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The historical anatomy of a contact zone : Calcutta in the eighteenth century

Indian Economic Social History Review 2011 48: 55
DOI: 10.1177/001946461004800103
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The historical anatomy of a contact zone:
Calcutta in the eighteenth century
Kapil Raj
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Founded in 1690 as an entrepôt by the English East India Company, Calcutta has been at the
intersection of a number of heterogeneous long- and short-range networks of trade, finance,
diplomacy, law, crafts and learning. This article explores the history of the first century of its
existence during which it grew from insignificance to become the second most important city
of the British Empire. During this period Calcutta also emerged as a world-city of scientific
knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making, geography, history, linguistics
and ethnology. Calcutta thus provides an excellent case study of the co-construction of
knowledge and urbanity in the early modern context of globalisation. As a contact zone between
different ethnic, professional and religious communities, each with their specific knowledge
practices, this article shows that new forms of knowledge, many at the heart of the second sci-
entific revolution, were produced in this city through attempts at recognising and managing
difference in this cosmopolitan context.
Keywords: South Asia, eighteenth century, contact zones, urban history, history of science, law,
colonialism
As a historian of science focusing on the role of circulation and intercultural

exchange in the emergence and reshaping of knowledge in the early modern and
modern periods, I have been progressively drawn to query the nature of the space
in which knowledge-producing encounters occur. The generally pervading repre-
sentations, especially between Europeans and non-Europeans, have been over-
determined by two iconographic genres: one associated with European travel and
discovery accounts, typically portraying overdressed Europeans meeting under
An earlier version of this article appeared in French in the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,
Vol. 55, 2008, pp. 70–100.
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 48, 1 (2011): 55–82
SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/001946461004800103

56 / KAPIL RAJ
clad, or over tattooed, indigenous populations on distant beaches or in dense tro-

pical forests—in all events in natural settings, as untouched by human civilisation
as possible; the other genre is associated with South Asian and Chinese imperial
court culture, depicting European missionaries, or ambassadors, presenting their
credentials and gifts to Asian emperors in the highly ritualised and grammatical-
ised structure of the court.1 And although a lot has been made of the Jesuits in the
Qing court, these encounters rarely gave rise to innovative knowledge production
in any significant sense of the term, apart of course from ostensibly ‘transferring’
European calendrical astronomy to the imperial bureaucracy and crucially shaping
early-modern European representations of the oriental ‘other’. For the construction
of knowledge as such, we have to look to long-term interaction between cultures—
that is, to the process rather than to the event.
However, although the process of intercultural encounter has been the focus of
a number of studies, few have actually dwelled on the question of knowledge
making.2 For this purpose, Mary-Louise Pratt’s now well-known concept of the
‘contact zone’ is particularly useful.3 Pratt defines the ‘contact zone’ as:
...the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come

into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving
conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. [It] is an
attempt to involve the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously
separated by geographic and historic disjunctures, and whose trajectories now
intersect... By using the term ‘contact’, I aim to foreground the interactive,
improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or sup-
pressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A ‘contact’ per-
spective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to
each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers
and ‘travelees’, not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of co-
presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within
radically asymmetrical relations of power.4
Unfortunately, neither Pratt nor other scholars inspired by the idea of contact
zones deploy the term to focus on any specific and geographically circumscribed
space of place. Moreover, they do not treat encounter as a sustained and historical
process—as ‘ongoing relations’ in Pratt’s definition might suggest.5 In this article
1
B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific; A. Jackson and A. Jaffer, eds., Encounters.
2
The locus classicus on the subject is P.D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. See
also F. Trivellato, ‘Juifs de Livourne, Italiens de Lisbonne, hindous de Goa’, pp. 581–603.
3
The references are numerous, but see, T. Ballantyne and A. Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact.
4
M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 6–7. See also R. White, The Middle Ground.
5
See for instance D. Kennedy, ‘British Exploration in the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 1879–1900.

The historical anatomy of a contact zone / 57
I would like to take both the geographical and historical character of the contact
zone seriously by exploring the changing anatomy of one such place: Calcutta
during the eighteenth century.
Set up in 1690 as a contact zone between the East India Company and its
suppliers of exports from north and east India, it is widely known that Calcutta
grew from a ‘straggling village of mud-huts’ at the end of the seventeenth century
to become the largest clearing-house of trade in Asia, the second most-important
city of the British Empire in the 1820s, capital of British India and the nerve cen-
tre of British expansion into the Far East and the Pacific. Less well-known perhaps
is the fact that during the same period Calcutta also emerged as a world-renowned
centre of scientific knowledge-making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making,
geography, history, linguistics and ethnology, to name but a few, and a world
pioneer in modern public education.
Although Calcutta is unanimously acknowledged as one of the most important
cities in the East from the late eighteenth century onwards, little has been written
about its rise to, and role as, a world capital of scientific knowledge construction.
Indeed, it was in this city that the first surveying and mapping institution in the
British empire was instituted in 1767 (preceding the foundation of the Ordnance
Survey of Great Britain and Ireland by 25 years); that the first veritable modern
botanic garden in the empire was created in 1787; that the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, modelled on the Royal Society of London, was founded in 1784. It was,
for instance, to the Asiatic Society in 1786 that Sir William Jones (1746–1794)
announced the structural affinity between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, thus laying
the principles of scientific linguistics, comparative philology and Indology.6 Like-
wise, it was in Calcutta in 1800 that the College of Fort William, the first institution
for higher education outside the British Isles, was founded with the assent of the
British parliament with a budget comparable to that of Oxford and Cambridge.
Indeed, already in 1792, Calcutta’s worldwide fame was such that, upon the advice
of none less than Thomas Jefferson, the newly founded United States of America
established its first consulate outside of Europe.7 It was also in Calcutta that the
first type fonts in Bengali and Devanagri scripts were cut in 1780 and the first
English-language newspapers were printed at the end of the eighteenth century,
6
The Asiatic Society and its founder-president William Jones have, of course, been the object of
much writing, but none of this scholarship has focused on Calcutta as a space and the urban dimension.
7
Acting upon the advice of Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, and the Senate, President George
Washington nominated Benjamin Joy of Newbury Port as the first American Consul to Calcutta on
19 November 1792. However, Joy, who reached Calcutta in April 1794, was never recognised as
Consul by the English East India Company, but was nonetheless permitted to ‘reside here as a Com-
mercial Agent subject to the Civil and Criminal Jurisdiction of this Country...’. See British Library,
India Office Records (henceforth IOR), Home Miscellaneous Series, H/439, Applications from the
Americans and Portuguese to be allowed Public Consuls in India, pp. 1–12.

58 / KAPIL RAJ
making it the birthplace of large-scale printing in the Subcontinent. Finally, it

