IN 1757, Louis Laurent de Féderbe, also known as the Count of Modave, landed in India. He was the typical European soldier of fortune who came to India to become rich. Luck blessed him the very next year when he married Marie Nicole Porcher, the daughter of his boss Thomas Porcher, the governor of Karaikal. Louis stayed in India initially for four years and returned to his native France as a fabulously rich man.
Then he came back in 1773 and died in 1777 in Machilipattanam—poor and broken.
Perhaps the only useful work of Louis’ life was writing memoirs of his experiences in India. He was both an observer of and participant in the tumultuous era of the eighteenth century. The Mughal House was rapidly falling apart and the Marathas were at the zenith of their power. As for the European trading companies, this is what Modave notes in his journal:
In his second and final trip to India, Louis disembarked at Balasore in a royal ship, Etoile on October 2, 1773. He lived for eleven months in Bengal—mostly in Chandernagore and Calcutta. Finding few options for a lucrative career there, he shifted to Lucknow and ingratiated himself with Shuja-ud-daulah, the Nawab. Just when things seemed to be going well, Shuja-ud-daulah died in 1775 and Louis was back to job hunting.
His next stop was Agra. His compatriot Rene Madec received him affectionately and recommended him to Shah Alam II, the nominal Mughal Emperor of Delhi. Shah Alam gave him pucca assurances of a profitable career but they were just that: assurances. What doomed even the hope of a career was the scheming and intrigues of jealous aides of Madec.
Fed up once more, Louis abandoned northern India and moved to the court of Basalat Jang at Adoni. Fortune smiled on him this time. He got a modest job that fetched him ₹ 600 per month but death overtook him before he could get properly settled. Louis Féderbe contracted serious illness and passed away at Machilipattanam on December 29, 1777. He was en route to Pondicherry.
Among Louis’ effects was a valuable collection of his letters and a remarkable Journal of the Voyage from Bengal to Delhi. It gives a detailed account of his impressions and experiences in North India. Louis was primarily a soldier and his obvious interest was the military and politics and these themes occur in abundance in his journal. However, his sidelights on trade and commerce in the era are both informative and enriching.
Even more remarkable is the fact that Modave’s journal was languishing in the Archive de la France d’Outre-Mer at Paris for nearly 175 years. The full credit for discovering its immeasurable value as a primary source of the history of the later Mughals goes to Acharya Jadunath Sarkar. He spent money from his own pocket, got it copied and added it to his vast personal library.
Modave’s eleven-month stint in Bengal is one of the most illuminating portions of his journal. His record has an embracive quality to it—geography, people, society, government, economics and life itself.
Among other things, Louis is stupefied by the indolence of the people and dubs it their “inherent quality” and an “indubitable fact.” He makes no concessions for the humid climate and the fecundity of soil which involves minimal labour. Above all, he ignores a brutal reality—the prevalent state of insecurity due to the prolonged absence of a strong government. Louis had landed in Bengal at its lowest ebb; the Province had been reeling under sustained oppression inflicted for about two centuries by successive Mughal governors.
In Modave’s eyes, Bengalis “distinguished themselves in sedentary arts which demanded a work more assiduous than painful.” He blamed them for another failure: their habitual idleness forbade them from “improving upon the abundant gifts of nature.” Thus, while Ganga Nadi “offered greater natural advantages than the Nile, the Bengalis unlike the Egyptians, had done little to augment its rich potentialities. With the exception of a very limited number of canals indicated by extreme necessity, the people of Bengal have left things much as it pleased God to create them.”
Another conspicuous reality that astounded Modave was the absence of any “great work devoted to public utility.” His experiences in other regions of India were the surest proof of this failing: “the coast of Coromondal, which compared to Bengal is a miserable country, and the rest of India abounded in caravan serais, tanks excavated at enormous expense, temples and similar religious or charitable establishments.”
Modave notes how he was shocked at the diminutive size of the temples in Bengal and the poor taste of their construction. Yet, he profoundly marvelled at the traditions, rites, customs, ceremonies and worship which appeared to him as more religious than what he had found anywhere else.
The most visceral and depressing picture was found in the villages and towns. Indeed, a paltry number of European accounts show this stark side of Bengal. One is reminded of Vincent Smith’s memorable quote:
A century after Shah Jahan died, Louis found all around him “ugly mud-built houses with bamboo tops thatched with straw. Towns presented a few brick edifices but their number was extremely limited.” These were the living, macabre proofs of the ravages inflicted by a series of Nawabs, the most notorious of whom was Murshid Quli Khan.
In spite of this all-round misery, it appeared that Bengal had an intrinsic capacity to produce unlimited prosperity—prosperity that was monopolised by an exclusive and unfeeling conclave of Mughal royalty and aristocracy.
Louis’ journal shows how the southern and the eastern parts of Bengal had suffered atrocities on a comparatively lesser scale. Even after the decisive Battle of Palashi, Dacca continued to produce the finest and largest quantity of muslin in the world. Indeed, the area had a substantial number of factories producing silk and muslin. The overall geography was also home to a variety of prolific natural products, and a large “part of India subsisted on this beautiful country from which it imported rice, oil, butter, sugar and other necessary provisions. Bengal imported from the rest of India salt and cotton, for which the demand was always steady and prodigious.” More vitally, Modave observes how
The trade of Bengal was not confined to India alone. It was still the centre of the largest amount of commerce in Asia. All the European nations trading in India visit the Ganges. Even the Spaniards from the Philippines and the Portuguese of Macao and Goa, send every year a few petty ships to Calcutta. It is towards the end of October that almost all the trading vessels are assembled in the Ganges and the greatest proportion is anchored at Calcutta.
