20 BENGALI] LITERATURE authority was acknowledged; yet the Mohammedan government, under the dual system, had too much reason to complain of their want of influence in the country which was “torn to pieces by a set of rascals, who in Calcutta walked in rags, but when they were sent out on gomastah- ships, lorded it over the country, imprisoning the ryots and merchants, and writing and talking in the most insolent and domineering manner to the fouzdars and_ officers.’ And this was not confined to a particular spot. “ It would amaze you,” writes Mr. Senior, Chief at Kasimbazar, “‘the number of complaints that daily come before me of the extravagancies committed by our agents and gomastahs »2 all over the country. Although the Company had now become actually possessed of more than one _ half of the Nawab’s revenue, yet the latter was continually harrassed by oppressive exactions and became “no more than a banker for the Company’s servants who could draw upon him [meaning presents] as often and to as great an amount as they pleased.”° Naturally the Nawab had to fall back upon the old method of raising from the zemindars what he had himself to render to his new masters; and the tradition of the royal oppression of zemindars, handed down from the days of Murshid Kuli Khan, of which vivid pictures will be found in the pages of the Mvazoo-s-Salatin or the Ser Mutagherin, was revived in the last days of the Mohammedan government in Bengal. The situation is vividly, if too sweepingly, narrated
‘ Letter of Mr. Gray, President at Maldah, dated January, 1764, quoted in Verelst, op. cit. iii p. 49 ; see also the Nawab’s Letter, quoted in Vansittart, op. cit, iii, 881.
- Letterof Mr. Senior, Chief at Kasimbazar, quoted in Verelst,
op. cit, p. 49.
- Clive’s speech; dated March 380, 1772, in Almon’s Debates, X. 14;
see also Mill, op. cit. iii 8354 et seq. In 1767, Lord Clive’s own income was calculated to be at least £96,000.
