Around a hundred and fifty years later, on 12th August 1765, another meeting took place, between another Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II and another British representative, Lord Clive. But this time, the power equations had completely changed. This meeting took place at Allahabad Fort where Shah Alam was to sign away Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the East India Company. A large oil canvas by contemporary artist Benjamin West, now a prized display at the Victoria Memorial Museum in Kolkata, graphically depicts the scene. Clive is dressed in a long redcoat and white stockings, with a royal blue sash around his waist. The Mughal emperor is seated on a throne, wearing a white angarkha and a bejewelled turban. Three steps lead up to the throne, and servants with whisks of peacock feathers fan the beleaguered monarch. But nothing can hide the triumphant and superior stance of Clive, as standing nearby he looks down at Shah Alam, who has no other option but to give away annual revenues estimated at UK Pound 33 million for a yearly stipend of Pound 272,000. That look encapsulates in an instant everything that had changed since Roe met Jahangir, and Shah Alam met Clive.

From then on, British power was in the ascendant, and the new rulers made no pretence to hide their swagger. The Company had material wealth and military might. Even its minor functionaries were surrounded by a battery of native servants: khigmatgars, durbans, syces, dhobis, bhistis (water carriers), hircarras (messengers), doreahs (dog-keepers), pankha-wallahs, palanquin bearers, malis, khansamas, ayahs and sweepers. Macaulay, who in 1833 was appointed as a member of the Supreme Council to govern India, and who laid down the policy to create a ‘class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and intellect’, lived in a princely mansion in Kolkata receiving a salary of Pounds 10,000 a month, while Ghalib, his contemporary survived on a monthly pension of ₹66.

And yet, the ‘natives’ did occasionally bristle at the dismissive way in which they were dealt with. When Francis Hawkins, the acting British Resident in Delhi, did not receive Ghalib with courtesy, he complained to the Chief Secretary in Kolkata that he ‘was received in a manner totally unsuited to my Rank and Standing in the Scale of Asiatic Society and extremely ungratifying to my Feelings’. In 1809, Raja Rammohan Roy was also publicly abused by Sir Frederick Hamilton, a British official, for not getting out of his palanquin to greet him. He too complained to Governor-General Lord Minto. Neither Ghalib nor Roy received a reply.

There was one man though, who came some years later, who knew how to deal with the hubris of the British and taught many other Indian citizens to do the same. His name was Mahatma Gandhi. In 1922, when tried for stoking ‘disaffection’ against the British Empire, Gandhi told the bewildered British judge: ‘I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty, but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for any extenuating act of clemency. I am here to invite and to cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what I consider to be the highest duty of a citizen.’

From then onwards, in spite of its military might and economic power, the British Empire was on trial. The power equation, although few could predict it so early then, had already shifted.