ABSTRACT
With Lord Bentinck's prohibition of suttee a new social conscience came to the Indian Government, and the next thirty years saw them warring against female infanticide, thuggee, human sacrifice, slavery, suttee, and all forms of indigenous barbarity. As suttee was a matter of internal polity, residents at native courts only expressed unofficially the abhorrence of their own Government when it occurred. It was not until that masterful man Lord Dalhousie became Governor-General that interference took a peremptory form. If the honour of the abolition within British India is Bentinck's, that of the final suppression of suttee by native states is largely Dalhousie's. Though practically no promises were made in his time, he insisted that promises already made must be kept, and those who broke them punished. It was this idealization of Udaipur that made the efforts of the British Government to extirpate suttee in native states so slow in meeting with success.
