2
Mankind are neither so good nor so bad as they are generally represented. Human life is a stream formed and impelled by a variety of passions, and its actions seldom flow from single and unmixed sources.1
This quotation comes from the journal of the diplomat George Bogle (1746–81), the first British envoy to Bhutan and Tibet (1774–5), Hastings’s ‘deputy to the Teshu Lama, the sovereign of Bhutan’.2 Even though Bogle’s remarks are directed to the Hindus – his comments follow a description of the Hindu custom of women burning themselves alive on their deceased husband’s funeral pyre – they may well be extended to the existence and actions of the two protagonists of this chapter, Edmund Burke and Warren Hastings. Both characters may, indeed, be recognized as extraordinary examples of deep respect for the Other, acute intelligence, courage and strength. At the same time, however, their lives abound in episodes that raise questions about their personal integrity.
Summarizing the career and works of Burke, a most controversial politician and orator, as well as an eclectic philosopher, is a daunting task. The same is true of Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal and bitter enemy of Burke: describing his adventurous life across Britain and India in a few pages can only result in a partial and rushed portrait of the man. From the nineteenth century onwards, the men’s intertwined lives have been the subject of a large number of studies and monographs, including Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, First Governor-General of Bengal (1841) and P. J. Marshall’s classic The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1965).3 In what follows, I shall concentrate on those details of the two protagonists’ personalities and careers that may help to illuminate the cause célèbre under examination, specifically in light of their knowledge and use of classical culture.
Edmund Burke
On being asked whether Burke had ‘read Cicero much’, the renowned lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–84) replied:
I don’t believe it, Sir. Burke had great knowledge, great fluency of words, and great promptness of ideas, so that he can speak with great illustration on any subject that comes before him. He is neither like Cicero, nor like Demosthenes, nor like any one else, but speaks as well as he can.4
This joke attests to the tendency of Burke’s contemporaries to associate the Anglo-Irish orator with the leading Graeco-Roman rhetoricians. As we saw in the previous chapter, this was a common trend in eighteenth-century Britain, but between Burke and Tully there was ‘a particular affinity’ (to use the words of Paddy Bullard) – a perception that Burke encouraged throughout his career.5 ‘In my long intimacy with Edmund Burke, […]’ – Sir Philip Francis (1740–1818) observed in his Letter Missive to Lord Holland in 1816 – ‘it could not escape me, nor did he wish to conceal it, that Cicero was the model, on which he laboured to form his own character, in eloquence, in policy, in ethics and philosophy’.6 Burke had, indeed, been represented as a latter-day Cicero well before the commencement of the cause célèbre. For example, together with an article on the life and political career of the Irish-born orator, the London Magazine for April 1770 published an elegant engraved portrait of Burke significantly titled ‘the British Cicero’.7 The anonymous print is not a caricature but depicts Burke as an eighteenth-century gentleman brandishing Magna Carta. At his back, behind a curtain, is a statue of Cicero. As the London Magazine reads, the connection between the Roman and Anglo-Irish orator was possibly to be made by virtue of Burke’s ‘uncommon display of oratorical powers’.8
The similarities between the two will be dealt with in more depth in Chapter 4. Suffice it to say here that Burke cites Cicero directly or alludes to him in nearly all his works.9 In this respect, it is worth recalling that the Anglo-Irish orator’s library included such volumes as Ciceronis Opera Philosophica (1642); Ciceronis Epistulae ad Familiares (1657); Ciceronis Opera. Notis Gruteri et Gronovii (1692); Ciceronis Orationes (1770); Cicero de Natura Deorum (1744) and Ciceronis Opera, Notis Variorum et Verburgii (1724).10
The son of a prosperous attorney, Burke was born in Dublin.11 The year of his birth is uncertain, with 1730 seeming more probable than 1729.12 In 1741, he was sent to a Quaker school at Ballitore, which provided him with a thorough academic training. In order to prepare for the law, Burke then returned to Dublin, where he attended Trinity College between 1744 and 1748. While he was a student there, he founded with six friends an ‘Academy of Belles Lettres’, intended to provide autodidactic training in public speaking. The Academy’s main activity, as Lock has highlighted, ‘was the practice of rhetoric. Members made extempore speeches on given subjects, or delivered orations carefully prepared in advance’.13 Sometimes model speeches from ancient rhetoricians would be delivered; at other meetings a subject would be chosen and debated as in the Irish House of Commons nearby.