was in here that the world’s first submarine telegraphic experiments were conducted
in 1839. One of the main trading ports in South Asia, Calcutta was to become the
hub of British expansion as much into Southeast Asia and China as into the Pacific
in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
The Founding and First Decades of Calcutta
Like a number of other world cities such as Madrid, Chicago or Singapore, the
existence and prosperity of Calcutta seems counter-intuitive. Until the end of the
seventeenth century, the principal urban centres of Bengal were situated elsewhere:
Rajmahal and Muxudabad (later known as Murshidabad) in the north, Nadia in
the centre, and Dhaka in the east. The region’s principal port, Chittagong, lying to
the east of the massive delta that the Ganges forms with the Brahmaputra, not far
from the Arakan frontier, suffered from the major handicap of being too far removed
from the massive trade of the Ganges valley which found its outlet in Satgaon, a
smaller port situated on the west bank of the Bhagirathi (known in European lan-
guages as the Hooghly), the principal distributary of the Ganges.8 It was thus in
the immediate vicinity of the latter that the Portuguese set up their main trading
post in the region at Bandel in the 1530s. Owing, however, to the progressive silt-
ing up of the river, Satgaon began losing its importance and a part of its resident
community, especially the north Indian and Gujarati bankers and merchants, moved
downstream and some set themselves up on the opposite bank, founding the towns
of Gobindpur and Sutanati.9 More accessible to large ships, Sutanati, as its name
indicates—suta and nati are Bengali for cotton and bale respectively—specialised
in the cotton trade and rapidly rose to become one its main markets in the region.
And if, in the course of the seventeenth century, the Dutch, the English and later,
the French chose to build their factories on the west bank in the neighbourhood of
Sutanati and Bandel (respectively in Chinchura, Hughly and Chandernagore), it
was more to benefit from the commercial and financial networks that had developed
around the Portuguese in the course of the sixteenth century in order to finance
intercontinental trade than for navigational convenience. This infrastructure was
crucial to all traders in the light of the growing importance of Bengal the exports
of which represented almost half of European trade with Asia at the beginning of
the eighteenth century.10
8
For a contemporary description of Satgaon, see the account of the Venetian merchant Cesare
Fedrici’s travels in Asia (1563–1581), Viaggio de M. Cesare de I Fedrici, nell’India Orientale, et
oltra l’India, 1587, pp. 91–3. The account was translated into English and published in the follow-
ing year by Thomas Hickock as The Voyage and Trauaile of M.C. Frederick, London, 1588.
9
C.R. Wilson, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal, Vol 1, p. 128.
10
P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, p. 29.

The foundation in 1690 by the East India Company of an English entrepôt on

the east bank of the river, downstream of their European rivals was purely fortuit-
ous. Having been evicted from Hughly by Mughal forces in 1686 for the bellicose
attitude of the English East India Company, some of its employees under the
command of one of its chief merchants, Job Charnock (d. 1693), left their factory
there and, after having unsuccessfully tried to settle near the mouth of the Hooghly,
eventually established themselves in 1690 in Sutanati where they already had
some dealings with the merchants as well as some dilapidated lodgings. They
eventually moved to Dihi Kalkatah, a small village situated on a promontary over-
looking the Hooghly between Sutanati to the north and Gobindpur immediately
to the south. It was here in 1698, through the intermediation of the Armenian
merchant-diplomat, Khwaja Israel di Sarhat, that they obtained zamindari (rent
farming) rights over part of a Mughal estate within which the three villages were
situated.11 In addition to its proximity to the important cotton markets and bankers
of Gobindpur and Sutanati, the site of Dihi Kalkatah was also strategically located
just above a bend in the river, allowing the English to keep a close watch on the
activities of the other Europeans and Asian merchants established further up-
stream.12 Fort William—completed in 1712, between the settlement and the
Hooghly—was erected to protect the Company’s interests.
However, this location also had a major drawback. Apart from the fact that it
was situated on the wrong side of the river with respect to its hinterland, the site
was also particularly unhealthy and has, not without reason, earned the sobriquet
of ‘the city in the swamp’.13 Visiting it on numerous occasions during the first
three decades of its existence, Alexander Hamilton, a ship’s captain who spent
many years as an interloper in the Indian Ocean, wrote,
[The East India Company’s merchants] could not have chosen a more unhealth-
ful Place on all the River; for three Miles to the North-eastward, is a Salt-water
Lake that overflows in September and October, and then prodigious Numbers
of Fish resort thither, but in November and December when the Floods are
dissipated, those Fishes are left dry, and with their Putrefaction affect the Air
with thick stinking Vapours, which the North-east Winds bring with them to
Fort William, that they cause a yearly Mortality. One Year I was there, and
11
The zamindari was acquired under a grant in 1698 from Azam-ush-Shan, grandson of Aurangzeb
and Governor of Bengal. For the rent, see IOR, Bengal Public Consultations (henceforth BPC),
P/1/1, Expenses for October 1704, f. 111v. There is a copy of the original deed in the British Library:
Add. MSS. 24039, N° 39. Calcutta soon acquired the status of Presidency, vide letter from the Court
of Directors to the President and Council of Calcutta dated 20 December 1699.
12
In examining the Calcutta City Council records of the period, one is struck by the number of
references to Dutch and French ships sailing past Calcutta. See, for instance, IOR, Calcutta Factory
Records, G/7/3, Diary and Consultations, 1697–1699, f. 12v, 13r, 18r.
13
R. Murphey, ‘The City in the Swamp’, pp. 241–56.

60 / KAPIL RAJ
there were reckoned in August about 1200 English, some Military, some Ser-
vants to the Company, some private Merchants residing in the Town, and some
Seamen belonging to Shipping lying at the Town, and before the Beginning of
January there were four hundred and sixty Burials registered in the Clerk’s
Book of Mortality.14
This, nevertheless, did not stop the settlement from burgeoning around its many
markets and Calcutta soon became the chief English station in Bengal and the
major source of textile shipments from Bengal which by the 1720s made up more
than half the value of the Company’s exports from India.15 Its population multiplied
from an initial ten thousand to around 100,000 by the middle of the eighteenth
century—another significant indicator of the prosperity of the city.
Concerning the demographic composition of the city, one of the most remark-
able features is its extreme ethnic, social and cultural diversity. We have already
mentioned the north- and west-Indian origins of the merchant bankers already
settled in Sutanati and Gobindpur upon whom the East India Company and all
other European merchants depended for their commercial and financial dealings
with the Indian and Asian coastal trade and manufactories.16 The new township
and its growing markets soon attracted other merchants—from Bengal and other
parts of the Subcontinent. A treaty signed in London between the East India Com-
pany and the powerful Armenian diaspora of merchant-bankers and diplomats—
who by the end of the seventeenth century, coordinated from Isfahan in Safavid
Iran, spread from Cadix and Amsterdam to Macao with a strong presence in the
Safavid, Ottoman and Mughal empires and in most port cities of the Indian
Ocean—had already attracted a small number of them to Calcutta.17 The Armenians
were to play a central role in diplomatic and financial negotiations with the Mughal
and Safavid authorities on behalf of the British.18 As noted earlier, it was through
the offices of an Armenian merchant that the Company was able to legitimise its
sustained presence in Calcutta through the attribution of zamindari rights.
14
A. Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies, Vol. 2, p. 5. Although the observation was an
accurate one, Hamilton’s estimate of Calcutta’s English population in the early 1700s is in all likelihood
highly exaggerated. For want of a reliable population census before 1821, it is estimated that the
initial population of the city was around ten thousand of whom five hundred were European, including
the fifty one covenanted employees of the East India Company.
15
Extract, Paras 9 and 10, from General Letter from Court of Directors of the East India Company
to the Bengal Council, dated March 6, 1695 cited in Wilson, The Early Annals, Vol. I, p. 16. For the
building of the Fort, see IOR, Calcutta Factory Records, G/7/2, 23 December 1696, 1 January, 1, 12
and 15 April 1697. Also, P.J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700–1765’,
pp. 487–507, on p. 490
16
D. Basu, ‘The Early Banians of Calcutta’, pp. 38–40.
17
R. Ferrier, ‘The Agreement of the East India Company with the Armenian Nation,
22nd June 1688’, p. 439; and S. Aslanian, ‘Social Capital, “Trust” and the Role of Networks in Julfan
Trade’, pp. 383–402; and more generally, M. Seth, History of the Armenians in India.
18
B. Bhattacharya, ‘Armenian European Relationship in India’, pp. 277–322.

