CONTENTS Welcome

Vyvyen Brendon Children of the Raj

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Christopher Penn Rebuilding the Catalogue of Albert Thomas Watson Penn, the Leading Commercial Photographer in Ootacamund, 1875-1900

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Avril Powell An Unusual Shipboard Encounter: Mary Carpenter Quizzes Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan on Education for Indian Women

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Richard Scott Morel Historical Sources for Afghanistan in the British Library

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Xiao Wei Bond Literary and Pictorial Sources for pre-20th Century Afghanistan in the British Library

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S. N. Pandita Aurel Stein’s Kashmir Legacy: An Introduction to the Website

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Frances Wood Aurel Stein and Kashmir

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Ursula Sims-Williams

Central Asian Manuscript Forgeries: New Correspondence between Aurel Stein and Rudolf Hoernle

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Ramesh K. Dhungel Opening the Chest of Nepal’s History: The Survey of B. H. Hodgson’s Manuscripts in the British Library and the Royal Asiatic Society, London

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Lionel Carter Publication of the Punjab Governor’s Reports

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News

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SAALG Newsletter 2

The 74th Conference of SAALG, hosted by the Kashmir Bhawan Centre.

Delegates at the 75th Conference at the Ancient India and Iran Trust, Cambridge.

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SAALG Newsletter

CHILDREN OF THE RAJ VYVYEN BRENDON

AUTHOR OF CHILDREN OF THE RAJ [Based on a paper delivered at the 75th Conference of SAALG, the Ancient India and Iran Trust,

Cambridge, 30 June 2006]

I was drawn to the children of the Raj in a most unscholarly fashion. In 2002 I was staying at the Taj Garden Retreat in Kerala, a lakeside hotel which used to be a coconut planter’s bungalow. Hanging on the wall of the verandah was a photograph of a little boy in a toy pedal car adorned with a Union Jack and attended by an Indian servant. In the bedrooms were copies of a history of the Baker family whose house it had been. There I discovered that the boy, David Baker, met his death as a Second World War pilot and that he had a brother and sister. I longed to find out about these children’s lives in India. When I came home, my quest was satisfied not in an archive centre but through the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA), whose meetings are attended by hundreds of old Raj hands. It was there that I met Beatrice Broad, David’s sister, and Paula Baker, his sister-in-law, who gave me permission to use this evocative photograph as the cover for the book I was to publish three years later.

David Baker in Kumerakom, c.1923

After my return from Kerala more academic factors came to the fore. I found that there was plenty of untapped primary evidence and that there was no published work on the topic. Of course, as always seems to happen, two books appeared as I was writing; but luckily their approach was very different from my own. Last Children of the Raj by Laurence Fleming is a rich mine of Indian memories presented verbatim without historical comment. Conversely, Elizabeth Buettner’s Empire Families contains plenty of historical analysis but no real-life children. As one reviewer commented, “the anguished poetry of an unhappy 11-year-old’s letter evaporates entirely when subjected to Buettner’s pious post-modern gaze”.1 What I tried to do was to use the children’s words and feelings to illuminate an aspect of imperial history. I also realised, in the course of my research, that this story contributes to the history of childhood and has a perennial relevance. Raj parents worrying about what to do with their children were not very different from wartime parents considering overseas evacuation, or African and Asian parents seeking to benefit their children by sending them to school in Britain, or even busy modern mothers and fathers juggling with parallel ca

reers.

1 K. Hickman in The Sunday Times, 11 July 2004.

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The book focuses on the thousands of British children who were born or spent some of their early years in British India, Ceylon (a separate Crown Colony) and Burma (part of the Raj between 1886 and 1935). It encompasses the whole period of British rule from the late 18th century to the granting of Independence to India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma in 1947/48. Most British families then left India but my book concludes with a study of those who stayed on in these countries for twenty or so years after Independence. What surprised me is how little the treatment of children changed over the two centuries.

In the early days the lack of young British women meant that most nabobs’ offspring came from mixed marriages or relationships. Known as Eurasians, such children were usually brought up with their parents in India. As their numbers increased life became increasingly difficult for Eurasians. In India top civil service and military jobs, as well as clubs, were closed to them and in Britain they could only prosper if they were very pale in colour and preferably rich. My researches revealed how hard it was for them to pursue a career in Britain or India. A typical story is that of the illegitimate sons of Lord Wellesley’s Private Secretary, Neil Edmonstone. They were given the name Elmore and sent to Scotland in 1802 to be brought up by a friend’s sister. Papers lodged in Cambridge University Library show what a struggle their fond guardian had to get them established in any career. Their father would not let them come to India and in Scotland their faces were too dark for them to be considered gentlemen. Edmonstone’s friend despaired of their chances: “the two lads who were brought up by my sister … are entitled to your name and the countenance of your family but they are deprived of the one and enjoy but little of the

other”.2 A similar tale could be told about the two half-Indian daughters of Francis William Pember-ton. I discovered their existence in a private archive but found no mention of them in the family tree. So this group of Raj children are somewhat elusive and many remain hidden from history.

Once the famous “fishing fleet” of English women came racing out to net lone Britons, there were more British families in India – or there would have been if most of the children had not been packed off to Britain (“Home” as the adults insisted on calling it) when they were very young. A famous example of this separation is the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. After the early death of his father in 1817, his beloved mother quickly married an old flame and put five-year-old William on a sailing boat at Calcutta for the six-month journey around the Cape of Good Hope to England. Here he was looked after by relations and went to “a dreadful school with cold, chilblains, bad dinners and caning awful”, where his only consolation was to “dream of Mama”. When his mother came back in 1819 he was so overcome that he could not speak.

2 Cambridge University Library, MS. Add. 7616, J. Baillie to N. Edmonstone, 15 January 1817.

SAALG Newsletter 6

William Makepeace Thackeray with his parents in India, 1814

Thackeray never forgot this parting and later wrote, “boy or man I have never been able to bear the sight of people parting from their children”.3 In my view, it is not anachronistic to judge that this boyhood experience had a permanent effect on Thackeray’s psyche, even though he lived so long before the days of Freud.

Like those of Rudyard Kipling or Saki, Thackeray’s story can be recreated from printed sources. For more obscure juvenile subjects there is also no dearth of evidence. Largely because of the separations there are plenty of letters and diaries, treasured by families and now preserved in

3 G. Ray (ed), Letters and Private Papers of W. M. Thackeray (1994), vol. 1. pp. 3, 5 and W. M. Thackeray, Roundabout Papers (1925 edn), p. 20.

libraries like that of the India Office. In itself a letter like the illustrated example from the huge Barlow archive would be of limited use although it does suggest an isolated child very anxious to please her parents.4 But Sir George Barlow and his wife kept many other letters from their fifteen children and also from Sir George’s brothers who looked after them in England. They span the long period of Barlow’s grand official career in Calcutta and Madras (1778-1813) and together they give a vivid picture of family life and separation. In fact the story, which involves perilous sea journeys, school riots, sexual adventures and divorces, frequently had me sitting on the edge of my library chair.

Letter from Barlow Papers

Another rich collection is that of the Benthall family from the Centre for South Asian Studies in Cambridge. I knew that earlier historians such as

4 India Office Library, MSS Eur F176/16, Eliza Barlow to her parents, 9 May 1801.

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Pat Barr had used it but they had not focused on such scenes as the departure of the three oldest children (aged between two and six) for England in 1847 when Mrs Clementina Benthall wrote in her diary: “Edith held up her dear merry face to be kissed, little thinking that it was the signal of parting. I cannot describe the sorrow of the poor boys, Ernest’s speechless look of anguish and Clement’s sobs and embraces and expressions of love.”5 It was another eight years before the family was reunited.

There are also letters in private hands which people have been kind enough to lend me. One collection of such documents arrived in a dusty suitcase hauled down from the attic of a woman I met at a friend’s wedding. They concern the Wilkins family who were Baptist missionaries in India in the early 20th century. Some of them had been attacked by white ants, fire, damp or paperclips, but they were all legibly written and signed off with noughts and crosses to represent hugs and kisses. The parents kept the letters the children wrote after they had been sent to school and to various dif-ferent relations in England. The parents’ letters did not survive because the children had no permanent home in which to store them.

The Wilkins correspondence tells the often heartbreaking story of Dorothy, Joyce and Phyllis at Walthamstow Hall trying to keep cheerful during years of separation from their parents, which were extended by the dangers at sea caused by the First World War. We see them struggling with exams, hoping for someone to come to Open Days, sorting out which relations they were to go to for the

5 Centre for South Asian Studies, Benthall Papers, C. Benthall, “Account of Separation from the Children”, 1848.

holidays, coping with illness, deciding on their future careers, going through crises of faith and longing all the time for their parents to whom they sent “as much love that the ships will hold”. I defy anyone not to be moved by Joyce’s words to her mother in 1917: “Just now as I looked out of the window I saw a huge, big, perfectly round sun sinking behind the trees. I have told him to give you my love when he sees you in a few minutes. I hope he will do so.”6 All the girls prayed that they would not get the call to be missionaries in their turn for fear that they would have to inflict the same fate on their own children. Their brother Eric did enter the Indian mission field – but he retired early once his sons reached school-age.

Not all letters are as expressive as these. Often they were censored by schoolteachers or constrained by the child’s own sense of duty. And, as Kipling said about the record of his own Anglo-Indian childhood, “children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as externally established”.7 Sometimes, as in the case of the Beveridge family, a written memoir adds to the picture conveyed by letters. In 1884 Letty, William and Tutu, the children of a judge in Bengal, were left at a school in Southport. They wrote brave letters to their parents; five-year-old Tutu, for instance, told them that she had played at horses in the field but did not cry when she fell because “a horse does not cry”. William told them about having a cake with candles on his sixth birthday but it was only in his family memoir India Called Them that he revealed his “bitter grief” that he had to share

6 Wilkins Papers (now deposited in Regent’s Park College, Oxford), Joyce to her mother, April 1917. 7 Quoted in A. Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977), p. 32.

SAALG Newsletter 8

another little boy’s party because his own mother was in India. The book also tells of the relief William felt when the children took the opportunity of their mother’s return for medical treatment to “argue their way back to India”. When she realised how unhappy the children were Mrs Beveridge took them back with her. She communicated her decision to her husband by the new electric telegraph: “Operation well done. Children accompany me.”8 Such memoirs should not be rejected as “one-sided interpretations”.9 When combined with knowledge gleaned from other sources they can be invaluable in recreating that time “when the grass was taller”.10

Finally, I found that oral memoirs gave me a vivid picture both of childhoods in India and of separation from parents. I interviewed over fifty people, all of whom I heard about by word of mouth. In case that should sound like an unrepresentative sample, let me add that they came from a wide range of backgrounds. As well as the planter’s daughter from Kerala, they included the sons and daughters of missionaries, bankers, railway employees, teachers, army officers and other ranks, civil servants, engineers, a river pilot, a ship surveyor and a journalist on the Times of India. Some were of mixed race (though I didn’t always know that beforehand) and some were from the rather despised domiciled families who had settled in India. Others came from pukka backgrounds. What they all had in common was

8 India Office Library, MSS Eur C176, Beveridge Letters, and Lord Beveridge, India Called Them (1947). 9 E. Buettner, Empire Families, Britons and late Imperial India (2004), p. 269. 10 R. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (1986).

that they had spent some of their childhood in India and wanted to share their memories with me, even if they were painful. Many had never previously talked about their childhood. With this wealth of primary sources I have tried to throw light on the question of whether children of the Raj were victims of empire.

Vyvyen Brendon interviewing Beatrice Board

The Two Monsoons theory of Indian history would have us believe that most of them met an early grave.11 Health was indeed a problem and many children died of cholera, tropical malaria, dysentery and typhoid. But is it true that children in India were at greater risk than children in Britain? The only statistics available are those produced by a government inquiry of 1859 into the Sanitary Condition of the British Army in India, for which Florence Nightingale produced a whole roomful of paperwork. Its surprising conclusion was that “the mortality of English children in India is lower than the general mortality of children at home”.12 As time went on health improved. By the beginning of

11 e.g. T. Wilkinson, Two Monsoons (1976). 12 Sanitary Report of the British Army in India (1863), vol.1, p. 29.

