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Updated: May 6, 2025
I remember how Jim and Nand used to come into my study for a kiss and then go hastily out upon urgent affairs. I'm for that. . . . I've got my own folk and they make the rest of the world thin and pale. The blessedness of babies is beyond words, but the blessedness of a wife is such that one can't start in on it."
Macaulay has not overstated Indian weaknesses in his Essay on Warren Hastings, where he has occasion to describe the character of Nand Komar, who, as a Bengali man-of-the-pen, appears to have been a marked type of all that is most unpleasing in the Hindoo character.
Nand Kumar had always been hostile to Hastings. Now, when Hastings was in danger, was threatened with defeat and with disgrace, Nand Kumar came forward with a whole string of accusations against him, accusations to which Francis, Clavering, and Monson listened eagerly.
It had aroused some suspicion even before the disclaimer, on account of the signature, which did not resemble her signature in undoubted and authentic communications. On the question of the forged bond Nand Kumar was duly and apparently fairly tried. It was not very much of a charge. The business was very old.
They treated him as if he were little better than a clerk in the Company's service; they acted as if their one purpose was to drive him out of public life. As soon as it was plain that the new men of the new Council were hostile to Hastings, Hastings's enemies were eager enough to come forward and help in the work. One of Hastings's oldest and bitterest enemies was the Brahmin Nand Kumar.
Every one must form as best he may his own judgment upon the matter and the men; but Sir James Stephen's opinion is one that must be taken into account in any attempt to decide. The death of Nand Kumar did not end the struggle between Hastings and his three antagonists.
"I did not press him to take it. "Please, sir," he went on after a pause, putting his nand in his pocket, "mother gave me some goodies, and I kept them till I saw you come back, and here they are, sir." Does any reader doubt what I did or said upon this? I said, "Thank you, my darling," and I ate them up every one of them, that he might see me eat them before he left the house.
The others immediately voted Clavering into the chair, summoned Nand Kumar before them, listened to all that he had to say, and on that evidence, in the absence of the accused man, the self-constituted tribunal found Hastings guilty of taking bribes from the princess, and ordered him to repay the sum of thirty-five thousand pounds to the public treasury.
But it is only due to the memory of a great man to remember that both in the case of the Rohilla war and in the case of Nand Kumar there were two sides to the question, and that Hastings's side has not always been investigated with the care it deserves.
On August 5, 1775, Nand Kumar was hanged on the Maidan outside Calcutta. He met his death with the composed courage of a man who looked upon himself as a martyr. Whatever his offences may have been, he had done nothing which in his own eyes, or in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen, called for the pitiless punishment which fell upon him.
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