The exploits and conquests of Charles Cornwallis in service of the British Empire traversed America, Ireland, France and India. In historical accounts from the period and since, he is often cited as a ‘failure’ in his colonial endeavours and military campaigns, owing to his crushing defeat by General George Washington in the last battle of the American War of Independence at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781. Yet, Cornwallis’ journey as an imperial agent continued long after this.

In 1786, Cornwallis was sent to India as Governor-General with full control of both government and military, supposedly to overhaul rampant corruption in the British East India Company which, through the surrender of ‘Diwani’ rights by Mughal Emperor Shah Alam in 1765, now had the authority to levy taxes over Bengal. Bengal is where my family and ancestors are from.

Bengal had been the wealthiest province of the Mughal Empire and it proved to be an extraordinary prize for the British. In 1793, the same year that revolutionary France declared war on Britain, Cornwallis enacted 51 policies that were passed into law in Bengal, which together became known as the Cornwallis Code. This included the Permanent Settlement, also known as the zamindari system, which gave all landowning rights and revenue collection duties to an Indian landed class, and entirely abolished the tenant rights of peasants who had tilled land over generations.

The Permanent Settlement codified into law that so long as the zamindars collected rents from tenant farmers and paid a permanently fixed amount of land tax to the treasury of the East India Company, they could keep the land as well as all profits they could squeeze out of the farmers for themselves. If zamindars failed to pay the Company on time, land holdings would be sold swiftly to other buyers. This arrangement created many absentee landlords living off copious passive income and oppressive methods of tax collection that forced peasants to take on debilitating debt and high-interest loans.

The Permanent Settlement extracted enormous land revenues from Bengal. And yet, over time, even as draconian as it was, the system still did not yield the levels of revenue that the East India Company aimed for. Many zamindars neglected to cultivate and invest in their lands and defaulted on land tax payments, especially in times of flood or drought, having coerced tenant farmers into producing cash crops demanded by the British, such as indigo and opium. By the early nineteenth century, in other parts of India including the Madras and Bombay presidencies, the Company excised landlords from the process so that it could directly extract the greatest possible share of wealth produced by Indian farmers. Only after the Indian uprising of 1857 against the Company did the British reinstate large landlords, thereby recultivating an Indian class that wielded huge power and influence and would be loyal to the Empire.

Following the end of British direct rule in 1947, the dismantling of the zamindari system was one of the first policies to be enacted by the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. Though the reverberations are still felt today, the system was legally abolished in East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – in 1950, in India in 1951 and in West Pakistan in 1959.

Cornwallis’ monument carefully omits his time in America, France and Ireland, and solely depicts his career in India. He stands paternalistically tall and larger than life on a column banded by a Mughal flower motif, wearing ceremonial Order of the Garter robes, with huge phallic-like tassels that hang from on high, and clutching a scroll that most likely depicts the 51 diktats of the Cornwallis Code. At his feet, sits the figure of Britannia in a helmet and draperies with a spearhead and shield with a Union Jack. On the other side, the female personification of India stands in a sheer sari, her head covered and bare-breasted and looking up at Cornwallis, as if in awe and submission. Next to her sits the figure of Bhagiratha, the legendary king of Hindu scriptures. His gaze is averted down towards the ground as though with resignation and defeat, and in turn he holds a miniature statuette of the Hindu goddess, Ganga, whom, it is said, he brought down from heaven to earth, and is the personification of the River Ganges, a symbol of India’s fertility and abundance.

In no way was Charles Cornwallis a failure in terms of extracting wealth and resources – first from Bengal and then from across India – for the benefit of the East India Company's fast-expanding empire. He would go on to suppress anti-British uprisings in Ireland next. The exploitation that Cornwallis presided over, with the complicity of an Indian landlord class contributed to the widespread impoverishment of the peoples and communities ruled by the East India Company, a starkly unequal society, and seismic economic and political turbulence and instability, including large swathes of migration resulting in the South Asian diaspora communities in both the UK and around the world today.

In the twentieth century, Bengal would experience not just one but three partitions -- in 1905 under British rule; in 1947, when British India was divided at the moment of its independence into the states of India and Pakistan; and, in 1971, with the secession of East Pakistan, its war of liberation, and its birth as the independent nation of Bangladesh.

For detailed information about this monument, visit the Pantheons: Sculpture at St Paul's Cathedral website.