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the 20th century there was quinine to treat malaria and mosquito nets to prevent it. There were also injections against smallpox, cholera, plague, diphtheria and tetanus. Parents became increasingly careful, too, about boiling water and milk. Thus British children in India in the days of the Raj were much healthier than are poor Indian children today. Some children’s health actually improved in India; I have come across several who were cured of tuberculosis there and a woman who attributes her survival as a premature baby in the days before incubation units to the heat of her native India.

There is also a view that women and children were often martyred in the cause of empire. The incident most often cited is the 1857 Indian Mutiny. In assaults by rebellious Indian troops and long sieges at Delhi, Lucknow and Cawnpore several hundred children were killed by bullets or died of sunstroke, cholera and dysentery. And at Cawnpore women and children were deliberately killed and their bodies thrown down a well. It is a gruesome story and it was never forgotten. But this was the only time in the history of the Raj that

Child’s grave in Trivandrum

British people were systematically attacked – normally children, in particular, were very safe; during the “Quit India” disturbances of the 1940s the British got away almost unscathed. Furthermore, most parts of India were unaffected by the Mutiny and even in the areas of conflict many English children were actually helped by Indians – servants, for instance, would paint their faces brown and help them to escape. It also needs to be remembered that more Indians were killed in the reprisals than were Britons in the Mutiny itself.

Another theory was that children suffered because they could not be properly educated in India. In fact there were good schools, such as the various self-styled “Etons of the East” established in the Himalayan foothills as early as the 1860s. In addition many were founded and run by the Catholic Church. Some English children attended such schools because their parents didn’t want or couldn’t afford to send them back to Britain or because war conditions made the journey too dangerous. M. M. Kaye, for instance, was sent to Auckland House in Simla during the First World War. But her mother quickly took her away once she realised that many of the pupils were Eurasians who “spoke with a lilting sing-song accent that was very like a Welsh one and was known as chi-chi”.13 So Mollie and her sister had no more education until the war was over and they could be brought to England. In many other cases mixed-race pupils were not thought fit company for the offspring of pukka sahibs.

13 M. M. Kaye, Sun in the Morning (1992 edn), pp. 194-5.

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St Mary’s School, Mount Abu, 1937

A contrasting experience is that of one of my interviewees, Agnes Heron, who attended St Mary’s Anglican School in Poona as a day-girl. Agnes was the only child of a Madras businessman who chose to keep her in India so that he could supervise her musical education. She passed all her music exams and her Senior Cambridge Certificate in India. Agnes did not suffer from tropical illnesses, she was not bitten by snakes, she had a happy childhood with her parents and she got a very good education, which has enabled her to support herself throughout life. And she certainly doesn’t speak with that chi-chi accent so dreaded by parents of the Raj. Through letters sent to me since the publication of Children of the Raj I have discovered more men and women who were well educated in India.

Thus I have had to conclude that the choices of most British parents living in India were based on class and race exclusiveness. They would rather send their children thousands of miles away and see them only every few years than allow them to mix with the wrong type of children. They were determined that they should be brought up as middle-class English children – whatever the emotional cost. This pattern continued all through

the Raj and beyond, despite the new child-centred theories of Sigmund Freud, John Bowlby and Dr Spock. Children themselves rarely had any choice in the matter. Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that no one actually listened to children until the 1960s. If, like the Elephant’s Child, “he asked questions about everything he saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, all his uncles and aunts spanked him”.

The only difference in the later years was that air transport sometimes made the journeys easier and contact more frequent. Nevertheless, I do not accept Trevor Royle’s conclusion that after Independence “thanks to air travel children could go out to India for the holidays”.14 Even in the 1950s and ‘60s air tickets were expensive and employers like ICI and HSBC were most reluctant to take on the cost of family reunions. Three-year separations were still common after the war. And, for as long as the Raj lasted, there were no tele-phone links with India, so that children had no speedy way of telling parents of their troubles or triumphs. Even after 1947 calls cost £1 a minute which was a lot of money in those days. It is a far cry from today’s constant text-messaging.

Thus I argue that the real price children paid for the British Empire was an emotional one. Separated children lost, to a greater or lesser degree, the normal rough and tumble of family life and the care of their parents. Joyce Wilkins had several nervous breakdowns as an adult and some interviewees have told me of the psychological problems they have suffered in later life as a result of childhood separation and unsuitable care arrangements. This was a serious matter and cannot be dismissed as “so much ado about family

14 T. Royle, The Last Days of the Raj (1989), p. 229.

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sacrifice”.15 It is true that children often coped with their experiences valiantly and developed the resilience and stiff upper lip on which British people pride themselves. Many deny to this day that they suffered at all and gamely say that their parents paid a greater price than they did – but I wonder about that.

Brian Outhwaite on army cantonment at Dagshai, 1939

Spike Milligan (son of an NCO) considered that children like himself, whose parents could not afford an English education, “may well have fared better than the more privileged children”.16 I agree that children usually gained more than they lost if they lived in India at an impressionable age and

15 Buettner, Empire Families, p. 145. 16 P. Scudamore, Spike Milligan (1985), p. 23

most would not have been harmed by a longer stay. Another sergeant’s son, Brian Outhwaite, described as “Paradise” a year spent roaming around Barrackpore when there was no army school available – and his patchy Indian education did not prevent his becoming a Cambridge History don. Children returned from India with some magical memories which transcend the “Raj nostalgia syndrome” decried by some modern historians.17 For children were more open to India than its hide-bound adult rulers. Through their contact with Indian servants and playmates, through speaking some of the local language and simply by being children they observed and absorbed what was going on around them. In such ways, Paul Scott concludes, India has “helped to nourish the flesh and warm the blood” of British people.

17 A. Burton, “India, Inc? Nostalgia, memory and the empire of things” in S. Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (2001), p. 226. Hilary Johnson in the

“Jungle Tales” from unpublished memoirs by Hilda Reid

SAALG Newsletter 12

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REBUILDING THE CATALOGUE OF ALBERT THOMAS WATSON PENN, THE

LEADING COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHER IN OOTACAMUND, 1875-1900 CHRISTOPHER PENN

[Based on a talk given at the 74th Conference of SAALG, the Kashmir Bhawan Centre, Luton, 9 December 2005]

This will be an article about A. T. W. Penn, who was born in Street in Somerset in 1849 and died in Coonoor in the Nilgiris in South India in 1924, but let me start the story a generation later.

A. T. W. Penn’s second son, my grandfather Harold Penn, was a soldier. He ran away from home and joined the 21st Hussars (to be renamed 21st Lancers) in Secunderabad when he was just sixteen. He was given the rank of “Boy”, before becoming a trumpeter and then a Private. He was a courageous man and as a L/Cpl in the 21st Lancers won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, going under enemy fire to rescue a fellow soldier who was wounded.

He was a good soldier but a brute of a husband and in 1918 he was divorced by my grandmother after ten horrendous years which left such a mark on my father and his brother that they never talked about the Penn family at all. It was as if it had been erased from their memory, which may indeed have been the case.

More than a decade after my father and his brother had both died I found a crumpled letter stuck behind the top drawer of his writing bureau from a cousin Patricia of whom I had never heard. I tracked her down and from her learned about A. T. W. Penn for the first time. She showed me an obituary headed, “IN MEMORIAM. The passing of

a pioneer Nilgiris artist by the death of Mr A. T. W. Penn at Coonoor”, in which the writer, who signed himself “Old Timer”, referred to a seminal book, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India by Edgar Thurston C.I.E, published in 1909, for which Penn had supplied some of the photographs used as illustrations.

A few days later, walking down Piccadilly, I noticed the antiquarian bookshop Sotherans on my left in Sackville Street and went in to enquire in as offhand a manner as I could muster, “You don’t by any chance have a copy of Thurston’s Castes and Tribes of Southern India do you?” “Do you know”, replied the attendant Stuart Leggatt, “I think I have”, and he reached up and took down a volume in its original cloth binding from the shelf.

I leafed through the Preface and was brought up short by the penultimate sentence, which read, “for some of the photographs of Badagas, Kurumbas and Todas I am indebted to Mr. A. T. W. Penn of Ootacamund”. To see my great-grandfather’s name in print, a man about whom I had known absolutely nothing just a few weeks earlier, was an extraordinarily exciting experience. From this point and an afternoon a few months later when Sophie Gordon, the curator of the Alkazi collection, showed me their collection of his photographs, I date my commitment to learning as much as I possibly could about Penn’s life and his

work. Very early on I took as my aim to rebuild a catalogue of his work.

Kurumbas

After that brief introduction, let me outline the article. First, the hill station of Ootacamund, where Penn lived and worked for the greater part of his life, will be set in its historical context; second, Penn’s family background will be described; third will be a description of the work of a commercial photographer in South India at that time; and last will be a few reflections on the process of my research over the last four years and the way in which each part has been in a sense a stepping-stone which led on to another.

Entrance to Toda hut

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Often, of course, it has been in discussion with the curators of the collections such as Rachel Rowe at Cambridge, Sophie Gordon at the Alkazi collection and John Falconer at the OIOC in the British Library that the next step has become clear. It is not just because I am writing this that I should wish to acknowledge my great debt to the curators of the photographic collections; they are an invaluable support for people such as myself who come to work in the archives with little knowledge of the subject or of what is available. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND THE HILL STATION OF

OOTACAMUND The historical context is well known. Trade was what drove British expansion in India in the 17th and 18th centuries. The East India Company was formed in 1601 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the great Mughal emperor Akbar.

During the 18th century military power enabled Britain to put an end to France’s imperial ambitions and to replace the Mughal Empire as the ruling power in India. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857/58 the subcontinent was brought under direct rule from London through the three Presidencies: Calcutta in the north and east, Bombay in the west and Madras in the south. The Governors of the Presidencies were appointed by the British Government and reported directly to London.

Madras, where the East India Company had been based, was the historic centre of British power in India. With effect from the mid-1870s the Governor and Council moved up to the hill station of Ootacamund, commonly known then and now as Ooty, for the six months of the summer. The exodus from the plains in April to return to Madras in September was formally sanctioned when Lord

Hobart was Governor of Madras (1872-75) and driven forward by his successor the Duke of Buckingham, who built Government House in Ooty and dearly loved the hill station.

Ooty is about 350 miles west of Madras and 100 miles south-west of Bangalore. It lies in the Nilgiri mountain range 7500 ft. above sea level and the excellent climate led to its original foundation as a military sanatorium in the 1850s. THE FAMILY BACKGROUND OF A. T. W. PENN From the 16th to the 19th centuries Penn's family lived in Northampton, where they worked in the boot and shoe industry. In the 1820s, Penn’s father moved as a young man down to London and opened a boot and shoe shop on the corner of Brooke Street and Holborn Bars, next to where the Prudential building now stands. In 1848 he moved again, to work for Clark’s Shoes in Street in Somerset, where Penn was born the following year. Although Penn’s father, like many generations before him, was a cobbler, he later started a successful business in the graphic arts as a ticket writer, a producer of price tickets and sales promotional material.

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A wayside scene, Kullar

Penn left home before he was twelve, became proficient in photography and found his way to South India and up to Ooty, where he started work as a photographer in 1865, the year in which he turned sixteen. While the independence and spirit that led him there was remarkable, the choice of profession was not so surprising. There was artistic talent in the family – apart from his father’s business as a ticket writer, one of his nephews was the artist Will C. Penn M.C., R.O.I., a fellow of the Royal Institute of Portrait Painters – and photography was the most exciting and popular art form of the mid-Victorian era.

Before leaving for India he sent his family a carte-de-visite photograph of himself, writing a note on the back such as that he sent to his elder sister, “to Clara with very kind love and affection (from her) brother Albert”.

THE WORK OF A COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHER Portraiture was the bread and butter of Penn’s work as a commercial photographer.