Maritime trade brought its own lot of entrepreneurs—Europeans, as well as

merchants from the Asian littoral and interior. Like other trading ports, a growing
population of craftsmen—shipwrights, masons, weavers, jewellers, painters,
carpenters—innkeepers and small businessmen came to settle in Calcutta and
specialised bazaars mushroomed all over the city. As with the other constituent
populations of the city, these craftsmen and small-time merchants were of diverse
origins, some coming from neighbouring regions, others from much further afield.
Being an immense entrepôt for international commerce from China to Europe,
the new settlement also attracted dubashis (interpreters), saraffs (money changers),
dalals (brokers) and banyans, indispensable intermediaries for the procurement
of Asian merchandise and the sale of European goods.19 Lusophones also marked
their presence, Portuguese being one of the main lingua francas both in the Indian
Ocean worlds of trade and law. Portuguese and Luso–Asians thus came to consti-
tute the second largest population speaking a European language after English.20
A Portuguese church was constructed next to the Armenians’, a few hundred
yards north of Fort William and of the Anglican church of Saint Anne which was
situated just outside the east exit of the Fort. There was already a large temple in
Sutanati and a number of mosques in different areas. Each community tended to
live around their respective places of worship although this was not a hard-held
rule. Affluent traders, many intermediaries and, later in the century, various literati
seeking their fortunes in Calcutta, acquired property and settled in the centre of
town next to the European merchants and Company’s servants. And, although the
northern parts were designated ‘Black Town’ and the population was predominantly
indigenous, an appreciable number of Europeans also resided there: sailors, inn-
keepers, chandlers and prostitutes.21
The commercial, social and cultural dynamics of Calcutta gave rise very soon
on to a cosmopolitan culture and a religious and linguistic diversity—Persian,
Hindustani, Portuguese, English, Arabic and Armenian being the most widely
used languages alongside Bengali and other vernaculars spoken by the crafts-
people.22 This composite character is, of course, not unique to Calcutta—it is to
be found in other Asiatic trading ports and cities of the region, for example, Melaka
and Batavia, or Madras and Surat.23 However, the cosmopolitan nature of the city
19
On the question of intermediaries in the making of the modern, globalised world, see S. Schaffer,
L. Roberts, K. Raj and J. Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World.
20
See C. Finch, ‘Vital Statistics of Calcutta’, pp. 168–82.
21
A. Rijaluddin, Hikayat perintah negeri Benggala, pp. 57 et seq.
22
T.W. Clark, ‘The Languages of Calcutta, 1760–1840’, pp. 453–74.
23
See D. Lombard, ‘Pour une histoire des villes du Sud-Est asiatique’, pp. 842–56; C. Cartier,
‘Cosmopolitics and the Maritime World City’, pp. 278–89; S. Subrahmanyam, ‘Madras, Chennai
and Sao Tomé’, pp. 221–39.

62 / KAPIL RAJ
in no way implied an ‘age of partnership’, but rather a deft management of differ-

ence and conflict. The city’s courts thus came to constitute the core of its intellectual
dynamic.24
Indeed, to maintain order and negotiate contracts in an eclectic space incor-
porating elements of traditional local exchange economies, Mughal institutions
and commercial practices brought by north- and west-Indian bankers, west-Asian
merchants and European long-distance trading corporations like the East India
Company, questions of a legal nature acquired primordial importance from the
very outset.25 For a start, the acquisition of zamindari rights over the land in and
around Calcutta entailed the obligation of administering justice.26
As such, the Company had jurisdiction in civil matters, while in regard to
criminal cases it had the powers of a magistrate to police. However, in this capacity,
the Company was within the jurisdiction of the Mughal Empire, and was as such
responsible, under pain of extrusion of its privileges, for the good conduct of its
several offices.27 The nucleus of the Calcutta settlement thus came to be the
zamindari kachahri, or office, of the previous tax farmers of the area, the Savana
Mazumdar family, situated by the great tank a couple of hundred yards to the east
of the newly erected Fort William on the banks of the river on a promontory be-
tween Sutanati and Govindpur.28 As an integral part of their duties, the Company’s
servants thus found themselves having to run penal, civil and revenue courts
modelled on the Mughal system in vigour in the rest of the empire.29
In addition to these, the Mayor’s Court was founded in 1727 in order to rule on
litigations amongst the British population.30 However, this latter soon found itself
dealing with conflicts amongst all the communities residing in Calcutta, not least
the indigenous bankers who lent money to Europeans.31 And to further complicate
24
The expression ‘age of partnership’ is taken from H. Furber, ‘Asia and the West as Partners
Before “Empire” and After’, pp. 711–21. Compare S. Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of
Commerce: Southern India, pp. 252–54, where he characterises this period as an ‘age of contained
conflict’, closer to the vision portrayed in this article.
25
For the functioning of such economies, see in particular C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and
Bazaars, p. 52 et seq.
26
R.C. Sterndale, An Historical Account of The Calcutta Collectorate, p. 12.
27
S. Nurul Hasan, ‘Zamindars’, pp. 284–98.
28
See C.R. Wilson, ed., Old Fort William in Bengal, Vol. 1, p. 14 n. 1.
29
Ibid. See also A.C. Patra, The Administration of Justice under the East-India Company,
pp. 11–30.
30
W.K. Firminger, ed., Affairs of the East India Company, Vol. I, pp. lxxix et seq.
31
Ever since its inauguration on 16 December 1727 the Mayor’s Court was assailed with litiga-
tion between Asians and Europeans and between Asians themselves. See IOR, BPC, Mayor’s Court
Proceedings, 1727–1728, P/155/10, f. 1r et seq. For the controversy over the jurisdiction of the
Mayor’s Court and the Court of Appeals, see IOR, Home Miscellaneous, H/420, pp. 13–21, letter to
Court of Directors from John Browne, 5 August 1749. See also P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes,
p. 43.

things, the other courts immediately contested its jurisdiction. Moreover, the East
India Company itself began to pursue subjects from the surrounding province of
Bengal, submitting them to its own laws.32
The ever-expanding administrative needs of the city and the ever-increasing
number of litigations in their turn attracted legal specialists from other parts of
the subcontinent and sometimes from even further.33 Thus, pandits from the uni-
versities and astronomical centres of Nadia and Banaras, and Persian, Arabic and
Turkish speaking literati found employment as judges, notaries, scribes or as simple
functionaries in the various administrative departments of the Company or of the
city.34 Like the other communities in this urban space, these literati were themselves
part of larger diasporic communities some of which had a long heritage in seek-
ing cultural accommodation between the different components of South Asian
society.35 As the city grew in size and complexity, needs for different forms of
knowledge increased and their role gained in importance.
Two major events in the mid eighteenth century were to dramatically overturn
the course of the Subcontinent’s history leading to the spectacular rise of Calcutta.
First, the invasion of north India and the sack of Delhi in 1739 by the Afshar-
tribal chief-turned-Persian Emperor, Nadir Shah (1688–1747) rang the death knell
of the declining Mughal Empire, accelerating its collapse and the rise of a myriad
successor polities vying with each other to fill in the power vacuum thus created.
Second, the victory in 1757 (in the first months of the Seven Years’ War which
started in Europe but soon spread almost across the globe) of the East India Com-
pany’s armies over those of Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, radically trans-
formed the geopolitical complexion of the region, making Britain a major political
actor in South Asia for the next two centuries. This conquest would also overturn
the administrative organisation and the very character of the Company—and,
indeed, the future of go-betweens and intermediation in the region.
Calcutta after 1757
However, the consciousness of this new role was slow in coming for, in the years
that followed the conquest of Bengal, Company officials devoted all their attention
to ruthlessly plundering and devastating the land.36 This led indirectly to the
32
S.C. Hill, ed., Bengal in 1756–1757, Vol. I, pp. 280–1 and 266–75 respectively.
33
The earliest reference to an indigenous lawyer, Lotmund Vacquelle (Lakshman Vakil) can already
be found in IOR, Copy Book of Letters to Subordinate factories, G/7/7, p. 3, letter dated 14 December
1697 from the Chutanuttee Council to Samuel Meverell, Balasore.
34
On the circulation of literati in early modern central and south Asia, see M. Szuppe, ‘Circu-
lation des lettrés et cercles littéraires’, pp. 997–1018.
35
On syncretic traditions in various currents of political thought in early-modern South Asia, see
M. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam.
36
A comprehensive list of these ‘most atrocious abuses that ever stained the name of civil gov-
ernment’ may be found in British Parliamentary Papers, ‘Reports from the Committee Appointed to

