Shadow of a public

The early history of the Indian reform movement is well known in its outlines. What requires elaboration here is the debate between reformers who claimed to speak for an Indian ‘public’ and authorities who disclaimed that such a public existed. The outcome of this debate was essential to the fortunes of political reform. At stake in the acknowledgment of a public was an acceptance that Indian society was amenable to representative, constitutional government. Concerns with the ‘public good’ and ‘good government’ had been armaments in the East India Company's rhetorical arsenal since the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵ They took on greater importance in the second half of the eighteenth century, as the Company acquired new subjects and territories, and opinion in Britain came to demand that its administration be made responsible to the British public. According to its Court of Directors in London, the Company was subject to ‘a system of publicity’; a governor knew that he was ‘acting upon a public theatre; that his proceedings will be publickly recorded there and publickly judged of here’.Footnote ⁶ Notwithstanding such scrutiny at home, Company rule abroad was commonly understood to be a species of ‘despotism’, which, as introduced into English by Hobbes, denoted a dominion acquired and held by the sword.Footnote ⁷ Repugnant though such a regime might have appeared to British notions of good government, it could be seen to be justified by local conditions and precedent or by the exigencies of security. According to Alexander Dow, in his influential History of Hindostan (1768–72), Indians were so adapted to despotism, both by nature and by long habituation under Muslim rulers, that they ‘would revolt against the introduction of freedom’.Footnote ⁸ Nor did most authorities consider the country's small, mainly official, European population—‘a nation of placemen’ in Edmund Burke's phrase—eligible for political rights.Footnote ⁹ Ideologically, the early Company state occupied a confused and shifting middle ground between conflicting desiderata: to separate itself from supposedly tyrannical ‘Asiatic despots’, on the one hand, and to preserve stability, on the other.Footnote ¹⁰ By the close of the eighteenth century, a new tutelary idiom of despotism was in the ascendant, based upon promises of ‘justice’, ‘benevolence’, and ‘improvement’, but this created as many paradoxes and ambiguities as it resolved.Footnote ¹¹ Administrative reforms, notably under Governor-General Charles Cornwallis, aimed to impart to Indian society a measure of rule of law, while conceiving of the state ‘as above that law and unaccountable to it’.Footnote ¹² Richard Wellesley, the most autocratic governor-general of the period, imposed severe restrictions on the press—which the directors endorsed, extending the principle to assemblies. Yet he was also credited with ordering the civil service and forging closer ties to Indian society through the College of Fort William. The despotic foundations of Company rule remained uncertain even as they were seen to persist into the nineteenth century.

Developments in the 1810s would spur the Company to articulate a more coherent defence of despotism. Peace in Europe and paramountcy in India made censorship of political discussion harder to justify, and an influx of non-official Europeans after the Charter Act of 1813 made it harder to enforce. Most importantly, the channels through which ‘public opinion’ had come to be expressed and accredited in Britain—meetings, societies, the press—were materializing at the seats of the Company presidencies, especially in Calcutta. The Town Hall opened at the civic heart of the capital in 1813 and soon became a principal meeting venue. Rammohan moved to the city in 1814 and established his Atmiya Sabha (philosophical society) the following year, providing the model for other societies of bhadralok.Footnote ¹³ In 1817, a group of these Bengali elites, along with several Europeans, founded the Hindu College, which would educate or employ many of the coming generation of Indian and Eurasian reformers. Voluntary associations like the Agricultural and Horticultural Society, the Calcutta School Society, and the Calcutta School-Book Society presented other opportunities for Indians and Europeans to club together under the banner of improvement.Footnote ¹⁴ What united and politicized Calcutta's budding reform community most of all was the press. In 1818, the Marquess of Hastings relaxed the Wellesley regulations; the following year, he appeared to lift them almost entirely. Addressing representatives of the citizens of Calcutta on 24 July, the governor-general described ‘the freedom of publication as a natural right’ and British India as an empire held by opinion. Furthermore, he reflected, ‘it is salutary for supreme authority, even when its intentions are most pure, to look to the control of public scrutiny’.Footnote ¹⁵ These were powerful words, which the addressees may have appreciated better than the addresser, for they held out the prospect not only of a free press, but also of a free government. As one journal put it, the Marquess had established ‘the Indian Public . . . as an efficient portion of the state’.Footnote ¹⁶

The Marquess's comments set the stage for a conflict over press and public that would resonate throughout the remainder of his administration. The leading champion of both causes was the journalist James Silk Buckingham, whose Calcutta Journal flourished as a liberal advocate in the newly tolerant publishing climate. This ‘paper of the public’ translated articles from Asian-language journals which had begun to appear in Calcutta in 1818, including Rammohan's Persian Mirat-ul-Akhbar and Bengali Sambad Kaumudi.Footnote ¹⁷ It also printed anonymous correspondents’ letters criticizing the government and sometimes exposing scandals. As the Company-aligned Asiatic Journal paraphrased incredulously, Buckingham saw it as the press's obligation ‘to admonish Governors of their duties, to warn them furiously of their faults, and to tell disagreeable truths’.Footnote ¹⁸ Such provocations repeatedly involved him in skirmishes with the Supreme Council, particularly the chief secretary John Adam. In a series of irate Minutes, Adam denied that journalists had the right ‘to discuss, censure, and control the measures of Government’ or to bring such measures ‘before the bar of what they miscall public opinion’.Footnote ¹⁹ As his colleague W. B. Bayley concurred, the government of British India was ‘substantially and necessarily despotic’ and thus inconsistent with a free press.Footnote ²⁰ Such views found support from other prominent administrators, as well as rank-and-file readers of Calcutta's John Bull and London's Asiatic Journal. ‘When a constitution shall be established in India’ in the course ‘of ages’, a contributor to the latter paper reasoned, ‘when a public shall have been formed in that country corresponding in its nature and composition with a British public; then let the press be free’.Footnote ²¹

In late 1822, the Calcutta Journal announced a meeting at the Town Hall to prepare an address upon the Marquess's retirement, ‘to shew to the world that he courts the approbation of Public Opinion, and that Public Opinion honours him with its applause’. This was to take place, the Journal noted, ‘in a country where we have been told over and over again that the constitution does not admit of the people having any influence over the motions of Government; and indeed that for this reason their pretending to offer an opinion at all is extremely silly and impertinent’.Footnote ²² In the event, the Journal expressed disappointment that the gathering, dominated by a small committee, neglected ‘the great question’ of the outgoing administration and could not ‘possibly convey either to England or to posterity . . . the true Public Opinion of India’.Footnote ²³ It was a mark of the delicate and contested status of the public that, in fact, none of the addresses to the departing governor-general mentioned his actions on the press, the most ‘engrossing theme of conversation and printed controversy during the last three years’.Footnote ²⁴ The Marquess's forbearance, if not his sanction, had protected Buckingham from embarkation and the press from censorship, but this security departed with his lordship on New Year's Day 1823. Adam, now acting governor-general, saw quickly to both items.

