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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
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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

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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.

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