“The Death of Raghu the Poddar: An Unknown Incident from the East India Company’s Annals”, The Dharma Dispatch, October 29, 2025
“IN LESS THAN half a century after Thomas Roe received a trading Farman from Jahangir, the English East India Company had steadily expanded its operations and extended its influence along the East Coast — mainly in Madras, Machilipattanam and Bengal; it also had a flourishing factory in Surat. In the same interim, the Mughal Empire had witnessed the fall of two Sultans and the rise of its most bigoted monarch, who underwrote its ruin.
Every fort, every factory and every trading post that the East India Company set up was akin to an independent republic run by rules, regulations and laws designed in England. In India, the Company operated through a maze of Courts and Committees answerable only to the Directors sitting in London. Its Indian partners and employees were bound to the Company’s laws and not to those of the Mughals or other Indian kings in whose domains the EIC functioned. The EIC’s officials stationed in India were also empowered to take penal action — including torture and the death sentence — against Indian citizens in its employ. This naturally led to frequent, violent clashes between the EIC’s men and the locals.
The story narrated in this essay series relates to one such clash that occurred in 1673 and dragged on till 1676. Ever since, it attained widespread notoriety as The Case of Raghu the Poddar in the annals of the EIC and in the public memory of Bengal. The story is instructive at multiple levels and has a contemporary touch to it…….”
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