Adam's accession to the governor-generalship, deportation of Buckingham, and stifling of the press rallied the respective partisans of public and despotic authority to the battle lines drawn by the recent debate. In Britain, the chief combatants were the directors. Prevented by the controlling authorities from reversing the Marquess's actions three years earlier, the directors now lobbied again to enhance restrictions on the press. ‘A free press is a fit associate and necessary appendage of a representative constitution’, they posited in correspondence with the Board of Control:

The directors supplied a taxonomy of the population of the Company's territories, comprising ‘natives’ of mixed and unmixed blood, as well as European merchants, adventurers, and civil and military servants. They averred in each case that it would be dangerous to allow such a group to engage freely in political discussion. British tenure in India depended not upon public opinion, which ‘cannot be said to exist’, but upon ‘the opinion entertained by the natives of our vast superiority and irresistible power’. Good government was secured not by the scrutiny of an Indian public, but ‘by a chain of responsibility and a gradation of checks, extending . . . through the Parliament to the people of England’.Footnote ²⁵ The status of the public, in other words, was bound up in the system of government, and in India the latter must either be despotic or dysfunctional. The directors’ arguments would soon be repeated out of doors, in a pamphlet by Adam defending the expulsion of Buckingham and in a printed speech by the respected soldier-administrator John Malcolm.Footnote ²⁶ They remained at odds, however, with the opinion of both the Board and Ministry that any attempt to strangle the press ‘will rebound hither: & it therefore cannot be considered as a purely India[n] question’.Footnote ²⁷ The deal reached among the home authorities in March 1823 was that Adam's permanent replacement Lord Amherst would have a free hand to enforce existing regulations. After moving quickly to expel Buckingham's associate Sandford Arnot, however, Amherst's hand stirred infrequently.

The ambivalence of Amherst and the home authorities created a political opening for the growing transmarine movement to reform Indian government. It was testament to ‘the rapid emergence of articulate and critical Indian opinion’ that Rammohan and other prominent Bengalis led the charge, petitioning the Calcutta Supreme Court against Adam's obnoxious ordinance.Footnote ²⁸ After the Court dismissed their memorial, on the grounds that a free press ‘might follow, but it could not precede, a Free Constitution’, the petitioners circulated a longer address to the king, arguing that public scrutiny was necessary to prevent ‘the abuses of uncontrolled power’.Footnote ²⁹ Buckingham, now in London, launched appeals of his own to the House of Commons, Privy Council, and Board of Control, as well as the Company's Court of Directors and Court of Proprietors (shareholders).Footnote ³⁰ While none of these efforts garnered formal redress, they drew metropolitan attention to the wider cause of Indian reform, which Buckingham pursued (alongside his personal grievances) in speeches, pamphlets, and a new journal, the Oriental Herald. He repeatedly criticized the directors for insisting ‘that the government of India always has been despotic, is now despotic, and always must continue to be despotic’ and for spurning ‘the bare idea of responsibility to the public over whom they rule in India’.Footnote ³¹ There was a ready audience for such criticism among merchants, manufacturers, and others seeking ammunition to puncture the Company's remaining monopoly of the China route. In the Court of Proprietors, meanwhile, a small knot of liberals, led by Joseph Hume, had begun to advocate for judicial independence and ‘colonization’ (European settlement) as well as for free trade and a free press.Footnote ³² The reform movement derived considerable stimulus from the Jury Act of 1826 and the Stamp Act of 1827. The Jury Act's restrictions on Indian jury membership inspired a petition, usually attributed to Rammohan, which also aired broader grievances about the unprecedented ‘state of political degradation’ in which British rule placed even ‘the better classes of the natives’.Footnote ³³ The Stamp Act's imposition of steep duties on a range of documents prompted meetings and petitions in Calcutta which were covered in the London papers. With ‘this novel assumption of power’, one pamphlet avowed, the government had roused to consciousness the very public it denied:

The author of the pamphlet was hardly alone in seeing the expiry of the Company's 20-year Charter, in April 1834, as a singular opportunity. This was the kairos towards which reformers in Britain and India alike were now directing their efforts.

Amherst's replacement by William Bentinck in mid-1828 marked a shift in the tone of Indian government which seemed to augur well for reformers’ chances. The appointment of an avowed liberal to the governor-generalship could be read as an index of the home authorities’ sentiments and a harbinger of greater changes upon the expiry of the Charter. The early record of Bentinck's administration offered further encouragement. Shortly after arriving in Calcutta, Bentinck placed a notice in local newspapers inviting suggestions for improvements from ‘Europeans both in and out of the service’ and from ‘all Native Gentlemen, Landholders, Merchants and others’.Footnote ³⁵ He would likewise commend himself to reformers by easing restrictions on the press and on European ownership of land (a step towards colonization). Straitened finances, however, limited Bentinck's scope for action.Footnote ³⁶ Reformers were all too aware, moreover, that his policies could be rolled back by successors or the home authorities—or by Bentinck himself. As governor of Madras 20 years earlier, Bentinck had declaimed that ‘the Press in India should be kept under the most rigid control’; as governor-general, he signalled a willingness to adopt this policy ‘whenever the safety of the State’ so required. If complaints about a reduction in army officers’ pay furnished one ‘exception to the general rule’ of toleration, what other exceptions might arise?Footnote ³⁷ The larger question was whether Bentinck, having proved responsive, also believed himself responsible to the public. As official discussion of the Charter commenced in 1832, reformers acknowledged that the governor-general had laid ‘the foundation of much solid improvement’, but were still unsure how reliable an ally they had.Footnote ³⁸ In this respect, the following months would be a proving ground as much for Bentinck in India as for the authorities and public in Britain.

