| Warren Hastings |
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| 1732 births | |
| 1818 deaths | |
| people from oxfordshire | |
| governors-general of india | |
| old westminsters | |
| people associated with the british east india company | |
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Hastings was born at Churchill, Oxfordshire . He attended Westminster School before joining the British East India Company in 1750 as a clerk. In 1757 he was made the British Resident (administrative in charge) of Murshidabad . He was appointed to the Calcutta council in 1761 then went back to England in 1764 . He returned to India in 1769 as a member of the Madras council and was made governor of Bengal in 1772 . In 1773, he was appointed the first Governor-General Of India . As Hastings had few Englishmen to carry out administrative work, and still fewer with the ability to converse in local tongues, he was forced to farm out revenue collection to locals with no ideological friendship for Company rule. Due to lax administration these revenue collectors became tyrants and the population of Bengal suffered horribly, even more so when famine struck. Englishmen continued to be seduced by the massive wealth of India into corruption and bribery, and Hastings could do little or nothing to stop it. Indeed, he participated in the widespread exploitation of these newly conquered lands. Hastings resigned in 1784 and returned to England. He was charged with high crimes and misdemeanors by Edmund Burke and Sir Philip Francis , whom he had wounded in a duel in India. He was impeached in 1787 but the trial, which began in 1788 , ended with his acquittal in 1795 . Hastings spent most of his fortune on his defense, although the East India Company did contribute towards the end of the trial. Hastings was made a Privy Councillor in 1814 . The city of Hastings, New Zealand is named after him. QUOTATIONS "The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive, when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrances." "I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality, of sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind.." REFERENCES
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