Some were private photographs of individuals on carte-de-visite (4½ x 2½ inches, 11.4 x 6.4 cm.), others were of family groups, normally cabinet size (6¼ x 4¼ inches, 15.9 x 10.8 cm). Others were produced to be sold to the public. Portraits of the indigenous people, “native characters”, were of this type and will be discussed in more detail later, as were photographs of “The great and the good”, many of which, such as Penn’s portrait of the Commander-in-Chief General Sir Frederick Roberts V. C., later Field Marshall Lord Roberts of Kandahar, were very popular.

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Group portraits such as those of the Ooty hunt or of entertainments or the fancy dress balls were also useful business; but seasonal. The “Season” in Ooty was from April to September. In Madras it was the reverse: October to March.

Scenic views were the second source of business. Penn was fortunate in seeing other accomplished photographers of the day working in Ooty, such as the doyen of them all Samuel Bourne, who visited Ooty in 1868/69, and W. W. Hooper, who made his famous Tiger Hunt series in the Nilgiris in the early 1870s.

Like Bourne, much of Penn’s work is in search of the “picturesque”. Though not working to such rigid formulas as Bourne espoused, Penn generally uses a darker foreground, often with glistening foliage, opening out to a sunlit middle distance and the mountains or the distant plains beyond. The eye is led through the composition, giving a sense of movement even to a static scene. Moving water and passing clouds, which were so much a part of the Nilgiri landscape, presented a special challenge to the photographer in those days. In photographs such as Kulhutty Falls18 and Law’s Falls, near Coonoor,19 Penn’s photographs capture both the flood of the water and the rugged terrain and boulders which hold it back. Kulhutty Falls is not unlike a watercolour by the Daniells seventy years earlier, reminding us that for these early photographers, it was the watercolourists who were their model. Scenic views such as these were sold as mementoes both to visitors and to residents of the Nilgiris.

18 BL: OIOC Photo 1115.1(17). 19 BL: OIOC Photo 1115.1(16).

The third part of the photographer’s work in India in those days was closely related to the first. It was to record the life of the indigenous people of India at that time. There were three tribes in the Nilgiris, which were aboriginal and very few in number: the Toda, the Kurumba and the Kota. The fourth and most numerous tribe were the Badaga, who had come up from Mysore in the north-west some three hundred years earlier. While the Toda were pastoral people, who tended their enormous herds of buffalo and traded milk and milk products for grain and other food and artefacts from the other tribes, the Kurumba were the hunters, the Kota the artisans and the Badaga the agriculturalists. Penn recorded the life of all of them, both in his studio and more frequently out in their villages, where in his photographs they appear natural and relaxed. His photographs of the indigenous people of the Nilgiris are now held in all of the major collections in the United Kingdom, in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, in the archives of the Basel Mission and in the Getty Institute in Los Angeles.

Following the development of photogravure printing at the end of the 19th century a new market opened up for the photographer. Penn’s contribution to Edgar Thurston’s work has already been mentioned. At about the same time, he supplied all the illustrations for Sir Frederick Price’s Ootacamund. A history, published in 1908, and the illustrations used by a dynamic young missionary and gifted author named Amy Wilson Carmichael for her book Overweighs of Joy, published in 1907. “The photos of the mountains”, writes Amy, “are the work of an expert in capturing the spirit of the wild ... imagine yourself on the mountain ... fill the forests with life, the clouds with movement. Flood all the wide spaces with light

and with colour. Then let the wind blow over the uplands, and stir the grasses and the little mountain flowers at your feet.”

Two years later Amy persuaded Albert, then in his mid-fifties, to travel with his equipment the three or four hundred miles from Ooty down to her mission in Dohnavour in the southern tip of the subcontinent. She wanted him to take photographs of the children and the countryside surrounding the mission for a new book called Lotus Buds which was published at the end of 1909. A review of the book in the Westminster Gazette early in 1910 reads: “The feature of the book is 50 photogravure illustrations from photographs specially taken of the children. Many of these – indeed all of them – are very charming. Some of them are mere babies, others of larger growth, but in each case the photographer, Mr Penn of Ootacamund, has succeeded in presenting pictures which will elicit high admiration. The laughing faces, curly hair, and fine physical development of the little Indians make photographs exceedingly attractive. Indeed, we have never seen a more ‘taking’ series of children of the Orient.”

In 1911, forty-six years after starting work as a photographer in the Nilgiris, Penn retired and returned to England. He called his house in Eversholt, Beds., “The Mund”, which means home or village in the Toda language. But the call of the Nilgiris was too strong and after the First World War was over he and his wife returned to live in Coonoor, close by Ooty, where he died in 1924. THE PROCESS OF RESEARCH – STEPPING STONES I wrote earlier that it was after the visit to the Alkazi collection that I had decided to rebuild the catalogue of Penn. That was not strictly true. I had

the idea then, but it was only after Sophie Gordon had pointed me to the OIOC in the British Library and John Falconer, in turn, had sent me on to the Royal Commonwealth Society’s collection in Cambridge University Library that I set as my aim the recreation of Penn’s catalogue. Clearly there had been one at some time. A number of the photographs were numbered on the negative or on the album page. So I started to make a record of each Penn that I had seen, noting the type of print, e.g. albumen, the dimensions and a brief description of the subject matter and particular points of identification.

By the beginning of this year I had a list of about 400 Penn photographs, of which one third were duplicated in the different collections, leaving about 300 original images. They came from both public and private collections including: the Alkazi collection (40 in London, 10 in New York), the OIOC (90 photographs in 5 albums), the Royal Commonwealth Society collection in Cambridge (60 photographs in one principal album and five others), the National Army Museum (83 photographs in one album in the Roberts archive), the NMPFT in Bradford (20), the Basel Mission (12) and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (8).

Discussions with one curator would lead me on to the next and so on. I have already acknowledged my debt in this regard. At the same time I was trying to rebuild a family tree of the descendants of Albert Penn and his wife, in the hope that among the descendants more of his work would be discovered and that I should get to know him better. Research into the family started with Patricia, whose letter I had found behind the bureau in 2000 and we had met for the first time in 2001. She had three more surviving cousins and from

SAALG Newsletter 18

them I was able to start to gather names and addresses of the following generation. At the beginning the information was fairly vague, even the number and names of Albert’s children were not known, but my wife and I decided to visit Ooty and from the church records there were able to put the record straight. With the help of e-mail we were finally able to get the names and addresses of a hundred and twenty-six living descendants of Albert Penn whom we invited to a reunion at home in September 2003. Fifty-eight accepted, of whom we were meeting thirty-two for the first time.

We were blessed with wonderful weather – truly an Indian summer in every sense – and following on from it, even though I had to wait for eighteen months, another album came to light with more than 50 of Penn’s photographs.

This find enabled me to bring the work on Penn’s catalogue almost to a conclusion, covering more than 200 photographs numbered on the negative, and many more, such as most of the indigenous people, which are unnumbered.

I cannot end without expressing my thanks to the staff of the OIOC in the British Library, which is such a wonderful resource if one is on a hunt like mine has been. Starting with the directories on the open shelves –

Thackers and the Asylum Press Almanac, the Indian Army List– and going on to the Ecclesiastical Records, the newspapers on microfilm, a large collection of photographs maintained in first class conditions, etc. and a very knowledgeable staff, one could hardly ask for more.

And what next? Over the past four years I have read a large number of books around the subject of my research. Some are works of history like The Cambridge History of India or The Oxford History of the British Empire, some are novels like A suitable boy by Vikram Seth or White Mughals by William Dalrymple; but the one with which I have felt most in accord and which perhaps points me forward in the right direction is Richard Holmes’ Footsteps: adventures of a romantic biographer. Early in his book Holmes writes, “Biography meant a book about someone’s life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following in footsteps. You would never quite catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.”

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SAALG Newsletter

AN UNUSUAL SHIPBOARD ENCOUNTER: MARY CARPENTER QUIZZES SIR SAIYID AHMAD KHAN ON EDUCATION FOR INDIAN WOMEN

DR AVRIL POWELL SENIOR LECTURER IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH ASIA, SOAS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

In 1869 two educationists met and conversed

together, for the only time in their lives, on matters Indian. The setting of the conversation was unusual. The SS Baroda as it steamed from Bombay to the Red Sea carried among its passengers Mary Carpenter, the educationist and penal reformer, en route home following her second tour of India.20 Also on board was an Indian civil servant, Saiyid Ahmad Khan, his two sons and their student friend, travelling to England for further studies. Both Mary and Saiyid Ahmad were already pioneers in the furtherance of particular kinds of education in India, and the later reputations of both would be built to a great extent on their achievements in this field. Mary founded the National Indian Association in Bristol a few months later, a major object of which was support for the education of Indian women. Saiyid Ahmad, who had already founded a boys’ school in northern India, returned from England a year later to mastermind the opening in 1875 of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, today’s Aligarh Muslim University.21

Mary Carpenter, educationist and penal reformer (1807-1877)

[BL: 10099.y.3/9]

They apparently talked on many matters, but surviving records detail only Mary’s own particular project, female education. During this and an earlier tour she had lectured exhaustively on the subject in Bengal and western India, encouraging her audiences to take initiatives for the establishment of girls’ schools.22 She insisted that individuals who showed interest, both British and Indian, the latter predominantly associated with the Brahmo Samaj movement among Hindus, should record their views on this and her other “reforming” projects in a large volume which

20

20 On Mary Carpenter’s connections with India see, J. E. Carpenter, The Life and Work of Mary Carpenter (London, 1879); N. C. Sargant, Mary Carpenter in India (Bristol, 1987); Frank Prochaska, “Carpenter, Mary”, ODNB (2004), article 4733. 21 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, 1978).

22 For a record of her first visit see, Mary Carpenter, Six Months in India, 2 vols (London, 1868).

21

always travelled with her.23 The majority of entries, unsurprisingly, expressed views that mirrored her own, and encouraged her, eulogistically, in her further endeavours. At the end of her conversation with Saiyid Ahmad, she asked him to write his own comments on the future of schooling for girls. The entry that he graciously greed to provide is articularly revealing because of his later reputation that he was in fact opposed to public educa

a p

tion for the females of his own

Sir an Anglo-Oriental C 1817-1898)

sition on

Saiyid Ahmad Khan, founder of the Muhammadollege at Aligarh ([BL: 14110.f.10]

Indian Muslim community, or at the least, had considerable reservations about it. What was he to do? Offend Miss Carpenter by recording his views for posterity in her journal, or pretend to a po

the subject which falsified his real views? It is because such interpretations hang on it

that this volume, deposited with some of Mary

l

w

p tenigmatic short

sta

23 Mary Carpenter, “Records of India 1866”, 2 vols, Mary Carpenter papers, Bristol Record Office.

Carpenter’s other papers in the Bristol Record Office, is of interest. The views Saiyid Ahmad expressed in it have long been available, both in a printed edition of the original Urdu entry, and in an English translation, made by Saiyid Ahmad’s close friend, Colone Graham, in his biography, The Life and Work of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.24 However, the original version in Mary Carpenter’s volume is important beyond the exciting fact that it is probably the only example of a document written in his own hand in Urdu which survives in any archive or library in Britain.25 An Indian Muslim student, Khudadad Beg, who was travelling with the Saiyid’s party, as asked to add an English translation below Saiyid Ahmad’s entry. His translation, either intentionally, or because of some weaknesses in his own command of English, tended to exaggerate the effusiveness of Saiyid Ahmad’s references to Mary’s work, adding some rhetorical flourishes of his own, thus making the meaning even more obscure than it actually was. Although Colonel Graham’s biography, which includes this passage, is still one of the first works to which students of the Saiyid turn, no attention has been aid in recent studies o the content and meaning of this somewhat

tement on female education.

24 Saiyid Ahmad Khan (ed. Muhammad Isma‘il Panipati) Musafirān-i London (Lahore, 1961), pp. 61-3; G. F. I.

id Ahmad Khan, with his own signature

Graham, The Life and Work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, 2nd ed. (London, 1909), pp. 78-9. 25 There are, for example, English translations of someletters by Saiyappended, in Edinburgh University Library’s ‘Special Collections’.