We have very little evidence of the Greek and Roman rhetoricians studied at Trinity College at the time, but we can conclude with Bullard that ‘Burke’s heart seems always to have been with the Latin authors’.14 Tellingly, around the age of fifty, Burke himself confessed to be ‘one so many years disused to Greek literature’.15 On the other hand, the abundance of Latin quotations interspersed in his writings and speeches leads us to assume that he read Latin texts mostly in the original language. This assumption is corroborated by a confession made to Sir William Jones, the celebrated linguist, orientalist and judge to whom Burke wrote in 1779: ‘I do not know how it has happened, that orators have hitherto fared worse in the hands of the translators, than even the poets; I never could bear to read a translation of Cicero’.16 As Michael J. Franklin has significantly pointed out, the two friends and fellow members of Johnson’s and Reynolds’s Turk’s Head Club, Burke and Jones, were to break their friendship a few years later, owing to ‘their divergent estimates of the career and character of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, whom Jones was to invite to be President of his newly-formed Asiatick and Burke was to impeach’.17
By 1753, Burke had drafted his masterpiece, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Originally published in 1757 – a second revised edition followed in 1759 – this small treatise linking human psychology and aesthetic taste would have an enormous impact and far-reaching effects not only in Britain, but also on the Continent. Notably, Kant regarded Burke as ‘the foremost author’ in ‘the empirical exposition of aesthetic judgments’.18
A few years earlier, in 1750, Burke had arrived in London to study law at Middle Temple. The five years he spent at the London Inns of Court maintaining a pretence of studying were profoundly unhappy, with Burke even suffering a breakdown. However, when he finally entered the Commons, in 1765, he immediately made a name for himself as an outstanding speaker. He owed his talent to an extensive knowledge of political and economic topics, as well as to an uncommon vehemence of speech. It is in a tone of stupefaction that on 25 December 1767 the English-born Charles Lee (1732–82), later a revolutionary army officer in America, wrote to Prince Czartoryski that ‘An Irishman, one Mr. Burke, is sprung up in the House of Commons, who has astonished everybody with the power of his eloquence’.19 As we will see in more detail in Chapter 3, Burke’s speaking enthralled his audiences and produced strong, physical effects upon them. For the moment, it will suffice to note that most of his listeners – both his supporters and enemies – were particularly struck by two qualities: ‘an uncommon extent and depth of knowledge and thought, and a remarkable prodigality of imagination’.20
Burke’s talent for performing highly emotional speeches may also be attributed to his passion for the stage. One biographer of Burke has stressed that, as ‘a regular theatre-goer while a student in Dublin’, Burke continued to attend theatrical performances in England, where he made friends with star actors and actresses of the time, among whom were David Garrick (1717–79) and Sarah Siddons.21 Including a vast repertoire of histrionic gestures, the Anglo-Irish orator’s exaggerated theatricality was repeatedly the object of comments and parody in contemporary newspapers and satirical prints.22 In this respect, Burke’s most celebrated coup de théâtre (made famous by Gillray and other caricaturists) occurred on 28 December 1792: while denouncing France as an infectious state of atheism and revolution, the orator took a dagger from under his coat and threw it to the floor.23
The combination of a dramatic performance with emotional appeals to sensibility and sensational images may be traced in Burke’s parliamentary pronouncements at least ten years before the trial of the Governor-General of Bengal. One may think, for instance, of the ‘Speech on the Use of Indians’, which Burke delivered on 6 February 1778. In 1777, during the early stages of the American War of Independence, Jane McCrea, a young American woman betrothed to an English officer, was scalped by a group of Native American scouts working for the British forces. Soon the episode became ‘a media sensation’ and ‘headline news on both sides of the Atlantic’.24 The details and circumstances of the incident were not entirely clear. Nonetheless, Burke seized on the tragedy and created ‘a sentimental tableau’ out of it.25
Contemporary comments on the ‘Speech on the Use of Indians’ and the speech on the Rangpur atrocities (18 February 1788), one of the most sensational orations pronounced throughout the impeachment of Hastings, reveal a number of significant correspondences and striking continuities between the two orations. As such, it is worth briefly touching on the oratorical strategies that Burke employed in both speeches. In what follows, I will refer in particular to the ‘Speech on the Use of Indians’. A detailed analysis of the Rangpur speech, as well as its reception, will be provided in Chapters 3 and 4.
As early as 1778, the orator seized on spectacularly violent material and dwelled on those disturbing details that would shock the sensibility of the audience. According to the Parliamentary Register, Burke ‘repeated several instances’ of the Native Americans’ cruelty and systematic brutality – their savage culture of warfare far exceeding ‘the ferocity of all barbarians mentioned in history’.26 The account then moved into what Ian Haywood has called ‘the register of hyperbolic realism’:27
their [the Native Americans’] rewards were generally received in human scalps, in human flesh, and the gratifications arising from torturing, mangling, scalping, and sometimes eating their captives in war. He [Burke] then repeated several instances of this diabolical mode of war, scarcely credible, and, if true, improper to be repeated.28
Although the ‘Speech on the Use of Indians’ survives only in drafts and fragments – among other things, the numerous ‘scarcely credible’ examples of the Native Americans’ violence have been lost – the comments we may glean from contemporary sources as well as newspaper reports attest to the Anglo-Irish orator’s ability to ‘paint’ horrid stories ‘in very strong colours’ and to manipulate his auditors’ feelings to the verge of tears.29 The Public Advertiser (7 February 1778), for instance, recorded that Burke spoke with ‘a Pathos which melted the Auditory almost to Tears, and filled them with the utmost Horror’, while in his Last Journals, Horace Walpole (1717–97) lauded Burke’s oration as a ‘chef-d’oeuvre’.30 Similarly, the Rangpur speech agitated the whole assembly and some ladies even fainted.
Some indications of the horror generated in 1778 by Burke’s ‘pathetic eloquence’ – as the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (9 February 1778) described it – can be derived from the orator’s draft notes for the speech. Much of interest, in this sense, is ‘the horrid story of Miss Mac Ray, murdered by the savages on the day of her marriage’:31
that hair dressed for other purposes that morning torn from her head to decorate the infernal habitation of cruelty and barbarism and there left a naked and [foul scale] her body a mangled ghastly spectacle of blood and horrour [sic], crying through an [sic] hundred mouths to that whose image was defaced for Vengeance.32
Arguably, the emotional power of this cameo resonates in Burke’s famous account of the French mob escorting the royal family from Versailles on 6 October 1789: ‘It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages, entering into Onondaga, after some of their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps.’33 But, before finding an echo in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the gothic description of Jane McCrea’s mutilated corpse anticipates the gory images conjured up by the Anglo-Irish orator in his Rangpur narrative. In particular, McCrea’s undressed and violated body (as Burke chooses to suggest here, though there was no evidence that the young woman had been raped), together with the allusion to her ‘infernal’ murderers, are evocative of the sexually abused Indian women and their torturers in the account of the Rangpur atrocities. As we will see in more detail in Chapter 4, Burke described Indian virgins and wives as ‘cruelly violated’ by ‘infernal villains’ and ‘fiends’, their bodies being ‘naked and exposed to the public view’.34
After the ‘Speech on the Use of Indians’ some contemporaries, such as the diplomat James Harris (1746–1820), dismissed the Anglo-Irish orator’s emotional performances as ‘mock tragedy, more plausible at Drury Lane’.35 Also, the newspapers criticized Burke’s use of dramatic and quasi-theatrical narratives. The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (9 February 1778), for example, suggested that ‘The facts alledged as proofs of the untameable and ungovernable rage of the Indians, were […] by much exaggerated’ and ‘owed a great deal of their horror to the fancy of the orator’. Similarly, the Public Advertiser (7 February 1778) reported that: ‘his [Burke’s] Stile [sic] [was] in general pathetic, eloquent, and sublime: But his Colourings we hope, for the Honour of Human Nature, were too high […]. That Crimes were committed by some of the Indians was granted; but that they were of so deep a Dye as they were represented was flatly denied’.
