The French victory at the Battle of Adyar River in 1746 showed how disciplined infantry and modern firepower could overturn the old Indian military order, while offering the British a lesson they would master. Joseph-François, Marquis Dupleix The Adyar, winding through the southern reaches of present-day Chennai before emptying into the Bay of Bengal, was neither a great imperial frontier nor the setting for one of those enormous engagements in which the fate of kingdoms appears to hang upon a single afternoon. In October 1746, exactly 280 years ago to this day, a small French force confronted an army of the Nawab of the Carnatic beside the shallow Adyar river near Madras. Death of the Nabob of the Carnatic by Paul Philippoteaux. The encounter, near the old settlement of St. Thomé on the riverbank, was brief and its casualties modest beside those of the great battles that have determined the fate of the subcontinent. The battle has since cast a gargantuan historical shadow, with its significance far exceeding its scale. A few hundred European soldiers and their Indian auxiliaries would demonstrate that a disciplined infantry force, equipped with modern firearms and supported by effective artillery, could defeat a much larger army whose strength rested principally on cavalry and numerical superiority. Recognising the significance of the encounter, Col. George Bruce Malleson, in his classic The Decisive Battles of India (1883), placed it at the very beginning of his account of the decisive military episodes through which British power expanded across India. Malleson observed that St. Thome was the first unmistakable demonstration of the military advantage that would eventually make European domination possible. The French victory revealed a new possibility of power in which military technology, commercial finance, maritime connections and political opportunism combined with a devastating congruency to unsettle the established Indian political order. While indisputably a turning point in Indian military history, the Battle of Adyar (also known as the Battle of St Thomé) was neither the first discovery of European military superiority nor proof that Indian armies were inherently incapable of defeating European troops. H. H. Dodwell, in a rebuke to Malleson, observes in his Dupleix and Clive: The Beginning of Empire (1920), its deeper significance lay in the transformation of warfare, the ambitions of two rival trading companies and the political opportunities created when European conflict intersected with the rivalries of Indian rulers. European War, Indian Shores The road to Adyar began thousands of miles away, amid the tangled skein of European dynastic rivalries. The War of the Austrian Succession, which erupted in 1740 and continued until 1748, arose from the contested succession of Maria Theresa to the Habsburg dominions. The Battle of Fontenoy (1745), part of the War of the Austrian Succession, by Emile Horace Vernet. A dispute over dynastic legitimacy swiftly widened into a continental struggle involving Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and other powers. Britain and France found themselves on opposing sides, and their rivalry travelled wherever their commercial and maritime interests intersected. The Indian Ocean was one such arena. The English and French East India Companies possessed fortified settlements, warehouses, shipping networks and commercial privileges along the coast of India. The British had attacked French shipping in the Indian Ocean, and French interests on the Coromandel Coast faced the prospect of naval assault. Dupleix, the remarkable governor of Pondicherry, understood that his settlement could not remain secure merely by cultivating commercial relationships with Indian rulers. He strengthened its defences and sought military assistance from Île de France, present-day Mauritius, where the French governor and naval commander Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais assembled an expedition. In September 1746, the French captured Madras, the principal English settlement on the Coromandel Coast. The victory was a substantial strategic success, but it produced a dispute almost as consequential as the conquest itself. La Bourdonnais had negotiated terms with the English that contemplated the ransom or restoration of Madras. Dupleix, who envisaged a more durable French political advantage, resisted those arrangements. Portrait of Bertrand François Mahé de La Bourdonnais For Dupleix, Madras offered the prospect of transforming French influence in India. For La Bourdonnais, naval strategy and the immediate terms of surrender mattered more. The tensions between the two men transcended the personal. It represented competing conceptions of what the French presence in India was supposed to become. And it was into this disagreement that the Nawab of the Carnatic found himself the impotent man in the middle. Commercial Rivals During the first four decades of the 18th century, the French settlement at Pondicherry had grown in population, prosperity and importance. Its expanding trade increasingly alarmed the English East India Company, which feared that its rival would capture markets and weaken its position in the Indian Ocean. As Dodwell observes, English perceptions of the French had changed markedly. By 1736, the French had come to be regarded as “our most dangerous rivals”. The following year, the English directors instructed their representatives to communicate annually whatever intelligence they could obtain about French commerce and power. Competition was no longer confined to the exchange of goods. In 1744, the English enlisted the assistance of Indian authorities to prevent weavers working for them from being enticed into producing cloth for the French. Commercial rivalry was now beginning to assume the character of a political contest. View of Pondicherry in the East Indies (1750) But the respective directors of the French and British East India Companies were preoccupied with shipping, profits and dividends – and not any design for the conquest of India. The companies were private corporations in Europe but political entities in India, where