Suttee, with Lord Hastings Shown as Accepting Bribes to Allow Its Continuation

Thomas Rowlandson's coloured aquatint renders a sati pyre in lurid orange and black smoke, a woman pressed against her husband's body as flames rise around a crowd of musicians and mourners. At right, a portly European clergyman and a figure identifiable by text as Lord Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, pocket coins — the political charge being that colonial administration tolerated widow immolation for corrupt gain. The handling is pure Rowlandson: loose etched line flooded with aquatint wash, grotesque physiognomies deployed without restraint across both Indian and British figures. Sheets like this one — partisan, topical, image-driven — fed directly into the sequential narrative traditions from which comic strips and graphic journalism would emerge.