In October 1764, on the Ganges at Buxar, Company sepoys under Hector Munro defeated the combined forces of Mir Qasim, Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. That victory — judged by Britannica to be more decisive than Plassey — led to the Treaty of Allahabad and the Diwani grant of 1765, turning a trading company into the revenue ruler of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
Every schoolchild who studies the rise of British rule in India learns two dates: Plassey, 1757, and Buxar, 1764. Plassey is the famous one — the mango grove, the conspiracy, Robert Clive. Yet the battle that actually sealed the fate of Bengal was the second. At Buxar, a small fortified town on the Ganges in present-day Bihar, some seven thousand men of the British East India Company faced the combined armies of the deposed Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Awadh and the Mughal emperor himself — and beat them in open battle. Where the victory at the Battle of Plassey had made the Company the power behind Bengal's throne, Buxar put the throne's revenues into the Company's own hands. Within a year of the battle, Shah Alam II had signed over the Diwani — the right to collect the taxes of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — and a trading corporation had become, in law as well as in fact, the ruler of the richest province of the Mughal Empire.
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The settlement that followed Plassey in 1757 was never stable. The Company ruled Bengal through Mir Jafar, a nawab it had installed and could unmake, but the arrangement satisfied no one. The Bengal treasury was drained by the indemnities and presents the new regime had promised; the nawab's authority leaked away as Company servants, trading privately on their own account, ignored his officials and his courts. By 1760 the Company itself had tired of Mir Jafar, and in October of that year it replaced him with his son-in-law, Mir Qasim, who bought his throne by ceding the Company the revenues of Burdwan, Midnapore and Chittagong.
Mir Qasim, however, had no intention of remaining a puppet. As Banglapedia's account of his reign puts it, he set out to reassert the sovereignty of the Bengal state — and he understood, as his predecessors had not, that sovereignty rested on money and a modern army. Encyclopaedia Britannica's summary of Buxar notes that the battle "marked the end of the attempt to rule Bengal through a puppet nawab". Mir Qasim was the reason that attempt collapsed: he was the first Company-made nawab who tried seriously to stop being one.
Mir Qasim moved his capital from Murshidabad to Monghyr (Munger), in Bihar, away from the Company's grip on the Hooghly. There he rebuilt his finances — resuming rent-free lands, conducting a fresh land survey, squeezing arrears out of defaulting officials — and raised a new army drilled on European lines, trained by officers such as the Armenian Gurgin Khan and the German adventurer Walter Reinhardt, known as Samru. Monghyr acquired workshops turning out muskets and cannon to match the Company's own.
The quarrel that destroyed him was about trade. By the Mughal farman of 1717, the Company's foreign trade was exempt from customs duties, and its goods travelled under a permit, the dastak. Company servants had stretched the privilege far beyond its terms: their private inland trade — in salt, betel nut, tobacco and the everyday goods of Bengal — also passed duty-free under borrowed dastaks, while Bengali merchants paid internal duties that could run to a quarter or more of the value of their goods. Governor Vansittart negotiated a compromise under which the English private trade would pay a modest duty; the Calcutta Council, whose members' fortunes were built on that trade, repudiated it.
Mir Qasim's answer, in March 1763, was radical: he abolished internal transit duties altogether, for Indian and foreign merchants alike, for two years. Equality, it turned out, was the one concession the English would not accept — they demanded that duties be reimposed on Indian traders so that the English advantage survived. In June 1763 the Company's chief at Patna, William Ellis, attacked the city on his own authority; Mir Qasim's garrison retook Patna and captured Ellis and his party. The Council declared war, and restored the ageing Mir Jafar to the throne.
The campaign of 1763 went steadily against the nawab. Major Thomas Adams defeated his armies in succession at Katwa, Murshidabad, Giria, Sooty and the Udaynala pass, and stormed Monghyr. Retreating westward in October 1763, Mir Qasim ordered the killing of his English prisoners at Patna — the infamous Patna massacre. The modern count, based on the surviving records, is of 45 mainly British Company employees put to death on 5–6 October 1763, together with some 200 Indian sepoys who had refused to change sides; older British accounts, counting prisoners killed at Patna and in other places, put the English dead at between 150 and 200. Adams stormed Patna on 6 November. Mir Qasim, his army broken and his name blackened, fled west to seek allies for one more throw.
The allies he found were the two greatest remaining powers of northern India. Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, was the Mughal Empire's wazir — its chief minister — and master of the rich and populous country between Bengal and Delhi. With him came Shah Alam II, the Mughal emperor himself: a fugitive since 1759, when he had escaped from Delhi, but still the fountain of all legal authority in India, whose farman could make a tax collector or unmake a nawab. Raja Balwant Singh of Benares joined them as well. For the emperor, the expedition promised the recovery of Bengal's tribute and perhaps of his throne; for Shuja, it was a chance to push the aggressive English back from his frontier; for Mir Qasim, it was the only road back to Murshidabad.
Their first campaign, in the spring of 1764, failed before Patna, where a night attack on the Company's entrenchments was beaten off on 3 May. The allies withdrew to Buxar to wait out the monsoon. The Company, meanwhile, was changing commanders and confronting a crisis of its own: its sepoy battalions, promised a donation by Mir Jafar that the Calcutta Council refused to pay, had mutinied again and again through 1764. Major Hector Munro, newly arrived with reinforcements from Bombay, restored discipline with terrible severity — in September 1764 the ringleaders of a mutinous battalion were tried by a court-martial of Indian officers and blown from guns, twenty-four sentenced at Chapra and, by Broome's history of the Bengal Army, thirty executed in all. The army that marched against the allies a few weeks later did not mutiny again.