A foundation for free institutions

Reformers were optimistic at the onset of negotiations over the Charter. While few expected, or indeed advocated, an immediate transition to representative government, they had reason to anticipate at least the adoption of the principle of public responsibility.Footnote ³⁹ Not only was change in the air following the Whig Ministry's passage of the Reform Bill, but the public had been elevated to a prominent position in British politics.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘I know only two ways in which societies can permanently be governed,’ Macaulay had declared in parliament, ‘by public opinion, and by the sword.’Footnote ⁴¹ India seemed to be at a similar crossroads. According to a correspondent in the Bengal Hurkaru, ‘The “Majesty of the people” is being every where proclaimed’; the Reform Bill was merely ‘the first scene of the first act’.Footnote ⁴² The Bengali- and English-language newspaper Samachar Darpan conveyed reports from London that a free press would be a condition for the Charter's renewal. ‘The freedom of publishing strictures,’ it reminded readers, ‘will operate as a check upon bad government.’Footnote ⁴³ Most encouraging of all was the groundswell of British opposition to the China monopoly. After all, the Company had long defended its mode of government, and even its right to govern, on the basis of its commercial privileges.Footnote ⁴⁴ Without these, it would find it all the more difficult to justify ruling India on principles different from those which obtained at home—it might not be able to justify ruling at all. Buckingham had once described himself as engaged in a ‘crusade against the despotism and monopoly of the East India Company’.Footnote ⁴⁵ For critics of the Company, at least since Adam Smith, these were twin evils: despotism was but a ‘monopoly of power’, monopoly a ‘commercial despotism’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Controls on settlement, the press, and the civil service were seen as prerogatives akin to, and bound up with, those which the Company enjoyed on trade. The notion that the one tendency in the merchant compounded the other in the sovereign also played into a long-standing theory that the Company's two roles were incompatible: ‘a despot cannot trade fairly . . . a monopolist cannot judge justly’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Reformers believed that mounting pressure to terminate the Company's trading rights would open the door to transforming its government. Indeed, simply by refusing to renew the Charter, the legislature could accomplish both purposes.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such hopes, however, were to be frustrated.

For the Company there were advantages and disadvantages in the ascendancy of the public in Britain. But these calculations did not translate to India, where the public remained an irrelevance, if not a menace. From the first communications with Lord Grey's ministry, the Court of Directors took for granted the retention of an absolute government, ‘upon which public opinion can exert but a feeble and uncertain operation’. While they discounted public opinion in India, the directors sought to marshal public opinion in Britain, arguing (unsuccessfully) for a system of ‘publicity’ to check the Board of Control.Footnote ⁴⁹ More ambitious was John Malcolm's proposal in a speech before the Court of Proprietors. With ‘public opinion . . . now all-potent in England’ and the subject of interested ‘pretensions’ in India, the ‘rights, privileges, and power’ of the Company were under daily assault, threatening the survival of the empire. To counter this assault, Malcolm urged, returned hands must form themselves into ‘something like an Indian public in England’. By this he meant a body of men with a common interest in India's welfare who would counteract ‘the fickle opinions of the multitude’ as well as the decisions of the Board, and who would seek to have their views represented in parliament.Footnote ⁵⁰ Malcolm's speech addressed a frequent concern of nineteenth-century British political thought: how public opinion, now unleashed, might be properly channelled.Footnote ⁵¹ But his project to establish an ‘Indian public’ at home also aimed to forestall the danger of such a public emerging in India itself. Government in that quarter, Malcolm assured his audience, must be ‘absolute’. Desirable as it might be in general ‘to place checks on the exercise of power . . . India required a strong government, conducted by men who would face calumny’ without wavering.Footnote ⁵² In this conviction at least, Malcolm was typical of the Company's advocates. If anything, the expected opening up of trade and easing of restrictions on settlement would stimulate an influx of refractory Europeans, thereby making despotic rule all the more necessary. Nor were such views restricted to Company men.

Negotiations over the Charter revealed scant enthusiasm from any segment of British opinion for overhauling the government of India. It has been suggested recently that ‘many of the iconic state “impositions” on the Company's affairs can be seen as compromises’ or ‘the cost of doing business’.Footnote ⁵³ This was explicitly true of the Charter Act of 1833. By this time the Company's ‘business’ consisted largely of lobbying and patronage in Britain and revenue collection in India. For the preservation of these functions the long-anticipated opening up of the China trade was a relatively small price to pay. Yet few in the government were willing to demand further concessions. Even Joseph Hume, ‘with all his love of reform’, thought parliament ‘ought not to drive a Jewish bargain’ or effect too much change too quickly.Footnote ⁵⁴ The only amendment he consistently sought was to halve the duration of the Charter from 20 to 10 years, and even this failed to gain traction among his fellow MPs. Such reticence reflected the extent to which mercantile and manufacturing interests had learned to work within the existing political structure; the extent to which officials had come to worry lest overzealous reform should lead to revolution; and, especially, the extent to which the currents of British politics had drifted from the eastern empire.Footnote ⁵⁵ Whatever popular momentum had gathered in Britain for reforming government in India had rapidly dissipated by the early 1830s, and was now channelled into the cause of reforming parliament or simply of terminating the Company's monopoly. Writing to his sister, Margaret, Macaulay made the by-now-customary observation that ‘all classes of people, members of parliament, reporters, and the public’ were indifferent to Indian affairs.Footnote ⁵⁶ As he remarked before the House of Commons, ‘A broken head in Cold Bath Fields produces a greater sensation among us than three pitched battles in India.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Macaulay noted, however, that he had discussed the Charter so extensively with the other framers on the Board of Control ‘that our opponents can hardly raise any objection which has not been already considered by us’. Nor did he complain of the general apathy, for it had allowed them ‘to effect some most valuable improvements with little or no opposition’.Footnote ⁵⁸ That the Charter Act extended despotic rule was by design, not lack of interest, on the part of these framers. The main thrust of its ‘improvements’ was to concentrate power in the hands of the governor-general.