64 / KAPIL RAJ
collapse of a number of traditional urban centres. Calcutta was one of the few
cities that prospered—it gained a new vitality in the space of a few years to become
the capital of the East India Company’s territories in India and soon the second
largest city of the British Empire. Its population and area quadrupled in a couple
of decades.37 Indeed, such was its importance that when the Mughal emperor
Shah Alam II (reigned 1761–1805) sent a delegation to George III, his represen-
tative Mirza Shaikh Itisam al-Din (1730–1800) transited via Calcutta.38
However, after ten million lives, or a third of the population of Bengal (almost
all peasants and artisans), had been lost in the space of three years—victims of a
famine compounded with the ruthless policies of the Company’s servants—
attention was turned to stabilising the internal order of the province.39 Under grow-
ing pressure from the British Parliament, which culminated in the Regulating Act
of 1773 and the institution in Calcutta of the Supreme Court of Judicature for the
administration of justice in the newly acquired territories, the Company and its
agents grudgingly shifted from commercial plunder to more orderly and permanent
forms of exploitation and government.
Thus, in order to re-establish order, Warren Hastings (1732–1818) was made
Governor General of Bengal in 1772, receiving orders from the Company’s Court
of Directors in London to take over and directly control the whole civil admin-
istration of the province. To Hastings’ mind, successful administration required
drawing up an inventory of the Company’s territories containing knowledge of
its revenues, antiquities, natural history, topography, languages and local customs,
alimentary habits and the general conditions of life. ‘Every accumulation of know-
ledge,’ he wrote, ‘and especially such as is obtained by social communication
with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest,
is useful to the state...’40 In addition to taxation and law—since, alongside the
conclusion and maintenance of legally viable commercial contracts with local
traders and bankers, the Company was now obliged to administer civil and criminal
law in the newly acquired territories—this knowledge was to include topography,
natural history and antiquities, local customs, diet and general living conditions,
in short all that was, in the coming decades, to go under the name of statistics.41
However, Hastings also soon realised that British would in no way be able to
Enquire into the Nature, State and Condition of the East India Company and of the British Affairs in
East India’, Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 1772–1773, Vol. III, London,
1803.
37
P. Thankappan Nair, ‘The Growth and Development of Old Calcutta’, Vol. I, p. 23.
38
M.H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism, pp. 87–92.
39
D. Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2, p. 299.
40
Warren Hastings, letter dated 4 October 1784 to Nathaniel Smith, Chairman of the East India
Company, reprinted in Charles Wilkins, tr. Bhagavad Gita, London, 1785, Preface, p. 13.
41
See M.J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain, pp. 10–11.

maintain sustained control over the territory by relying solely on the mere 1200
civil and military agents of the Company, who were, in addition, poorly trained
for administrative tasks.
The collaboration between Britons and South Asians progressively broadened
to include tax collection, administration of justice and finally education. And,
although the British set up a variety of new intermediary relationships with native
South Asians, they had to maintain many of the existing local administrative struc-
tures, and most of the ‘under civil servants’. Thus, the various revenue and judicial
officials inherited from the Mughal and other princely administrations, continued
to act in their official capacity as intermediaries between the British and local
populations.42 Until then a contact zone between Asian and European heterogene-
ous networks organised mainly around trade and urban administration, Calcutta
now also became a locus of control and coordination of vast networks of territorial
administration. New institutions such as the Munshikhana (secretariat of the pro-
vincial administration) emerged in the footsteps of the Surveyor’s office already
established in the 1760s.
Giving the highest priority to a knowledge of the region’s languages, Hastings
devised a policy of handsome monetary incentives to those of his officials who
were willing to study the languages and other aspects of South Asian society.
This policy constituted the first step in the transformation of the study of exotic
peoples from an individual activity—mainly of European missionaries—into a
massive and institutionalised activity reflecting the vital concern it represented
for the emerging rulers of the subcontinent. This was also the first step in the
transformation of the emerging British empire from one held by force of arms to
one held, at least in theory, by information and knowledge.
However, not all of the Company’s agents had the wherewithal to respond to
Hastings’ incentives. It must be said that the vast majority of recruits to the East
India Company arrived in India between the ages of fourteen and eighteen with
the aim of making a quick fortune.43 In keeping with the tradition of the Com-
pany’s service, those from England were usually younger sons from commercial,
landed or professional (mainly London-based banking) families which vied with
each other for procuring highly lucrative careers in Bengal for their offspring.
The only prerequisite for recruitment to the Company, as shown by the surviving
42
See R.N. Nagar, ‘The Subordinate Services in the Revenue Administration of the North West-
ern Provinces’, pp. 125–34; ‘Employment of Indians in the Revenue Administration of the N.W.P.,
1801–1833’, pp. 66–73; ‘The Tahsildar in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, 1801–1833’,
pp. 25–34; Maulana Khair-ud-Din Muhammad, Tazkirat-ul-Ulama or a Memoir of the Learned Men
of Jaunpur; see also B.S. Cohn, ‘The Initial British Impact on India’ and ‘The British in Benares’,
pp. 320–42 and 422–62 respectively; and C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information.
43
IOR, Court Minutes 1784–1785, B/100, p. 216.

66 / KAPIL RAJ
educational testimonials of aspiring candidates, was ‘the rule of three and mer-
chants’ accounts.’44 Few had been to university, a costly affair normally reserved
for elder sons or for those seeking academic or clerical careers. Engrossed in
fortune making, most had little curiosity about the Subcontinent’s inhabitants or,
indeed, the culture to acquire learning.
Of the minority of Englishmen—and we shall have more to say about the
Scottish and North Europeans—who had a penchant for intellectual pursuits in
the leisure time their fortune-making activities left them,45 most were, in the fashion
of the ‘Great-school’-and-Oxonian, High-Church élite of the eighteenth century
to which, like Hastings himself, they generally belonged, obsessed with class-
ical thought and scripture. Indeed, their education was dominated by the study of
Greek and Latin.46 Throughout the eighteenth century, the university continued to
be supplemented by the Grand Tour in the gentleman’s education almost as a
matter of course. Italy with its relics of the classical past was the chief attraction.47
Bred in this tradition and ‘impressed by the visible remains of the ancient world
seen on their travels, young milords... easily saw themselves through the eyes of
the Romans; their attitudes to politics and government, conduct, manners and
style mirrored those of the world of Horace and Virgil and testify to the influence
of the classical discipline in which they had been trained.’48
Not surprisingly then, their understanding of South Asia and its inhabitants
was shaped by their own education and training. Sanskrit, in their eyes, was to
Indian vernaculars what Greek and Latin were to contemporary European lan-
guages and, like their virtuoso contemporaries in Britain and continental Europe
who invested a great deal in recovering the works of ancient Greece and Rome,
they concentrated, in their exploration of Indian learning, on stone inscriptions
and other archaeological artefacts, as well as ancient literary, philosophical and
scientific works, mainly those written in Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian, the principal
intellectual and diplomatic language of North India at the time.49
Naturally enough, they sought as privileged interlocutors their subcontinental
counterparts—those of the literate Hindu castes who had mastered Sanskrit, and
maulavis and munshis adept in Arabic and Persian—who were already working
44
A.J. Farrington, The Records of the East India College Haileybury & Other Institutions, p. 4.
See also IOR, Court Minutes, B/100, 1784–1785, p. 216; and Richard Wellesley, ‘Notes on the
Foundation of a College at Fort William’, Vol. 2, pp. 325–55.
45
For a description of the daily life of the British in India during this period, see P. Spear,
The Nabobs.
46
See R. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek, p. 46 et seq.
47
See J. Plumb, ‘The Grand Tour’, pp. 54–66.
48
J. Lawson and H. Silver, A Social History of Education in England, pp. 217–18; see also G.C.
Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman, pp. 156–94.
49
For a more detailed anatomy of the British population in India and their relationship to know-
ledge, see K. Raj, ‘Christian Confessions and Styles of Science in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’,
pp. 285–97.

