Lord William Bentinck

Lord William Bentinck (born September 14, 1774, Bulstrode, Buckinghamshire, England—died June 17, 1839, Paris, France) British governor-general of Bengal (1828–33) and of India (1833–35). An aristocrat who sympathized with many of the liberal ideas of his day, he made important administrative reforms in Indian government and society. He reformed the finances, opened up judicial posts to Indians, and suppressed such practices as suttee, or widow burning, and thuggee, or ritual murder by robber gangs. The innovations effected in his years of office were milestones in creating a much more interventionist style of government than preceding ones, a style that involved the westernization of Indian society and culture.

Early career

The second son of the 3rd duke of Portland, Bentinck at age 17 received a commission as ensign in the Coldstream Guards, and by 1794 he had become a lieutenant colonel. Born to wealth and rank, he was a promising, if not outstanding, young officer. Nevertheless, his appointment as governor of Madras (now Chennai) in 1803, at the early age of 29, caused surprise.

Although he performed his duties satisfactorily enough, his administration was clouded by his disagreements with his council and was abruptly terminated by the mutiny at Vellore. An unwise order by the commander in chief of the Madras army had forbidden the native troops to wear their traditional beards and turbans; Bentinck, even more unwisely, would not allow the order to be rescinded. The consequence was a serious mutiny in July 1806, accompanied by attacks on officers and British troops. The outbreak was suppressed with heavy loss of life, and the ill-considered order was finally withdrawn. Bentinck was held responsible and was recalled from his post in 1807. Believing he had been treated unjustly, he pressed for the next 20 years for a chance to vindicate his name by service in India.

Tour in Sicily

With the Napoleonic Wars ongoing, he was next assigned to Spain, where he commanded a brigade at Corunna, after which he was appointed commander of the British troops in Sicily. Italy was then in the hands of Napoleon, but in Sicily the Bourbon monarchs of Naples still reigned under the protection of the British fleet. Bentinck’s orders were to raise a Sicilian army of 10,000 men to supplement his 5,000 British soldiers and land on the east coast of Spain with his combined forces to assist in the campaign against Napoleon. Had Bentinck been no more than a soldier, his course would have been clear. But he was a man of imagination, a Whig (a liberal) by family tradition, and a radical in the eyes of his contemporaries. Therefore, besides merely raising a Sicilian army, he engineered the deposition of the Bourbon king—in favour of the heir apparent—as well as the adoption of a liberal Sicilian constitution with a legislative body modeled on the British Parliament. Further, he planned to invade Italy and rally the people not only to expel Napoleon but to set up a constitutional monarchy. The British government would never have supported such a plan; in fact, it intended eventually to restore Austrian rule in Italy. The Italian landing did not take place at that time, however, and Bentinck delayed his landing in Spain beyond the date when he was most needed. When he finally did land in Italy, at Genoa in 1814, his liberal proclamations again embarrassed his government, and he was recalled to England in 1815. On his return he was elected to the House of Commons.

Governor-general of India

He refused reappointment to the governorship of Madras in 1819, waiting to attain his real ambition—the appointment as governor-general of Bengal, which came in 1827. Bentinck’s immediate instructions were to rescue India from its financial difficulties; at this time the government in India operated on an annual deficit of about £1.5 million. Bentinck soon succeeded in turning the deficit into a surplus of about the same amount. The result of his efforts was the renewal of the East India Company’s government by the Charter Act of 1833, whereby Bentinck became the first governor-general of India. He next turned to personnel reforms, which included making more administrative and judicial positions available to Indians and improving the salaries and status of Indian judges. Bentinck also made English, instead of Persian, the language of the higher courts and of higher education and arranged for financial aid to colleges, which were to be adapted to the Western models.

Bentinck showed great courage and humanity by his decision to abolish suttee (sati), the Hindu custom of burning widows alive with the corpses of their husbands. Previous governors-general had shrunk from prohibiting the custom as an interference in religion and one particularly likely to upset the Indian army, but Bentinck cut through these hesitations without facing much open opposition. He was also responsible for the measures taken to suppress the murder of unwanted children, human sacrifice, and the thags—bands of robbers, bound together by oaths and ritual, who murdered unsuspecting travelers in the name of the goddess Kālī. Flogging in the Indian army was also abolished, long before it ended in the British army.

Legacy

Bentinck left India in March 1835 and returned to England, where he refused a peerage and was again elected to the House of Commons. He died in Paris in 1839. It has been argued that the reforms he initiated and those that followed in the next 20 years—which accelerated the westernization of India—were partly responsible for the Indian army’s Mutiny of 1857. Bentinck was not an original thinker; his philosophical masters were the utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; his practical instructor, especially in the field of education, was the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, among others. He borrowed useful elements from the creed of his liberal Whig ancestors and of Bentham and combined them in policies that were sensible, practical, and humanitarian. Toward the end of his career, he had lost the impetuosity that had characterized his earlier years in Sicily and the tactlessness that had appeared when he first held office in Madras. Though certainly not the most brilliant of the governors-general, in solid achievements and in utilizing the resources available to him, he ranks among the most successful.