SAALG Newsletter 22

What then did Saiyid Ahmad write, and what does it add to our understanding of his position?26 He commenced conventionally enough, with praise for Mary Carpenter’s benevolent concern for the condition of Indian women, of which he had clearly heard much already, and expressed his anxie therefore to meet her. Interesting, in the context of much talk on this subject in both mid-19th century Britain and India, was his representation of God as having created woman as “a second hand” and a “helper” for man. Colonel Graham’s translation rendered this as, “woman, whom God hath made as an helpmate to man in good works”.

ty

a pa

p p pe n

27 So far so good, but the next section was much more enigmatic, hinting that however excellent the intentions, the best-laid plans do not always come to fruition. He seemed to be warning that there is a danger in trying to work against the grain of the customs and traditions dominant in a particular society at

rticular time. No good will result from this, for by so doing it is as if one is acting against “nature”.

The relevance of trying to “oppose nature” is then taken u by an exam le s lled out i the next paragraph which is particularly interesting in the wider context of his growing, and controversial, reputation as a “nechari”, or advocate of naturalistic resolutions of seeming conflicts between scriptural revelation and rational thinking. For he referred here to the Old Testament miracle in which Joshua had ordered, “Sun, stand thou still” until the children of Israel had completed the destruction of the Amorites, explaining that God of course knew that the sun

was always static, and it was the earth that moved, but in executing Joshua’s request He took account of prevalent ideas on the subject in that period of time and society.

26 Loc. cit. in: “Records of India”; Saiyid Ahmad Khan, Musafirān-i London; Graham, Life and Work.

ay’s objective of

op

os W x

inappropriate to encourage women’s education outside the zanana, if at all, until men’s education had made considerable more advances than it

27 Graham, Life and Work, p. 79.

28 The moral he drew from this was that those who want to do good works but who ignore current public opinion and “the spirit of the age” risk acting against nature itself and are likely to fail. Is he hinting here, in an indirect w y, that in spite of his initial praise for her good intentions and character, Mar

ening public schools for girls will fall into this category because of a misjudgment of the conditions then prevailing in India?

The final paragraph returned, however, to praise of Mary for her wish to improve the conditions of Indian w men and his hopes for her future succe s. as he following the e pected conventional niceties while at the same time intruding his own reservations about any modification of the status of Indian Muslim women? Comparison with some of his later pronouncements would suggest this is correct. When called as a witness to the Education Commission of 1882 he made a statement, much quoted subsequently, to the effect that it was

28 See Joshua 10, vs. 12-13. Saiyid Ahmad’s usage of this biblical reference is particularly interesting as he had earlier written in denial of the Copernican system. It should be considered in the light not only of his “conversion” to the “Copernican world view”, but also his recent studies of Christianity, resulting in the publication of his Tabyin al-kalam, The Mohamedan Commentary on the Holy Bible, 2 parts (Ghazipur, 1862; 1865). See Christian Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology (New Delhi, 1978).

23

had to date.29 However, his earlier position in the 1860s was much less clear-cut, even vacillating and inconsistent. The early numbers of his Urdu journal, the Aligarh Institute Gazette, published before his meeting with Mary, between 1866 and 1869, included several reports favourable to girls’ public education in India, which although authored by others, he could have jettisoned if he had so wished.30 Some of his own early statements, in favourable recognition, for example, of girls’ edu-cation in Egypt and Turkey, or in admiration of the level of education enjoyed by middle class girls in England, might be understood in the context of this shipboard statement as appropriate to rather different “stages of society” or to “prevailing conditions” different from those in India, even when some of the girls in question were also Muslim. Conditions in Cairo or London might be ripe, but not in Delhi? It is suggested therefore that this intriguing shipboard statement of Saiyid Ahmad’s contributes usefully to current interests in trying to resolve some of the conundrums concerning the evolution of his social agendas and the ambiguities of his character.

On the latter, what evidence do we have of how Mary Carpenter took to her shipmate, and he, reciprocally, to her? It seems she had not heard of him previously, a reflection perhaps of her lack of interest in Indian Muslims generally, whom she considered, as most British observers currently did, more reluctant than Hindus to educate their

29 Report of the Indian Education (Hunter) Commission: Report for the North-Western Provinces and Oudh with Testimony (Calcutta, 1884), p. 300. 30 e.g., article, “Mahomedan female education”, Aligarh Institute Gazette, vol. II. No. 40 , 4 Oct. 1867, English and Urdu, pp. 626-7.

daughters in the ways she proposed. He had clearly made a strong impact on her in this meeting however. Four years later she reported very favourably in the Journal of the National Indian Association the recent activities at Aligarh of “a venerable Mahommedan, who, with his two sons and his nephew, was on his way to England” when she encountered him in 1869.31 That Mary, actually ten years his senior but very sprightly, invoked him as “venerable” probably reflects the full beard and considerable gravitas of even the earliest portraits (he was fifty-two at the time of the voyage!). The more she learned of him afterwards, the more her admiration grew for his “high character and his influence among his countrymen”.32 However, she neither directed her own subsequent efforts towards Muslim women, nor did she include either the North Western Provinces or the Punjab, Saiyid Ahmad’s homeland and the centre of much Muslim cultural influence, in the itineraries of her subsequent visits to India. There is of course no evidence that she had managed to read between the lines of Saiyid Ahmad’s entry in her own journal to realise the thrust of his ambiguously couched reservations, but, anyway, by the time of her death in 1877, no further moves had been made by either participant in the conversation towards a programme for specifically Muslim women. It was left to her successors in the National Indian Association, and some other Indian Muslim visitors to England, notably the prominent lawyer, Saiyid Amir ‘Ali, to take up the issue in a serious way in the 1880s.

31 Journal of the National Indian Association, No. 26 (Feb. 1873), p. 268. 32 Ibid. She also admired him for his “loyal” stance during the rebellions of 1857!

SAALG Newsletter

However, like Mary, Saiyid Ahmad did consider the meeting significant enough to insert its account in the travelogue he later compiled covering his journey to Britain, and his year’s stay there. Of the shipboard conversation he remembered, “I had long and interesting conversations with her upon female and general education, as well as upon other important matters”, but their ignorance of each other’s language had been “rather a drawback” in getting into any detail.33 He was well informed about her family background and influence in Bristol, and her programmes for poor children there, and knew that her interest in Indian women had been aroused in Bristol by Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s visits to her father’s house in that city. Clearly an admirer in general, whatever his reservations about her particular agendas, he does not seem to have taken any steps to maintain contact either then or later, and the episode then passed without further mention in his later works.

station, visited by SAALG members in 2004, is drawing attention to the wider context of Britain’s imperial past. Mary Carpenter’s volume of Indian opinions on the relationship between mid-Victorian Britain and India, including many references to movements for “social improvement”, signals the Bristol Record Office as a possible source for other useful nuggets of information concerning India. Housed in a magnificent, historic “bond warehouse”, it has recently been awarded “Designated Status”, together with Bristol Central Library’s Local Studies section in reflection of the excellence of their combined archive, history and literary collections.

I acknowledge the help of the staff of the Bristol Record Office in researching this topic.

A mere footnote to history as it may be, this brief encounter had some serious, if rather tantalizing dimensions. The existence of the volume recording their meeting, together with the views of many other Indians who came into contact with Mary Carpenter, draws attention too to the importance of the city of Bristol for the history of India during the colonial period. Raja Ram Mohan’s interactions with the Unitarians of Bristol, and his death there are well known, and in recent years the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in the city’s old railway

24

33 There were some references to Mary Carpenter’s activities in India in various issues of the Aligarh Institute Gazette even before Saiyid Ahmad met her in person.

Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s entry in Mary Carpenter’s

journal

25

SAALG Newsletter 26

HISTORICAL SOURCES FOR AFGHANISTAN IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY RICHARD SCOTT MOREL

ARCHIVIST, ASIA, PACIFIC & AFRICA COLLECTIONS, THE BRITISH LIBRARY [Based on a paper delivered at the 74th Conference of SAALG, the Kashmir Bhawan Centre, Luton, 9

December 2005]

Since the British Library purchased the papers of Lord Lytton, who was Viceroy of India during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the Asian & African Studies Section has been very active in a number of outreach projects designed to highlight some of our holdings relating to Afghanistan. At the start of 2005 we held a small exhibition in the Ritblat Gallery at the British Library and also developed an online guide to India Office Records’ materials relating to Afghanistan.34 To date we have completed an eight-panelled travelling exhibition which aims to promote such materials at various institutions in the UK.35 Such work has shown that there is a rich diversity of sources relating to Afghanistan not only in our section, but within the British Library as a whole. This paper is in part a summary of some of the documents we looked at when preparing for these projects, but it is also a brief outline of some of the key features in the relationship between Britain and Afghanistan, based primarily on the India Office Records. The India Office Records comprise the papers of the English East India Company, the Board of

34 This guide can be accessed at http://www.bl.uk/collections/asiapacificafrica.html . 35 This travelling exhibition can be borrowed by contacting Ms Penny Brook at the British Library at penny.brook@bl.uk

Control and the India Office. They span a period from 1600 to 1947 and reflect the evolution of an early modern trading company into a fully-fledged government office. As the East India Company evolved over this period of time, so too did its interests and relationship with Afghanistan. This is reflected in the records which can be categorised into three distinct periods. 1600-1745 Established in 1600 by a Royal Charter, the East India Company pre-dated the establishment of the Kingdom of Afghanistan by nearly a century and a half. Nevertheless references to the region and ethnic groups which were to make up Afghanistan are referred to in the records from an early date. By 1623 the East India Company had established trading posts known as “factories” in Persia and India, two countries which shared a frontier with the region which was to become Afghanistan. Due to intense competition with the Dutch and Portuguese, the Company’s servants in Persia and Surat were constantly sending information back to their superiors in London. The type of topics which caught their attention were those which they felt could have a detrimental impact on existing trading patterns, or which might present new opportunities for trade. Often these pieces of intelligence were vague and fragmentary and, as the Company had

no direct trade or connections to the regions making up Afghanistan, the references on Afghanistan for this period are of this type.

Diagram 1 opposite represents the main groups of records which contain such references. Of these, the two most important series of records are IOR G Factory Records, c. 1595-1858, and IOR E/3 Correspondence with the East, 1602-1753. Both of these collections were compiled artificially and consist of letters, diaries and consultations received from the Company’s servants in Asia. The Factory Records are arranged by geographical location and then chronologically, whilst the records in the Original Correspondence series are arranged in a chronological sequence

Surat Factory Records

27

SAALG Newsletter 28

Diagram 1: East India Company Records referring to Afghanistan, 1600-1745

Home Correspondence Records

The image on the left is taken from a general letter addressed to the Court in London from the Company’s factory at Surat on the west coast of India. Written in 1621, it is a fine example of how scanty such references to the region and peoples of Afghanistan are. This one merely states that the “Emperor” is going to Kabul. Another early reference to the Afghans can be found in IOR E/1 Home Correspondence, the earliest surviving records of which begin in 1699. Although the bulk of the letters are from various agents and individuals in Britain and Europe, there are also letters from Egypt and Persia. By the 18th century, the Consul, appointed by the Levant Company at Aleppo, forwarded packets from India overland to the Company in London.

East India Company

IOR E/3 Original Correspondence

IOR G Factory

IOR E/1 Home Correspondence

Persia and Persian Gulf Records

Surat Records

Miscellaneous LettersReceived

Over time a considerable amount of corres-pondence built up and these letters provide details of significant events happening in the region throughout the 18th century. This letter from the Consul, dated, 30 May 1722, reports the invasion of Isfahan by Mahmud the Afghan. 1745-1858 The creation of the independent nation of the Afghans at Kandahar, following the election of Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1745, was closely followed by the Company’s acquisition of territory in India following the Battle of Plassey. These political changes were to lead to a fundamental change in how the two new territorial powers were to view each other. The acquisition and subsequent expansion of British territory in India gradually led to the existence of a common frontier

with the North West of India. Over time, the security of this frontier was to become increasingly important and this is reflected by the increased detail in the records reporting on the region and peoples that made up Afghanistan. As Diagram 2 overleaf shows, this changing relationship correlates with an increase in the administrative records of the Company’s activities during this period. References to Afghanistan can now be found in the Factory Records and Proceedings of Bombay and Bengal in addition to Surat. The reason for this is that by this period Bombay had superseded Surat as the primary seat of the Company’s trade on the west coast of India, whilst from the mid-18th century onwards the Presidency of Bengal was to become the seat of the Company’s authority in India.

Diagram 2: Records of the East India Company containing references to Afghanistan, 1745-1858

East India Company

IOR P Proceedings

IOR G Factory

IOR L/ Departmental Papers

Persia

Surat, Bombay,

BengalPolitical and Secret series

Bombay and Bengal

29

SAALG Newsletter 30

Another body of records which contain important references to Afghanistan for this period are the IOR/L Departmental Records. These departmental papers contain the earlier records of the East India Company which were inherited by the various departments of the India Office to facilitate their business activities.

Persia Factory Records

The surviving Company papers of this period show an organisation which felt it was surrounded by hostile enemies, and Afghanistan at various times in this period came to be seen as a threat and not an ally. Ahmad Shah’s brief occupation of Delhi and the ambitions of Zeman Shah over certain areas of India ensured that, by the late 18th century and turn of the 19th century, the Company was increasingly alarmed by the threat of Afghanistan being a hostile neighbour. This, along with fears of Napoleon’s ambitions to invade India, led to increased contact between the

British and Afghan authorities as the Company sought to find a political solution for the security of its frontiers. Such contacts were established by the East India Company using its sites in Persia and India to try and secure their Indian territories. The image on the left is taken from a report in the Persia Factory Records which provides a clear illustration of the fears of the Company in relation to Afghanistan. In it, Zeman Shah is described as a ruler hungry to expand into neighbouring ter

t

o M

is best dem

o

nistan published at the turn of the 19th century.

ritory in India. Records on Afghanistan can also be found in

the IOR H Home Miscellaneous Series. This collection, like many other groups of the India Office Records, is a complex amalgamation of papers collected from a variety of provenances that were bound together in the late 19th century by the Record and Registry Department of he India Office. Due to the complexities of its compilation it is impossible to assess the full range of subjects c vered by the Home iscellaneous Series, but its importance as a collection containing materials on Afghanistan

onstrated by the following example. The image at the top of the opp site page is

taken from the title page of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s report on his “Mission to Caubul” which was submitted to the Political Department. This was the most famous of a number of missions that were dispatched to Afghanistan in the 18th and 19th centuries. They did much to improve Britain’s knowledge of Afghanistan both as a region and a political entity. This manuscript report was used to form the basis of his famous book on Afgha

Home Miscellaneous Records

In addition to the records of the East India Company, the Board of Control Records are of considerable value for research on Afghanistan. When the East India Company became a territorial power in India, the British Government was increasingly concerned about the conduct of the Company and its servants in India. This worry was intensified following a number of financial crises and scandals in the 1770s and 1780s and, in response to such concerns, the Board of Control was established by the India Act of 1784. This was a Governmental body which was established primarily to regulate the affairs and policies of the East India Company in India. Like the Company records these were also inherited by the India Office following its establishment in 1858, and by the early 19th century they demonstrate a change in the political concerns of the period.

Following the defeat of Napoleon, French inf-luence in the region was increasingly seen as less

of a threat. However Russia’s military activities in Central Asia quickly became a perceived danger to British India. To counter Russian activities a number of British officials were appointed to political posts in Herat and Kabul in the first half of the 19th century. The image at the top of the next column, taken from the Board’s Collections, outlines the Board’s interpretation of Russian designs against Afghanistan and India.

Board of Control Records

The image on the following page is a letter from the envoy at Kabul to the Secret Committee. Such correspondence was often the subject of debate in the Company’s Secret Committee in London and these records now survive in IOR L/PS Political and Secret Records. Despite the number of diplomatic attempts to secure the Company’s North Western frontier in India, they were not always successful. Such diplomatic failures were a major cause of the First Anglo-Afghan war and like

31

its predecessors, when the India Office failed to ensure the continuance of sound diplomatic relations with the rulers of Afghanistan war broke out on two more occasions. 1858-1947 Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857/1858, the East India Company and Board of Control were replaced by the India Office which conducted

relations between Afghanistan and Britain, in addition to various officials from the Foreign Office. Diagram 3 illustrates some of the major collections in the India Office Records which contain references to Afghanistan during this period, and it reflects the political and military character of Anglo-Afghan relations for this period

. Political and Secret Department Records

Diagram 3 Records of the India Office containing references to Afghanistan, 1858-1947

SAALG Newsletter

India Office Records

32 IOR L/ Departmental

PapersIOR R/Afghanistan: Kabul IOR V/ Official

Legislation Records Publications

Parliamentary Papers

The majority of the papers relating to Afghanistan can be found in the various Departmental papers of the India Office Records. The importance of the

Political and Secret series as a source for Afghanistan was referred to in the last section but another series worth consulting is the Parliamentary Papers, as from the mid-19th century onwards Afghanistan was a subject regularly debated in Parliament. The image above, taken from the Parliamentary papers, represents the changing frontier of Afghanistan in the 19th century.

Finally the Kabul Legation Records, 1923-1948, are another rich source of information on educational policies, political visits and the opium trade in Afghanistan. This image discusses another major event which was to lead to a change in Anglo-Afghan relations. This report details the impact of Indian Independence on Anglo-Afghan relations. Although the India Office Records end during this period, Anglo-Afghan relations are an important part of English foreign policy to date and more recent records can be consulted at the National Archives at Kew.

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Other items of interest in the India Office Records include the libraries of the Military and Political and Secret Departments which contain early 19th century printed books, Who’s Who, gazetteers and maps relating to Afghanistan. There is also a rich collection of maps in the India Office Records, which were the subject of a previous SAALG talk by Dr Andrew Cook.

Kabul Legation Records

Lord Lytton [BL: Photo 2/1 (12)]

Lytton Collection

SAALG Newsletter 34

In addition to the India Office Records, the Asian & African Studies Section also houses a significant collection of manuscripts, prints, drawings and photographs. As my colleague, Xiao Wei Bond is going to refer to these sources in the following article, I will merely highlight two images which we used in our exhibitions.

Photo 2/1 (12) is an image of Lord Lytton taken from the rich visual collection of prints, drawings and photographs relating to Afghanistan, which are housed in the Prints and Drawings Section of the Asian & African Studies reading room. Shortly after his appointment as Viceroy of India, a breakdown in diplomatic relations and fear of Russian ambitions in the region, coupled with a more aggressive foreign policy under the British Prime Minister Disraeli, led to the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

In addition to these, there are a number of papers in the Private Papers collections, which contain very rich and detailed accounts on Anglo-Afghan relations for this period. The Lytton collection makes up part of the Private Papers and the image above on this page is taken from a handwritten copy of a telegraph sent during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. It is an excellent example of the minutiae of detail concerning Anglo-Afghan relations within the collections. RELATED HOLDINGS IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY The British Library, in addition to acquiring material by legal deposit, still collects and buys printed books, serials, official publications and audio materials relating to Afghanistan. They make up important collections in the Asian &

African Studies, Manuscripts, Newspapers, and Sound collections of the British Library. Online databases to the majority of these collections can be found in the catalogues on the home page of the British Library’s website http://www.bl.uk .

The Manuscripts Department of the British Library contains the papers of many individuals who were prominent in Turkey and the East during this period. The image below is taken from the papers of Sir Austin Henry Layard, who was the Ambassador at Constantinople in 1878. This was one of the items used in the exhibition held at St Pancras in 2005. It is a lithograph copy of an interview of the Turkish Mission with the Amir of Kabul in 1877 and is a wonderful example of the discussions with Afghan officials during this period.

The wars conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan are subject to intense media scrutiny today. The same can be said for the Second Anglo-Afghan War in the contemporary press. Thus another rich source of materials to consult is the collection of newspapers and periodicals. These contain caricatures and images which provide evidence of public opinion in Britain on the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

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Layard Papers

The image to the right is a photograph taken from Punch, the foremost satirical magazine of its day. It depicts the Afghan ruler, Sher ‘Ali, between the British Lion and the Russian Bear. In England, politicians and the general public were watching the unfolding events in the East with interest. Regular articles appeared relating to events of the “Great Game”. This print is perhaps the most famous and memorable, illustrating the difficult circumstances which Sher ‘Ali Khan faced in his dealings with the two major European powers in Central Asia.

Finally, the image below showing Ghurkha soldiers in camp during the Second Anglo-Afghan War is taken from the London Illustrated News. The pictures and articles in this publication were a lot more conservative and nationalistic than in Punch, but they provide a very powerful image of how the editors of this publication felt as the war was progressing.

SAALG Newsletter 36

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Punch

London Illustrated News

SAALG Newsletter 38

LITERARY AND PICTORIAL SOURCES FOR

PRE-20TH CENTURY AFGHANISTAN IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY XIAO WEI BOND - ARCHIVIST, APAC, THE BRITISH LIBRARY

[Based on a paper delivered at the 74th Conference of SAALG, the Kashmir Bhawan Centre, Luton, 9 December 2005]

Throughout two centuries, the British Library has acquired a wide range of material about Afghanistan, which comprises not only the archives in the India Office Records, but also manuscripts and printed books in vernacular languages, publications in Western languages, illustrated material including prints, drawings, and photographs, music recordings, rare stamps and modern publications on both social sciences and natural sciences. This brief introduction intends to describe some of the major historical collections in the Library by means of some examples: 1. Western language publications 2. Vernacular language material 3. Image sources: - Persian miniatures - Western drawings - Photographs 1. WESTERN LANGUAGE PUBLICATIONS The India Office Records are undoubtedly the first port of call for students of history in search of primary sources on Afghanistan. The archival material is however supplemented by a wealth of published sources in the Western Language Section. Interestingly it was one of the characteristics of the period that some of the records of the India Office were published after their confidentiality had expired. Many publications on the history, geography and

foreign relations of Afghanistan, as well as gazetteers and route maps for military use can be found in the Military Department library36 and in the Political & Secret Department library.37

Another genre of literature representing the Western view of Afghanistan is in the 19th century writings of travellers. The British fascination for the country developed in the early 19th century when the strategic importance of Afghanistan was recognised by the European powers. The British officials who came into contact with that part of the world while on duty were often accomplished linguists, who had mastered Persian, Sanskrit or other Indo-Iranian languages before they set off for Central and South Asia. Some were well-known scholars; Sir Henry Rawlinson, Political Agent at Kandahar in the 1840s, had a well-established reputation for his authoritative knowledge of Persian antiquity. Sir John Malcolm, who headed three missions to Persia at the beginning of the 19th century, was also a Persian scholar turned diplomat and military leader. Apart from collecting local literature and other artefacts, official or non-official travellers from the West also wrote down their own experiences and impressions of Afghanistan in their journals and reports to be sent back to Europe, which were later published in the forms of travelogues or memoirs, either as sources of

36 See IOR/L/MIL/17/14. 37 See IOR/L/PS/20.

information to be fed to government intelligence services, or for the consumption of the general public, who had an insatiable appetite for exoticism.

The examples given here are the works of two British explorers who ventured into Afghanistan in the early 19th century:

Mountstuart Elphinstone headed the first official mission to the Afghan Court from 1808 to 1810 for the purpose of negotiating a treaty with Shah Shuja to counteract the menace from Napoleon. The mission was considered a failure as the treaty with Shah Shuja was rendered invalid soon after it was signed. A positive outcome of the mission was a monumental work in which Elphinstone made a classic study of the peoples of Afghanistan, in addition to gathering a mass of information on the geography, climate and history of the country.

