Which of the following Governor General showed great courage and humanity by his decision to abolish sati?

Q. Which of the following Governor-General showed great courage and humanity by his decision to abolish sati?

1. Dalhousie
2. William Bentinck
3. Charles Metcalfe
4. Henry Hardinge

Answer: William Bentinck

It was William Bentinck, who showed great courage and humanity by his decision to abolish suttee (sati), the Hindu custom of burning widows alive with the corpses of their husbands.

Sati or suttee was a largely historical practice found chiefly among Hindus in the northern and pre-modern regions of South Asia, in which a widow sacrifices herself by sitting atop her deceased husband's funeral pyre.

During the early modern Mughal period, sati was notably associated with elite Hindu Rajput clans in western India, marking one of the points of divergence between Rajput culture and Islamic Mughal culture, which allowed widow remarriage. In the early 19th century, the British East India Company, in the process of extending its rule to most of India, initially tolerated the practice; William Carey, a Christian evangelist, noted 438 incidences within a 30-mile (48-km) radius of the capital Calcutta, in 1803, despite its ban within Calcutta. Between 1815 and 1818, the number of incidents of sati in Bengal doubled from 378 to 839. Opposition to the practice of sati by Christian evangelists, such as Carey, and Hindu reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy, ultimately led the Governor-General of India Lord William Bentinck to enact the Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829, declaring the practice of burning or burying alive of Hindu widows to be punishable by the criminal courts.

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Who stopped the Sati system in India?
Governor-General of India Lord William Bentinck stopped sati system in Indian by enacting the Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829.

Who opposed the abolition of sati system?

Bhabani Charan Bandyopadhyay was a noted Indian journalist, author and an orator. He was adored for his deftness in speech. He was a conservative Hindu, who opposed Ram Mohan Roy in the abolition of Sati System. He was the founder of the Dharma Sabha. After his death, work on his life and history (Jeebancharit) was published in 1849 under the custody of his son, Raj Krishna Bandyopadhyay, the then Secretary of the Dharma Sabha.