It is difficult to thread one’s way without danger through the “forest of boats,” numbering at least 500 which cumbered the access to the ‘Ghats’ at Calcutta. A very small number of these was bound for Europe… The largest outlet for the commerce of Bengal lay along the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf…
The bulk of Bengal trade was constituted of saltpetre, opium herbs for dyeing and above all, its far famed muslin. Of these saltpetre, which was of the finest quality known to the Europeans, and opium were drawn from Patna and its neighbourhood.
Modave spills gushing praise for Bengal rice which was “the finest in India and was sent to remote places” throughout the globe. Indeed, he might have been echoing what Francois Bernier wrote about Bengal rice 120 years earlier:
By way of comparison, Louis notes that the “upper regions” (the fertile Ganga-Jamuna belt) produced wheat in extravagance—far exceeding the “needs of the Europeans in the Coromandel coast.”
What was true of wheat there was true of rice in Bengal. An unlimited production and export of rice and other foodstuff exhausted the land. A particularly gruesome famine hit Bengal in 1770—it still holds a grim record as one of the deadliest famines in human history, remembered in the Bengali memory as Chhiattor-er Monnontor (Famine of the year 1176 in the Bengali calendar). It wiped out about ten million people—one-third of Bengal’s population. Modave was horrified at what he saw in his travels in the Province: scattered skulls and littered remains of both humans and animals.
He either missed the cruel irony or was ignorant of it—a major cause for the overproduction of food was the East India Company’s rampant revenue extortions following the 1765 Battle of Buxar. It caused a man-made famine to fund a twofold objective: future military campaigns and untrammelled loot to keep its shareholders rich and happy.
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On the pan-Indian canvas, Modave’s journal is preponderantly similar to other European writings of the period. The difference lies in the details and in the specifics of the places he was active.
One such specific was an ugly facet of India’s trade scenario:
Indeed, Modave’s bleak observation hearkens back to Jahangir’s era, the pivotal juncture at which the seeds of a changing global order were first sowed. The ambassador Thomas Roe who took the maiden English embassy to Jahangir’s court was a contemporary of other Europeans who began a slow but rising influx of commerce into India. Roe’s junior Dutch counterpart was Fransisco Pelsaert, a merchant-adventurer who spent about seven years in Agra and documented his experiences in the city. His Remonstrantie records the pervasive practice of a vast array of disgusting sexual deviances throughout northern India (including what is now called Pakistan) that began right from the Sultan’s harem down to the seedy gullies. In Modave’s time, it had clearly exploded into a profitable epidemic.
This was but a more appalling sliver of the very nature of the Mughal state. An Islamic theocracy, it was not dissimilar to its peers elsewhere in the world. By its very ideological formulation, it was the worst expression of the winner-takes-it-all approach. Even the notion of wealth sharing which creates a prosperous, stable middle-class was nonexistent. Social stability was maintained by the looming threat of a standing army in peacetime. Thus, the Mughal state was orderly as long as powerful and ruthless sultans manned it and it vanished with Aurangzeb’s death.
Louis witnessed the all-encompassing, all-India consequences of this post-Aurangzeb disarray. The disarray began right at the top with the “decline in the magnificence of the Delhi Court.” It was reflected everywhere. “...in the deplorable state of neglect in which the roads had fallen. Delhi had been previously the centre where the arterial roads of trade converged.” But now, these roads were in supreme disrepair. They “presented an appearance of being traced out by the crowd of travellers rather than being kept up by the care of the Government. Of the grand imperial road which Akbar had constructed from Agra to Delhi and extended later to Lahore, the portion between Agra and Delhi had ceased to exist.” Indeed, Modave suspects whether the stretch between Delhi and Lahore actually, physically remained. These erased roads begot another natural consequence: large-scale brigandage. Louis writes how “brigands ranged themselves in bands on foot or on horseback to raise their black-mailing levies on travellers and sometimes on a whole village.” Indeed, on one occasion, Modave himself became a victim of both brigandage and swindling. He gives a pathetic account of their modus operandi.
The direst aspect of this disorder showed itself most prominently in that age-old institution of money: banking. It was helmed by the Sowcars—a word imbued with a substantial range of meanings. Today, it generally means “a rich man.” However, in Modave’s time, it included the business class whose activity included a variety of transactions.
The Sowcars undertook the transport of commodities from and to any part of India. Most of them had private armies so that they could arrange “for the sending of goods wherever required, with absolute safety.” The Sowcars also ran the insurance business, “particularly against accidents of voyage.”
They were perhaps the undisputed masters of moneylending, a skill and art they had perfected over a millennium. But the Sowcars that Modave saw levied “a monstrous form of usury which was, in a way, natural in India.” The minimum rate of interest was 24 percent per annum. It was pure extortion but Modave is not blind to what necessitated it.
It was the result of the rapacity of administrative officers, to which the bankers were constantly exposed. The rapacity was the general characteristic of Muslim administration, while the subjects of the Hindu princes were in many respects in happier or at least more supportable condition.
In the overall reckoning, Modave’s journal is indispensable for not only reconstructing the history of the later Mughals and the evolution of colonialism but also as a primary source for understanding some of the key factors that caused India to lose her freedom. Indeed, we have no better authority than Acharya Jadunath Sarkar who waxes high praise for its value:
