Joseph-François Dupleix

French colonial administrator

• Born: January 1, 1697
• Birthplace: Landrecies, France
• Died: November 10, 1763
• Place of death: Paris, France

As the governor-general of French India, Dupleix dreamed of achieving French hegemony in southern India. To that end, he fought for more than a decade against the British East India Company for control of the region but ultimately failed.

Early Life

Joseph-François Dupleix (zhoh-zehf frahn-swah dyew-plehks), was the son of François Dupleix, a director of the French East India Company. Through his father’s connections, he was appointed senior councillor of the Superior Council at Pondicherry, the company’s headquarters in India, and arrived there on August 22, 1722. After almost a decade in Pondicherry, Dupleix was appointed in 1731 superintendent at Chandernagore in Bengal, where he remained for eleven years. His helpmate during that time was a biracial woman, Jeanne Albert, called “the Begam Jeanne,” known for her strong will and intelligence. Throughout Dupleix’s years in India, she was his most trusted adviser.

Appointed governor-general of Pondicherry in 1740, Dupleix assumed his duties in January, 1742. In 1743, maurauding Marāthās invaded the Carnatic, killing the nawab, Dost Ali, overlord of both the French at Pondicherry and the English at Madras. Then, news arrived that the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) was in full flow in Europe: The French and English in India found that they were officially at war.

Life’s Work

When Dupleix returned to Pondicherry from Chandernagore, he was forty-five years old with twenty years’ experience of India. He may have been one of the first Europeans to diagnose the collapse of the Mughal state-system, due principally to the fact that, while military technology in contemporary Europe was rapidly changing, the armies of Indian rulers remained little better than undisciplined rabbles, armed with medieval weaponry and led by commanders who were often inept and cowardly. Dupleix divined that quite small, well-armed European forces or European-led Indian forces must always be superior to indigenous armies, and he dreamed of French political hegemony in South India. Such hegemony would require weakening the British in the region.

Both nations were at war in Europe, presenting Dupleix—as he thought—with the opportunity to crush English pretensions in India once and for all. Dupleix resolved to take Madras with the help of the French governor of Île de France (Mauritius), Bertrand-François La Bourdonnais, who blockaded Madras by sea, enabling land forces from Pondicherry to enter the city on September 21, 1746. The French occupied it for the next two years, although failure to capture Fort St. David, near Cuddalore, left the English with a base on the coast.

Meanwhile, events of great significance for Dupleix’s future were occurring inland. Dost Ali, nawab of the Carnatic, had perished in battle in 1743. The overlord of the nawab of the Carnatic was the Mughal viceroy of the Deccan, Asaf Jah, known by his honorific title of Nizam al-Mulk (r. 1719-1748). Following the death of Dost Ali, Asaf Jah had appointed a new nawab, Anwar al-Din. The new nawab, enraged to learn of Dupleix’s aggression against Madras (both French and English were under his protection), marched a large force to the relief of Madras, only to discover that the French were already in possession. Confrontation at the River Adyar proved disastrous for the nawab, but in the history of European imperialism it was of immense significance, for it demonstrated conclusively Dupleix’s contention: A troop of 450 Frenchmen was able to disperse an indigenous force of thousands. Not long afterwards, news of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle reached India, and Madras was restored to the English. Overt conflict with the English was forbidden.

Since the engagement at the River Adyar, Dupleix regarded the nawab as an enemy. Fortuitously, Chanda Sahib, Dost Ali’s son-in-law, returned from Marāthān captivity in 1748, and Dupleix enlisted him as an ally. Combining their forces, they defeated and killed Anwar al-Din at Ambur (August, 1749). Dupleix then installed Chanda Sahib in Arcot (the capital of the Carnatic) as the new nawab. Dupleix was now master of the Carnatic, but part of his plans miscarried: Anwar al-Din’s son, Muhammad Ali, escaped the carnage at Ambur and fled south to the fort of Trichinopoly, where he allied himself with the local rajas, reckoning that the nizam would confirm his succession.

Asaf Jah died in 1748, and his second son, Nasir Jang, assumed the sovereignty of the Deccan. His claim, however, was disputed by a nephew, Muzaffar Jang, who enjoyed the support of Dupleix and who entered into an alliance with Chanda Sahib, Dupleix’s other client. Nasir Jang marched on the Carnatic (March, 1750), attempting to force Muzaffar Jang into submission, but Nasir Jang was assassinated in December, 1750, and Dupleix provided French troops to accompany Muzaffar Jang to Hyderabad. Muzaffar Jang was installed as nizam at Hyderabad by the French commander, Charles-Joseph Patissier, marquis de Bussy, but he was in fact a puppet of the latter Frenchman. From 1751 until he was recalled in 1758, Bussy was the virtual ruler of Hyderabad.