An account of the kingdom of Caubul and its dependencies in Persia, Tartary, and India; comprising a view of the

Afghaun Nation, and a history of the Dooraunee Manarchy, by Mountstuart Elphinstone (London, 1815) [BL: W765]

Alexander Burnes was an ambitious officer in the British Army, as well as being a gifted linguist who had acquired several native tongues, which enabled him to travel through Central Asia in local disguise. His first trip to Central Asia was made between 1831 and 1833 as a private traveller. His travelogue was written after his second journey to the country as the

head of a British Mission and later as Second Political Officer for the Government of India in Kabul between 1836 and 1838. He was assassinated two years later just before the First Afghan War. The travelogue was published posthumously in 1842.

Cabool: being a personal narrative of a journey to and residence in that city, in the years 1836-8 by Sir Alexander Burnes (London, 1843) [BL: IOL V 22917] The sources on Afghanistan in Western language publications are almost inexhaustible, not to mention other secondary sources in periodicals, such as the Journal of Central Asian Society, which may contain information of more immediacy than that in monographs. 2. VERNACULAR LANGUAGE MATERIAL The population of Afghanistan is composed of over fifty ethnic communities, among which those of Iranian origin form the largest group and those of Turkic origin make up the second-largest group. Before it was proclaimed an independent kingdom by the first ruler, Ahmad Shah Durrani, in the early part of the 18th century, the territory now known as Afghanistan belonged to the Persian world, from which the British Library has acquired a large number of representative works in the domains of art, literature and religion. The Persian language

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collections came into the possession of the British Library mainly via three routes: material collected by the India Office Library before 1982; material collected by the British Museum Department of Oriental Printed Books prior to 1973; subsequent acquisitions of the British Library era. The India Office collections of Persian manuscripts, including some Pashto illuminated manuscripts, were originally brought together by the East India Company’s library, established in 1801, which acquired much material directly from its servants in the East as well as through private collectors. On the British Museum Library side, Persian manuscripts could be found in the foundation collections of the British Museum Library in 1753. The collection expanded through the centuries to include a vast variety of material in all possible subject fields.

Most of the earliest literature originating from what is now Afghanistan was written in Persian, although the national spoken and written language of present day Afghanistan is Pashto. Early Pashto literature is little known outside Afghanistan. There is nonetheless a remarkable collection in the British Library ranging from religious studies to poems.

Tārīkh-i Vaṣṣāf [BL: Ms.Or.15379]

The example given here is Tārīkh-i Vaṣṣāf – a history of the Mongol Ilkhans of Iran by the 14th century historian ‘Abd Allah ibn Fazl Allah Sharaf Shirazi. This finely illuminated copy was produced at Kabul, commissioned by the then ruler of Afghanistan, Dost Muhammad Khan, at the beginning of his second reign in 1845.

There are some rarities in the printed books collection, for example, one of the earliest Afghan newspapers, Sirāj al-akhbār, was published in 1906 and later suspended due to political pressure. The publication resumed in 1911 and was taken up by the reformer and politician Mahmud Tarzi (1886-1933) as an instrument of propaganda to introduce the idea of a national Islamic identity.

Sirāj al-akhbār [BL: Per SW2]

3. PICTORIAL MATERIAL Visual material on Afghanistan is of as much importance as the textual material in the British Library. The images are in the form of miniature paintings, photographs, and watercolours or lithograph prints, all held by the Prints & Drawings

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Section which inherited these impressive collections from the former India Office Library.

3.1. PERSIAN MINIATURES Examples of these illustrations can be found in some of the Persian manuscripts produced by authors or artists who came from the part of the land now known as Afghanistan. One of the most famous examples is the illuminated manuscript Khamsa of Nizami, in which a miniature painting depicts the battle of two rival tribes. This was painted by Kamal al-Din Bihzad, one of the leading painters of the 15th century, under the patronage of Sultan Husayn of Herat.

Battle of the Tribes, watched by Majnun. Painted by Bihzad

(1493). In Persian Mss: Khamsa of Nizami [BL: Add.25900, f.121b]

3.2. WATERCOLOURS AND LITHOGRAPHS The so-called “Western drawings” refer to, by definition, the drawings of Afghanistan by Western artists, mostly amateur artists employed by the East

India Company Army or by the British government. It was quite common in those days for some Indian Army officers to be excellent draftsmen or artists, recruited specifically by the army either to draw routes and charts for military planning, or to record the events as war correspondents before photo-graphy was invented.

Khyber Pass (1840). Watercolour landscape by James

Atkinson (1780-1852) [BL: WD1347]

Like many of the amateur artists of the Indian Army at that time, James Atkinson’s official title was Superintending Surgeon; he served with the Bengal Medical Service. This landscape was painted during the First Afghan War around 1840. It is one of the twenty-four drawings later made into lithographs and published with the title “Sketches in Afghaunistan”.38 The Khyber Pass was said to be the only overland route through the mountains between Northern Asia and the Indian plains. It cuts through the Hindu Kush Mountain range in the North West Frontier Province of today’s Pakistan. It is 33 miles long; the narrowest point is said to be only three metres wide. Therefore it is a very treacherous place for any battles.

Exoticism, synonymous of anthropological curios-ity, was one of the main themes of Oriental studies in

38 J. Atkinson, Sketches in Afghaunistan (London 1842). Note the archaic spelling of Afghanistan.

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the 19th century, reflected in numerous drawings of human figures in different attires and poses.

The subject of the following portrait was Begum Jan, described as a high-caste lady in Kandahar. James Rattray (1790-1862), like Atkinson, was a British artist who followed the Indian Army into Afghanistan during the First Afghan War (1838-40). His immaculate study of the costumes of different tribes of Afghanistan and his drawings of the scenery were published in London in 1848,39 about thirty years after Elphinstone published his scholarly work on the peoples and history of the same country.

Rattray held a high opinion of Afghan ladies who, according to him, had more power over their husbands than most other women in the East. He also believed that Afghan ladies certainly had more freedom than their Indian counterparts, as he had seen them throw off their burka or veils in secluded spots and thoroughly enjoy themselves in pleasure excursions into private gardens, bazaars, etc.

Lady of rank engaged in smoking by James Rattray (1840s) [BL: X717]

3.3. PHOTOGRAPHS

39 J. Rattray, The costumes of the various tribes, portraits of ladies of rank, celebrated princes and chiefs, views of the principal fortresses and cities, and interior of the cities and temples of Afghaunistaun (London, 1848).

Cameras began to be employed for journalistic purposes in the Indian Army around the 1850s. Many photographs taken in the late 19th century still retain a remarkable quality and they provide an invaluable visual documentation of the most complex and intriguing period in the modern history of Afghanistan.

John Burke, like his artistic predecessors, was an apothecary (pharmacist) by trade and served with the British Indian Army in Afghanistan during the Second Afghan War (1878-80). He was at first rejected for the role of official photographer but nonetheless he produced a substantial number of photographs documenting the war. He was later recognised as a professional photographer. His main rivals were the better known Bourne and Shepherd.

Major Cavagnari and Afghan sardars (1879) [BL: Photo 487/73]

Above is a photo of Major Cavagnari and Afghan sardars or chiefs taken at Jalalabad by John Burke. Cavagnari was the British Resident in Kabul in 1879. He was killed by Afghan rebels at the British Residency shortly after this picture was taken, in the middle of the Second Afghan War in September 1879. The savagery of the event provoked the anger of the British government, which immediately

despatched a punitive column led by General Roberts from India. Kabul was quickly taken by General Roberts and the war ended a year later.

Sher ‘Ali Khan, Amir of Afghanistan, played a significant role in the Anglo-Afghan relationship in the Second Afghan War. This portrait photograph was taken by a more commercially-oriented photographic studio, Bourne and Shepherd. Samuel Bourne lived in India from 1863 until 1870. Apart from portraits of eminent personalities and the peoples of the various ethnic groups or professions of Afghanistan, he also produced a magnificent collection of landscapes and architectural views of the Indian subcontinent.

Sher ‘Ali Khan, Amir of Afghanistan (1825-1879) [BL: Photo127/44]

CONCLUSION The above is a summary of the main collections on the art, literature and social sciences of pre-20th century Afghanistan. The intention of this summary is

to provide a few samples of different genres to whet the appetite of readers. Regrettably, the collections are so vast that it is impossible to describe every type of material in this short space. To gain a more thorough knowledge of the British Library’s collections on this subject, including those of contemporary Afghanistan, one has to study the separate catalogues and lists available in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room or from the Internet. I include a list of further readings and websites which will explain in more detail the content of each category of material. FURTHER READINGS Handlist of Islamic manuscripts acquired by the India Office Library 1938-85. Sims-Williams, U. (London: India Office Library and Records, 1986).

Supplementary handlist of Persian manuscripts, 1966-1998. Waley, M. I. (London: British Library, 1999).

Miniatures from Persian manuscripts: catalogue and subject index of paintings in the British Library and the British Museum. Titley, N. M. (London: British Library, 1974).

Persian paintings in the India Office Library: a descriptive catalogue. Robinson, B. W. (London; New York: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1976).

British drawings in the India Office Library. Archer, M. (London: HM Stationery Offfice, 1969).

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SAALG Newsletter

A brief guide to sources for the study of Afghanistan in the India Office Records. Hall, L. (London: India Office Library and Records, 1981).

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WEBSITES www.bl.uk/collections/afghan/introduction.html for information on India Office Records relating to Afghanistan www.bl.uk/collections/persian.html for information on British Library collections of Persian manuscripts and printed books www.bl.uk/collections/orient

alprints.html for information on prints, drawings and photographs of the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections of the British Library www.collectbritain.co.uk/galleries for images of Afghanistan

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AUREL STEIN’S KASHMIR LEGACY: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WEBSITE

S. N. PANDITA KASHMIR BHAWAN CENTRE

[Based on a paper delivered at the 74th Conference of SAALG, the Kashmir Bhawan Centre, Luton, 9 December 2005]

I am delighted to have been part of the beautiful conference on Sir Aurel Stein and thank the Libraries and Archive Group, the British Library and the Kashmir Bhawan Centre for the opportunity to put before them the results of a few initial steps taken on a long journey – the development of a website dedicated to Stein’s Kashmir legacy. There is no dearth of material on the life and work of Stein. This provides enough resources for there to always be some new study of his great achievements. While the iconic Central Asian image of Stein is well-known and sufficiently studied, his life and labours in Kashmir have drawn relatively less attention. Before embarking on his Central Asian career, Stein worked as a classical Orientalist and Sanskritist for twelve years (1888 to 1900), during which period his main area of focus was Kashmir. While his edition of the Rājataraṅgiṇī and its translation into English remain as the crowning glory of his labours there, many other aspects of his life and achievements in Kashmir also bear great importance.

Amongst these are Stein’s archaeological tours in Kashmir, his collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, his interest in Kashmiri language and literature, and his association with, and help to, other Western

scholars who were working there. More than this, Stein was fascinated by Kashmir. It was his adopted home. In Kashmir, he made many friends, lived amidst its people and worked with local scholars. He kept many retainers at his camp, lived at many camp sites and in various bungalows, and it was here that he compiled and wrote most of his reports on Central Asian explorations. It was in Kashmir, too, that he experienced his proudest moment in life – the knighthood. To recall his own words, and I quote, “It will always be a gratifying remembrance for me to associate its receipt with Kashmir where most of my work as far as it concerns Indian soil has been done.” In fact, interspersed with journeys into Central Asia, Europe and America, Stein spent more than fifty-five years in Kashmir, which is best described in his own words, and I again quote, “How grateful I must feel to the kindly Fate that allowed me to do so much of my work for the last fifty-five years in Kashmir.”

The Bala Hissar & city of Caubul from the Citadel.

