Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T22:13:29.609Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Utilitarianism of Dalhousie and the Material Improvement of India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Suresh Chandra Ghosh
Suresh Chandra Ghosh
Affiliation:
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his final minute in March 1856, just on the eve of his departure from India, Lord Dalhousie, while reviewing the last eight years of his administration, describes the railways, electric telegraph and uniform postage which he introduced into India as the ‘three great engines of social improvement’. Posterity certainly knows how correct Dalhousie's description was, but under this prophetic utterance of Dalhousie flows a subtle current of philosophy which few scholars working on the Dalhousie era have been able to detect and interpret. That philosophy was the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and his faithful and able lieutenant, James Mill. In his History of British India, which Mill undertook before 1808 and published in London in 1817, Mill had questioned the values of Indian society and suggested its reform on Benthamite principles. The key to progress in India, Mill also pointed out, lay in the introduction of Western science and knowledge. It is surprising that Daihousie, though a staunch Tory, subscribed to this view of Bentham and Mill about India and as a result ‘the natural alliance of the Scientific Benthamite administrator and the authoritative Tory gentlemen’ which ‘was never fully achieved in England’ was ‘achieved only in India’.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , February 1978 , pp. 97 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

The research on which this paper is based was undertaken at Edinburgh where the author was a Fellow of the University of Edinburgh during the academic years of 1968–70. An earlier version of this paper was read and commented upon by Mr J. B. Harrison of S.O.A.S., University of London, and a later version by Professor Tapas Majumdar of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi-57. I am grateful to all of them. The responsibility for any errors or views expressed in it is, however, solely mine.

1 A reappraisal of Dalhousie's administration in India is long overdue. In the absence of it, Arnold's, E.The Marquis of Dalhousie's Administration of British India, 2 vols (London, 1862–1865),Google Scholar and SirLee-Warner's, W.The Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie, 2 vols (London, 1904), still hold the field.Google ScholarDas's, M. N.Studies in the Economic and Social Development of Modern India (Calcutta, 1959) is informative but not illuminative.Google Scholar

2 Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons), 1856, Vol. 45, 245, p. 161, para 24.Google Scholar

3 The finest tribute has been paid by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of Independent India, in his Preface to Shridharani, L. K., Story of the Indian Telegraphs (New Delhi, 1953): ‘A person living two thousand years ago would have recognized the main features of human existence [in India] right up to the middle almost of the 19th Century…Then came the great change heralded by the railway and the telegraph which has progressively altered the very texture of human life.’Google Scholar

4 See Halévy, Elie, La Formation du Radicalisme Philosophique, 3 vols (Paris, 1901–1904), Vol. 2, p. 286.Google Scholar

5 The British Museum possesses a copy of this publication of 1817.Google Scholar Professor Eric Stokes incorrectly states in his preface to The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959) that Mill undertook this work in 1808 and finished it in 1819.Google Scholar

6 See Books II and III in Mill, James, History of British India, 3 vols (London, 1817) Vol. I, pp. 91–648.Google Scholar Also Halévy, , Radicalisme Philosophique, p. 286. Halévy regards Mill's History of British India as ‘un instrument de propagande benthémique’.Google Scholar

7 Young, G. M., Victorian England (London, 1936), p. 54.Google Scholar

8 Stokes, , The English Utilitarians and India, pp. 248–51.Google Scholar

9 Kaye, J. W. and Malleson, G. B., History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–1858, 6 vols (London, 1888–1889), vol. I, pp. 259–60.Google Scholar

10 Young, , Victorian England, p. 8.Google Scholar

11 Trotter, L. J., Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie (London, 1889), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

12 A study of Dalhousie's Papers as President of the Board of Trade in England provides a background understanding to Dalhousie's governor-generalship of India, 1848–1856. The total number of those papers which have been scientifically processed by the archival staff at the Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, is 76.Google Scholar

13 Bain, A., James Mill (London, 1882), p. 370.Google Scholar

14 Stokes, , The English Utilitarians and India, p. xiv.Google Scholar

15 Macaulay's speech has been quoted in Young, Victorian England, p. 53.Google Scholar

16 Trotter, , Life of Dalhousie, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

17 Bentham to Malcolm, 2 June 1824, Portfolio No. 10, Folder No. 22, p. 158 in Bentham Papers. In the Collection of Bentham Papers at the University College Library, London, Boxes X and CLXIX show Bentham's great interest in Indian affairs.Google Scholar

18 Halévy, , Radicalisme Philosophique, Vol. 3, pp. 379–80.Google Scholar

19 SirBowring, John (ed.), Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols (Edinburgh, 1843), Vol. IV, p. 418.Google Scholar

20 As yet there has not been any comprehensive account of Bentinck's governor generalship of India, but, for his life, see Boulger, D., Lord William Bentinck (Oxford, 1892),Google Scholar and Rosselli, John, Lord William Bentinck (Delhi, 1974).Google Scholar

21 Bain, , James Mill, p. 369.Google Scholar

22 Dalhousie to Colvin, 20 December 1855. Dalhousie Papers 117, Letter No. 151.Google Scholar

23 Lee-Warner, , Life of Dalhousie, Vol. 2, p. 227.Google Scholar

24 Halévy, Elie, Histoire du peuple Anglais au XIXe Siècle, 5 vols (Paris, 1912–1932), Vol. I, p. 551.Google Scholar

25 Dalhousie's Diary, Part I, 1848, quoted in Das, M. N., Economic and Social Development of Modern India, p. 45.Google Scholar

