On the occasion of the birth anniversary of Satyendra Prasanna Sinha a program was organized by the Subharti Law College, to pay tribute to the unsung heroes of India’s Freedom Movement. To provide detailed knowledge about Sh. Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, Dr. Sarika Tyagi, Associate Professor, was invited by Shalini Goel.
As the speaker, detailed information about Satyendra Prasad Sinha was provided by Dr. Sarika Tyagi. She said that Satyendra Prasanna Sinha was a prominent Indian lawyer and statesman and was the first Governor of Bihar and Orissa, the first Indian Advocate-General of Bengal, the first Indian to become a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, and the first Indian to become a member of the British ministry.
He was born in Raipur in Bengal in 1863. He entered Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1878, married Gobinda Mohini, had four sons and three daughters, in 1880, and left for England in 1881 without taking a degree.
In England, he joined Lincoln’s Inn where he won a scholarship of £50 a year for four years to study Roman Law, Jurisprudence, Constitutional Law, and International Law. Later he also won the Lincoln’s Inn scholarship of £100 for three years. Sh. Sinha was called to the Bar in 1886 and finished his education by touring the European continent. In 1886, he returned to Calcutta where he joined the City College as a lecturer in law and he also practiced as a barrister.
In 1903, Sinha became Standing Counsel to the Government of India overriding the claims of an English Barrister. He was the first Indian to be appointed as Advocate-General of Bengal in 1905, a post that was confirmed in 1908. His legal practice in 1908 was so lucrative that accepting the government’s invitation meant a cut in his annual income of £10,000. Sinha’s first inclination was to turn down the viceroy’s invitation, but Jinnah and Gokhale convinced him to accept the job.[10] He also became the first Indian to enter the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1909. He was knighted in the New Year Honours on 1 January 1915. Sinha was elected President of the Indian National Congress in 1915 at the Bombay session of Congress, in 1917, Sinha returned to England to work as an Assistant for Secretary of State, Edwin Samuel Montagu. Later, he also worked as a member of the Imperial War Cabinet and Conference along with the Maharaja of Bikaner, Ganga Singh following the outbreak of the First World War, and represented India in Europe’s Peace Conference in 1919. In the same year, he was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for India and also raised to the peerage as Baron Sinha of Raipur in the Presidency of Bengal. He became the first Indian member of the British House of Lords, taking his seat in February 1919. He was instrumental in passing the Government of India Act, 1919 through the House of Lords.
He returned to India in 1920 and was appointed as the first governor of the Province of Bihar and Orissa. His term as Governor did not last long and he served in this position for 11 months on grounds of bad health. In 1926, Sinha went back to England and joined the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London but bad health forced him to return to India. Shantiniketan was originally a part of the ancestral zamindari of the Sinha family of Raipur, Birbhum.[12] Satyendra Prasad Sinha donated to the construction of Sinha Sadan with a clock tower and bell. It was in this building that Oxford University conferred its honorary doctorate on the poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Sh. Sinha died on 4 March 1928 at Berhampore.
His published works are The Future of India: Presidential Address to the Indian National Congress, 1915 (London: J. Truscott & Son, 1916).
The Insistent Claims of Indian Reform: Speeches at the Banquet in London to Lord Sinha on 7th March 1919 (London: P. L. Warner, 1919)
Speeches and Writings of Lord Sinha, with a Portrait and a Sketch (Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., 1919)
During the program Dr. Reena Bishnoi, Dr. Ashutosh Garg, Dr. Prem Chandra, Ms. Afreen Almas, Sh. Vikas Tyagi, Ms. Ana Sisodia, Ms. Anjali Yadav and Ms. Anjum Jahan was present
