Britain launches a successful campaign in Bengal,…

Britain launches a successful campaign in Bengal, led by English Baptist missionary and linguist William Carey, to stamp out the practice of the “suttee”, the ostensibly voluntary self-immolation of the widow on her husband’s pyre. (In practice, a widow who refuses self-immolation is often forcibly thrown on the pyre by relatives and friends of her husband to forestall the visitation of plague or death upon the village).

The practice is abolished on December 4, 1829, when, in the face of fierce opposition, British Lord William Bentinck, who had been appointed Governor-General of India in 1827, carries a regulation declaring that all who abet suttee in India are guilty of culpable homicide.

Bentinck’s principal concern is to turn around the loss-making British East India Company, in order to ensure that the British government will renew its charter.

The British authorities also begin the active suppression of the fraternity of the Thugee, professional assassins and religious fanatics devoted to Kali, one of the Hindu Tantric Goddesses.

Bentinck engages in an extensive range of cost-cutting measures, earning the lasting enmity of many military men whose wages are cut.

Although his financial management of India is quite impressive, his modernizing projects also include a policy of westernization, influenced by the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, which is more controversial.

Reforming the court system, he makes English, rather than Persian, the language of the higher courts and encourages western-style education for Indians in order to provide more educated Indians for service in the British bureaucracy.

Although his reforms meet little resistance among native Indians at the time, it will later be argued that they bring on the dissatisfaction that ultimately leads to the Great Mutiny of 1857.

His reputation for ruthless financial efficiency and disregard for Indian culture leads to the much-repeated story that he had once planned to demolish the Taj Mahal and sell off the marble.

According to Bentinck's biographer John Rosselli, the story arose from Bentinck's fund-raising sale of discarded marble from Agra Fort and of the metal from a famous but obsolete Agra cannon.