Munro advanced with, by his own return, 7,072 men — about 850 Europeans, 5,297 sepoys and 918 Indian cavalry, with a train of field artillery. The allied host camped around Buxar was far larger: at least 40,000 by most estimates, and some accounts run to 60,000. The two armies came into contact on 22 October 1764; the main fighting is dated to that day by Britannica and Banglapedia, though some older histories place the battle itself on the 23rd.
At daybreak the imperial troops under Mirza Najaf Khan attacked Munro's line — and ran onto formed infantry that stood, volleyed and drove them back, in Britannica's account, within twenty minutes. On the other flank, Major Champion's column seized a village near the town and swung outward, turning the allied position. The allies had numbers, cavalry and guns, but they had three masters and no single commander; once the line was outflanked, the battle became a rout under disciplined musketry. In about three hours it was over.
The numbers of the fallen tell the same story of a one-sided, hard-fought action. The military historian J. W. Fortescue counted 847 British casualties in all, and put the allies' dead at about 2,000, with 133 guns left on the field; Britannica gives the allied losses at some 6,000 of 35,000 men. Shuja-ud-Daula escaped across the Karmanasa river by a bridge of boats — and blew the bridge up behind him, abandoning the emperor and part of his own army. Mir Qasim fled the field into a long exile; he would die in poverty near Delhi in 1777. Shah Alam II, deserted by his allies, detached himself from the wreck of the confederacy and came to terms with the victors. The pursuit rolled on into 1765 — Benares taken, the great fort of Chunar stormed in February, Shuja driven to shelter with the Rohillas before he too submitted.
The peace was made by Robert Clive, who returned to Bengal as governor in May 1765 determined to convert victory into a permanent settlement. At Allahabad in August he concluded two separate treaties. By the imperial farman of 12 August 1765, Shah Alam II granted the East India Company the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — the office of diwan, carrying the right to collect the land revenue and administer civil justice across the whole of the old Subah of Bengal, in perpetuity. In exchange, the Company promised the emperor an annual tribute of Rs 26 lakh and settled on him the districts of Kora and Allahabad, carved out of Awadh, where he would live under Company protection. Four days later, on 16 August, Shuja-ud-Daula signed his own treaty: Awadh was restored to him minus Kora and Allahabad, he paid a war indemnity of Rs 50 lakh, accepted a defensive alliance, and opened his country to duty-free Company trade. Awadh, the strongest state left in the north, had become a buffer between Company Bengal and the powers beyond.
The ceremony of the grant became famous through Benjamin West's painting of 1818, which shows the emperor enthroned in splendour handing the scroll to Clive. The reality, recorded by the contemporary Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, was almost a parody of it: the emperor was perched on an armchair set upon Clive's dining table, and the whole transaction, he wrote, was completed in less time than would be spent on the sale of a donkey or a bullock. A lesser detail of the settlement mattered as much: the nizamat — defence, police and criminal justice — formally stayed with Bengal's nawab, now a minor maintained on Rs 53 lakh a year, but was in practice run by a deputy answerable to the Company. Under Clive's "dual government", the Company took the revenue while someone else carried the blame for ruling.
Historians have long debated which battle founded British India, and the weight of judgement falls on Buxar. Plassey, for all its fame, was barely a battle at all: it was decided in advance by conspiracy, when Mir Jafar's wing of the nawab's army stood aside by arrangement, and it left the Company ruling through a puppet whose authority it could borrow but never own. Buxar was the opposite kind of event — a genuine trial of strength, in daylight, against the combined forces of the three greatest authorities in northern India, including the Mughal emperor in person, and won by the discipline, drill and firepower of the Company's sepoy army rather than by treachery.
Britannica's verdict is concise: Buxar was the "decisive battle" that "confirmed British power over Bengal and Bihar" and ended the experiment of ruling through a puppet nawab — "thenceforth the company took control". The consequences explain the judgement. Plassey had given the Company influence; Buxar gave it legality and income. The Diwani was not plunder or a pension but an imperial office, granted by farman by the one authority every Indian power recognised, and it carried the land revenue of tens of millions of people. From 1765 the Company's wars, its trade and its administration in India were financed out of Bengal's taxes — the engine of everything that followed.
For Bengal, Buxar closed an era. The province that had been the richest jewel of the Bengal Sultanate and then of the Mughal subah now had as its revenue minister a joint-stock company answerable to shareholders in London. The dual government that followed the treaty blurred every line of responsibility — the Company took the taxes, the nawab's deputy took the odium — and historians have not been kind to the misgovernment of those years, which ran on until Warren Hastings abolished the dual system in 1772 and the Company, in his phrase, "stood forth as Diwan".
The afterlife of the settlement also measured how completely the balance had shifted. In 1771 Shah Alam II tired of his gilded dependence, left Allahabad under Maratha escort and returned to Delhi; the Company promptly stopped his Rs 26 lakh tribute and in time took back Kora and Allahabad altogether. The emperor who had granted away Bengal ended as what Buxar had made him — a pensioner whose pension could be cancelled. Mir Qasim's gamble had been the last coordinated attempt by the powers of the old order to expel the Company from Bengal by main force, and its failure left no successor: after Buxar, Indian states would face the Company one at a time. That is why, of the two famous dates, the quieter one — 22 October 1764, on a riverbank in Bihar — is the one on which British rule in Bengal was truly sealed.