Letter from Stein to Pandit Nityanand Shastri July 7, 1921

Letter from George A. Grierson to Pandit Nityanand Shastri

April 7, 1936

It was with these facts in mind that two years ago the Kashmir Bhawan Centre, through its inspiring

team of Dr Vijay Dhar, Dr S. N. Ganju, Mr Shuban Kotwal and Mr Surinder Koul, with the fullest cooperation and support of the Bodleian Library (the foremost credit for which goes to Dr Gillian Evison) and funds granted by the Heritage Lottery Fund, began a project to create a website on Stein’s Kashmir legacy. The first step was to identify visual and printed material in the Stein collection at the Bodleian Library, as well as other possible sources, detailing Stein’s native links in Kashmir. As Stein and my grandfather were very close friends until the end of their lives, it is a matter both of family pride and of personal satisfaction for me to be associated with the endeavor to map Stein in Kashmir. Besides being an attempt to shift focus from Central Asia to Kashmir, the project is in a way a tribute to Stein’s great work in Kashmir.

I would now like to put before you some interesting features of this journey and a general outlay of the website that is in the making.

The major content to be hosted on the website includes some Sanskrit manuscripts from Stein’s collection, together with their translation into English. The selection is based on the contemporary relevance of the manuscripts to modern times. Identification of the manuscript of Rājataraṅgiṇīsaṃg̣raha Gadyarūpa, written by Pandit Sahib Kaul, for example, explodes the myth that the practice of writing history in Kashmir in the tradition of the Rājataraṅgiṇīs ceased after the advent of Mughal rule with Akbar’s conquest of Kashmir. Sahib Kaul’s Rājataraṅgiṇī covers Kashmiri history up to the time of Maharaja Ranbir Singh’s rule in Kashmir. This manuscript holds great promise and is key to understanding Kashmir’s recent past. In the manuscripts of Purātanmandira Saṃgraha, Tīrtha Saṃgraha, and

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Haramukuṭagaṅga lie the secrets and tales of the archaeology, ancient history and cultural traditions of Kashmir. Their study will indicate a modern outlook into the archaeological preservation of ancient remains in Kashmir. The study of the manuscript of the Sarada shrine, one of the landmarks in the great cultural legacy of Kashmir, enables us to relive the great glory of one of the most important presiding deities of Kashmiri society. It would be highly desirable to attempt to have the shrine notified as a heritage site.

Many of the other Stein papers accessed in the Bodleian archives are also invaluable in the context of the history and scholarship of Kashmir. Amongst these papers, the more salient and important ones relate to Aurel Stein’s revised manuscript of the Rājataraṅgiṇī with photographic illustrations. Evidence indicates that Stein had the publication of an illustrated Rājataraṅgiṇī in mind from 1922 and he carried the burden of its publication until the very end of his life in 1943. This manuscript, which was kept in a bank locker at the Imperial Bank, Srinagar (now called the State Bank of India), was later sent to Oxford University Press for publication. Today it remains in the confines of the aborted publications of the Oxford University Press, since the cost of its publication remained unresolved between the Kashmir Darbar and the Oxford University Press.

The manuscript of the revised edition of the Rājataraṅgiṇī is not alone in bearing importance for retrieval. Equally significant is the manuscript of Lokaprakāśa — the great work of the 11th century Kashmiri polyhistorian, Kshemendra. The Lokaprakāśa joins the Rājataraṅgiṇī (the political history of ancient Kashmir) and the Nīlamatapurāṇa (the cultural history of ancient Kashmir) to complete the trilogy of Kashmir’s past. This work, which

deals with the ancient governance and financial structure of Kashmir and is based on the best manuscript on the subject, was translated with a commentary in Sanskrit by the eminent Kashmiri scholar Pandit Sahaz Bhat. At Aurel Stein’s initiative, it was sent to Paris for publication under the auspices of the Asiatic Society. However, due to the eruption of the First World War, its publication was interrupted midway. Hence its final fate needs to be determined. A printed edition of the Lokaprakāśa based on this rare manuscript will bring credit to the scholarship of Kashmir and will redefine its historical past.

It is well known that, while editing the Rājata-raṅgiṇī, Aurel Stein undertook many antiquarian tours in Kashmir to establish the historical authenticity of Kalhana’s work by geographical verification. During these sojourns, he made numerous archaeological studies of various monuments and ancient temple sites. A few of these were in fact discovered by Stein, as no mainstream archaeologist had ever gone to these off site locations before. The preliminary report on these sites, which Stein submitted to Raja Amar Singh in 1891, and Stein’s subsequent recommendation of 1896 are fascinating documents that reveal many rare facets of archaeology in Kashmir. They also detail acts of vandalism and identify the vandals. They show the need for the protection of these ancient sites for the preservation of Kashmir’s past. Stein’s recommendation to the Darbar on these issues can safely lay the ground rules for the protection of monuments in today’s troubled Kashmir. They define historical concern and social necessity. It was from the antiquarian collection obtained by Stein during his archaeological tours in Kashmir that the nucleus of the Pratap Museum, Srinagar,

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was built. The rich collection preserved here makes it one of the most important museums of the world.

Another very important aspect revealed in the Stein papers pertains to anthropometrical studies in Kashmir and the exploration of the racial and linguistic determinates of Kashmiri society. Stein had recommended to the Government of India that these studies should be undertaken by the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Further research on this front holds an important key to lasting peace in Kashmir.

The papers in general illustrate Stein’s fascination with – and great love for – Kashmir and her people. As well as drawing attention to the Valley’s great beauty, they shed new light on his life there. It emerges that he had plans and permission to build a bungalow at Mohand Marg and also one in the foothills of the Zabarvan Range adjacent to Pari Mahal on the shores of Dal Lake in Srinagar, that he held a ration card and was issued a British Indian passport indicating his domicile in Kashmir. Besides enriching Stein’s biographical account, the papers also extol the achievements of Stein’s Kashmiri correspondents, revealing the social, personal and scholastic relationship he had with them. The import of these accounts will rekindle in many Kashmiris a sense of pride in their ancestors. Discoveries of their attainments are bound to bring a change of outlook to the history and process of harmonization in Kashmir. Stein’s self-kept records bear names and references to many ordinary local Kashmiris. Their identities are determinable and such facts, when made public, will bring pride and grace to their descendants by linking their ancestors to this great man’s life and achievements. Such records are important from both a human and a social angle. And finally, the papers amply show Stein’s keen desire to promote the Kashmiri language, his intense understanding

of Kashmiri traditions and his profound interest in its folklore. It was fascinating to discover Kashmiri letters written in the Devanagari character, as well as Sanskrit ones in Sharada, from Kashmiri scholars to Stein. These reveal the efforts he took to learn to write and speak Kashmiri.

It may be stated that there is hardly any ancient temple site, sacred spring or pilgrimage centre in Kashmir that is not preserved in Stein’s photograph collection. Included are photos of the temples at Sarada, Paraspura, Pattan, Shankaracharya Hill, Martand, Pandrethan, Hari Parvat, Vangath and Avantipur etc., and sacred springs and pilgrim spots like Vecar Nag, Naran Nag, Kounsar Nag, Gangabal Lake, Jethyeir Nag and Ishber Nag as they stood a century ago. The rich collection of these photographs has been listed for inclusion in the website. Further photos show the camp sites and villas Stein occupied in Kashmir – those which survive today could be attractions for heritage tourism in Kashmir – whilst others feature his Kashmiri helpers, correspondents and scholarly associates. No other record of these faces seems to have survived in any other photographs. With these images much comes to life about the recent past of present day Kashmir.

The format of the website is now fixed and will include 1) Introduction: Preamble, Launch brief, Aims and objectives, Institutional support, Research input, Promoters, 2) Kashmir: Legend and literature, Landscape, People, Language and script, History and chronology of rulers, 3) Aurel Stein: Career profile, Distinctions and honours, Major publications, Patron of Kashmiris, Important dates in Kashmir, 4) Sanskritist: Stein en route for India, In search of the Rājataraṅgiṇī, the Royal Jammu Catalogue, Antiquarian tours, 5) Pilgrim to sacred abodes: Archaeology of ancient Kashmir,

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Tributes to Sanskrit, 6) Manuscript treasures: Facsimiles, together with their translation into English, 7) Kashmiri Scholarship: Profiles of native collaborators, Tributes and memoir notices to native Kashmiri scholars, 8) Scholarship between Kashmir and the West: Role in preparation of the Dictionary of Kashmiri Language, Hatims Tales, edition of the Mahānāya Prakāśa, translation of the Spanish classic Don Quixote into Kashmiri and Sanskrit, edition of Mahābhārata and the Leiden edition of the 6th century Kashmiri text Nīlamatapurāṇa, Views on education, Role in giving Kashmir its first technical institute, 9) Stein in Kashmir: First visit, Mohand Marg, Camp retreats and bungalows, Camp retainers and assistants, Knighthood, Last journey from Kashmir, Memorial stone, Unfinished tasks.

This is a project of huge potential. As well as being of far-reaching public interest, the completed website40 will be of great importance both socially and historically.

40 The website is expected to have been completed by June 2007.

Sir Aurel Stein’s dogs – Dash V and Spin Khan – with Dr Ernest Neve

SAALG Newsletter 50

[BL: Photo 392/33(4)]

AUREL STEIN AND KASHMIR DR FRANCES WOOD

CURATOR, CHINESE, THE BRITISH LIBRARY [Based on a paper delivered at the 74th Conference of SAALG

the Kashmir Bhawan Centre, Luton, 9 December 2005]

The achievements of Sir Aurel Stein are so enormous and so broad in scope that you could say there is an Aurel Stein for everyone. For Kharosthi scholars it is the Stein of Niya who must be most significant and for Tibetan scholars, perhaps it is Stein at Miran. My Aurel Stein is first of all “Chinese” Stein and my first close acquaintance with “Chinese” Stein dates back to 1977 when I joined the Chinese section of the British Library. I spent the whole of my first summer there moving the Chinese scrolls from Cave 17 at Dunhuang from their blue cardboard storage boxes into new wooden cabinets that had been specially designed to house them. As there

were nearly 7000 documents to be moved, this absorbing task took some time. In the 1980s another great Stein project developed: the conservation and cataloguing of the remaining Chinese documents from Cave 17, which eventually brought the total up to almost 14,000. This project involved long visits from Chinese conservators and Dunhuang specialists, most of whom remain great friends. And following the Chinese project, similar conservation and cataloguing developments have been carried out on other language and script groups within the Stein collections in the British Library.

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Throughout my almost thirty years of looking after the Stein Chinese collections, there have been numerous occasions for reflection on different aspects of the man and his work. In the early-1980s we organised a small exhibition in the four ancient display cases in the old King’s Library in the British Museum, in the area then reserved for the display of oriental books and manuscripts. The intention of the exhibition was to set out the great variety of materials, languages and scripts contained in Stein’s Central Asian collections and it was my first foray into the area beyond Chinese. In 1985 many Stein manuscripts and artefacts from the British Museum were included in the joint British Museum-British Library exhibition, “Buddhism: art and faith” and I learned a great deal about the non-Chinese Stein material from working with Wladimir Zwalf on the exhibition catalogue as his extremely lowly editorial assistant. When preparing for the Silk Road Coins and Culture conference which was held in the British Museum in 1993, I looked at Stein’s early career, in particular his research into coins, for the foundation

sponsoring the conference was established by a noted coin-collector, Professor Ikuo Hirayama. Stein began researching Central and South Asian coinage before embarking on his first jobs as registrar of Punjab University and principal of the new Oriental College in Lahore in 1887. With Lahore as his working base, attracted both by its natural beauty (“the green paradise of Kashmir”) and its ancient culture, he began to spend his vacations in Kashmir. In his study of ancient Kashmiri literature, he was following the lead of his teacher in Vienna, George Buhler, and he gained a new teacher in Srinagar, Pandit Govind Kaul. The extent to which Stein was indebted to Pandit Govind Kaul is evident in the tributes he

