“Sher Shah’s infantry, carrying firearms, were recruited from the eastern Ganges plain.” The historian, James Frey, is amongst the many who increasingly believe that the real significance of European interest in the lands that are now those of Bangladesh, the Ganges delta and the banks of the river itself, was gunpowder.
There has long been an assumption made that gunpowder originated in China. Certainly, the Arab language makes much use of China in the names of many of the artefacts using gunpowder, but there are those, who, pointing to the Indian origin of much of the use of the explosive in warfare, suggest that, in fact, the origin of the potential in warfare indicates north east India as the most likely source. And, curiously, to the very learned monks of Buddhism is given the credit, by some, for this particular weapon of mass destruction!
Perhaps the most effective early user of gunpowder was the brilliant Pathan general, Sher Shah Suri, whose five year usurpation of the Mughal throne in Delhi, from 1540, until his death, perhaps somewhat ironically, in a gunpowder explosion accident, five years later.
India, it has been said, was in fact, the “largest gunpowder producer in the world until the twentieth century. Specifically, the Bengal and Bihar regions. Operated by a caste of peoples called the nuniah, saltpetre beds supplied the most vital element in gunpowder – saltpetre. And north east India produced virtually all of it.”
There are, even, suggestions that in 664 CE, an Indian visitor to China, “demonstrated the peculiar flammability of saltpetre and provided instructions on how to locate it.”
As usual, as contemporary evidence emerges of the fascinating history of a substance that has played such a large part in international history, for better or worse, in which ancient India played such a significant role, we find the vast modern library, the internet, dominated by Indian input which skilfully intermixes India as the totality of the ancient subcontinent, and India as the modern geopolitical entity, thereby confusing attributions. Gunpowder plots indeed!
The role of the lands that are now Bangladesh in this social and economic history of the entire world is often only traceable in pieces.
That Sher Shah commenced his challenge for the Mughal throne by conquering Bengal, gives a hint about origins; so, too, does the reference that, “When Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore capitulated to Islam Khan in 1609, he agreed to surrender twenty thousand infantry, five hundred war boats and, (significantly) 41 tons of gunpowder.”
That quantity of surrendered gunpowder in 1609 may be compared with a request from King Philip of Spain, monarch of what was certainly the most powerful kingdom in Europe at the beginning of the 17th century, to the Viceroy of Goa, in south west India, in 1605, ordering an annual despatch of 10 to 12 caskets of gunpowder! The contrast spells out, quite clearly, the difference in levels of usage in India and Europe at the time; it also, of course, underlines the growing demand in Europe.
When we read of the development of European interest in south and south east Asia in the seventeenth century, we read, mostly, of spices, fabrics and luxury goods, and there is no doubting the commercial value of those materials of trade. However, a glance at Europe and its international, and internal, conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would certainly suggest that the European interest in north east India, accessed through the Ganges delta, was far from limited to consumer goods.
In 1814, the year before that in which Britain finally defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo, “the East India Company exported 146,000 cwt ( about 7,300 tons) of saltpetre to England.” The British victory, it is said, “was in no small measure thanks to the use of Indian saltpetre.”
In fact, the sense in which the lands of the Ganges, and those of the Ganges delta which are now almost entirely the heartland of today’s Bangladesh, which was not only the foundation stone of the world’s largest democracy of modern India, but also both the foundation of the British Empire, and the means by which it grew, and was protected, is especially revealed in this history of a natural chemical that largely derives from human and animal waste! Which might be considered amusing, if it weren’t so serious.
As far as Bengal was concerned, the influence of this trade in saltpetre had, perhaps, not only a military significance. There is little doubt, for example, that the notorious Amir Chand, known as Omichund, the wealthy Armenian merchant who was a significant player in the conspiracy that led to the agreement between Clive and Mir Jafar, that led to the betrayal and defeat of Siraj Ud Daulah, the young Nawab, at Plassey, made his fortune largely in saltpetre. It was, therefore, not so much the guns that defeated the Nawab, than the influence obtained through the sale of the foundation chemical of gunpowder!
Frey’s writing, in the journal, “History,” in 2009, makes the observation that, “by seizing Bengal, the British exerted mastery over 70% of the world’s saltpetre production during the latter part of the eighteenth century.”
By the middle of the fifteenth century, nearly forty years before da Gama opened a sea route to India that would facilitate the carrying of such bulk cargoes as saltpetre, Frey believes, the Sultan of Bengal had already made saltpetre a state monopoly. That would be the Ilyas Shah dynasty, which had such early connections with the Ming Dynasty in China.
That monopoly based around the lands that are now Bangladesh, is reflected over the ensuing five centuries by subsequent rulers, the last of whom were, of course, the British. The monopoly of the East India Company, with its profitable contracts to supply the growing British Navy, was, undoubtedly, a significant contributor to that business’s profitability, not least because the Government charged no tax on the income as part of that vital contract.
This international near monopoly, of course, stimulated the development of alternative chemicals for manufacture, as well as sources. The nineteenth century development of such highly profitable businesses as Nobel and Du Pont represent a part of that pressure in Europe and North America, and early nineteenth century declaration of the Munroe Doctrine by the US President probably reflects the importance to Chile of its export of bird guano represents an aspect of alternative source of natural supply.
However, the mid eighteenth century figures of export of saltpetre from India tell their own story. From export of 20,000 tons in 1862, to 11,000 tons by 1865, it is easy to see that the importance of Indian saltpetre was rapidly diminishing. It has, however, been said, often, that, by the time of that steep decline, Britain was already the pre eminent world power; on the back of Indian, especially north east Indian, saltpetre supplies and gunpowder factories.
So far, this potentially, economically and socially “explosive” subject has been little researched, and little written about. There is, however, no doubting that, when the sixth Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, one of the greatest of them all, described the lands of Bangladesh, that were then the vibrant centre of Bengal, as, “the paradise of nations, for its wealth and trade,” gunpowder may well have been at least part of what was on his mind. After all, not for nothing was the Mughal Empire described as the, “gunpowder empire.” And not the last Empire to merit that description!