in the various departments of the new administration. These Asian literati also
had a ‘classical’ education which, apart from discretion and virtuosity, consisted
not only of a rigorous learning of Persian, Arabic and scriptural knowledge—
both Quranic and Biblical (the Old Testament being part of the common heritage
of the three Abrahamic religions), but also of disputation, accounting, law, politics,
history, poetry and literary criticism.50 Some were even trained in mathematics,
logic, astronomy and astrology.51 Indeed, much like the English elites, they too
were expected to travel and give a written account of their peregrinations as part
of their education.52 It is thus easy to see that for the English, an understanding of
the society that they were to govern was fashioned through the study of classical
Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic texts.
This demand for indigenous collaborators for language teaching as well as for
administrative needs particularly for the administration of justice, naturally
attracted literati from the fast collapsing Mughal empire as also from the new
successor states, like Avadh and Hyderabad and even from as far away as Iran. A
significant number of North Indian and Central Asian savants thus found employ-
ment translating learned texts of all kinds. One area where these texts were par-
ticularly crucial was in the administration of civil law, in part because of the
rising flood of litigation between South Asians and Europeans ever since the new
territorial conquest, and in part because British courts offered new legal possi-
bilities to indigenous litigants.53 Also, following the Mughal example, the British
perceived a duality in the South Asian legal system: one for the Muslims and an-
other for the Hindus. And if Islamic law was fixed through religious texts, in
Arabic but more often in Persian (the official language of the Mughal state), Hindu
law varied according to region or caste. Moreover, it was rarely based on legal
texts but rather on normative texts. New texts thus had to be urgently written.
John Derrett, an authority on Indian legal history, estimates the number of legal
treatises produced for the British at about fifty, the most well-known of these
being the Vivadarnavabhanjana (‘breakwater to the flood of litigation’), also
known as the Vivadarnavasetu (‘commentary on the flood of litigation’), compiled
by eleven pundits between 1773 and 1775, translated into Persian by Zayn al-Din
Ali Rasai and thence into English in 1776 by Nathaniel Halhed as The Code of
Gentoo Laws, or, ordinations of the pundits....54
50
On the education of elites in early modern South Asia, see M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam,
‘The Making of a Munshi’, pp. 61–72; ‘Discovering the Familiar’, pp. 131–54.
51
See Mirza ‘Abd al-Latif Shushtari, Tuhfat al-‘Alam va Zayl al-Tuhfah, quoted in Gulfishan
Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West, p. 101.
52
M. Alam and S. Subrahamanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries.
53
W. Hastings, ‘A Plan for the Administration of Justice, extracted from the Proceedings of the
Committee of Circuit, 15th August 1772’, Vol. 2, pp. 295–96.
54
For a list of expressly commissioned works, see J.D.M. Derrett, ‘Sanskrit Legal Treatises
Compiled at the Instance of the British’, pp. 72–117. The topics contained in Halhed’s Code were

68 / KAPIL RAJ
The role of legal institutions, already a crucial part of Calcutta, as noted earlier,
since the very first decades of its existence, thus began to extend to, and play a
central role in, the organisation and construction of knowledge. In 1781, the Com-
pany’s administration established a Madrassa in the middle of the city, a mile to
the north east of Fort William. This was in response, on the one hand to a request
from ‘a considerable number of Musselmen of credit and learning’ to promote
institutions of traditional learning which ‘had been the pride of every polished
court and the wisdom of every well regulated government both in India and in
Persia [but of which] in India only traces... now remain, the decline of learning
having accompanied that of the Mughal Empire’ and, on the other, ‘with a view...
to the production of officers for the courts of justice.’55 The subjects taught were
Arabic, Persian and Islamic law, with later additions such as natural philosophy,
astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, logic, rhetoric and oratory—‘all according to
Islamic culture.’56 A few years later, in 1792, they had sponsored a Hindu College
at Banaras for ‘the preservation and cultivation of the laws, literature and religion
of the Hindus.’57 The course consisted in ‘theology, ritual, medicine, music, mech-
anic arts, grammar, prosody, sacred lexicography, mathematics, metaphysics, logic,
law, history, ethics, philosophy and poetry.’58
Both these institutions were to rapidly become major centres of training and
the production of legal knowledge in tune with the new complexities emerging
from the necessity to take into account the multitude of legal traditions to administer
the country as well as commercial exchanges between the different communities.
The Supreme Court, instituted through the same regulating Act that named
Warren Hastings Governor-General, was henceforth to adjudicate according to
British law. Two other courts, the Sudder Diwani Adawlat and the Sudder Nizamat
Adawlat, were created for civil and penal justice for indigenous inhabitants accord-
ing to their respective traditions.59 However, the jurisdictional boundaries between
these institutions proved impossible to maintain and the jurisdiction of the Supreme
Court was modified by a new Parliamentary Act in 1781 which recognised Hindu
understood to confirm what Hastings believed was needed to effectively govern: debt, inheritance,
civil procedure, deposits, sale of stranger’s property, partnership, gift, slavery, master and servant,
rent and hire, sale, boundaries, shares in the cultivation of lands, cities and towns and fines for
damaging crops, defamation, assault, theft, violence, adultery, duties, women, miscellaneous rules
(including gaming, finding lost property, sales-tax, adoption). See ibid., p. 86.
55
Minute by Warren Hastings, dated 17 April 1781, in Selections from Educational Records,
pp. 7–9 and 30.
56
Ibid.
57
Thomas Fisher’s Memoir dated 7th February 1827, quoted in ‘Appendix A - Analysis of Fisher’s
Memoir’, in ibid. pp. 186–87.
58
Ibid. p. 31.
59
W. Hastings, ‘A Plan for the Administration of Justice, extracted from the Proceedings of the
Committee of Circuit, 15th August, 1772’, Vol. 2, pp. 295–6. Also in IOR, Home Miscellaneous,
H/420, pp. 43–55, especially Articles V–VIII.

and Muslim laws and usages in matters relating to ‘inheritance and succession to
land rent and goods and all matters of contract and dealing between party and
party.’60 Hindu and Muslim savants, often employed as law officers and clerks in
these institutions, were given the further task of writing new laws in the three
official languages of the colony. These were then translated into English for the
use of British judges.
This complex translation enterprise in which English started to play an increas-
ing role, began in turn to attract a number of Europeans. As mentioned above, the
number of intellectually inclined English employees available in Calcutta was
quite limited. Scotsmen usually filled jobs that demanded more skills than simple
accounting. A large number were absorbed into the Company’s ever-expanding
services overseas, many as army medics—qualified by one eminent historian as
‘the brains of the colonial establishment’,61 where they came to learn the verna-
culars of the subcontinent. But less well-educated young men seeking to pick up
new skills that they might put to profit in Britain, also looked to the East India
Company for employment or patronage. Some mastered Persian and Arabic, the
court languages of Mughal India, and in collaboration with munshis and pandits,
compiled bilingual dictionaries and translated texts.
Legal knowledge was not the only form of knowledge sought after. Disputes
over the jurisdiction of the various courts, for instance, gave rise to major contro-
versies over the scope of British law in the new colonial context and indeed, over
the uncertain constitutional status of the Company’s dominions.62 The translation
enterprise thus expanded to include gazetteers and other documents used by the
erstwhile Mughal administration for tax collection, logistical needs and government
in general. A proposal to translate the A’in-i Akbari—perhaps the most popularly
read compendium by the munshis and indigenous literati in general—compiled
at the end of the sixteenth century by the publicist ‘Abu ‘al-Fazl ibn Mubarak
(1551–1602), which detailed the state of the Mughal empire during the reign of
the emperor Akbar, was presented in London by Francis Gladwin (c. 1744–1812),
an East India Company soldier turned Calcutta revenue official in the 1770s. The
translation, made with the collaboration of many of the city’s indigenous court
officials and published between 1783 and 1786 in 3 volumes in Calcutta, was
widely esteemed by contemporaries as embodying, in the words of Gladwin’s
generous patron Warren Hastings, ‘the original constitution of the Mogul Empire,
knowledge of which would enable British administration to return to “first prin-
ciples”.’63 Gladwin’s ambitions in intermediation went further than just translating
60
Quoted in J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India, p. 236.
61
C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 156.
62
See R. Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India.
63
W. Hastings’ “Minute” on the Publication of Gladwin’s Translation of the Ayeen Akbari, or, The
Institutes of the Emperor Akbar, Vol. I., p. ix.

