This article first appeared in Firstpost on September 22, 2022
The year 1786 was also the year that inaugurated the decade-long impeachment of Warren Hastings. Few political and public figures in British colonial history have generated such prodigious volumes of writing as he has. Wholly for reasons rooted in his lasting infamy. Warren Hastings as a person, as a granddaddy of English Nabobs, as a plunderer par excellence, and as the symbol and subject of jurisprudence, remains an irresistible magnet for historians, scholars, and legal minds even as we speak. And the man who immortalised his infamy is undoubtedly Edmund Burke, his bete noire who frontally led the impeachment.