Whereas historians have tended to emphasize James Mill's influence on the Charter Act, contemporaries pointed more often to that of Holt Mackenzie, who was secretary to the government in Bengal for many years before he joined the Board of Control.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bentinck had formed an early and abiding opinion of Mackenzie as ‘by far the ablest of the Company's servants’ and, upon the latter's return to England in 1831, had recommended him to Charles Grant (junior), president of the Board, as ‘the best possible guide’ to Indian affairs.Footnote ⁶⁰ That September, when transmitting some proposals on the internal administration of the country, Bentinck had urged Grant to utilize Mackenzie as ‘a ready interpreter of Indian hieroglyphics, for such they must be to you . . . No man is so thoroughly informed of all Indian details as he is and his views are in my judgment most humane and liberal.’Footnote ⁶¹ Correspondents would later inform Bentinck that Mackenzie wielded ‘a great deal of influence with Grant’ and was ‘much consulted throughout the investigation and negotiation’ of the Charter renewal.Footnote ⁶² Macaulay, himself a novice in ‘Indian hieroglyphics’, considered Mackenzie ‘the only one of our people who is up to the mark in energy and judgment’.Footnote ⁶³ Mackenzie's signal contribution to the Charter Act can be glimpsed in his evidence in 1832 before a select committee of the Commons appointed to investigate the Company's affairs. Asked whether he thought it dangerous to allow ‘public discussion’ of political measures, Mackenzie responded that, on the contrary, such discussion had proved useful. Crucially, however, it was useful not in checking the government, but in giving it ‘a new access to the notions of the people’. The governor-general was under no obligation to heed these notions: his power ‘should be absolute’. Moreover, the scope of his authority should correspond to the scope of political discussion. Mackenzie favoured a ‘considerably larger’ legislative body, ‘including possibly some natives’, but he proposed giving the governor-general control of appointments, an overriding veto, and ‘the power of passing laws which he might deem necessary to the safety of the state’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This was a logic that ran against theories of balanced government, yet encouraged consultation and deliberation. Mackenzie may have yielded to Mill on the number of legislators, but his mixture of discussion and authority was an animating principle of the Charter Act.Footnote ⁶⁵

Echoes of Mackenzie's testimony sounded in Grant's speech of 13 June 1833, in which he outlined the Charter Bill before the House of Commons. Grant credited British public opinion with arriving at a mature and enlightened determination against the China monopoly. This was evidence of an effective system of scrutiny that justified the continuation of the Company's political functions. The government of India would remain ‘strong’, ‘arbitrary’, and ‘despotic’. Yet Grant found that a dramatic change had recently taken place in its relation to its subjects:

Grant did not go into detail on this ‘political existence’ nor its place in the Charter Bill. But the phrase held significance for his chief respondent on the occasion. Buckingham had argued before that to deny the presence of a public in India, as the Company did, was to deny that those who financed the state should ‘have some political existence, not to say influence’ in its affairs.Footnote ⁶⁷ In reply to Grant, therefore, Buckingham disputed that the Company had ever recognized ‘any political right, or even political existence in a people, whom they use for no other purpose than . . . to plunder all their substance’. Were the new Bill finally to admit such an existence, Buckingham would ‘rejoice’; but he remained sceptical.Footnote ⁶⁸ The question that emerged from this confrontation—how a ‘political existence’, much less ‘influence’, ‘rights’, or ‘privileges’, might be recognized—went unresolved on 13 June. But Grant's formulation seemed to proffer a greater political role for Indians than mere passive affirmation of their rulers’ ‘vast superiority and irresistible power’, as the directors had once imagined. Did it go so far as to acknowledge their membership in a public? Buckingham's earlier comment suggested that such acknowledgment might be at stake. At one point in his speech, Buckingham noted the presence of the young secretary to the India Board on the front bench. Macaulay would describe his role in these debates as no ‘mere idle attendance. I have to sit on the Treasury Bench the whole time, watching every word that is said, and ready to answer every objection to our India Bill.’Footnote ⁶⁹ By the second reading of the Bill a month later, he had readied an answer to Buckingham.

On 10 July, after applauding the general consensus to open up the China trade and addressing some minor discontents, Macaulay came to the crux of his speech: the case for despotism. It was easy enough, he began, to secure good government in Europe, where the people were ‘competent to hold some share . . . of political power’ through representative institutions. But no one, Macaulay claimed, had ‘ever maintained the possibility of giving, at the present time, such institutions to India’. Here he cited Mill—‘utterly out of the question’—eliding the position of most reformers that representation should be introduced gradually. It was this incrementalist position, however, that Macaulay proceeded to contest. Couching authority in the language of reform, he represented despotism in the present as the surest route to liberty in the future. As evidence he adduced three liberal reforms of the Charter Bill whose accomplishment, he asserted, would require enhancing the despotic powers of the government. First, there was the measure curtailing the Company's licensing system, which would allow Europeans to settle more freely in India. Macaulay anticipated benefits for ‘the minds of our native subjects’, but also worried that the newcomers might ‘trample on the indigenous race’. The governor-general must therefore be enabled to restrict European privileges through legislation, overruling even the Supreme courts if necessary. Second, there was the clause removing barriers to Indians holding high office. Macaulay stipulated that the government must be empowered to reserve the implementation of this ‘benevolent’ measure until ‘the fullness of time is come, when the interest of India requires the change’. Finally, there was the Bill's provision for a digest of Indian laws, an undertaking that Macaulay argued was tailor-made for ‘an enlightened and paternal despotism’. These examples were meant to show that, in the absence of a public, the government must ‘engraft on despotism those blessings which are the natural fruits of liberty’. It must cultivate, if not a fictive public opinion, then a nascent ‘public mind’. As yet inarticulate and incompetent to act as a check on the government, this mind was in the process of ‘expanding itself to just and noble views of the ends of government and of the social duties of man’. At length, Macaulay augured, ‘the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system . . . by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government’ and ‘all the privileges of citizens’. Some day the sceptre might pass from British hands entirely into those of an enlightened public capable of governing itself: this would be ‘the proudest day in English history’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Here, then, was a grand vision of reform to rival Buckingham's. But it was a vision in which despotism would enable, not stifle, the creation of a public.