In 1751, Muzaffar Jang was killed in a skirmish with hostile nobles, and Bussy swiftly substituted Muzaffar Jang’s uncle, Salabat Jang (r. 1751-1761), as the fourth nizam. Salabat Jang was as much a French client as Chanda Sahib, but from Dupleix’s point of view he was easier to handle—paradoxically, as a result of the fact that Hyderabad was farther away than Arcot, and the English had not yet reached the Deccan. However, Bussy’s contingent was a heavy drain on the company’s resources. He therefore prevailed upon the nizam to lease the Northern Circars to cover its expenses.

Dupleix could rely upon Bussy to take care of Hyderabad. The Carnatic, however, proved more intractable. With Muhammad Ali on the loose in Trichinopoly, Chanda Sahib’s position remained precarious. He therefore marched on Trichinopoly to overcome his rival, aided by a succession of indifferent French commanders.

Although it was not apparent at the time, Trichinopoly was to prove Dupleix’s Achilles’ heel. At first, all of Dupleix’s schemes went well, but there then appeared an English military genius in Robert Clive (1725-1774). In 1751, Clive was a British East India Company writer (a junior clerk) at Madras, who, bored, had been permitted to enlist in the company’s military service, attaining the rank of captain. Clive now proposed a diversion, the seizure of Chanda Sahib’s capital of Arcot while Chanda Sahib was busy besieging Trichinopoly. Learning from the action on the River Adyar, Clive marched a force of some two hundred European troops and three hundred sepoys (European-trained Indian troops) to Arcot in midsummer, capturing the city with ease. Predictably, Chanda Sahib drew off a force from the siege of Trichinopoly to recover his capital, which Clive held during a fifty-three-day siege (September-October, 1751).

In Trichinopoly, matters now went badly for Dupleix. The initial French commander, Dupleix’s nephew d’Auteuil, fell ill and was replaced by Jacques Law, who belied his later impressive military reputation by timidity and prevarication in the face of a determined resistance by Muhammad Ali and his allies, who now included an English contingent. Unwisely, Law withdrew across the Kaveri River to the island of Srirangam to await reinforcements but was himself besieged. A relieving force under d’Auteil was ambushed (June 9, 1752), and Law was forced to capitulate. Taken with him was Chanda Sahib, who was promptly beheaded.

The execution of Chanda Sahib left Dupleix without a protégé, but he remained as resolute as ever, and by December, 1752, the siege of Trichinopoly was renewed. French and English forces countermarched across the Carnatic, each with some success, but Dupleix was ill-served by his commanders. The French had the edge in numbers of European troops, but the English had supremacy at sea.

For Dupleix, time was running out. His vision of French hegemony in South India with Indian puppet rulers providing the revenue base with which to fuel the company’s operations was at variance with the priorities of his masters in Paris. Moreover, he had foolishly failed to explain his audacious schemes to those masters. It appears that the first time he communicated his plans to the homeland was in a dispatch of October 16, 1753, when his recall had already been determined, and Charles-Robert Godeheu had been named his successor.

Godeheu landed at Pondicherry on August 1, 1754, and by December had negotiated a provisional treaty with the English, which, although subsequently derided by Dupleix’s partisans, retained for the French everything that Dupleix had striven to secure, including territories providing a total revenue of 68 lakhs (one lakh was equal to 100,000 rupees) and Bussy retaining power in Hyderabad; thus ended the Second Carnatic War.

Dupleix left India with his family on August 15, 1754. He was given an honourable reception in Paris, but he died an embittered man in straitened circumstances on November 13, 1763.

Significance

Had Joseph-François Dupleix succeeded in his schemes and had he been succeeded by men of equal ability and foresight, it is not too far-fetched to imagine that India might have been a French dependency rather than a British one for the next two centuries. The French East India Company, however, unlike its English rival, was an unenterprising state-managed bureaucracy, and the French were never able to retain the initiative at sea. The victory on the River Adyar was certainly a turning point in European expansion, but it was Clive, learning from Dupleix and Bussy, who reaped the advantages of that victory. For all that, Dupleix’s ambitions and his initiative in attempting to realize them place him among the great empire builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Bibliography

Dodwell, Henry. Dupleix and Clive: The Beginning of Empire. London: Methuen, 1920. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968. Still the best narrative in English of the struggle between Dupleix and Clive for control of India.

Martineau, Alfred. “Dupleix and Bussy.” In The Cambridge History of India, vol. 5. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1929. Detailed brief narrative summary by the author of a definitive, four-volume study in French.

Price, J. Frederick, and K. Rangachari. The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai. 12 vols. 1904-1928. Reprint. New Delhi: Asian Educational Service, 1985. Pillai was Dupleix’s dubash (interpreter). A unique record of his thoughts and actions.

Sen, S. P. The French in India. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1947. A useful narrative.

Thompson, Virginia M. Dupleix and His Letters, 1742-1754. New York: R. O. Ballou, 1933. Useful biographical material.

Vigié, Marc. Dupleix. Paris: Fayard, 1993. A later study, in French, incorporating late twentieth century scholarship.