Warren Hastings

(click to enlarge)
Warren Hastings, oil painting by Tilly Kettle; in the National Portrait Gallery, London. (credit: Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born Dec. 6, 1732, Churchill, near Daylesford, Oxfordshire, Eng. — died Aug. 22, 1818, Daylesford) British colonial administrator in India. He worked for the English East India Company from 1750, rising to membership in its council in Bengal (1761 – 64) and Madras (now Chennai; 1769). As governor of Bengal (1772 – 74), he moved the central government to Calcutta (now Kolkata) under direct British control and remodeled the justice system. In 1774 he acquired the new title of governor-general, with responsibilities for supervising other British settlements in India. His powers were shared with a council of four, several of whom tried to blame Hastings for the continuing abuses of power by Englishmen. From 1777 to 1783 he sought to counter the instability created by the fall of the Mughal Empire and tried to maintain peaceful relations with neighbouring states but was drawn into the Maratha Wars. This disrupted the company's trade and antagonized opinion in England, as did several dubious ventures Hastings entered into to raise extra funds. In 1785 he left India at peace and retired to England. In 1786 Edmund Burke introduced an impeachment process against him on charges of corruption; after a trial that lasted from 1788 to 1795, Hastings was acquitted.

For more information on Warren Hastings, visit Britannica.com.

The English statesman Warren Hastings (1732-1818) was the first governor general of British India. He established the system of civil administration that was the basis of Anglo-Indian security and prosperity.

Warren Hastings was born on Dec. 6, 1732, in Churchill, near Daylesford, of an old but poor family. His mother died immediately after his birth, and his father, a clergyman, disappeared in the West Indies. Raised by an uncle, Hastings had a good education and attended Westminster. He became a clerk in the East India Company and reached Calcutta in October 1750. As was the custom, he augmented his salary by private trading. He was placed in charge of a factory weaving silk and cotton goods in Kasimbazar (Cossimbazar) and by 1756 was a member of the council, the local governing body of the company.

When Suraja Dowla (Siraj-ud-Daula), the nawab of Bengal, attacked and took Calcutta, Hastings was taken prisoner but was soon released to act as intermediary for the prisoners in the Black Hole. He joined Robert Clive's relief force, which recaptured the city.

In August 1758 Clive appointed Hastings resident at Murshidabad to deal with the new nawab, Mir Jafar. Three years later Hastings was named to the Calcutta council under Henry Vansittart, Clive's successor. Disgusted by the widespread corruption, Hastings retired to England in 1764 with a modest fortune. His funds gone after 4 years, he applied for reemployment and was appointed to the Madras council, arriving there in 1769. In 1772, after Vansittart and two other members were lost at sea, Hastings became governor of Bengal. Two years later he was governor general of India, a post he held until 1785.

Hastings's tenure of office was marked by constant strife in his council and in England. He faced and dealt with continual opposition to his policies. Yet by strength of character, firmness of resolve, and sense of duty he overcame all obstacles, many of which arose from the difficulty of defining his new position and its responsibilities.

Hastings carried out an aggressive policy of administrative, judicial, and fiscal reform to improve government and eliminate abuse. He suppressed banditry in the country. He put down a serious Maratha conspiracy supported by the French. He reestablished British prestige, which had declined after Clive's departure. He used military forces throughout India to prevent the fragmentation and dissolution of British power. He perhaps occasionally overstepped his prerogatives by making British forces available to the nawab of Oudh, by using questionable methods to recover from the dowager of Oudh money illegally withheld. But he vigorously maintained his authority over subordinate provincial governors despite objections to what at times seemed like his autocratic or dictatorial control.

Hastings also fostered education, encouraged the codification of Hindu law, stimulated the study of Sanskrit by European scholars, founded a Mohammedan college in Calcutta and an Indian institute in London, opened a trade route to Tibet, sponsored a survey of Bengal, and organized expeditions to explore the seas.

The passage in 1784 of Pitt's India Act, which provided a new constitution, persuaded Hastings there was little point for him to remain. Resigning, he returned to England in 1785. He was immediately charged with "high crimes and misdemeanors, " which he denied vigorously. He was impeached by Parliament in 1786, but the trial opened 2 years later and lasted 7 years. The House of Lords found him not guilty, but his personal fortune was exhausted by his defense. The East India Company came to his aid and granted him funds and an annuity.