70 / KAPIL RAJ
oriental texts: in 1784 he took over the management of the East India Company’s
printing press in Calcutta and worked towards the cutting of type fonts ‘in the
Oriental Characters’ which he presented to the College of Fort William in 1801,
soon after it opened.64
This intellectual production in Calcutta relied on a rising number of bookshops
for European books and numerous libraries which had sprouted all over the city,
containing manuscripts from all over the subcontinent and from central Asia,
collected, but often pillaged by the British during their campaigns of conquest.
Many of these collections were to be centralised in the library of the College of
Fort William established in 1800. The casting of Bengali and Devanagari fonts in
the early 1780s gives rise to a number of printing presses, more than 40 in 1800.65
Baptist missionary activity from the neighbouring Danish colony of Serampore
accelerated the publication and diffusion of printed texts, greatly expanding the
number and roles of knowledge go-betweens who now entered the material world
through which locally constructed knowledge could be widely circulated.
Finally, reference must be made to the presence of Wakils (representatives) of
the various kingdoms and princely states to the colonial authorities in Calcutta.
Thus, Tafazzul Hussain Khan (1727–1800) represented the Nawab of Avadh. A
young Iranian immigrant ‘Abd al-Latif Shushtari (1758–1806), looking for work
in India, arrived in Calcutta in 1786 and after some searching, was appointed the
Nizam of Hyderabad’s envoy to Calcutta, a position in keeping with his qualifi-
cations. Both Tafazzul and Shushtari were highly reputed Persian savants. Educated
by some of the best teachers of the Indo–Persian tradition of North India, Tafazzul
Hussain Khan developed a passion for disputation, mathematics, astronomy and
Aristotelian logic as a young boy, subjects which he in turn to teach as tutor to the
princes of Avadh. Mastering Persian and Arabic and being able to read Latin and
Greek, he soon acquired a good knowledge of English and often served as a go-
between, sometimes for the kingdoms of Avadh and Bengal, at times for the British,
in various negotiations between the regional polities and the colonial government.
Appointed ambassador of the court of Avadh to the East India Company in Calcutta
in 1788, Tafazzul established close relations with various British literati in the
city: the governors-general John Shore and Charles Cornwallis, the judge William
Jones, the mathematician Ruben Burrow with whom he undertook the gigantic
project of translating Newton’s Principia Mathematica into Arabic.66 Abd al-Latif,
the son of a family of Iranian jurists from Shushtar in western Persia, had like
64
Peter James Marshall, ‘Francis Gladwin’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online
edition, [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10788, accessed 31 October 2010].
65
G. Shaw, Printing in Calcutta to 1800, p. 3.
66
For Tafazzul Hussain Khan, see S.M.A. Khan, ed., Life of Tuffuzzool Hussain Khan; For ‘Abd
al-Latif Shushtari, see his autobiography, Tuhfat al-‘Alam va Zayl al-Tuhfah.

Tafazzul also received a rigorous education in theology, mathematics, logic and

astronomy. Besides the fact that they were both active collaborators in various
projects patronised by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in particular William Jones’s
work on the origins of mankind and languages, Calcutta provided both men with
an unrivalled vantage point from where to closely observe British administration
and culture, to compare them with Indo–Persian practices and to analyse the pol-
itical and intellectual dynamics which in their eyes underlay European ascension
and the concomitant decline of oriental cultures. In order to complete his analy-
sis, Shushtari partially financed his friend and colleague Mirza Abu Talib Khan
Isfahani’s (1752–1806) journey to Europe from 1799 to 1803. In return, Isfahani
corresponded with both his Calcutta friends on his observations and analyses dur-
ing his voyage. The press, newspapers, transport, the steam engine and the navy,
he claimed were the wellsprings of European supremacy. And although he was
not particularly attracted towards Newtonian astronomy, he did agree to write a
short treatise in Persian on the subject upon his return to Calcutta on the request
of his curious friends.67
Just as it served Europeans to look into India, Calcutta also served as a window
looking out onto Europe and the world for Tafazzul, Shushtari and other Asian
literati, allowing them to make sense of the momentous political, economic and
cultural changes of the period. Besides, the acuteness of their observations did
not go unnoticed by the British and other Europeans who were avid readers of the
observations of this community. For instance, Siyar-al Muta’akhkhirin [Relation
of modern times] by Ghulam Hussain Khan Taba’tabai (1727–1806), completed
in 1781, was almost immediately translated into English by a Franco–Turk resident
of Calcutta called Monsieur Raymond, alias Haji Mustafa or Nota Manus, and
was published in the city in 1789.68 This work attempts to provide a critical analysis
of South Asian history during the eighteenth century—the fall of the Mughal
empire, British successes in their face-off with the successor states, the French,
the Dutch, contrasting these with their defeat at the hands of the Americans and
the Marathas—and was to have a great influence on nineteenth century British
historians like James and John Stuart Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay.69
More than serving as a mere ‘contact zone’, Calcutta thus occupied the strategic
67
For example, ’Abu Talib’s travel account, Masir-i Talibi fi bilad-i afranji [Talib’s travels in the
land of the Franks] (1806), was published in English translation soon after as The Travels of Mirza
Abu Talib Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803, tr.
Charles Stewart, 2 vols., London, 1810. The French translation appeared the following year from
Paris with a second edition in 1819 and a German version was published from Vienna in 1813. On
the subject of European fascination for the way they were portrayed in Indo–Persian travel accounts,
see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo–Persian Travels, pp. 245–46.
68
Ghulam Hussain Khan Taba’tabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin.
69
On Taba’tabai as a source of knowledge on Mughal India, see H.M. Elliot, The History of
India, Vol. 8, p. 198.

72 / KAPIL RAJ
role of geographical go-between, providing a privileged vantage point for Indian

observers while simultaneously serving the British to organise regularity and eco-
nomic, political and social control over their Indian empire.
In order to illustrate the nature and forms of knowledge elaborated in Calcutta
and the conditions of their production and to better appreciate the role of the city
and its institutions in this production, let us consider the example of Sir William
Jones (1746–1794).
William Jones and Calcutta
William Jones was born in London in 1746 where his father, another William, a
Welsh-born yeoman-turned-counting house-assistant-turned-sailor, had finally
settled, making a living teaching mathematics and writing books on navigation
and gunnery theory. Gifted in Latin and Greek, Jones studied the Classics at Uni-
versity College, Oxford where he began to learn modern Persian with the help of
a visiting Asian, none other than Mirza Shaikh Itisam al-Din, the Mughal Emperor’s
representative to George III, who had spent some time at the ‘Madrassah of Oxford’
during his stay in England from 1766 to 1769. Itisam al-Din helped Jones decipher
the basic rules of Persian grammar and let him use his translation ‘of the twelve
rules of the Ferhung Jehangaree which comprise the grammar of the Persian lan-
guage. Mr. Jones having seen that translation, compiled his Grammar, and having
printed it, sold it and made a good deal of money by it. This Grammar is a very
celebrated one.’70
His knowledge of oriental languages was to prove particularly useful: in 1768,
Jones was approached by the King of Denmark with a request to translate into
French a Persian manuscript of the Ta’rikh-i-Nadiri, an official history of the
parvenu King Nadir Shah (1688–1747), that he had recently received. The French
translation, published in London in 1770, was to establish Jones as a specialist in
oriental languages in Europe and to put him firmly on the road to fame and long
sought-after glory.71 In 1773, at the age of 26, William Jones was elected a Fellow
of the Royal Society. The following year he was admitted to Samuel Johnson’s
Literary Club and was to become its president in 1780. He soon settled in London
as a barrister, all the while looking for a more lucrative career, ideally as a judge
in India. Indeed, his interest in Asian literature had already drawn him towards
the East India Company and he had already published A Grammar of the Persian
Language in 1771 for the use of the Company’s employees, where he used Itisam
al-Din’s translations. He began to study Indian law and succeeded in being con-
sulted in the framing of the Parliamentary Act to modify the jurisdiction of the
70
Mirza Shaikh Itisam al-Din, Shigurf Namah-i Vilaët, Or Excellent Intelligence Concerning
Europe, pp. 65–66.
71
William Jones, Histoire de Nader Chah connu sous le nom de Thahmus Kuli Khan.