they maintained fortified settlements and negotiated with local rulers. Their military establishments were intended primarily to protect commerce and defend their privileges, not to establish territorial empires. Many English and French merchants feared that war would destroy the commerce on which their fortunes depended. Others hoped that a royal squadron would cripple the rival company’s shipping without forcing the trading companies themselves into an expensive military confrontation. The French Company was particularly vulnerable: eternally short of capital, it depended on annual loans to finance its cargoes. The failure of a single year’s shipping could jeopardise the entire cycle of borrowing and repayment. Neutrality therefore appeared commercially prudent. But for the remarkable and ambitious Joseph François Dupleix, governor of Pondicherry, it was also strategically attractive. His settlement lacked a harbour while French trading vessels were exposed to capture, with the company having limited means of retaliating at sea. Dupleix accordingly sought an agreement under which the English settlements and their shipping would remain neutral during the European conflict. He was convinced that the English would agree. He was mistaken. The Naval Gambit Madras was poorly defended. Its fortifications had changed little since the time of Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt, governor of the settlement decades earlier. Commodore Curtis Barnett, the energetic British naval commander, complained of the poor defences while bitterly observing that the British EIC directors had failed to prepare for war until its arrival was imminent. Dupleix knew the weakness of Madras. He received regular intelligence from the priest Noronha, a relative of Madame Dupleix, while the Swiss engineer Louis Paradis – later to play a signal role in the French victory at Adyar - had visited the settlement and drawn up a plan of attack. Dupleix believed that this vulnerability would compel the English to accept neutrality. The Siege and Capture of Madras, 1746 He had, however, miscalculated the English response. Rather than rely exclusively on their inadequate land defences, the English Company sought the protection of a royal squadron. When the European war reached the Indian Ocean, Commodore Barnett moved rapidly against French shipping, capturing several vessels carrying valuable cargoes, including a French ship from Manila reportedly carrying 400,000 dollars. The French losses were severe. They utterly disrupted French commerce on the Coromandel Coast and struck at the private fortunes of Pondicherry’s governing elite, including Dupleix himself, who had spent two decades amassing it. Dupleix demanded the return of the prizes, although the English had refused the proposed neutrality agreement and the royal squadron's operations were not covered by it. Under the pressure of personal and commercial losses, he came to regard the English action as a betrayal. He appealed to La Bourdonnais, governor of the French islands in the Indian Ocean, to bring a squadron to his assistance. The contest now acquired a momentum that neither company had initially desired. La Bourdonnais assembled a fleet from the vessels available at the islands, but his ships were at a disadvantage against the English men-of-war. They had been designed principally to carry cargo, and their armament was inferior. His crews, however, were comparatively strong, while tropical disease and scurvy had weakened the English sailors. The encounter off Nagapattinam in 1746 failed to settle the naval contest. La Bourdonnais sought another engagement, but the English commander Edward Peyton avoided a decisive confrontation. When the French squadron appeared off the coast again, Peyton withdrew towards Bengal rather than remain to defend Madras. Peyton’s conduct deprived the English settlement of the assistance it urgently needed, while leaving La Bourdonnais uncertain whether the British ships might return at the moment of greatest danger. The Fall of Madras La Bourdonnais finally resolved to attack Madras in September 1746, as French batteries began bombarding the fort. The garrison numbered only about 300 men, approximately half of them Europeans. The remainder were Portuguese of mixed descent; the troops were poorly disciplined and commanded by officers with little experience of active service. The English could hope for relief only from Peyton’s squadron or from Anwar-ud-din Khan, the Nawab of the Carnatic. The Nawab had repeatedly warned the French against attacking Madras. He had an interest in maintaining order along his coast and preventing foreign companies from conducting war at will within his dominions. On receiving an urgent order from the Nawab to abandon the siege, Dupleix promised that Madras would be handed over once it had been captured. Surrender of the city of Madras (1746) by Jacques Francois Joseph Swebach-Desfointaines. On September 21, the French entered Madras through the Water Gate after agreeing to accept its surrender in return for a ransom to be determined later. The capture exposed a major schism within the French establishment. La Bourdonnais considered himself entitled to manage the settlement and negotiate its ransom while Dupleix insisted that the authority of the governor and council at Pondicherry extended to every place where the French flag flew in India. La Bourdonnais expected to profit from the ransom terms he had negotiated. Dupleix hoped to secure control of Madras and benefit from permits allowing goods to be removed from the settlement. The ransom was ultimately fixed at 11 lakh pagodas for the French Company, with a private payment of one lakh pagodas for La Bourdonnais. The disagreement between La Bourdonnais and Dupleix over the fate of Madras was to have momentous consequences. The stage was now set for an internal French dispute to collide with the authority of the Nawab and bring the French into direct military confrontation with an Indian army. The Nawab’s Challenge Anwar-ud-din could not permit the European powers to disregard his authority without consequence. His repeated warnings had failed to