In 1813 Hastings was asked to discuss Indian matters in Parliament and was received with extraordinary respect. In 1814 he was made a privy councilor. He died at Daylesford on Aug. 22, 1818.

Hastings was said to have "looked like a great man, and not like a bad man." He was physically slight, temperate in his habits, and reserved in his behavior. Personally neither corrupt nor cruel, he has been characterized as "the scapegoat upon whose head parliament laid the accumulated sins, real and imaginary, of the East Indian company."

Further Reading

There are three standard biographies of Hastings: Cuthbert C. Davies, Warren Hastings and Oudh (1939); Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India (1947); and Keith Grahame Feiling, Warren Hastings (1954). Hastings the man is revealed in Letters of Warren Hastings to His Wife, edited by Sidney C. Grier (1905), and in H. H. Dodwell, ed., Warren Hastings' Letters to Sir John Macpherson (1927).

Hastings, Warren (1732-1818). Hastings joined the East India Company in 1750. He rose quickly in its service, being a member of the Bengal Council by 1757 when Robert Clive achieved his first military victories. In 1764 he retired to England with a large fortune which he rapidly lost. He returned to India in 1769 and, three years later, was appointed governor of Bengal. In 1773, he became the first governor-general of India. In office, he reformed the company's revenue and commercial systems and extended its influence across the Ganges valley. He retired with a second fortune, but was impeached for murder and extortion. The prosecution was led by Edmund Burke and the proceedings lasted from 1788 until 1795, when Hastings was acquitted, but left impoverished.

Hastings, Warren (1732–1818), first governor-general of India. Warren Hastings was a competent, honorable, and farsighted administrator whose policies, some controversial, decisively shaped and stabilized future Anglo-Indian relations. The controversy surrounding his administration made him the subject of impeachment and trial in Great Britain.

Warren Hastings was born at Daylesford, Worcestershire, on 6 December 1732, the son of a country solicitor whose family had fallen into poverty. When his mother, Hester Warren, died soon after his birth, his father departed for the West Indies. Warren was raised by an uncle who sent him to school, first at Newington and then to Westminster, where he became the first king's scholar of his year in 1747.

In October 1750, Hastings entered service as a clerk in the East India Company. Able and ambitious, he advanced rapidly, becoming the company's resident (1757). From 1761 to 1764, he served on the Calcutta Council, the chief governing body in Bengal. During this period he attempted to reform abuses in the transit system, specifically the practice whereby British officials passed private consignments free of duty, resulting in disproportionate fiscal burdens on the Mughul nabob Mir Kasim and his subjects. Hastings's compromise proposal proved ineffectual and a brief war erupted, ending in the defeat of Mir Kasim and restoration of the former nabob, Mir Jaffier.

In 1764 Hastings returned to England, but financial need forced him to seek reemployment with the Company, which, in 1769, appointed him to the Council of Madras. Two years later he was promoted to the governorship of Bengal.

From 1772 to 1774, Hastings consolidated British control over native authorities, restored order to the province's judicial system, abolished the pension that Lord Clive had paid to the Mughul, and created a new, more efficient procedure for collecting the land revenues, a major source of the company's financial solvency. The English collectors, being inexperienced and extortionate, were removed and replaced with native officers of proven knowledge and ability. Six divisions were created by grouping the districts and subordinating them to provincial councils under the control of non-Indian administrators. This arrangement, like so many of Hastings's ideas, was to become an enduring part of the British ruling tradition in India.

Lord North's Regulating Act of 1773 placed India under three presidencies, with one governor-general, a position held by Hastings from 1774 to 1784, assisted by a newly created council of five, three of whom—strangers to India—were hostile to his policies. Given only a single vote, Hastings frequently found himself overruled in his efforts to curb further corruption and introduce reforms. Eventually his fellow councillors, led by Sir Phillip Francis, conspired against him, fabricating charges of corruption and cruelty that were to culminate in his impeachment. Despite such obstructionism, Hastings launched military expeditions to defeat the Mahrattas conspiracy that threatened Britain's imperial governance, quelled provincial revolts, continued his financial reforms, and founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Calcutta Madrisa, a vital center of Muslim culture. He also had to confront the danger posed by the sultanate of Haidar Ali, who (with the connivance of the French and Dutch) plotted insurrection against British rule. On his own authority, Hastings removed the incompetent governor of Madras and replaced him with the veteran militarist Sir Eyre Coote, who defeated Ali's forces at Porto Novo. Parallel naval action drove the rebels out of the Carnatic (a region in southeastern India). On the death of Haidar Ali in 1782, Hastings negotiated the treaty of Salbai, which acknowledged British supremacy throughout India and calmed the situation in Madras.