Apparently, Burke intended to publish his Indian speech along with his two great American speeches, known as the ‘Speech on American Taxation’ (19 April 1774) and the ‘Speech on Conciliation with America’ (22 March 1775), but what would have been, as Paul Langford has put it, ‘an astonishing triptych of American orations’ remains incomplete.36 Even so, the speech on taxation probably contributed to his election on 2 November 1774 as MP for Bristol, the empire’s second city. On the occasion of new elections in 1780, however, the orator was compelled to withdraw and was deprived of his seat. Burke’s failure is hardly surprising, considering that during the six years of his mandate he visited Bristol only twice (once in 1775 and once in 1776) and supported such causes as the commercial concessions to Ireland, the promotion of the Catholic Church in Scotland and the abolitionist movement. It goes without saying that Burke’s endorsement of the latter was not well received in one of Britain’s great slaving ports.
In the next two decades, the Irish-born orator maintained an impassioned engagement with imperial politics in India. Even though Burke travelled little and, according to Carl B. Cone, ‘never further than Paris’,37 he took great pains to collect information about the geography, history, religions and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. A large number of volumes listed in the catalogue of the orator’s library, among which Koran, Translated by Sale (1734), Dow’s History of Hindostan (1768), History of Bombay (1781), Rennell’s Bengal Atlas (1781), and Crawfurd’s Sketches of the Hindoos (1792), bear witness to his close and detailed study of India.38 One of the foremost scholars of the Hastings impeachment has, indeed, stressed that ‘Burke’s study of India was probably more intensive and more prolonged than any study of a non-European people undertaken by any of his great contemporaries, Voltaire and Diderot included’.39
Owing to an exuberant personality, Burke often proved dogmatic and impervious to criticism. He seems always to have pursued what he believed were the interests of the Company’s Indian subjects, in accordance with morality.40 It has often been remarked that Burke’s approach to the problem of reconciling moral law and particular traditions is akin to Cicero’s, with Frederick G. Whelan arguing, for example, that both men sought to justify the institutions of their own country ‘as embodying justice and other values of natural law, and thus as satisfactorily realizing the proper ends of social life’.41 Peter J. Stanlis has also contended that the Anglo-Irish orator borrowed largely from Cicero ‘one of the most important ideas derived from the Natural Law – that the state is an indirect emanation of God’s power and goodness and rests on divine law’.42
Burke’s conception of a transcendent origin of power is encapsulated in his ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’ (16 February 1788). While demolishing any claims to arbitrary power, Burke enunciated his belief in a universal law (‘We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law […] by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe’) and eloquently appealed to the divine origin of the ‘great gift of Government, the greatest, the best that was ever given by God to mankind’.43 This part of the speech contains some of the most fundamental elements in Burke’s political and moral thought, particularly his ‘total rejection of any kind of moral relativism’.44 For the Anglo-Irish philosopher it was not conceivable that there could exist one law for Europe and another for India, all men being bound by a universal ‘code of morality, resting on the will of God’.45
As P. J. Marshall has highlighted in his Introduction to the sixth volume of the Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, any educated eighteenth-century gentleman would have recognized that the arguments used by Burke to prove that Indians were subject to the same ‘laws of morality’ as the British, were ‘of great antiquity’.46 Indeed, they were the arguments employed by Cicero also in his arraignment of Verres. Burke’s renowned accusation of ‘geographical morality’, for example, may have been inspired by a passage in Cicero’s Verrines.47 The section where the Anglo-Irish orator contends that ‘the laws of morality are the same every where, and […] there is no action which would pass for an action of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and of oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over’48 tellingly echoes Cicero’s trenchant question to Verres ‘Or is one thing fair in Rome and another in Sicily?’ (Verr. II.1.118: an aliud Romae aequum est, aliud in Sicilia?).49
Burke’s interest in India began many years before the commencement of the trial of Hastings and lasted until his death. From 1781 to 1783, the orator served on a Select Committee on Bengal, for which he drafted eleven reports on the activities of the East India Company. The reports later underpinned many of the twenty-two ‘Articles of Charge of High Crimes and Misdemeanors’ against Hastings that Burke presented between 4 April and 5 May 1786 before the House of Commons. It has been observed that Burke’s work for the Committee ‘left its mark on his thinking on Indian questions’: as a matter of fact, ‘insistence that Indian institutions should be preserved from alien impositions’ was to become a constant presence in practically all of Burke’s speeches and writings about India.50
