Indian Antiquary Vol 60

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 141

JUNE, 1931]
BOOK-NOTICES
repeated her assertion that the baby was in truth the old man's son.
On this assurance the second daughter-in-law asked for another trial of the blood and bone test. She was warned of the consequences of failure, but still preferred her request. The second test had the same result as the former one, and the second daughter-in-law was deprived of her head. More recriminations of the mother followed, with more. assurances on her part that the child was indeed the son of the old man.
The third daughter-in-law then asked for a retrial. The magistrate began to smell a rat. Two had already staked their heads on the child's legiti. macy and a third was willing to do so. He therefore
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ordered that first the test should be made between the old man's bone and his own undoubted daughter. The bone was put into water and the daughter supplied the drop of blood; but once again it did not flow towards the bone as it should have done, although there was no doubt of the relationship.
The daughter then confessed that she had changed her father's body for that of another man, as she expected the test to be made, and naturally the baby's blood would not flow towards the bone of someone who was not his father.
The story was interrupted at this point so that the narrator never told if the daughter lost her head also.
BOOK-NOTICES.
WARREN HASTINGS AND PHILIP FRANCIS, by SOPHIA WEITZMAN, M.A., Ph.D., with, an Introduction by Ramsay Muir, M.A. 9x 5 in.; pp. xxx+400; with map and 2 illustrations. Manchester University Press, 1929. The so-called "Regulating Act" of 1773 (13 George III, c. 63) was the first attempt of the British Parliament to deal definitely with the administration of our affairs in India; but the lessons to be learnt from the results of that legislation have not been sufficiently realized or remembered. This measure enacted that the administration of Bengal should be conducted by a Governor-General and a Council of four, in accordance with the votes of the majority of the Council, the Governor-General being given no power of overruling the decision of such majority. Hastings, already Governor, was nominated Governor-General, while General Clavering, Colonel Monson and Philip Francis, sent out from England, and Richard Barwell, one of the members of the existing Council in Bengal, were appointed to be the new Members of Council. Of these, Clavering and Francis had never set foot in India before. How Francis from the very first took up an attitude of opposition and hostility towards Hastings, and how he was supported by his two military associates, who were little more than pawns in his hands, is well known. Francis, a man of remarkable abilities and inordinate ambition, "had received early practice, intensive in character, in the art of scurrilous writing and malignant denunciation," as Miss Weitzman expresses it, and was "steeped dogmatism of Macaulay." In the correspondence in the political philosophy of his day." Wholly now printed for the first time, among other interignorant of Indian conditions, he perversely per-esting points, the sidelights cast upon the relations sisted in applying to questions of Oriental admini- between Francis and Clive will, we expect, evoke stration principles begotten of such training. For some surprise. some three years, till both Monson and Clavering were dead, this conflict paralysed the government of the country. For another three years Francis carried on the fight, until he realized he could not gain his end in Calcutta. Leaving India in 1780, he continued with renewed oporgy to carry on
the offensive in England by vigorous pamphleteer. ing, poisoning the minds of the authorities against Hastings and encouraging his enemies to persecute him. Miss Weitzman has, with great industry, revealed much new material (in particular the hitherto unpublished documents in the "Robinson Collection" at Eridge Castle) that throws further light upon the sinister activities of this extraordinary man. She has properly avoided dwelling unduly upon the personal features of the drama, while she has succeeded in keeping prominent before her readers the fundamental issues at stake. She has shown how the principles advocated by Francis, which he succeeded in persuading politicians in England to accept, were in great measure given effect to, as, for instance, in the India Act of 1784, in the policy of abstention from diplomatic relations with Indian states, and in the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, carried through by Cornwallis in the face of wiser counsels. She has traced the important hand that Francis played in the impeachment proceedings and his influence with Burke, as no historian had previously done." "Thanks to Francis," as Mr. Ramsay Muir writes in his. appreciative and exceptionally discerning introduction, "the greatest of all English GovernorGenerals of India was the only one who received no honour from his sovereign"; and "the distorted picture [of Hastings] which was first conceived by the malignity of Francis, and then painted in lurid colours by the noble but fevered genius of Burke, has been perpetuated by the cocksure
Miss Weitzman is to be congratulated on the publication of what is a valuable, and in many respects admirable, piece of work. The acumen and grasp of historical perspective disclosed impel us to wish for more from her pen.
C. E. A. W. O.