prevent the capture of Madras. He therefore ordered his eldest son, Mahfuz Khan, to drive the French out of the settlement. The intervention would reflect the political realities of the Carnatic. Until now, European companies had operated within a world governed by Indian rulers, whose permission, protection and political goodwill remained essential to their position. This arrangement was about to be rudely upturned. The Nawab’s forces first encountered French firepower in a skirmish in which the latter’s field guns scattered the advancing troops. The weapons were probably short four-pounders firing grape shot, which spread destructive volleys at close range. The blockade of Madras nevertheless remained in place, and Dupleix decided to send a stronger force under Paradis, who led approximately 450 Europeans, accompanied by Indian troops, towards the river where Mahfuz Khan’s force blocked the route. The River Crossing The Adyar was broad and shallow enough to be forded. Paradis boldly led his men across it, bringing them within effective range of the Nawab’s troops. The French opened sustained fire. The Carnatic army could not withstand the volleys; its formations gave way, and the retreat became confused as soldiers became entangled in the streets of St Thomé, causing the blockade to be abandoned. French and English East Indiamen Robert Orme, in his A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1763-78), said it represented the first considerable European success over the native troops for more than a century. Dodwell, however, challenges the interpretation that the battle suddenly revealed an inherent superiority of European soldiers over Indian ones. He points out that European observers had long commented on the weakness of Mughal military organisation, particularly the difference between the impressive appearance of cavalry and its ability to withstand disciplined infantry. Earlier encounters had also demonstrated that European-led forces could defeat larger Indian armies. Sir Thomas Roe, the English diplomat who served as ambassador to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, had encountered numerous horsemen but, in his assessment, few soldiers in the European sense. François Bernier, the French physician and traveller who spent years in Mughal India, went further, claiming that a single regiment from the army of Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne, one of France’s most celebrated 17th century commanders, could scatter the entire Mughal army. In 1711, the English at Fort St. David, near Cuddalore on the Coromandel Coast, had defeated a numerically superior force of Indian troops. Paradis, who commanded the force at Adyar, had himself routed a Tanjorean army near Karikal, another French settlement on the Coromandel Coast. What the action on the Adyar announced emphatically was the value of the transformation in arms and tactics introduced over the preceding eighty years. Clive on the roof of the Nawab Siraj Ud Daulahs hunting lodge, 1757, by Richard Caton Woodville (1893) An illustration readily conveys the magnitude of this change. In 1687–88, the English had sent to Bengal a larger number of European soldiers than Robert Clive commanded at the Battle of Plassey in 1757; yet their expedition in the seventeenth century had failed almost as conspicuously as Clive’s campaign would succeed in the eighteenth. In 1687, a third of the English troops were armed with pikes. By 1746, every infantryman carried a musket and bayonet. That change alone, Dodwell argues, had increased infantry effectiveness by more than a third. In 1687, even the lightest artillery consisted of cumbersome pieces that could fire perhaps fifteen rounds in an hour. This meant that numerical superiority no longer guaranteed victory. French Master, English Acolyte Adyar strengthened Dupleix’s confidence in the possibilities of military intervention. Importantly, his strategies were keenly absorbed by a young Robert Clive, whose execution of them would pave the view for the ultimate British paramountcy of India. Robert Clive by Thomas Gainsborough, circa 1764 The subsequent struggle for the Carnatic and the Deccan would bring both French and British officers into the succession disputes of Indian rulers, where the companies could offer troops and military expertise in exchange for political influence and revenue. Dupleix eventually backed Chanda Sahib in the Carnatic and supported Muzaffar Jung in the Deccan. The English, fearing that French grants and influence would encircle their settlements, supported rival claimants, including Muhammad Ali. Dodwell sees the seeds of Dupleix’s eventual failure in his successes. His ambitions expanded faster than the resources available to sustain them. The result was administrative disorder and an increasingly difficult relationship between the company’s servants and its directors in France. The English, meanwhile, learnt from the same conflicts. Clive, who arrived at Madras in 1744 as a company writer, was driven towards military service by the capture of the settlement. His later campaigns in the Carnatic helped shape the experience and methods he carried into Bengal. The British victory at Plassey in 1757, followed by the acquisition of the diwani in 1765, would eventually provide resources that strengthened British power in southern India as well. The Carnatic conflicts helped form the military edifice that would establish British predominance in Bengal, while Bengal’s wealth would help sustain the later campaigns against the French in the south. None of this was inevitable in October 1746. Madras itself would be returned to the English under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, as part of the wider settlement of the War of the Austrian Succession. The restoration of the settlement demonstrated how closely the fate of Indian possessions remained tied to the calculations of European diplomacy. Ironically, the Adyar carried the memory of a French victory that would eventually become part of the story of the British empire. The merchants had crossed the river. Empire would follow.
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