Warren Hastings
1st Governor General
of India 1773-1785
• Hastings was born in
Oxfordshire 1732 and died
in 1818. He was the first
Governor General of India
(1773-1785) but was
famously impeached for
corruption in 1787, and
acquitted in 1795. He was
made a Privy Councillor in
1814.
• Warren Hastings (similar background to
Clive) joined the EICo as a clerk in 1750, and
was made the British Resident (administrative
in charge) of Murshidabad in 1757.
• He was appointed to the Calcutta council in
1761 but returned home in 1764.
• In 1760 he returned 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-year
tenure in which he greatly
extended and regularised the
nascent Raj created by Clive,
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 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.
Gilray’s famous cartoon of Sheridan,
the chief prosecutor
Impact on Indian history
• In many respects Warren Hastings
epitomizes the strengths and shortcomings of
the British conquest and dominion over India.
Warren Hastings went about consolidating
British 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
• In 1784 he makes the following remarks
about the importance of various forms of
knowledge 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”
Hastings creates Precedents
• Hastings had a great respect for Hindu
scripture 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;
• It also accentuated the caste system and
other religious frameworks which had, at least
in recent centuries, been somewhat
incompletely applied.
What does that mean?
• 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.
• 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 administration 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".
• 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 1769 famine, 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.
Judgement
• 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.
• In his Essay on Warren Hastings, Macaulay, while impressed by
the scale of Hastings' achievement in India, found that “His
principles were somewhat lax. His heart was somewhat hard.”
• The nationalists in the subcontinent consider Hastings as
another English bandit, along with Clive, who started the
colonial rule in the subcontinent through treachery and cunning.
However, it should be pointed out that other bandits, English or
otherwise, did not found colleges, nor helped to collect and
translate Sanskrit works into English.
An Estimate:
C.J.B Gaskoin Heritage History
• “For a hundred years after Plassey the English
possessions in India were still ruled by the East India
Company, that is, by a trading body whose first aim
was to make the highest possible profit out of a
country supposed to be inexhaustibly rich. A
government which thinks first of profits is likely to be
bad, but the Governors whom the Directors sent out
were happily often excellent. They realized their
duties as well as their rights. They saw that millions
of Indians, so far from being rich, were miserably
poor. And they fought valiantly against oppression
and corruption…
• Clive, after his famous victories, ruled well and wisely.
Especially, he forbade the Company's servants to trade
themselves, or accept bribes and presents, lest they should
neglect its interest; while he increased their pay, lest poverty
should make them dishonest. But other difficulties remained,
especially the uncertain division of powers between the
Governors of the three Presidencies (each independent of the
other), the Directors in England, and the British Government.
• Just before the American Rebellion, however, the Governor of
Bengal, always the chief man in India, became GovernorGeneral of all the Company's possessions. Thus one strong
man at Calcutta might guide affairs in all three provinces. And
the first Governor-General—Warren Hastings—whatever else
he may have been, was beyond all doubt a strong man.
• Otherwise, indeed, English rule in India could hardly have
survived the next ten years. For it was threatened from without
by three great powers: the loose league of Mahratta chiefs in
Western and Central India, whose marauding horsemen were
the terror of all their neighbours; the new kingdom of Mysore in
the south, built up by the great warrior Hyder Ali; and France,
now helping the Americans in the far West, but helping also the
enemies of England in the East, and fighting in Indian waters—
and there alone—on equal terms with the English navy.
• It was threatened also from within by disputes between the
English authorities themselves.
• Warren Hastings was never heartily supported either in England
or in India. The Directors at home disapproved his methods. The
other Governors in India dragged him into unwise and unjust
wars, and so drove him to wring money out of native princes at
the point of the sword to pay the cost. And his own councillors
thwarted and insulted him at every opportunity. Only when two
of them had died, and he himself had fought and wounded a
third in a duel, was he really master in his own house.
• Naturally, therefore, he was sometimes high-handed, and even
unscrupulous. He lent English troops to one Indian prince to
attack a tribe at peace with the Company. He demanded
enormous sums for war expenses from another, and deposed
him for refusing them. He forced the widowed Begums, or
Queens, of Oudh to surrender a vast treasure, so that the new
ruler might therewith pay his debts to the English, and by so
doing he caused their servants to be harshly treated —even,
perhaps, tortured. So, when he at last returned to England, he
found himself impeached by the Commons before the House of
Lords.
• The trial lasted seven years. The greatest orators of the day
denounced every mistake in Hastings's career. They painted in
lurid colours his sternness, his immovable determination, his
readiness in emergency to sweep away every scruple—all the
characteristics which he shared with Charles I's minister,
Strafford. They proved against him some deeds difficult, others
perhaps impossible, to defend. And the end of the long trial
found him poor, broken, and embittered.
• Yet, after all, he was acquitted. Some of the charges against him
were foolish. Others were exaggerated. All were urged by men
who lacked a real knowledge of the facts. For, rightly as his
accusers denounced the evils of English rule in India, they
should have blamed for them the weakness of a system, not the
wickedness of a man. Hastings had done strange things, but he
had done them in times of extraordinary difficulty and danger.
And in those times only his magnificent courage and patient
endurance—his readiness to risk not only his life but even his
good name for England's sake—had saved the English power in
India. So the verdict of history echoes the verdict of the House
of Lords— ‘Not guilty!’ ”
• Consider Gaskoin’s analysis from
www.heritage-history.com on the preceding
4 pages.
• Can you identify the words and phrases that
demonstrate bias?
• Can you assemble an alternative perspective
from these and other sources? (Some are
listed below).
Bibliography
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7.
Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The
British in India Oxford University Press 1997.
John Keay, India: A History. United States: Grove Press Books
2000.
M.E. Monckton-Jones, Warren Hastings in Bengal, 1918.
G.W. Forrest, G.W., Selections from The State Papers of the
Governors-General of India - Warren Hastings (2 vols), Blackwell,
Oxford 1910.
Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (1954)
Marshall, P.J., The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1965)
T.B. Macaulay, “Warren Hastings” in Critical and Historical Essays
(1843)