"And that as Mahomed Reza Khân can no longer be considered by us as one to whom such a power can safely be committed, we trust to your local knowledge the selection of some person well qualified for the affairs of government, and of whose attachment to the Company you shall be well assured. Such person you will recommend to the Nabob, to succeed Mahomed Reza, as minister of the government, and guardian of the Nabob's minority; and we persuade ourselves that the Nabob will pay such regard to your recommendation as to invest him with the necessary power and authority.
"As the advantages which the Company may receive from the appointment of such minister will depend on his readiness to promote our views and advance our interest, we are willing to allow him so liberal a gratification as may excite his zeal and insure his attachment to the Company; we therefore empower you to grant to the person whom you shall think worthy of this trust an annual allowance not exceeding three lacs of rupees, which we consider not only as a munificent reward for any services he shall render the Company, but sufficient to enable him to support his station with suitable rank and dignity. And here we must add, that, in the choice you shall make of a person to be the active minister of the Nabob's government, we hope and trust that you will show yourselves worthy of the confidence we have placed in you by being actuated therein by no other motives than those of the public good and the safety and interest of the Company."
My Lords, here they have given a reward, and they have described a person fit to succeed in all capacities the man whom they had thought fit to depose. Now, as we have seen how Mr. Hastings obeyed the Company's orders in the manner of removing Mahomed Reza Khân from his office, let us see how he obeyed their order for filling it up. Your Lordships will naturally suppose that he made all the orders of Mahometan and Hindoo princes to pass in strict review before him; that he had considered their age, authority, dignity, the goodness of their manners; and upon the collation of all these circumstances had chosen a person fit to be a regent to guard the Nabob's minority from all rapacity whatever, and fit to instruct him in everything. I will give your Lordships Mr. Hastings's own idea of the person necessary to fill such offices.
"That his rank ought to be such as at least ought not to wound the Nabob's honor, or lessen his credit in the estimation of the people, by the magisterial command which the new guardian must exercise over him,—with abilities and vigor of mind equal to the support of that authority; and the world will expect that the guardian be especially qualified by his own acquired endowments to discharge the duties of that relation in the education of his young pupil, to inspire him with sentiments suitable to his birth, and to instruct him in the principles of his religion."
This, upon another occasion, is Mr. Hastings's sense of the man who ought to be placed in that situation of trust in which the Company ordered him to place him. Did Mr. Hastings obey that order? No, my Lords, he appointed no man to fill that office. What, no man at all? No, he appointed no person at all in the sense which is mentioned there, which constantly describes a person at least of the male sex: he appointed a woman to fill that office; he appointed a woman, in a country where no woman can be seen, where no woman can be spoken to by any one without a curtain between them; for all these various duties, requiring all these qualifications described by himself, he appointed a woman. Do you want more proof than this violent transgression of the Company's orders upon that occasion that some corrupt motive must have influenced him?
My Lords, it is necessary for me to state the situation of the family, that you may judge from thence of the corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings's proceedings. The Nabob Jaffier Ali Khân had among the women of his seraglio a person called Munny Begum. She was a dancing-girl, whom he had seen at some entertainment; and as he was of a licentious turn, this dancing-girl, in the course of her profession as a prostitute, so far inveigled the Nabob, that, having a child or pretending to have had a child by him, he brought her into the seraglio; and the Company's servants sold to that son the succession of that father. This woman had been sold as a slave,—her profession a dancer, her occupation a prostitute. And, my Lords, this woman having put her natural son, as we state, and shall prove, in the place of the legitimate offspring of the Nabob, having got him placed by the Company's servants on the musnud, she came to be at the head of that part of the household which relates to the women: which is a large and considerable trust in a country where polygamy is admitted, and where women of great rank may possibly be attended by two thousand of the same sex in inferior situations. As soon as the legitimate son of the Nabob came to the musnud, there was no ground for keeping this woman any longer in that situation; and upon an application of the Company to Mahomed Reza Khân to know who ought to have the right of superiority, he answered, as he ought to have done, that, though all the women of the seraglio ought to have honor, yet the mother of the Nabob ought to have the superiority of it. Therefore this woman was removed, and the mother of the Nabob was placed in her situation. In that situation Mr. Hastings found the seraglio. If his duties had gone no further than the regulation of an Eastern household, he ought to have kept the Nabob's mother there by the rules of that country.