26 Dalhousie Papers 31/111.Google Scholar

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Dalhousie Papers 22/116.Google Scholar

30 Lt-Col. Cotton, A., Public Works in India (London, 1859), p. 81.Google Scholar

31 Court to Dalhousie, 26 September 1855. Railway Despatches to Bengal and India, Vol. 2, pp. 183–5.Google Scholar

32 Ibid.

33 Friend of India, Serampore, 17 05 1855.Google Scholar

34 Stuart Mill, John, ‘Bentham’ in Dissertations and Discussions, 2 vols (London, 1859), Vol. I, p. 337.Google Scholar

35 Dalhousie papers 27/367.Google Scholar

36 Quoted in Lee-Warner, , Life of Dalhousie, Vol. 2, p. 189.Google Scholar

37 Dalhousie to Halliday, 29 August 1854. Dalhousie Papers 117, Letter No. 50.Google Scholar

38 Dalhousie Papers 22/116.Google Scholar

39 Dalhousie Papers 38/25.Google Scholar

40 Dalhousie Papers 36/39.Google Scholar

41 Mill, J. S., ‘Bentham’, pp. 339–40.Google Scholar

42 Bowring, , Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. I, p. 11.Google Scholar

43 Dalhousie to Wood, 29 June 1854, Dalhousie Papers 63.Google Scholar

44 This impression is formed by a study of several hundred minutes of Dalhousie consisting 26 volumes at the Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh.Google Scholar

45 Bowring, , Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. I, p. 8.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., p. 6.

47 Stokes, , The English Utilitarians and India, p. 249.Google Scholar

48 Arnold, , Dalhousie's Administration of British India, Vol. 2, pp. 323.Google Scholar

49 Friend of India, Serampore, 8 09 1853.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 22 September 1853.

51 Hunter, W. W., The Indian Empire (London, 1882), p. 432.Google Scholar

52 Kaye, and Malleson, , History of the Indian Mutiny, Vol. I, p. 261.Google Scholar

53 Ibid.

54 Dalhousie Papers 22/116.Google Scholar

55 Dalhousie Papers 131.Google Scholar

56 Dalhousie Papers 37/70.Google Scholar

57 Dalhousie Papers 34/1.Google Scholar

58 Dalhousie Papers 38/34.Google Scholar

59 Dalhousie Papers 41/10.Google Scholar

60 Bentham to Young, 28 December 1827.Google ScholarBowring, , Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. X, pp. 576–7. Bentham reproduced it as he later heard it from Mill in his letter to Young.Google Scholar

61 Ballhatchet, Kenneth, Social Policy and Social Change in Western India (London, 1957), pp. 34–6.Google Scholar

62 Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India, p. xii.Google Scholar

63 Bain, A., John Stuart Mill (London, 1882), p. 32.Google Scholar

64 Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India, p. xii.Google Scholar

65 Ibid., p. 249.

66 Bowring, , Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. I, p. 20.Google Scholar

67 Dalhousie to Couper , 23 March 1856.Google ScholarBaird, J. G. A. (ed.), Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie (Edinburgh, 1911), p. 372.Google Scholar

68 Dalhousie Papers 218.Google Scholar

69 Elphinstone quoted in Griffith, P., Modern India (London, 1957), p. 62.Google Scholar

70 Munro quoted in Muir, Ramsay, The Making of British India (Manchester, 1915), pp. 284–5.Google Scholar

71 Trevelyen, C. E., On the Education of the People of India (London, 1838), pp. 192–5.Google Scholar

72 Macaulay's speech of 10 July 1833 in the House of Commons. See Hansard, , Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 19, col. 536.Google Scholar

73 See Chapter III, pp. 45–69 in Stuart Mill, John, Considerations on Representative Government (London, 1861).Google Scholar

74 Stuart Mill, John, ‘Civilization’ in his Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I, p. 163. Because of the influence of his father's History of India on him, he, however, denied ‘the applicability of his theories of liberty and of representative government to the conditions prevalent in Eastern dependencies’.Google Scholar See Iyer, R., ‘Utilitarianism and All That’ in St Antony's Papers No. 8 South Asian Affairs, I (London, 1960), p. 14.Google Scholar

75 Farewell address by the Lt-Governor of Bengal to Dalhousie on 13 February 1856, Dalhousie Papers 218, pp. 7–8.Google Scholar

76 Prichard, T., The Administration of India, 2 Vols (London, 1869), covering the period from 1859 to 1868.Google Scholar

77 Arnold, E., Dalhousie's Administration of British India, Vol. 2, p. 388.Google Scholar

78 The Duke of Argyll, India Under Dalhousie and Canning (London, 1865), p. 68.Google Scholar

79 Speech of Lord Salisbury (Viscount Cranborne) on 24 May 1867. See Hansard, , Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 187, col. 1075.Google Scholar

80 Martin's, BritonNew India, 1885 (Bombay, 1969–1970)Google Scholar should be read with Anil, Seal'sThe Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar and Mehrotra's, S. R.The Emergence of the Indian National Congress (Delhi, 1971) which provide a background understanding to the birth of the Indian National Congress.Google Scholar

81 Proceedings of the 3rd Day, 30 December 1885 Proceedings of the First Indian National CongressBombay28–30 December 1885p. 90.Google Scholar