Supreme Court in Calcutta mentioned above. Finally, in early 1783 William Jones
was nominated a puisne, or junior, judge at the Calcutta Supreme Court.
In Bengal he soon discovered the handful of men who, responding to Warren
Hastings’ incentives, were acquiring Asian languages and knowledge in return
for liberal monetary incentives. But each worked in isolation from the others and
their efforts remained dispersed, eclectic and little known. Realising that ‘such
inquiries and improvements could only be made by the united efforts of many’,
and using his own experience in metropolitan learned societies, Jones quickly set
about channelling these efforts and a few months later, in January 1784, established
the Asiatick Society of Bengal, with himself as president, and the Governor-General
and the Supreme Council as patrons. It was situated in the New Supreme Court
recently built on the Esplanade over-looking the vast Maidan, or central park.
Right from the start, he imposed a rigorous discipline and a weekly schedule
reminiscent of the Royal Society. Only original contributions were to be dis-
cussed; no simple translations of oriental texts or documents would be entertained;
‘such unpublished essays or treatises as may be transmitted to us by native authors’
would be accepted, although the question of enrolling ‘any numbers of learned
natives’ as members was left open. The scope of the Society was to be the ‘geo-
graphical limits of Asia’ and its object ‘the study of MAN and NATURE; all that
is performed by the one and produced by the other.’
At the practical level, he exhorted ‘all curious and learned men’ to:
...correct the geography of Asia by new observations and discoveries; ... trace
the annals, and even traditions, of those nations, who from time to time have
peopled or desolated it; ... bring to light their various forms of government,
with their institutions civil and religious; ... examine their improvements and
methods in arithmetick and geometry, in trigonometry, mensuration, mech-
anicks, opticks, astronomy, and general physicks; their systems of morality,
grammar, rhetorick, and dialectick; their skill in chirurgery and medicine, and
their advancement, whatever it may be, in anatomy and chymistry. To this you
will add researches into their agriculture, manufactures, trade; and whilst you
inquire with pleasure into their musick, architecture, painting and poetry, will
not neglect those inferior arts, by which the comforts and elegance of social
life are supplied or improved.72
But languages were not part of Jones’ preoccupations: ‘You may observe, that
I have omitted their languages, the diversity and difficulty of which are a sad ob-
stacle to the progress of useful knowledge; but I have ever considered languages
as the mere instruments of real learning, and think them improperly confounded
72
W. Jones, ‘A Discourse on the Institution of a Society’, pp. xii–xiv.

74 / KAPIL RAJ
with learning itself.’73 However, not a year-and-a-half later, Jones had set about
learning Sanskrit and, within a few months adopted a radically different position:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure;

more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely
refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the
roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been pro-
duced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all
three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which,
perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible,
for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a
very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian
might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any
question concerning the antiquities of Persia.74
Mainly on the strength of this part of his discourse, popularly known as the
philologer’s passage, Jones has been bestowed the title of ‘Father of scientific
linguistics and comparative philology’. And because, in the same programmatic
address, Jones also laid out his principles of judging the affinities and diversities
among the human races according to their ‘Languages and Letters;... Philosophy
and Religion;... the actual remains of their old Sculpture and Architecture; and...
memorials of their Sciences and Arts’,75 he is said to have inaugurated ‘Orientalism’
and Indology as disciplines in their own right.
What had transpired in the intervening period for Jones to not only change his
mind about language learning but also to elevate Indian civilisation to the same
status as that of ancient Greece and Rome? During this period, Jones was quite
simply confronted with British–Indian reality, discovering to what extent his daily
life, and that of all the British, in the Indian subcontinent depended upon an organic
reliance on autochtonous intermediaries, especially in the administration of justice.
His famous discourse ‘On the Hindus’ had, I shall argue, very directly to do with
a resolution of the problem of mediated knowledge.
As a judge, Jones depended on the advice of Muslim and Hindu jurisconsults.
He relied heavily on a vast network of Persianate and Sanskrit scholars whom he
referred to as ‘my private establishment of readers and writers,’ in spite of the fact
that many of them, like Tafazzul Hussain Khan and ‘Abd al-Latif Shushtari, were
73
Ibid. (my italics). Jones had always held a Miltonian conception as to the futility of learning
languages for their own sake, as the following remark addressed to his bête noir, Anquetil makes
clear: ‘Do you not know that languages have no intrinsic value? And that an erudite person could
learn all the dictionaries that were ever complied by heart and could still at the end of the day be the
most ignorant of mortals?’ William Jones, Lettre à Monsieur A∗∗∗ Du P∗∗∗, p. 11 (my translation).
74
W. Jones, ‘On the Hindus’, pp. 422–23.
75
Ibid., p. 421.

not dependent upon British colonial institutions.76 His entourage included Ghulam
Hussain Khan Taba’tabai, author of the famous Siyar-al Muta’akhkhirin, Mir
Muhammad Hussain Isfahani, the ‘Aristotle of Islam’ who had spent many years
in Europe in a quest for European learning, the musicologist Ali Ibrahim Khan
Bahadur, the paleographer Muhammad Ghaus and Pundits Radhakant Sarman
and Radhakanta Tarkavagisa.77
Within two years of his arrival in India, Jones was confronted with the question
of perjury. How was one to legitimise the testimony of people of a different civility,
let alone that of a conquered culture? The problem was of crucial importance in
an age when the overwhelming majority of English men of science came from a
very homogeneous milieu: women, servants, children and the insane were rigor-
ously excluded from the world of reliable witnesses. The solution was to come to
him progressively.
Already in March 1785, Jones was grappling with this problem, albeit within
the traditional framework of private arrangements between individual Europeans
and local intermediaries. Heretofore, Hindus had to take their oath upon the Ganges
in British courts, but the oath did not seem to be in any way binding.78 A court
pundit had recently compiled a treatise to show that swearing on Ganges water
was prohibited. The policy of commissioning texts to serve as a basis for admin-
istering justice had decidedly begun to boomerang on the British! Faced with
massive refusals and perjury, Jones sought to find an ‘oath, if any, [that] is held
so solemn, that no expiation or absolution will atone for a wilful violation of it.’79
So obsessed was he with the question of oath-taking amongst Hindus, that Jones
himself undertook to learn Sanskrit, the ‘language of the Gods’, in order to judge
the credibility of his interlocutors and at the same time to have an accessible
digest of Hindu laws.
It is in this context that his discourse ‘On the Hindus’ takes on special import-
ance. In this essay Jones was trying to kill many birds with the same stone; in
particular, he aimed on the one hand to vindicate Biblical ethnology of the dispersal
across the globe of Noah’s sons Ham, Sham and Japhet by seeking to establish
the affinity of nations through an affinity of their languages and, on the other
hand to establish Biblical chronology against the contentions of the French radicals
like Voltaire and Bailly. He also aimed to establish the antiquity of Indian civil-
isation and, through all these projects, to give substance to his Promethean pro-
gramme for the Asiatic Society.
Jones takes as his immediate point of departure Jacob Bryant’s Analysis of
Antient Mythology, published in 1774–1776 in which the latter, building on
76
W. Jones, The Letters of William Jones, Vol. 2, p. 798.
77
See R. Rocher, ‘The Career of Radhakanta Tarkavagisa’, pp. 627–33.
78
Jones, Letter to William Pitt the Younger, 5 February, 1785, in Letters, Vol. 2, p. 662.
79
Jones, Letter to Charles Wilkins, 6 June, 1785, in ibid. pp. 677–8.