Before describing in more detail the circumstances that led Burke to prosecute the ills of imperial rule in the person of Hastings, we should set India aside for a moment and turn our attention towards France, as the impeachment of the Governor-General of Bengal is inextricably intertwined with the outbreak of the French Revolution. The sensational events that followed the taking of the Bastille in the summer of 1789 were, in fact, to have an enormous repercussion on Burke’s life as well as on his political career and alliances. In this respect, although Burke continued to speak in Parliament until the conclusion of the trial against Hastings, the Reflections on the Revolution in France, which he passionately set out to write in 1790, ‘is very much a valediction to his career as an orator’.51
Ever since the news of the taking of the Bastille had reached England, many observers – among whom Fox, Sheridan and most of the Whigs – supported the French Revolution and applauded it as the dawn of liberty. Conversely, insisting on the Revolution’s destructive nature, Burke responded furiously to the events in France and fiercely opposed any attempt to imitate them in the British Isles. In vivid and memorable language, Burke condemned the Revolution as ‘a progress through Chaos and darkness’,52 the work of ‘Atheistick [sic] Banditti’ and ‘systematick [sic] regicides’.53 These stigmatizing expressions were charged with highly evocative power in the English collective imagination: not only were they reminiscent of literary texts dealing with transgression, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost (‘Chaos and darkness’) or eighteenth-century Gothic novels (bandits populated Gothic landscapes as suggestive figures of threats), but they also alluded to bloody historical events, particularly the execution of Charles I (1600–49). It was at this point – first, with the publication of the Reflections (1 November 1790) and then, officially and acrimoniously, with Burke’s reply to Fox at the end of the parliamentary session of 11 May 1791 – that Burke decided to separate from the latter and from his former friends in the Whig party. Eloquently, a footnote in the Parliamentary History’s report for 11 May reads: ‘Thus ended the friendship which had lasted for more than the fourth part of a century’.54
F. P. Lock has acutely noted that the Reflections ‘has proved the most enduring book on the Revolution […] and one that remains contested and contentious’.55 As a matter of fact, the text made an immediate impact and triggered an endless ideological debate that was to transform Burke’s reputation not only among his contemporaries but also for posterity. The treatise immediately received extensive coverage in the press, with Burke and the Reflections being parodied in popular caricatures.56 The controversy surrounding the text and its author was further inflamed by the appearance of at least six hundred pamphlets – very few of which were written in Burke’s defence. Four weeks after the publication of the first British edition, the Reflections appeared in French. The translator and friend of Burke’s, Pierre-Gaëton Dupont (c. 1759–1817), wrote enthusiastically to the orator that, in two days, the text had sold 2,500 copies.57
Meanwhile, the trial went on and necessitated a minimum of collaboration between Burke and his old Whig friends. After the storming of the Bastille, however, the outcome of the prosecution of Hastings ceased to interest most of the latter. Indeed, even before the first year of the impeachment was out, the Duchess of Devonshire noted in her diary that ‘Sheridan, who is heartily tired of [the] Hastings trial, and fearful of Burke’s impetuosity says that he wishes Hastings would run away, and Burke after him’ (20 November 1788).58 In spite of Burke’s tenacity and dedication to the cause to the end, on 23 April 1795 the Governor-General of Bengal was acquitted on all charges, after the trial had dragged on for eight years and 180 changes to the peerage had taken place.59
Who was, then, the first Governor-General of Bengal? And how was his political and, particularly, cultural administration of India informed by classical models? In order to attempt to answer these questions, it is important to illuminate Hastings’s early life and education first.
Warren Hastings
The image of Hastings that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted at some point between 1766 and 1768 encapsulates many aspects of the sitter’s personality. The portrait shows a young, refined man with an ivory complexion. Even though he is not looking at the viewer, but instead glances to the left, his upright pose and slightly parted arms infuse a sense of composed self-confidence. Hastings’s figure and sophisticated clothing stand out against a purple-red heavy curtain of brocade and a refined armchair of the same colour.
