WARREN HASTINGS

'Warren Hastings' (December 6 1732 - August 22 1818) was the first governor-general of British India, from 1773 to 1785. He was famously impeached in 1787 for corruption, and acquitted in 1795. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1814.
Hastings was born at Churchill, Oxfordshire. He attended Westminster School before joining the British East India Company in 1750 as a clerk. In 1757 he was made the British Resident (administrative in charge) of Murshidabad. He was appointed to the Calcutta council in 1761, but was back in England in 1764. He returned to India in 1769 as a member of the Madras council and was made governor of Bengal in 1772. In 1773, he was appointed the first Governor-General of India.
After an eventful ten years tenure in which he greatly
extended and regularised the nascent Raj created by Clive of India, Hastings resigned in 1784. On his return to England he was charged with high crimes and misdemeanours by Edmund Burke, encouraged by Sir Philip Francis whom he had wounded in a duel in India. He was impeached in 1787 but the trial, which began in 1788, ended with his acquittal in 1795. Hastings spent most of his fortune on his defence, although towards the end of the trial the East India Company did provide financial support.

Contents

Impact on Indian history

Eponyms

As judged by history

References

See also

Impact on Indian history

In many respects Warren Hastings epitomizes the strengths and shortcomings of the British conquest and dominion over India. Unlike the Islamic invaders, who did not even bother to learn an Indian language till they had been in the land for at least half a dozen generations and whose approach to power was to strike terror in the population by building pyramids of skulls of the 100,000 civilians they killed in a single day, the British personified by such able and brilliant administrators such as Warren Hastings went about consoilidating their power in a highly systematic manner. They realized very early into their rule after they gained control over the vast lands of the Gangetic plain with a handful of British officers, that they would have to rely on the Indic to administer these vast areas. In so doing, he makes a virtue out of necessity by realizing the importance of various forms of knowledge to the Colonial power, and in 1784 towards the end of his tenure as Governor general, he makes the following remarks about the importance of various forms of knowledge , including linguistic, legal and scientific for a colonial power and the case that such knowledge could be put to use for the benefit of his country Britain
“Every application of knowledge and especially such as is obtained in social communication with people, over whom we exercise dominion, founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state … It attracts and conciliates distant affections, it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence… Every instance which brings their real character will impress us with more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own… But such instances can only be gained in their writings; and these will survive when British domination in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance” (Bernar Cohn Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge" Oxford University Press 1997
Men like Warren hastings are rare in any society be it in England or in India. They combine the ability to work for a higher cause in this case the enrichment of Britain while enriching themselves at the public expense. But then Britain has never been coy about honoring its buccaneers and bandits beginning with sir Francis Drake and Robert Clive
During Hastings' time in this post, a great deal of precedent was established pertaining to the methods which the British Raj would use in its rule over India. Hastings had a great respect for the ancient scripture of Hinduism and fatefully set the British position on governance as one of looking back to the earliest precedents possible. This allowed Brahmin advisors to mold the law, as no Englishman understood Sanskrit until Sir William Jones; it also accentuated the caste system and other religious frameworks which had, at least in recent centuries, been somewhat incompletely applied. Thus, British influence on the ever-changing social structure of India can in large part be characterized as, for better or for worse, a solidification of the privileges of the caste system through the influence of the exclusively high-caste scholars by whom the British were advised in the formation of their laws. These laws also accepted the binary division of the people of Bengal and, by extension, India in general as either Muslim or Hindu (to be governed by their own laws). The British might therefore be said to be responsible to some extent for causing division, as they were both cause and effect of the forces which would eventually polarize Hindu and Muslim nationalists into the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan.
In 1781 Hastings founded Madrasa 'Aliya, meaning ''the higher madrasa'', in Calcutta showing his relations with the Muslim population.^[1] In addition, in 1784 Hastings supported the foundation of the Bengal Asiatik Society (now Asiatic Society of Bengal by the Orientalist Scholar William Jones, which became a storehouse for information and data pertaining to India.^[2]
As Hastings had few Englishmen to carry out administrative work, and still fewer with the ability to converse in local tongues, he was forced to farm out revenue collection to locals with no ideological friendship for Company rule. Moreover, he was ideologically committed at the beginning of his rule to the administation being carried out by 'natives'. He believed that Europeans revenue collectors would "open the door to every kind of rapine and extortion" as there was "a fierceness in the European manners, especially among the lower sort, which is incompatible with the gentle temper of the Bengalee".^[3]
British desire to assert themselves as the sole sovereign led to conflicts within this 'dual government' of Britons and Indians. The very high levels of revenue extraction and exportation of Bengali silver back to Britain had probably contributed to the famine of 1769-70, in which it has been estimated that a third of the population died; this led to the British characterising the collectors as tyrants and blaming them for the ruin of the province.
Some Englishmen continued to be seduced by the opportunities to acquire massive wealth in India and as a result became involved in corruption and bribery, and Hastings could do little or nothing to stop it. Indeed it was argued (unsuccessfully) at his impeachment trial that he participated in the exploitation of these newly conquered lands.

Eponyms

The city of Hastings, New Zealand and the Melbourne outer suburb of Hastings, Victoria, Australia were both named after him.
Hastings is a Senior Wing House at St Paul's School, Darjeeling, India, where all the senior wing houses are named after colonial age military figures.

As judged by history

★ In his ''Essay on Warren Hastings'', Lord Macaulay, while impressed by the scale of Hastings' achievement in India, found that “His principles were somewhat lax. His heart was somewhat hard.”

References

★ Forrest, G.W., CIE, (editor), ''Selections from The State Papers of the Governors-General of India - Warren Hastings'' (2 vols), Blackwell's, Oxford, 1910.

★ Feiling, Keith, ''Warren Hastings'' (1954)

★ Marshall, P.J., ''The impeachment of Warren Hastings'' (1965)

★ Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Warren Hastings" in ''Critical and Historical Essays'' [1]

See also

★ History of India

★ Bernstein, Jeremy (2000). ''Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings'' ISBN 1-56663-281-1