The speech was a resounding success in parliament. ‘I made the best speech . . . that I ever made in my life,’ Macaulay wrote his sister, Hannah, adding that he had received ‘such compliments as . . . you never heard’ from as many as half of the attendees.Footnote ⁷¹ Grant beheld ‘the great principles he [himself] had propounded to the House, glowing with fresh colours’.Footnote ⁷² At least several MPs thought it the finest piece of oratory they had ever witnessed.Footnote ⁷³ Macaulay was flattered most of all, however, by comparisons with Edmund Burke, not only a great speechmaker but the greatest of the Company's critics.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, Macaulay had pulled off a feat: promoting the extension of despotism as the expansion of a tradition of reform, and an act befitting the first reformed parliament. As his fellow MP for Leeds put it, in a toast in his honour, ‘the people of India are not yet in a condition to receive a representative system of Government, but the foundation is laid for free institutions’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This characterization did not go entirely unchallenged in parliament. The clauses of the Bill allowing the governor-general to overrule his council, the subordinate governors, and the Supreme courts raised objections from various quarters, even making strange bedfellows of Buckingham and the Company's lawyers.Footnote ⁷⁶ Petitions to the Lords and Commons from the Court of Proprietors maintained that the Bill placed ‘excessive power in the hands of the Governor-general’.Footnote ⁷⁷ And several members questioned the logic of tempering European domination by abridging legal rights. As the Irish reformer Daniel O'Connell put it, in a much-repeated phrase, parliament should be ‘elevating the natives to the standard of the British’, not ‘bringing down the British to the level of the natives’. For ‘who is to create public opinion but British residents’ armed with British liberties? During one debate, Buckingham and Hume raised the prospect of an Indian Supreme Council member, adding that this member ‘should be elected by his native countrymen’ as ‘a first step to the formation of a representative assembly’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the afterglow of Macaulay's speech, such desultory opposition failed to halt the Bill's passage by large margins in both houses. Opposition in India, however, would prove harder to dispel.

As news of the Charter Bill trickled into the Calcutta newspapers in the last quarter of 1833, reactions were overwhelmingly negative. Some commentators objected to the duration or financial terms of the agreement, others to the enlargement of the ecclesiastical establishment from one bishop to three. The Company would retain internal monopolies on salt and opium, and controls on European settlement in the mofussil (upcountry). There were no provisions for education or a free press. But the most offensive news, by common agreement, regarded the extraordinary powers of the governor-general. As the Bengali- and English-language Gyannaneshun put it, his was now an ‘almost uncontroulable power’, subject only to the distant restraint of the home authorities.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to the Reformer, another Indian-owned paper, ‘More than 80 millions of men are placed at the mercy of a single individual who is allowed to exercise almost the same despotic power as the Czar of Russia.’ There were means, perhaps, of palliating such a concentrated authority: ‘Had India like England a voice in the management of her own affairs, the evils arising from the caprice of Individual rulers might be kept under a salutary check.’ Alas, the Reformer concluded, ‘that is not here the case’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Even the Calcutta Courier, more deferential than its rivals, evinced unease about ‘these shadowy forms of power, whose . . . reason is ever in the clouds . . . beyond the reach of remonstrance’.Footnote ⁸¹ A contributor to the Bengal Hurkaru developed the argument further, picking out the select committee's claim that past ‘ages of anarchy and misrule’ had rendered Indians ‘insensible to the blessings of organized society’ and thus incompetent to judge their rulers. Such claims, according to this ‘Friend to Truth’, betrayed the intention of home officials ‘to discourage any thing like an attempt at a more free communication’.Footnote ⁸² Surprised and disappointed at the Bill's contents, reformers in India tended to conclude that the Company had won out handily, either by co-opting or outmanoeuvring the British government. According to the Hurkaru, the so-called negotiations were really a ‘sham fight which served to blind the public’ in Britain. It noted that Grant's opening speech

If reformers in India barely considered the liberal reading of the Bill that Macaulay had propounded to such effect in the Commons, one reason was that the text of his speech was scarcely available. The 10th of July had been a Wednesday, normally designated for private members’ bills and, as usual, most ‘reporters gave hardly any account of what passed’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Believing that there was no report of his speech, Macaulay agreed to correct it for publication; by the end of July he had returned the proofs to Hansard.Footnote ⁸⁵ Therefore the speech reached India some time after the substance of the Bill and attracted little and late notice. If the case for the Charter Act as a foundation for free institutions was going to be made there, it would have to be made by someone else.

So enlightened an undertaking

Correspondents in London had kept Bentinck apprised of the state of negotiations over the Charter, regularly forwarding the papers and reports of parliament. It was from these sources, presumably, in the autumn of 1833, that he learned of Macaulay's speech and formed a high opinion of the future legislative member on his council. By Christmas Day, writing to inform Bentinck of this appointment, Grant could be confident that Macaulay was known to the governor-general ‘by name and fame’ as well as by his speeches.Footnote ⁸⁶ Bentinck would later write to Daniel Wilson, the Bishop of Calcutta, ‘I cannot tell you how much I am delighted with Macaulay's appointment. I think he has more power of doing good to India than any man, governor-general or other, who ever came to India.’Footnote ⁸⁷ It was Macaulay, he suggested, who would guide his interpretation of the Charter Act.Footnote ⁸⁸ Historians have questioned Bentinck's enthusiasm for Company rule, but his approbation of the Act, especially as put forward by Macaulay, cannot be in doubt.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a Minute of 20 January 1834, Bentinck assured the Board that, ‘For the general provisions of the Bill I entertain the highest admiration. Nothing can prevent its effecting a prodigious improvement in the condition of the people of India.’ No longer in the ‘inconsistent’ position of a merchant-sovereign, the Company would now serve as ‘an intermediate councilling body’ between British governments and ‘Indian opinion’, of which it ‘may be regarded as the best representative’. Bentinck approved of Indians holding high office and lamented that they would not be immediately involved in the legislative functions of the Supreme Council, which operated so often ‘in utter darkness as to their habits and feelings’. He proposed further reforms: creating a new governor and council to administer local affairs in Bengal, and relocating the seat of government to the Upper Provinces, to whose inhabitants he accorded a more martial and ‘political’ character.Footnote ⁹⁰ It was here in the Gangetic heartland, perhaps, that the materials for a public were to be found.

For all of this concern with ‘Indian opinion’, ‘habits and feelings’, however, Bentinck was unequivocal in supporting the preservation and extension of despotic rule. As governor of Madras, he had espoused a ‘well-regulated despotism’ as the appropriate mode of government for British India, granting subjects ‘civil’ but not ‘political liberty’.Footnote ⁹¹ Now, as governor-general, he approved of the Charter Act's ‘concentration of authority in a small executive Council, and when need arises in the one Person at the head of the Government’. India was an empire ‘we have won, and must keep by the Sword’; upon its policies ‘the influence and control of Public Opinion are wholly inoperative’.Footnote ⁹² Bentinck's authoritarian programme of reform was thus substantially the same as that of the framers of the Act.