What did he do? Not satisfied with giving to this prostitute every favor that she could desire, (and money must be the natural object of such a person,) Mr. Hastings deposes the Nabob's own mother, turns her out of the employment, and puts at the head of the seraglio this prostitute, who at the best, in relation to him, could only be a step-mother. If you heard no more, do your Lordships want anything further to convince you that this must be a violent, atrocious, and corrupt act,—suppose it had gone no further than the seraglio? But when I call this woman a dancing-girl, I state something lower than Europeans have an idea of respecting that situation. She was born a slave, bred a dancing-girl. Her dancing was not any of those noble and majestic movements which make part of the entertainment of the most wise, of the education of the most virtuous, which improve the manners without corrupting the morals of all civilized people, and of which, among uncivilized people, the professors have their due share of admiration; but these dances were not decent to be seen nor fit to be related. I shall pass them by. Your Lordships are to suppose the lowest degree of infamy in occupation and situation, when I tell you that Munny Begum was a slave and a dancing-girl.
The history of the Munny Begum is this. "At a village called Balkonda, near Sekundra, there lived a widow, who, from her great poverty, not being able to bring up her daughter Munny, gave her to a slave-girl belonging to Summin Ali Khân, whose name was Bissoo. During the space of five years she lived at Shahjehanabad, and was educated by Bissoo after the manner of a dancing-girl. Afterwards the Nabob Shamut Jung, upon the marriage of Ikram ul Dowlah, brother to the Nabob Surajah ul Dowlah, sent for Bissoo Beg's set of dancing-girls from Shahjehanabad, of which Munny Begum was one, and allowed them ten thousand rupees for their expenses, to dance at the wedding. While the ceremony was celebrating, they were kept by the Nabob; but some months afterwards he dismissed them, and they took up their residence in this city. Mir Mahomed Jaffier Khân then took them into keeping, and allowed Munny and her set five hundred rupees per month, till at length, finding that Munny was pregnant, he took her into his own house. She gave birth to the Nabob Nujim ul Dowlah, and in this manner has she remained in the Nabob's family ever since."
Now it required a very peculiar mode of selection to take such a woman, so circumstanced, (resembling whom there was not just such another,) to depose the Nabob's own mother from the superiority of the household, and to substitute this woman. It would have been an abominable abuse, and would have implied corruption in the grossest degree, if Mr. Hastings had stopped there. He not only did this, but he put her, this woman, in the very place of Mahomed Reza Khân: he made her guardian, he made her regent, he made her viceroy, he made her the representative of the native government of the country in the eyes of strangers. There was not a trust, not a dignity in the country, which he did not put, during the minority of this unhappy person, her step-son, into the hands of this woman.
Reject, if you please, the strong presumption of corruption in disobeying the order of the Company directing him to select a man fit to supply the place of Mahomed Reza Khân, to exercise all the great and arduous functions of government and of justice, as well as the regulation of the Nabob's household; and then I will venture to say, that neither your Lordships, nor any man living, when he hears of this appointment, does or can hesitate a moment in concluding that it is the result of corruption, and that you only want to be informed what the corruption was. Here is such an arrangement as I believe never was before heard of: a secluded woman in the place of a man of the world; a fantastic dancing-girl in the place of a grave magistrate; a slave in the place of a woman of quality; a common prostitute made to superintend the education of a young prince; and a step-mother, a name of horror in all countries, made to supersede the natural mother from whose body the Nabob had sprung.