. Two of the six Englishmen in the picture were not present with him in Allahabad on that day, and the emperor’s throne, far from being a canopied, oriental affair, was in fact Clive’s dining table surmounted by an armchair.
At about the same time Shah Alam was being reduced to a piece of rococo furniture…[…]”
—arvind krishna mehrotra, Introduction to “A History of Indian Writing in English”
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