The trial of Nand Kumar 1775
The story of the conflict in the Council and the
discomfiture of Warren Hastings and Barwell encouraged Nand Kumar, who had some
old grouse against Warren Hastings, to bring some charges of corruption and
nepotism against the Governor-General. On 11 March 1775, Francis produced a
letter from Nand Kumar before the Council which charged Warren Hastings of
having accepted Rs 3 ½ lakhs as gratification from Mumry Begum for appointing
the latter as guardian of the minor Nawab, Mubarak-ud-Daulah. A few days later,
Nand Kumar offered to appear before the Council to substantiate the charges.
Warren Hastings refused to recognize the right of the Council to sit in
judgement on him and dissolved the Council in a huff. Warren Hastings decried
Nand Kumar as ‘the basset of mankind’, ‘a wretch’, and as coming from ‘the
dregs of the people’. Warren Hastings’ action lent suspicion to the whole case
and convinced the trio about the truth of Nand Kumar’s charges. The trio sought
the advice of the law officers for the recovery of the amount from Warren
Hastings.
Meantime, Warren Hastings and his friends planned a counter
offensive against Nand Kumar. On 19 April 1775, one Kamal-ud-din brought
charges against Nand Kumar and Fowke for having coerced him to sign a petition
containing various allegations against Hastings and Barwell. The case was
referred to the Supreme Court. A more sensational charge against Nand Kumar was
filed by Mohan Prasad, a pleader, acting on behalf of the executor of a banker
named Balaki Dass (deceased) alleging that a certain Jewels Bond purporting to
be signed by Balaki Dass and to be an acknowledgement by him of a debt due to
Nand Kumar was a forgery. On 6 May 1775, Nand Kumar was arrested for forgery
and hanged by a majority decision of an European jury.
Critics of Warren Hastings and Impey have described the
trial and execution of Nand Kumar as ‘a judicial murder’ and have accused
Warren Hastings and Impey to have acted in collusion. Macaulay believed that
Warren Hastings was the real prosecutor and wrote that ‘only idiots and
biographers doubt that Warren Hastings was not the real prosecutor’. In this
context the comments of Mr. Chambers, one of the four judges of the supreme
court are revealing. He wrote, ‘I argued against the general unfitness of
punishing forgery with death in this country. My arguments on this head were
overruled in private as they had been in public. The credit of Nand Kumar’s
evidence against the government was thus not only invalidated, it was destroyed
entirely by taking the witness not only out of the way but out of the world’.
Apologists of Warren Hastings like J. F. Stephen contend that the prosecution
of Nand Kumar for forgery in 1775 was a mere coincidence and that Warren
Hastings had no hand in the trial and ultimate punishment of Nand Kumar. One,
however, cannot escape the conclusion that Nand Kumar was punished on weak
evidence and the temper of the Chief Justice – Impey was a close friend of
Warren Hastings – played the decisive part. True, the law of England provided
for capital punishment for forgery, but the same had never been applied in
Calcutta. A few years earlier the Mayor’s court in Calcutta which followed the
English criminal law and pardoned a prominent Bengali, who was sentenced to
death for forgery. Thompson and Garratt describe the whole affair as ‘a
scandalous travesty of decency’ while P. E. Roberts attributes it to ‘anchor of
judgment’ on the part of the judges and the sentence of death as ‘miscarriage
of justice’. Evidently, the punishment accorded to Nand Kumar was excessive and
even unjust because no Indian law prescribed death penalty for forgery.
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