Thanks to the high quality of Reynolds’s representation, it is also possible to make out the fabric of Hastings’s expensive garments: he is wearing black velvet breeches; a silk-wool-blend dark blue coat with gold-thread buttons and buttonholes, velvet collar and frills, and an unusually long, floral waistcoat.60 The latter, a shakula, is an Indian version of a British waistcoat made of a delicate muslin fabric. Hermione De Almeida and George H. Gilpin have stressed that ‘Hastings’ adoption of this waistcoat as the defining feature of his clothing is a mark of his ease in India and his fascination with its culture because he wears a shakula not only in this London portrait by Reynolds but in a 1784 portrait done in Calcutta by Arthur William Devis’.61 As was the case with many British expatriates, Hastings enjoyed combining traditional British clothing with garments of native manufacture. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for example, has a pair of crocheted short gloves in fine wool and some knitted woollen hose that he brought back from India. As we shall explore in greater detail below, in his political practice and administration of justice, Hastings constantly showed a tendency to combine British and Indian elements and traditions.
Two years before sitting for Reynolds, Hastings had returned to England after fifteen years’ residence in India. Born in Oxfordshire to a clergyman of the Church of England, he found himself virtually an orphan in early infancy: his mother died soon after he was born and, within nine months of his birth, his father abandoned him, remarried and moved to Barbados, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Warren was first entrusted to his grandfather and then to an uncle, Howard Hastings, who provided him with what was probably the best education then available. In 1743 Warren was enrolled in Westminster School in London, where he was named a King’s Scholar and Captain of the School.
While he showed a great promise as a schoolboy, in 1749, on his uncle’s death, Hastings found himself cut off from formal education. As P. J. Marshall has suggested, ‘his time at Westminster seems, however, to have been a good preparation. It left him with […] a facility to learn languages, with a cultivated taste for literature, and above all with a quick, inquiring intelligence that absorbed new knowledge very readily’ – all aptitudes and skills that, later in life, would kindle his interest in Indian culture and civilization.62 Following the mode of the period, Hastings also relished classical studies and never lost the habit of versifying in Latin or, more frequently, in English, imitating Latin metres.63 Hastings’s early attraction to literature and his persistence in writing verse may indicate a passion that, later in his life, was to take him towards the classical languages of India.
Having to fend for himself, Hastings was granted a junior appointment as a writer in the East India Company and in January 1750, at the age of seventeen, he left for Bengal. When he arrived at Calcutta in September, the city was already a large commercial emporium, whence merchant ships loaded mostly with cotton cloth and silk sailed for London. For the early part of his career in India, Hastings worked in the East India Company’s commercial business. But after 1756 the role of the Company, as well as that of its servants, underwent a series of radical changes. Between the 1750s and 1760s the Company became involved in hostilities in south India with the French and subjugated the vacillating regime of the Bengal nawabs. A conventional breakpoint, in this sense, was the battle of Plassey (1757): in an expedition under Robert Clive (1725–74) in which Hastings himself participated as a volunteer, the British deposed the nawab of Calcutta and installed a new ruler. In theory, the new nawab was independent; in practice, Clive secured from him a grant of new territories and their tax revenues, so much so that the Company’s servants – including Hastings – were drawn more and more into Indian politics. From 1761 to 1764 Hastings succeeded to the Company’s council, the body that managed its affairs in Bengal. Owing to bitter disputes within the council, however, his career was interrupted, and in January 1765 he returned to Britain.