Hastings resigned his office in December 1784 and returned to England on 13 June the following year. In 1787 he faced impeachment charges initiated by Edmund Burke (working with Hastings's enemies), whose outrageous conduct evoked numerous rebukes from the House of Lords. The lengthy trial, beginning in 1788 and lasting until 1795, ended in Hastings's acquittal, but severely compromised his reputation, ruined his health, and cost him £50,000.

In his later years, Hastings campaigned for a peerage and a parliamentary reversal of the impeachment, neither of which ever materialized. He received a doctorate of civil law from Oxford in 1813, was sworn privy councillor in May 1814, and died, a rural recluse, on 22 August 1818.

Although Hastings's conduct of affairs tended at times to be high-handed, if not unscrupulous, his motives were invariably patriotic, not self-interested. He expanded the territorial scope of British dominion in India, honored and preserved indigenous cultures, and introduced many needed and lasting reforms. The prince regent (the future George IV) put it best when, in 1814, he called Hastings "the most deserving yet also one of the worst used men in the empire."

Bibliography

Bowen, H. V. Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.

Feiling, K. Warren Hastings. London and New York, 1954.

Forrest, G. W. India under Hastings. New Delhi, 1984.

Marshall, P. J. The Impeachment of Warren Hastings. London, 1965.

Turnbull, P. Warren Hastings. London, 1975.

—KARL W. SCHWEIZER

The Right Honourable  Warren Hastings
1st Governor-General of Bengal
In office 1773 – 1785
Preceded by	None
Succeeded by	Sir John Macpherson, acting
Born	6 December 1732 (1732-12-06) Churchill, Oxfordshire
Died	22 August 1818 (1818-08-23) Daylesford, Gloucestershire
Nationality	English

Warren Hastings (6 December 1732 – 22 August 1818) was the first Governor-General of Bengal, from 1773 to 1785. He was famously accused of corruption in an impeachment in 1787, but was acquitted in 1795. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1814.

Contents 1 Life 2 Hastings's administrative ethos and legacy 3 Impeachment 4 Eponyms 5 Play on Warren Hastings 6 References 7 Bibliography

Life

Warren Hastings was born at Churchill, Oxfordshire in 1732 to a poor father and a mother who died soon after he was born^[1]. He attended Westminster School before joining the British East India Company in 1750 as a clerk. In 1757 he was made the British Resident (administrator in charge) of Murshidabad. He was appointed to the Calcutta council in 1761 and returned to England in 1764. He went back 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.

Warren Hastings, as painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, ca. 1767-1768.

At the time of his appointment to the post of Governor-General of India, the position was so new that the mechanisms by which the British would administer the territory were still being developed. Hastings held the title of governor, but rule was effected by a five man council on which he was no more than a member. In fact, the organisational structure was so confused that it "passed the wit of man to say what consitutional position he occupied^[2]."

After an eventful ten-year 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.

He retained his supporters, however, and on 22 August 1806, the Edinburgh East India Club and a number of gentlemen from India gave what was described as "an elegant entertainment" to "Warren Hastings, Esq., late Governor-General of India", who was then on a visit to Edinburgh. One of the 'sentiments' drunk on the occasion was "Prosperity to our settlements in India, and may the virtue and talents which preserved them be ever remembered with gratitude."^[3]

In 1788 he acquired the estate at Daylesford, Gloucestershire, including the site of the medieval seat of the Hastings family. In the following years, he remodelled the mansion to the designs of Samuel Pepys Cockerell, with magnificent classical and Indian decoration, and gardens landscaped by John Davenport. He also rebuilt the Norman church in 1816, where he was buried two years later.

Hastings in the late 18th century, as painted by Lemuel Francis Abbott.

