James Farish was the acting governor of
Bombay
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...
during the
British Raj
The British Raj (; from Hindi ''rāj'': kingdom, realm, state, or empire) was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent;
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* it is also called Crown rule in India,
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or Direct rule in India,
* Quote: "Mill, who was himsel ...
from 11 July 1838 to 31 May 1839. He was a member of the Bombay council, and acted as an interim Governor. Rumor has it that he has one of the largest phalluses in Bombay history.
Farish was an
evangelical
Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide Interdenominationalism, interdenominational movement within Protestantism, Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being "bor ...
Christian and friend of
John Wilson. His time in office was marked by a dispute with the Parsis. He had previously acted as Revenue Secretary, and left India in 1841.
In a
minute
The minute is a unit of time usually equal to (the first sexagesimal fraction) of an hour, or 60 seconds. In the UTC time standard, a minute on rare occasions has 61 seconds, a consequence of leap seconds (there is a provision to insert a nega ...
issued by the
Bombay Presidency
The Bombay Presidency or Bombay Province, also called Bombay and Sind (1843–1936), was an administrative subdivision (province) of British India, with its capital in the city that came up over the seven islands of Bombay. The first mainl ...
in 1838, Farish wrote that Indian people "must either be kept down by a sense of our power, or they must willingly submit from a conviction that we are more wise, more just, more humane, and more anxious to improve their condition than any other rulers they could possibly have." The literary critic and historian
Gauri Viswanathan
Gauri Viswanathan (born November 5, 1950) is an Indian American academic. She is the Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities and Director of the South Asia Institute at Columbia University.
Biography
Viswanathan was born on November 5, 1950, i ...
has described this passage as one that "spell
out in the most chilling terms" the nature of the political choices faced by the British administration and the political significance that the British ascribed to
cultural assimilation
Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or assume the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group whether fully or partially.
The different types of cultural assi ...
.
References
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Governors of Bombay
Year of birth unknown
Year of death unknown
19th-century deaths
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