Even though he had failed to make his fortune, Hastings lived in some luxury in England: he rented different homes in London, purchased several paintings and even a carriage, which he had ornamented with his coat of arms. It was in this period that he commissioned the striking portrait described above. It has been calculated that this picture must have cost him an enormous sum of money, Reynolds having been appointed in 1768 – the year of the completion of Hastings’s portrait – first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Jeremy Bernstein has, indeed, remarked that ‘Reynolds charged twenty guineas for a head, fifty for a half length, and over a hundred pounds for a full length. The Hastings painting is somewhere between a half and a full’.64 Throughout his life, Hastings showed a tendency to spend more than he possessed. As a result of his profusion and extravagance, he squandered most of the £220,000 which he had amassed during the period of his governorship, even before settling in England for good in 1785.65
During the four years of his permanent residence in Britain, Hastings tried to spread his interest in Indian civilization at home. Hence his Proposal for Establishing a Professorship of the Persian Language in the University of Oxford (1767), which he discussed with, among others, Samuel Johnson, the well-known man of letters and Royal Academy’s Professor of Ancient Literature. It was through the latter that Hastings also became familiar with the foremost linguist at Oxford at the time, William Jones. Even though the project of establishing a chair in Persian was approved both by Johnson and the Chancellor of the University, it did not receive enough encouragement to succeed. A dedicated believer in learning Asian languages as a means of building bridges between England and India, some thirty years later Hastings vigorously argued for the introduction of Persian and Arabic in the curriculum at the College of Fort William, the institution founded in 1800 at Calcutta with the aim of providing instruction in the languages of India to the officials of the East India Company.66 Hastings himself was a skilled linguist and had a good knowledge of Persian and Urdu. In a 1784 sketch for a painting by Johan Zoffany (1733–1810), for example, he is portrayed in the act of speaking to a Mughal prince without an interpreter.67 During his early years in India, Hastings also became acquainted with the circle of the East India Company army officer and philanthropist, Claude Martin (1735–1800), ‘whose collections of Indian watercolors and Persian and Sankrit documents’ – Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin note – ‘became a valuable archive for the study of Indian culture during his governorship’.68
Hastings’s early attraction to Indian languages, laws, religions and institutions is also clearly visible in the Reynolds portrait: if we pay particular heed to the papers lying under Hastings’s right hand, we notice some documents and a seal in Persian script. Possessing a monogram in one of the Oriental languages was, at the time, quite fashionable. Yet, in Hastings’s case, the presence of an exotic alphabet does not simply represent a transient attempt to follow a contemporary fashion, but rather the reflex of a profound interest, as well as a political philosophy that accompanied him throughout his life.
An ambitious man short of money, Hastings sought to go back to India with an important post. Therefore, on 26 March 1769 he sailed for Madras and then returned to Calcutta, where in 1772 he was appointed Governor of Bengal. One of the most important and urgent reforms that he believed was necessary was the revision of the local judicial system. Although the latter was placed under British supervision, Hastings was vigorously opposed to the introduction and imposition of British law.69 As Marshall observes, Hastings considered that ‘it was neither practical nor desirable to tamper with traditional Hindu or Muslim law, which were “consonant to the ideas, manners and inclinations of the people for whose use it is intended” ’.70 In addition to the practical aspect of his conviction – namely, ensuring the stability of the acquisition in Bengal by securing the affection of the natives – Hastings’s judicial reform also adumbrated a ‘classical’ approach towards Indian languages, manners and institutions, which is worth noting here.
The idea of ruling the conquered by means of their own traditions bears a striking similarity to the toleration and forbearance adopted by the Romans towards their provinces. According to Keith Feiling, for example, one may recognize ‘a Roman theme’ in Hastings’s attempt ‘To conciliate, to elevate “the British name”, by fair and magnanimous dealing’.71 In his preface to the Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), a translation of the Persian text of the pandits’ code, the orientalist Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–1830) pointed out that the Romans ‘not only allowed to their foreign subjects the free exercise of their own religion, and the administration of their own civil jurisdiction, but sometimes by a Policy still more flattering, even naturalized such Parts of the Mythology of the conquered, as were in any respect compatible with their own System’.72 As time went on, parallels between Britain’s empire and that of Rome were to be drawn more persistently. For example, Sir William Jones wished that Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805), Governor-General of India from 1786 to 1793, would become the ‘Justinian of India’. In Jones’s view, in fact, the British government should give to the natives ‘security for the due administration of justice among them, similar to that which Justinian gave to his Greek and Roman subjects’.73 Parallels between the Graeco-Roman heritage and India were not to stop there.