Articulating this programme in India required weighing a different and knottier set of political considerations. Bentinck did not need, of course, to garner any formal approval for a Bill that had already passed through parliament. Yet he had often expressed the view that government plans could only succeed with the cooperation of the people. The Charter Act, he believed, was far more likely to stimulate improvement with popular support mobilized behind it. For a start, this meant persuading as many European residents as possible to embrace reform on the government's terms. More important still, it meant convincing influential segments of the vastly larger ‘native’ population that their interests lay with the government and not with the upstart projectors of a ‘public’. The speeches of Grant and Macaulay had suggested one means of doing this: framing the governor-general's arbitrary power as the only bulwark against a looming threat of settler oppression. As Buckingham had warned the Commons, however, the Act's curtailment of British legal protections was bound to excite ‘a strong feeling of indignation’ in Calcutta.Footnote ⁹³

Bentinck would have been loath to stoke this resentment further and risk putting European support out of reach. Setting communities at odds, moreover, while it might impede their collaborating against the government, would be counterproductive to the aim of uniting British India ‘into one harmonious whole’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In a sense, Bentinck's entire tenure as governor-general had been laying the ground for a new political settlement: years of retrenchment and piecemeal reform had been building up to such a watershed. And with his health failing, Bentinck knew he might have little time left in India to realize it. A biographer might well evince surprise, then, that ‘the only part Lord William Bentinck publicly played with regard to the renewal of the Charter was to issue a notice . . . calling for a general illumination and a display of fireworks . . . when the news reached India’.Footnote ⁹⁵ This is the moment at which a conventional political history comes up short, leaving the impression that Bentinck did curiously little to promote the Charter Act upon its arrival. As will be seen however, everything he wanted to say went into the celebration. It was the failure of this bid for popular support that would shatter the prospect of a liberal consensus between the government and the would-be public.

By 14 October 1833, Bentinck had sufficiently gleaned the contents of the Charter Act to issue a Minute approving ‘the general spirit and purport of the new arrangement’ and suggesting a ‘public commemoration’. The Act appeared to the governor-general ‘well calculated to promote the prosperity of India, to raise the moral condition of the people, and to give an impulse towards the improvement of its great resources’. This was an outcome of ‘universal benefit’, which afforded ‘an opportunity of gratifying our Native population’. But what would be an apposite mode of celebration? Bentinck noted that it had been customary for the European community to observe the king's birthday with a ball and supper ‘at the public expence’. This entertainment had the advantage of ‘cementing those mutual feelings of union and harmony which promote the public strength and tend to the preservation of the Empire’. As a ‘consequence of our different manners and habits’, however, it had the defect ‘that it cannot include our native brethren and subjects, whom it would be desirable to see joined with us in kindred sentiments upon this occasion’. Bentinck therefore proposed ‘a grand exhibition of fireworks’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Bentinck's Minute, which was soon reported in the Calcutta press, contained a number of suggestive nods to reformers. In selecting fireworks over a ball and supper on the grounds of inclusiveness, it followed a line of reasoning that had emerged a year earlier during a local dispute over how to celebrate the Reform Act. At a Town Hall meeting, and thereafter in the papers, reformers debated the relative merits of a ball, a supper, or a fête champêtre (‘which might be accompanied by fire works’).Footnote ⁹⁷ One set argued that ‘an exclusive dinner is not a suitable manner of celebrating Reform’, what with its ‘extravagant price, fixed . . . for the sake of excluding the vulgar’.Footnote ⁹⁸ While accepting the idea of a dinner, other commentators agreed that the proposed ticket price—some Rs 32—belied ‘an aristocratic feeling’ among the organizers, such that ‘a very great reform is wanted in our social arrangements’.Footnote ⁹⁹ For its part, as host to much of this exchange, the Bengal Hurkaru agreed that ‘private feeling’ ought to give way to the ‘public desire’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In resurrecting the earlier debate and weighing in against the idea of a ball and supper, Bentinck thus aligned himself with proponents of liberal reform and, in particular, with those who claimed to be upholding the rights and status of a public. The term ‘public’ appeared several times in his brief Minute. The sequence of its usages—‘public expence’, ‘public strength’, ‘public commemoration’—itself implied an argument for representation: those who financed and strengthened the state should be accorded a place in its rituals, akin, perhaps, to what Buckingham and Grant had called a ‘political existence’. Significantly, Bentinck's Minute extended the debate of the Reform Act celebrants to a consideration of how indigenes as well as indigents might be brought into the fold. He made a point of noting that it was customary already to invite ‘the whole European community’ to the balls and suppers held for the king's birthday.Footnote ¹⁰¹ If this practice were adopted to commemorate the Charter Act, it was ‘our native brethren and subjects’ who stood to be excluded, as ‘the consequence of our different manners and habits’. By contrast, not only would the exhibition overcome disparities of language and literacy through its largely atextual content, it would also incorporate local pyrotechnics like the ‘Shurrhgole’, ‘Chundercote’, and ‘Kunnuck Chumpah’.Footnote ¹⁰² There was, after all, a long history in India of illuminations, fire festivals, and fireworks displays, in many instances organized by one ruler or community for another.Footnote ¹⁰³

