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By Root 1223 0

’s time in the subcontinent Grant’s two young daughters had been carried off by smallpox. Tragedies like this were very common, but Grant considered their deaths to be divine punishment for his way of life. The experience turned him into an evangelical Christian, convinced not merely of the injustice of slavery but that it was the duty of the British Empire to turn India Christian. Without the influence of Christian missionaries, the land would be left to idolatry, immorality, dishonesty, depravity and general wickedness. His attempt to get a ‘Pious Clause’ inserted into the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1793 failed. But he found a ready ally in William Wilberforce, then labouring to persuade parliament to legislate against the slave trade. Wilberforce saw a readiness to continue to allow ‘our fellow subjects in India’ to wallow ‘under the grossest, the darkest and most degrading system of idolatrous superstition’ as ‘the foulest blot’ on the moral character of the country.

The East India Company was unenthusiastic about having Christian missionaries tramping about the place telling its troops that their misguided religions would see them all destined for hell. This was not because it was especially concerned about freedom of religious belief, merely that it cared a great deal more about making money. As long as the local holy men raised no objections to what the Company traded, the Company would raise no objections to what they preached, so was perfectly happy to see them blessing the colours of sepoy regiments. Christian missionaries declaring the whole lot of them to be heathens was not likely to be conducive either to a peaceful country or to good trade. But Wilberforce and others had their blood up. The caste system (‘a detestable expedient for keeping the lower orders of the community bowed down in an abject state of hopeless and irremediable vassalage’, he called it in parliament) was a form of hereditary slavery. The weapon to destroy it was Christianity. ‘Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent,’ he went on. ‘Theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.’ Against this tide of moral self-confidence the Company’s restrictions on missionary activity would simply have to yield. The India Bill of 1813 obliged the East India Company to license missionaries to travel the country preaching Christianity and imperial destiny.

There was an immediate opportunity to do good with the practice of sati, a tradition in which widows threw themselves (or were thrown) on to the funeral pyres of their newly dead husbands. Here was a custom grotesque enough to appal even the fiercest advocate of cultural tolerance. Nonetheless, it still took until 1829 for the Governor General, Lord William Bentinck, to act. The Governor General held the splendidly paternalist belief that India was ‘a great estate, of which I am the chief agent’, and he ruled as a clumsy, unpopular autocrat. (There were even made-up rumours that he planned to knock down the Taj Mahal, so that he could recycle the marble.) But he was sufficiently affected by the new mood of empire that he reformed the education and judicial systems, replaced Persian with English as the official language, built roads and bridges and established a college to teach western medicine. On the memorial erected to honour Bentinck in Calcutta was inscribed the judgement of Macaulay, that he ‘infused into oriental despotism the spirit of British freedom’, an expression only really comprehensible in the context of British India. It was under Bentinck that sati was finally suppressed, his self-confidence finding an echo in General Sir Charles Napier, who was reported to have replied, when facing down a defender of the practice of tossing women on to funeral pyres, ‘It is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre and beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your national custom – then we shall follow ours.’

There is no evidence that sati was practised all