Hastings's administrative ethos and legacy

During the final quarter of the eighteenth century, many of the Company's senior administrators realised that in order to govern Indian society, it was essential that they learn its various religious, social, and legal customs and precedents. The importance of such knowledge to the colonial government was clearly in Hastings's mind when, in 1784, he remarked that:

“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” ^[4]

Under Hastings's term as Governor General, a great deal of administrative precedent was set which profoundly shaped later attitudes towards the government of British India. Hastings had a great respect for the ancient scripture of Hinduism and set the British position on governance as one of looking back to the earliest precedents possible. This allowed Brahmin advisors to mould the law, as no Englishman thoroughly understood Sanskrit until Sir William Jones, and, even then, a literal translation was of little use; it needed to be elucidated by religious commentators who were well-versed in the lore. This approach accentuated the Hindu caste system and, to an extent, the frameworks of other religions, which had, at least in recent centuries, been somewhat more flexibly applied. Thus, British influence on the fluid social structure of India can in large part be characterised as a solidification of the privileges of the Hindu caste system through the influence of the exclusively high-caste scholars by whom the British were advised in the formation of their laws.

In 1781, Hastings founded Madrasa 'Aliya, meaning the higher madrasa, at Calcutta in an attempt to conciliate the goodwill of the Muslim population.^[5] In addition, in 1784 Hastings supported the foundation of the Bengal Asiatic Society (now Asiatic Society of Bengal) by the oriental scholar Sir William Jones, which became a storehouse for information and data pertaining to the subcontinent, and exists in various institutional guises up to the present day.^[6] Hastings' legacy has been somewhat dualistic as an Indian administrator, he undoubtedly was able to institute reforms during the time he spent as governor there that would change the path that India would follow over the next several years. He did, however, retain the strange distinction of being both the “architect of British India and the one ruler of British India to whom the creation of such an entity was anathema^[7]."

Impeachment

On the trial of Warren Hastings

He was impeached for crimes and misdemeanours during his time in India in the House of Commons upon his return to England. At first deemed unlikely to succeed^[8], the prosecution was managed by MPs including Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. When the charges of his indictment were read, the twenty counts were so long that it took Edmund Burke two full days to read them^[9].

The house sat for a total of 148 days over a period of seven years during the investigation^[10]. The investigation was pursued at great cost to Hastings personally, and he complained constantly that the cost of defending himself from the prosecution was bankrupting him. He is rumored to at one time have stated that the punishment given him would have been less extreme had he pleaded guilty.^[11] The House of Lords finally made its decision on April 1795 acquitting him on all charges.^[12]

His simple memorial in Daylesford churchyard

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Warren Hastings

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 Anglo-Indian colonial figures.

Play on Warren Hastings

Warren Hastings ka saand is a docu-drama based on Indian writer Uday Prakash's story by the same name, recreated on stage by the director Arvind Gaur. Warren Hastings ka saand is a socio-economic political satire. The play is a representation of Warren Hastings's interaction with traditional India.

References

1. ^ Sir Alfred Lyall, Warren Hastings (London: Macmillan and Co, 1920) 1
2. ^ The Earl of Birkenhead, Famous Trials of History (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1926) 165
3. ^ Gilbert, W.M., editor, Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh, 1901: 44
4. ^ (Bernard S Cohn "Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India" Oxford University Press 1997
5. ^ Rahman, Fazlur (1982). Islam & Modernity. United States: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 73–74. ISBN 0-226-70284-7. 
6. ^ Keay, John (2000). India: A History. United States: Grove Press Books, distributed by Publishers Group West. pp. 426. ISBN 0-8021-3797-0. 
7. ^ John Keay, The Honourable Company (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991) 394
8. ^ Macaulay, Thomas Babington . "Warren Hastings (1841), an essay by Thomas Babington Macaulay." Columbia University in the City of New York. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/hastings/txt_complete.html#22 (accessed May 20, 2009).
9. ^ The Earl of Birkenhead, Famous Trials of History (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1926) 170
10. ^ Sir Alfred Lyall, Warren Hastings (London: Macmillan and Co, 1920) 218
11. ^ The Earl of Birkenhead, Famous Trials of History (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1926) 173
12. ^ Political Trials in History by Ron Christenson, p178-179, ISBN 0887384064

§ -most famous play in India "the myth of lord warren hastings"

§ -there is also a name of a road in kolkata, after him..

Bibliography

• 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 (1843)
• A new look at Modern Indian History. Grover and Grover.

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Government offices
New creation	Governor-General of India 1773–1785	Succeeded by Sir John Macpherson, acting

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