As this history indicated, there was nothing particularly novel about Bentinck's choice of entertainment; but then his message was as much one of continued authority as one of enlightened reform. In India, as in Europe, pyrotechnic displays were popular events that could bring together disparate constituencies and promote social intercourse. At the same time, they had often been employed to uphold authority, not least by the Company's governors-general.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 1789, following the king's recovery from illness, Cornwallis commissioned illuminations of the town and suburbs of Calcutta.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As he made clear in correspondence, the entertainment was designed to avoid opening a channel for grievances: ‘The inhabitants of this settlement were very desirous of sending home a congratulatory address; but . . . I thought it was better not to establish a precedent that might give rise to addresses of a very different nature, and persuaded them to be satisfied with illuminations, music, &c., &c.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Wellesley, ‘uncommon[ly] partial to fireworks’, incorporated them into the pomp and ceremony which he considered essential to cultivating respect for the state.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In 1803, he marked the Peace of Amiens with a grand fete at the new Government House, featuring elaborate pyrotechnics whose artificers had been lent by the nawabs of Awadh and Bengal.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Marquess of Hastings believed similarly in maintaining the trappings of state power: his procession through northern India in 1814–15 was attended by illuminations and fireworks at the princely courts of Murshidabad, Benares, and Lucknow, and at the Company station at Fatehgarh.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Upon assuming the governor-generalship, Bentinck had eschewed such grandeur, hosting relatively humble and egalitarian entertainments at Government House.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Whereas Wellesley had been faulted for ‘sultanizing’ his office, Bentinck was faulted for demeaning it.Footnote ¹¹¹ Thus the Charter Act celebration marked something of a reversion, an uptake of the old focus on awe and authority. This emphasis could only have been heightened by the celebration's martial tenor. Bentinck entrusted the pyrotechnics to the military department, under the direction of Major Richard Powney, agent for the gunpowder manufactory at Dum Dum. He proposed modelling the display on an earlier one Powney and other artillery officers had given to commemorate the 1826 capture of Bharatpur.Footnote ¹¹² Such elements as a feu de joie of infantry, salvos of artillery and mortars, and a royal salute from the anchored HMS Curacoa would deliver a thundering declaration of the power and resources of the state.Footnote ¹¹³ The conspicuous expense of all this bombast—estimates of which rose quickly from Rs 5,000 to 10,000 to 20,000—would bear similar testimony. In an important sense, the celebration was designed to enact the relations between the government and the populace envisioned in the Charter Act. Here again there was a contrast to be drawn with the royal birthday entertainments. Whereas a ball and supper would give quarter to discussion, and perhaps dissension, the only response to the fireworks display that Bentinck seems to have countenanced was acclamation. The crowd were imagined as spectators, not participants.

The twin ideological threads of the Charter Act—authority and reform—came together in the exhibition's centrepiece. This was described in a published programme as:

A daylight observer noted that this ephemeral ‘pillared building in front of Government House . . . seemed intended to represent the India House’ in London, with its ‘twenty-four puppets’ standing in for the 24 Company directors.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Transported to their Asian seat of government, crowned with eastern diadems, and assembled in a durbar, these quondam merchants were transformed into wise and paternal sovereigns. The enlightened promise of their rule was indicated by the pediment's Virgilian dictum and brilliant sun, both symbols of the College of Fort William.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The arms and motto of the Company underneath offered a reminder that this promise rested on the dignity and authority of the state. Thus, the ‘Eastern Court of the Directors’ encapsulated the message of enlightened despotism articulated by the framers of the Charter Act in Britain and endorsed by Bentinck's government in Bengal. This message would be accessible, in some degree at least, to anyone who attended the exhibition: Calcuttans of all stripes, but also far-flung visitors, notably the Indian rulers and dignitaries invited for the occasion to a durbar at Government House.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The distribution of a programme in pamphlet form, and its republication in local and metropolitan journals, promised to widen the audience still further to include virtual spectators across the empire and beyond.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Lost in a fog

‘Expectation was on tip-toe’ reported the press on 14 January 1834.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The fireworks had already been postponed from the tenth, heightening anticipation: the Englishman declared itself ‘absolutely inundated with letters and reports’ on the subject.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Post Office closed early, a measure taken on no other day of the year, including Christmas.Footnote ¹²¹ And by the afternoon, throngs of Indians were seeking out the best vantage points. ‘Such was the eagerness to get a good peeping place, that a single verandah was let for 200 rupees’, while those of some of the taller buildings were said to fetch more than a thousand.Footnote ¹²² On the principal avenues, ‘carriages, keranchees, hackeries, buggies, &c. were drawn up on all sides . . . and the roofs of all the houses likely to command a view . . . were covered with people’.Footnote ¹²³ By a little after dusk, ‘several thousands of people had assembled . . . in the vicinity of Government House’, while hundreds more crowded the rooms inside, waiting to be allowed onto the central south veranda.Footnote ¹²⁴ ‘Every body and his wife’ had turned out.Footnote ¹²⁵ At around eight o'clock, Bentinck led the durbar attendees onto another veranda to watch the opening display.Footnote ¹²⁶ Following the signal gun, ‘40,000 blue lights were set off at once, and, as if by magic, a perfect amphitheatre of beautiful pale blue and red fire, comprising an area of four miles, burst at once upon the sight’.Footnote ¹²⁷ This auspicious beginning,

From that point on, all agreed, the exhibition was invisible, save for whatever pierced through the fog or came within a few feet of the observers. Even the presence of the directors in their ‘Eastern Court’ had to be ‘taken for granted. One pyramid also was lost to sight, and the other was not illuminated . . .’.Footnote ¹²⁹ As the Asiatic Journal summed up, ‘Great expectations were raised on this occasion, and it appears to be generally allowed that the féte altogether was a failure: all, at least, seem to have been disappointed that Rs. 20,000 should have produced nothing more.’Footnote ¹³⁰ None, surely, experienced greater expectations or greater disappointment than Bentinck, who reportedly stayed on the veranda watching what he could of the fireworks until eleven, when he finally retired to his bedchamber.Footnote ¹³¹

The exhibition had attracted criticism almost since its announcement, merging with and underscoring animadversions on the Charter Act itself. The Reformer marvelled at the perversity of ‘20,000 Rs. blown up in fireworks to commemorate an event [in] no ways advantageous to India’. The Act, it reminded readers, granted the governor-general absolute legislative and executive power, removing ‘even the small check which . . . the Supreme Court used to exercise’. How could ‘an occasion which robs the people of a part of their rights’ provide cause for celebration?Footnote ¹³² With few exceptions, commentators saw the fireworks’ considerable expense as a sign not of liberality, but of irresponsibility, on the part of the government. ‘Even were the new India Bill a real benefit to the people,’ averred the Bengal Hurkaru, ‘lavish expenditure upon such vanities in a time of general distress and clipping and cutting in all directions, would be, to say the least of it, exceedingly ill-timed.’Footnote ¹³³ The India Gazette concurred, remarking upon the ‘inconsistency of retrenching with one hand and flinging away with the other’.Footnote ¹³⁴ As usual, the object of censure in the press was to hold the government accountable to the public. ‘The money to be expended, is not the private property of Government,’ a correspondent to the Englishman remarked, ‘it is raised from the people.’Footnote ¹³⁵ According to the Reformer, such gratuitous outlay was thus a violation of public trust as well as an insult to ‘public feeling’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Had the exhibition come off as planned, it might have silenced some of the detractors. Instead, its failure vindicated them. Having earlier joined calls to redirect the money to charity, the India Gazette concluded its post-mortem with the question: ‘was this sum of twenty thousand rupees really such a waste as has been represented?’ Its answer, should any doubt remain, was rendered in the form of an observation: the morning after the exhibition, ‘a hundred poor aged and shivering wretches, were . . . scraping together . . . in front of Government house, the splinters of bamboos and sticks scattered by the fireworks’ as kindling for the day's uncertain meal.Footnote ¹³⁷ A similar assessment was given by Frederick John Shore, an upcountry judge and critic of the Bentinck regime, whose essays as ‘A Friend to India’ were widely published.Footnote ¹³⁸ ‘Had the sum been expended in building or endowing a College; in a remission of revenue; or even in feeding some of the starving thousands,’ Shore chided, ‘there would have been something to boast of’; instead, ‘it is gone’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Reformers thus turned the message of the fireworks on its head to reveal a despotism not enlightened, but selfish and aloof.