76 / KAPIL RAJ
Newton’s earlier chronology through a series of dubious etymological arguments,

identified the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Indians as descendants of Ham.80
Jones thinks Bryant was right but for the wrong reasons and sets about correcting
his etymology. He chooses India because ‘the sources of wealth are still abundant
even after so many revolutions and conquests; in their manufactures of cotton
they still surpass all the world... nor can we reasonably doubt, how degenerate
and abased so ever the Hindus may now appear, that in some early age they were
splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation, and eminent
in various knowledge....’81
It is thus that he propounds his surprising passage on deep structural similar-
ities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic and old Persian. After having
examined linguistic and literary evidence, Jones then goes on to analyse India
according to the three other criteria for characterising a people: philosophy and
religion, sculpture and architecture and sciences and arts. With respect to the last
set of criteria, he claims:
That the Hindus were in early ages a commercial people, we have many reasons
to believe; and in the first of their sacred law-tracts, which they suppose to
have been revealed by MENU many millions of years ago, we find a curious
passage on the legal interest of money, and the limited rate of it in different
cases, with an exception in regard to adventures at sea; an exception, which
the sense of mankind approves, and which commerce absolutely requires,
though it was not before the reign of CHARLES I. that our own jurisprudence
fully admitted it in respect of maritime contracts.82
The kinship established is now clear: the Hindus and the English are not only
of common descent but they are both a commercial people with similar laws.
Already in his essay on bailments of 1781, Jones had written: ‘and although the
rules of the Pundits concerning succession to property, the punishment of offences,
and the ceremonies of religion, are widely different from ours, yet, in the great
system of contracts and the common intercourse between man and man, the POOTEE
of the Indians and the DIGEST of the Romans are by no means dissimilar.’83 Now
having shown common ethnic origins, a large-scale institutionalised collaboration
between the two in the administration of justice could be legitimately founded.
It remains that in all the historiography concerning William Jones, few have
asked how he came to formulate theses that were so original and surprising to his
contemporaries in Europe. One could, of course, always defend this by arguing
80
James Bryant, A New System; Or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology. Isaac Newton, The Chron-
ology of Ancient Kingdoms.
81
Jones, ‘On the Hindus’, p. 32.
82
Ibid., pp. iii and 42–43.
83
William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments, p. 114.

that genius cannot be explained! But, those who are familiar with political and
linguistic theories of the Mughal period are struck by the similarity between them
and those of Jones. As Muzaffar Alam has shown, there were, ever since the
sixteenth century, Sufi traditions which sought to provide a doctrinal basis for a
religious, cultural and political synthesis and a cultural fusion between Islam and
Hinduism. These currents gained in strength during and after the reign of the
Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1602) and worked toward a legitimation of syn-
cretic forms of government and society. It is even more striking that these ideo-
logies should be based upon comparative linguistic analyses.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the poet, lexicographer and linguist, Siraj al-
Din ‘Ali Khan Arzu (d. 1756) wrote Muthmir, a treatise on Persian in which he
analyses its similarities to Sanskrit based precisely on the same reasoning as Jones’.
This text was widely circulated amongst the Persian-speaking elites of the Sub-
continent and there is serious and credible textual evidence to show that Jones
was aware of this work.84 Indeed, the Mughal literati were well trained in the pre-
valent syncretic political theories of the time. It is also to be noted that Islamic
ethnographies and the classification of peoples in the Islamic empires of Asia
were based on the same Biblical foundations as were those of Newton, Bryant
and Jones.
Jones, however, did not simply apply local theories that his collaborators
brought to his notice. As we saw, he confronted them with European ideas and
tried to build a true map of mankind. In successive anniversary discourses of the
Asiatic Society, he analysed each nation according to the same cultural and lin-
guistic criteria to conclude that the Persians, Indians, Romans, Greeks, Goths,
Egyptians, Chinese and Japanese had a common origin descending from Ham;
the Jews, Arabs, Assyrians and Abyssinians all descend from Sham, while the
Tartars and other nomadic peoples including the Amerindians were traced to Japhet.
All three branches of the human family had their origins in a single place, which
Jones identified as Iran. Without this cultural encounter organised within the urban
framework of Calcutta at the end of the eighteenth century, it is difficult to imagine
the development of Jones’ ethno-linguistico-genealogical theories.
Conclusion
This brief presentation thus seeks to highlight certain issues. First, this detour
via Calcutta provides the opportunity of outlining an alternative approach to the
history of modern science and knowledge making by firmly anchoring the ‘local’
in the ‘global’ and thus taking globalisation as a longue durée phenomenon seri-
ously. It shows that it is possible to conceive the history of specific ‘colonial’
sites in a non-diffusionist manner and at the same time avoid the agonistic stance
84
M. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, pp. 26–28.

78 / KAPIL RAJ
of the ‘clash of civilizations’. This historiographical approach has of course to re-

spect the agency of the actors involved and the strategies they adopt in negotiat-
ing with the institutional and material environment. In the context of the history
of science, it allows one to perceive the dynamic construction of knowledge at a
key moment in history, a period, when Europe was rising to power but had not yet
established its supremacy, when the die was not yet (fully) cast and modern science
did not conceive itself as purely ‘western’.
As the historical geography of Calcutta unfolds, we find the notion of a con-
tact zone transformed into that of an intersection of myriad heterogeneous net-
works, a node in the transformative circulation of knowledge which structures
and organises cultural encounter and its outcome. Through its institutions it also
plays a major role in hierarchising knowledge. This however is not an ode to
structuralism—it seeks instead to show that the contact zone is a space constituted
both of constraints and possibilities. In this sense, it also points to the limitations
of the more traditional approaches that seek simply to juxtapose changing prac-
tices on each side of the cultural divide. In this approach, intercultural encounter
is conceived as a temporal process, where the conjectural evolution of conditions
and institutions provide the framework within which individual actors shape their
strategies while at the same time reshaping their institutional and urban environ-
ment. It is thus that the ‘local’ makes it possible to perceive and make sense of the
world, and that the world can be thought of from Calcutta.
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Indian Economic & Social History

The historical anatomy of a contact zone : Calcutta in the eighteenth century

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As a historian of science focusing on the role of circulation and intercultural

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clad, or over tattooed, indigenous populations on distant beaches or in dense tro-

...the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come

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making it the birthplace of large-scale printing in the Subcontinent. Finally, it

The Founding and First Decades of Calcutta

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The foundation in 1690 by the East India Company of an English entrepôt on

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Maritime trade brought its own lot of entrepreneurs—Europeans, as well as

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in no way implied an ‘age of partnership’, but rather a deft management of differ-

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Calcutta after 1757

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Tafazzul also received a rigorous education in theology, mathematics, logic and

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role of geographical go-between, providing a privileged vantage point for Indian

William Jones and Calcutta

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The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure;

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Newton’s earlier chronology through a series of dubious etymological arguments,

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of the ‘clash of civilizations’. This historiographical approach has of course to re-

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek on May 17, 2011

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek on May 17, 2011

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek on May 17, 2011

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek on May 17, 2011

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek on May 17, 2011

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