The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck Governor-General of India 1828-1835 (Set of 2 Volumes, An Old and Rare Book)

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Good biographies of the great British governors-general of India, particularly those of the nineteenth century, are few and far between, and the most surprising neglect of all is that of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck's rule in India between 1828 and 1835.

There is no doubt about the importance of his period of rule, for it was in Bentinck's day that the British seriously began to get to grips with the questions whether and how far they should attempt by means of deliberate policy to change traditional India; and his own contributions in trying to define the right direction and lines of social and economic policy and to improve race relations were positive, distinctive, and formative. Bentinck has a special place in the history of race relations. Unfortunately, his just and humane attitudes towards Indians and their potential role in the new India did not gain general acceptance among British ruling groups either in India or Britain. Had they done so there can be little doubt that the Indo-British empire would have been more beneficent than it was and its contribution to the well-being of mankind even greater.

No doubt the complexity and massive scale of documentation which is to be found in the archives on British India have done something to daunt would-be biographers, and the prevailing anti-imperialist mood of the last thirty years has been far from encouraging, but the British governors- general belong as much to the history of South Asia as to that of Britain, and the time will come again when in terms of their human importance such studies will be called for, and as much by the east as by the west.

This published selection of correspondence from the Bentinck archive is therefore offered not only as important in its own right but also in the hope that it will encourage others to write about his governor-generalship preferably in the context of his varied career as a whole.

The papers of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, from which this selection is drawn, form part of the Portland Collection deposited by the Duke of Portland with the University of Nottingham in 1949. The Lord William Bentinck papers, which constitute about one-third of the whole Portland Collection, have been sorted and admirably listed by the Department of Manuscripts there, and are organised in seven sections chronologically covering the main phases of Bentinck's life and career: (a) Pre-Madras to 1803, (b) Madras 1803-7, (c) Pre-Sicily 1807-11, (d) Sicily 1811-14, (e) Pre-Bengal 1814-27, (f) Bengal 1827-35, (g) Post-Bengal 1835-9.

Bentinck's career-problems of interpretation Although generally regarded as one of the outstanding governors- general of British India, and although his family papers and official correspondence have long been available for study, no substantial treatment of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck's rule in India has been published. The subject itself, moreover, is not without attractive features both as they relate to his personal reputation and the generally accepted judgments about him, and also to his important role in history; for it was his lot as governor-general not, like his predecessors, to make war, but in peace to face squarely the question of how far and when the British should embark on a deliberate policy of modernizing and westernizing Indian society. By his day the British political conquest of India was virtually complete, India was at peace, and to Bentinck thus fell the task of defining the new responsibilities and the new lines of policy.

His reputation, especially in Bengal, where his memory is still kept green, is that of a great governor-general, an original thinker and far- sighted social reformer, and a considerable man of affairs with solid contributions as a ruler to his credit. This, too, is the view expressed in general histories of India by modern British historians, for example, by H. H. Dodwell writing in 1934, and by Thompson and Garratt in the same year, and more recently by Dr. Spear. Modern writing by Indian historians, too, has taken much the same line. On the other hand, a detailed research study by Dr. John Rosselli of a relatively short period of Bentinck's career between 1811 and 1814, when he was commander-in- chief in the Mediterranean and virtual governor of Sicily, has presented a very different picture of a politically rash, often short-sighted ruler, sometimes impractical, and apparently possessing few of the qualities for which elsewhere he has generally been so highly praised.