Many colonial European writers compared contemporary Indians to ancient Greeks and Romans. Particularly significant here is a letter penned by Jones on 23 August 1787. Addressed to the second Earl of Spencer (Jones’s former pupil Viscount Althorp), the epistle pointed to resemblances between Brahmans and ‘the priests of Jupiter’:
To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo; suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other Europeans had ever heard of. Such am I in this country; substituting Sanscrit for Greek, the Brahmans, for the priests of Jupiter, and Valmic, Vyasa, Calidasa, for Homer, Plato, Pindar.74
Although in this ‘little Anglo-Indo-Hellenic fantasy’ the Greece to which Jones likens India is a place ‘not yet modern (the old gods were still worshipped) but also no longer classical (it has been conquered by post-classical invaders)’, references to classical Greek literature and religion figure prominently.75
To promote a ‘conciliation’ between the British and Indian cultures, the Governor-General encouraged and patronized Oriental learning to such an extent that, as has been stressed, a history of Oriental studies would be ‘incomplete without a mention of Hastings’.76 Among his many acts of patronage, the Governor founded the Calcutta madraseh, or college, and promoted the study of Hinduism. He attracted and surrounded himself with young men of extraordinary ability, among whom the aforementioned Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), who produced in 1785 the first scholarly translation into any European language of the Bhagavad Gītā (a small part of the epic poem Mahabharata) – ‘a performance of great originality; of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction, almost unequalled’, as Hastings himself described it.77
Wilkins’s translation and the many others that started to appear in the 1780s, following the establishment in 1784 of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta, drew further attention to Sanskrit and its relationship with Greek and Latin. Of particular importance, in this respect, is Jones’s emphasis on the common origin of what came to be known as the family of Indo-European languages.78 One of the implications of Jones’s claim was that the study of Sanskrit would help learners to understand European classical languages better.79 In this sense, as Phiroze Vasunia reminds us, from an early date, Orientalists linked Sanskrit to Latin and Greek. The ‘European “discovery” of Sanskrit’ was, in fact, ‘the discovery of its similarity to Latin and Greek’.80
As a consequence of the good reputation that Hastings had gained since his appointment as Governor of Bengal, in 1773 he was given the title of Governor-General. His undisputed power, however, came to an end or, at least, was drastically diminished in the next year. Following the East India Regulating Act – an act aimed at reducing the power of the Company’s Indian administration – the British Government decreed that authority in Bengal was to be split up between the Governor-General and a Supreme Council of five. Apart from Hastings, the Council was composed of another Company servant, Richard Barwell (1741–1804), and three others all new to India, General Clavering (1722–77), Colonel Monson (1730–76) and a very ambitious clerk, Philip Francis. The effectiveness of the Supreme Council was immediately undermined by the virulent quarrels that broke out among its members, as the three newcomers were unremittingly hostile to the Governor-General’s policies. Not only did they accuse Hastings and the majority of his fellow servants of personal corruption, but they also demanded an investigation into the causes behind the war against the Rohillas, a group of mercenary soldiers of Afghan origin who had settled in northern India.
Twelve years later, this conflict would be singled out by Burke as the first article of charge against Hastings to be discussed in front of the House of Commons.81 Presenting the Rohilla war anew, on the occasion of a major speech on 1 June 1786, Burke included a reference to classical Rome. In his evocation of ‘the noble character of an accuser in Rome’, as well as the contrast that he delineated between the ‘facility of coming at a Roman Governor with high crimes and misdemeanors, and the extreme difficulty of making out any accusation with effect against a British Governor’, we may easily trace the germ of what would become a constant point of reference for Burke throughout the eight years of the trial, namely the arraignment of Verres by Cicero.82
As a result of the multiple accusations piled up against the Governor-General of Bengal, the British government tried to dismiss him in 1776, but the Company did not consent to this. Suddenly and unexpectedly the situation changed in favour of Hastings, for two of his opponents – Monson and Clavering – died in 1776 and 1777 respectively. Conversely, Francis’s opposition to Hastings dragged on for three more years and was terminated in a pistol duel on 17 August 1780. Francis was slightly wounded and that same year, in December, he left India.83 After this, he worked relentlessly to discredit Hastings and was in regular contact with Burke. In 1785, Hastings finally resigned and on 7 February he returned to Britain. The previous year his wife had been forced by illness to leave India – a separation that he found hard to bear. Most importantly, he was convinced that he had little to hope for from the new government directed by William Pitt the Younger.
In the meantime, with the help of Francis, Burke drew up an indictment in the form of twenty-two ‘Articles of Charge of Crimes and Misdemeanors’, which he presented to the Commons between April and May 1786. A string of charges – six out of twenty-two – was accepted as ‘Articles of Impeachment’, and against all expectations Hastings was tried before the House of Lords. Nine months later, on 13 February 1788, the trial began. How and to what extent Burke and his fellow managers successfully employed classical rhetorical techniques to transform – at least, during the first months of the prosecution – what may have been a tedious legal action into a public spectacle attended by the most fashionable members of the British and foreign elite, will be the subject of the next chapter.