In this, the smoke proved an invaluable accessory, effacing the symbolic content of the exhibition and furnishing its own. Since the appearance of the programme, especially, commentators had discerned a political thrust to the pyrotechnics. The Englishman printed an ode on the occasion, containing the warning:

Needless to say, the last lines would come to appear prophetic. In the exhibition's aftermath, describing the nominal centrepiece, the same paper declared it ‘most ominously characteristic of the dark doings of the future Kings of the East in Council assembled, that the durbar was so completely enveloped in obscurity’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ All too easily, metaphors of darkness and obscurity supplanted the intended ones of light and clarity, compounding the interpretive difficulties attendant on a visual medium. It has been noted, in the context of early modern Europe, that observers at pyrotechnic displays rarely took away the intended messages.Footnote ¹⁴² One solution on the part of organizing authorities was to circulate descriptive texts, in the hope of disciplining the messy array of responses. But print was itself a flexible medium, subject to varied interpretation.Footnote ¹⁴³ This point was brought out in a satire by the upcountry administrator Henry Whitelock Torrens, writing under a pseudonym in the Meerut Observer. Having conceived, in an earlier piece, that the fireworks would be ripe for ‘allusion’ and the illustration of ‘measures, men, and their theories’, Torrens now professed to decipher ‘the meaning concealed’ in each act listed on the programme.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Here the pyrotechnist Powney was rendered a subversive. His ‘Eruption of Mount Etna’ stood for ‘Recent Courts of Proprietors during the Charter renewal discussion’. The ‘man in the pillory’ was the obstinate chairman of the directors ‘Mr. Marjoribanks, and the Board of Controul’. Something, meanwhile, ‘was certainly meant by putting twenty-four puppets to do duty for directors, and also dressing them up in swaddling clothes’. In Torrens’ elaborate allegory, the Virgilian motto emblazoned on the Company's ‘Eastern Court’ conveyed not a pledge, but a boast: ‘i.e. “we've won the day, and got back our Charter”’. Breaking or shifting character towards the end, Torrens reasoned that the fireworks must have contained ‘some deep stroke of policy’ to warrant their expense. Due to the smoke, however, ‘soi-disant spectators’ in Calcutta ‘had as much idea of what details of fizzing and banging were going on’ as he did a thousand miles away in Meerut. It was thus in a deeply ironic sense that Torrens pronounced Bentinck's display ‘so enlightened an undertaking’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Greater mishaps had not prevented rulers in Europe from distributing idealized visual and textual accounts of pyrotechnic displays. Indeed, these generally held more propaganda value than the events themselves.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Having effectively ceased censorship of the press, however, Bentinck lacked the means of controlling the popular narrative.

Bentinck had also misjudged the inclination of this narrative, especially among influential segments of the Indian population. ‘As far as I have seen the opinions of the Native Newspapers,’ he declared in his Minute of 14 October, ‘all seem to agree in praising the sound wise and liberal principles, upon which this measure [the Charter Act] has been founded.’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The exhibition was calculated less to overcome opposition than to marshal nascent support. As we have seen, however, Indian-managed publications like the Reformer and Gyannaneshun were at least as critical of the Charter Act as their European-managed counterparts. By late 1833, there was reportedly a ‘stir among the Natives’ to petition parliament against the Act's offensive clauses.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Such indications may explain why commentators readily disbelieved Bentinck's stated rationale for the fireworks. ‘The natives were aware of the discussions which were going on in England,’ deduced Shore; the exhibition was arranged ‘to make it appear that the East India Company had gained their point’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In an apparently unsatirical moment, Torrens surmised that the aim had been to glean ‘the extent of disaffection to Government among that highly important and influential class, the Calcutta Baboos’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ By the time Shore and Torrens were writing, days or weeks after the fact, the celebration appeared only to have exacerbated Indian disaffection. For one commentator in Gyannaneshun, events that night had been enough to discredit the European rulers’ pretensions to advanced ‘knowledge and civilisation’. This ‘Impartial Observer’ had been one of a group of Indians watching the fireworks from the roof of the Town Hall. At one point a European had shoved his way in, and when one of the group protested, ‘not only heaped the most indecent abuses upon him but even attempted to beat him’. For the ‘Impartial Observer’, the ‘pride of colour’ demonstrated in this and several other incidents made the European character unworthy of imitation, whatever the claims of the government or its supporters.Footnote ¹⁵¹ These sentiments were echoed by another letter in the India Gazette, attributed to ‘A Poor Bengallee’ who had ‘heard many stories about the fireworks of Government’ but was likewise disenchanted by the violence at Town Hall. His complaint was even more sharply directed at Bentinck's administration: ‘You better kill us all and reign governors of desolate India, not suffocate our feelings.’Footnote ¹⁵² The letters of ‘An Impartial Observer’ and ‘A Poor Bengallee’ suggested that Bentinck's attempt to garner Indian support had backfired. They also undermined central tenets of the Charter Act: that a strengthened despotism would thwart European oppression and, moreover, that the populace was eager to be remade in its rulers’ image. The letters offered, finally, another indication that the celebration had galvanized the public it was meant to contain. Commenting on the abuses at Town Hall, the Bengal Hurkaru declared that while the offenders had escaped punishment by a tribunal of the state, their guilt had been established by ‘another and a higher one—that of the public’.Footnote ¹⁵³