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pays to him in the prefaces to his Catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Raghuntaha Temple Library of His Highness the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir (Bombay and London, 1894) and his Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī: a chronicle of

the Kings of Kaśmīr (London, 1900). There, Stein described Govind Kaul: “This accomplished Kaśmīrian scholar, who had already assisted me in collecting some of the critical materials embodied in my edition of the Sanskrit text of the Rājataraṅgiṇī, the later Chronicles and other Kaśmīrian texts requiring constant reference, and by similar labours he lightened for me the great burden of mechanical work which is inseparable from such a task. The identification of Kalhaṇa’s numerous allusions to stories contained in the Mahābhārata and Purāṇas is mainly his work. I am also indebted to his aid for a preliminary collation of the Lahore manuscript of the Chronicle which has enabled me to improve the critical constitution of the text underlying the translation.” The detail with which Stein describes his indebtedness indicates the significance of the Pandit’s contribution and Stein continues, “It is a source of true sorrow to me that this faithful assistant of my labours is no longer among the living. Paṇḍit Govind Kaul died at Srīnagar in the

summer of 1899, separated from me at the time by the whole breadth of India …”

After Pandit Govind Kaul’s death, other assistants were to follow, but from 1888, Kashmir became a constant fixture in Stein’s life. Though he spent time in Srinagar and travelled quite widely, in search of manuscripts and ancient monuments, it

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was the alpine meadow of Mohand Marg that became his favourite place. Whenever he could, he spent summer there and it became the closest thing to “home” for him as an adult. What is particularly interesting is that Mohand Marg was only a meadow. Stein camped at Mohand Marg, as he camped when he was on his long and arduous expeditions into Central Asia. Compared with the hardships of camping in freezing deserts, Mohand Marg was a comfortable encampment with a kitchen tent, but everything had to be carried up there and carried down at the end of the season and when he was seventy-six, he reported on the summer ascent, “My legs … felt the stiff climb a bit … I allowed myself three hours to do the 3000 feet.” One of my favourite Stein photographs is of Mohand Marg. It shows Stein’s table with a jar of flowers, placed on the grass in the shade of a tree, with a black and white terrier asleep beneath it. Mohand Marg must have been a fine place for his dogs (mostly terriers and all called “Dash”) with rabbits, rats and marmots to chase, although Dash IV, known for “his plucky hunts among rocks and ravines” gave Stein a fright when he vanished for a night after losing his foothold and falling.

The significance of Kashmir to Stein was enormous. Camped on Mohand Marg with his dog and servants to take care of him throughout the summer, he recovered from his winter expeditions, wrote them up and continued his work on Kashmiri literature and folk tales. Sitting at his table on the grass under the trees, he wrote long letters to the group of friends and relations with whom he remained in close epistolatory contact all their lives, though they rarely met. Mohand Marg, high in the mountains, beautiful but without modern conveniences for it was only a meadow, with tents, was perhaps a deterrent to potential visitors, but for Stein, it was his retreat.

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CENTRAL ASIAN MANUSCRIPT FORGERIES: NEW CORRESPONDENCE

BETWEEN AUREL STEIN AND RUDOLF HOERNLE

URSULA SIMS-WILLIAMS [Based on a paper presented at the 71st Conference of SAALG, the British Library, London, 26 November

2004]

In the field of Central Asian studies, forged documents and artefacts are unfortunately all too common, with faked manuscripts appearing on the art market with frequent regularity. It is interesting to note, however, that this is not entirely a modern phenomenon, with well documented examples of forgeries dating from as early as 1895. In the context of the discovery and decipherment of previously unknown scripts and languages from Central Asia at the end of the 19th century, it is not surprising that the enterprising entrepreneurs who created these forgeries met with considerable success, temporarily deceiving experts such as

Rudolf Hoernle, Aurel Stein and, more recent scholars also.41 The search for Central Asian antiquities, particularly written ones, began with the discovery of the so-called “Bower” manuscript,42 a 5th-century medical birch-bark manuscript in Sanskrit, found by treasure-seekers in 1889, together with a “mummified” cow and two foxes, in a stupa near Kucha. Its true significance as by far “the oldest

41 For a more detailed account of many aspects of these forgeries, see Ursula Sims-Williams, “Forgeries from Chinese Turkestan in the British Library’s Hoernle and Stein Collections.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 14 (2000 [2003]), pp. 111-129. 42 Named after Lieut. H. Bower who purchased it early in 1890. It is now in the Bodleian [MS. Sansk.c.17)].

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Indian written book that is known to exist”43 was first announced to the scholarly world in 1891 by the Sanskritist A. F. Rudolf Hoernle (1841-1918), then Principal of the Calcutta Madrasah. Such was the interest aroused by Hoernle’s report that the super-powers soon became engaged in a competitive hunt for further archaeological and manuscript finds,44 with the Russians and the Government of India emerging as the main contenders in this cultural aspect of the “Great Game.” The Government of India not only supported the Central Asian expeditions of Sir Aurel Stein, but also collected material on its own account through its political agents in Kashmir and Kashgar. Between 1895 and 1911, it sent 33 consignments of manuscripts to Rudolf Hoernle for decipherment. These manuscripts formed what became known as the Hoernle Collection or the British Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia, now kept in the British Library, London.

43 A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, “Remarks on birch bark ms.” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1891), p. 64. 44 A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, The Bower Manuscript (Calcutta, 1893-1912), p. ii: “Professor G. Bühler, having seen the report of the discovery in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, at once announced it in an early issue of the Vienna Oriental Journal for 1891, p. 103. The Russian Archaeological Society, having thus their attention attracted, addressed, in November 1891, a request to Mr. Petrovski, the Russian Consul General in Kâshgar, to endeavour to collect similar manuscript treasures.”

Islam Akhun photographed with Stein’s dog Dash

in Khotan in 1901 [Stein, Ancient Khotan (Oxford 1907), p. 508]

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Hoernle’s first publication of manuscripts in the British Collection appeared in 1897.45 Most were in

A genuine 8th-century Khotanese document probably from Dandan Uiliq [BL:

Cursive Brahmi script forgery “discovered” in October 1895. According to its discoverer, Islam Akhun, this manuscript was found in the remains of an iron box buried in mud in a hole in the wall of a structure at Kok Gumbaz. Many of the characters resemble those of the Khotanese document above. The cursive Brahmi script, however, was used exclusively for secular documents on single sheets or rolls and never in the palm leaf-shaped pothi

45 A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, “Three further collections of ancient manuscripts from Central Asia.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 66, pt. I (1897), pp. 213-60.

recognisable scripts and included material in two completely new languages: Tocharian and Khotanese - which Hoernle was to play a major part in deciphering. However a considerable number were “written in characters which are either quite unknown to me, or with which I am too

manuscripts which contained Buddhist religious texts written in formal Brahmi “sutra” script [BL: Or.13873/57]

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imperfectly acquainted to attempt a ready reading in the scanty leisure that my regular official duties allow me. I thought, however, that even a mere publication of specimens of the original manuscripts would be welcome to Oriental scholars.46 The manuscripts in this latter category came in a number of different shapes and sizes and were written in a variety of scripts. Some were single sheets, but others had been bound in the style of a primitive codex. They all subsequently proved to be forgeries. The British Library now has some 41 specimens of forged codices and collections of manuscript sheets, mostly from the Hoernle Collection. They can be divided into five basic types of scripts resembling Brahmi, Aramaic, Uighur, Arabic/Persian, and Chinese.

46 Op. cit.: p. 250.

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Map based on Hoernle’s map of 1899 showing the sites supposedly visited by Islam Akhun 1895-1897 in italics, together with their correct locations as established subsequently by Stein.

By 1899, when Hoernle published the first part of his Report,47 the British Collection included many more examples, in addition to 45 block-prints, all in unrecognisable scripts. They were nearly all discovered by Islam Akhun, a treasure-seeker from Khotan, and came from a number of different sites, some well-known, such as Yotkan (old Khotan), and Ak Safil, a deserted fortress in the desert northeast of Khotan, while others were less well documented: Karakol Mazar, Kok Gumbaz, Kara Yantak and Aktala Tuz to the west of Khotan, and Yabu Kum and Kiang Tuz to the east. At Hoernle’s request, Islam Akhun provided

47 A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, “A report on the British Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia, part I,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 68, pt. I, extra no. (1899).

information about the sites and the circumstances of the finds through George Macartney and Stuart Godfrey, the Government of India’s representatives in Kashgar and Ladakh. Hoernle published these details together with an analysis of the blockprints, which he divided into nine different sets according to the texts they contained.48 The British Library has altogether 61 blockprint forgeries. They are mostly in a Cyrillic/ Brahmi/Kharoshthi type of script, sometimes resembling one more than the other. Blocks of text are repeated, sometimes quite randomly, and often upside down. Some of the blockprints also contain sketches. The paper is generally an unevenly textured felt-like paper of varying thickness. Many volumes appear damaged by

48 Op. cit.: pp. 64-110.

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burns. They are mostly in a “western” style codex format and have been fastened with copper pegs, twists of paper, and thread. Some, however, are more like an Indian pothi, but with a copper peg acting as a rivet instead of a piece of string. Considering the large number of undecipherable manuscripts and blockprints and the peculiarity of their scripts, Hoernle was already in 1897 suspicious that they might be forgeries. In 1898 he received a letter dated 8th April from the Reverend Magnus Bäcklund, a Swedish Missionary in Yarkand, who reported that he had been informed that the books were modern and that “after being printed, the sheets are hung up in the chimney in order to make them look old. They are now burnt in parts and covered with soot. When they have assumed as a dark colour as seems to be suitable, the soot is wiped off and the papers are nailed together into a book and taken out into the desert, where they are buried in the sand. Having remained there for some time they are “discovered” and brought out into the market in order to—make fools of the Europeans.”49

49 Op. cit.: p. 59.

Blockprint forgery dating from around 1897, purchased by Gul Muhammad, a well known Kashgar merchant, for RS 40 and sent to Capt. Godfrey. Several blocks of text can be seen repeated randomly at different places on the page. Several of the letters, Hoernle thought, resembled characters in the Kharoshthi alphabet [BL: Or.13873/52]

Hoernle, however, was not convinced by such accounts. The question of forgery was still an open one. He conceded that some of the blockprints were probably modern, but considered them copies of older formulaic collections of prayers and incantations which served the same purpose as prayer-wheels or prayer-flags. As for the manuscripts, Hoernle’s overall view in 1899 was that they were genuine. Stein and the Iranian

61

scholar E. W. West had confirmed that at least one of the scripts (“Pahlavi” see below) was genuine. Hoernle’s examination of the paper led him to believe that it did not all come from Khotan. To solve the problem of the diversity of scripts by the hypothesis of forgery, he concluded, “is only to substitute one riddle, and a harder one, for another. How can Islām Akhūn and his comparatively illiterate confederates be credited with the no mean ingenuity necessary for excogitating them?”50 Hoernle’s concluding plea in the introduction to part I of his 1899 Report was for a scientific archaeological expedition to be made to Central Asia, which would independently investigate “these sand-buried sites near Khotan.”51 Stein had corresponded with Hoernle about such an expedition as early as June 1898,52 but his plans did not come to fruition until the end of May 1900. Meanwhile Hoernle was still working on part II of his report on the British Collection, in which he made considerable advances with the decipherment of Khotanese, but was still unsuccessful in interpreting the manuscripts in “unknown characters.” New correspondence between Stein and Hoernle has recently come to light, which describes Stein’s progress in unravelling the truth about the Khotan forgeries.53 Stein first wrote to Hoernle from Yarkand on September 22 and 24th

50 Op. cit.: p. 62. 51 Op. cit.: p. xxxii. 52 IOR MSS Eur F 302/13: entry for 25 June 1898: “Priv., from Dr. A. Stein, respecting projected exploration in Khotan.” 53 IOR MSS Eur F 302/51.

1900. His letters do not survive, but according to Hoernle’s register, they described a “well-preserved stūpa in Kashgar.” After leaving Yarkand, Stein stopped on the way to Khotan at Guma, on 5th October, with a view to investigating further the sites at which Islam Akhun and others had found the numerous manuscripts and blockprints that Hoernle had described in his articles of 1897 and 1899. Stein wrote again from Khotan on November 12th – another letter which does not survive – presumably reporting to Hoernle his failure to find corroboration for Islam Akhun’s supposed ancient sites. Hoernle, however, did not receive this letter until early in 1901,54 by which time he had already sent part II of his Report to press.55 Hoernle’s reply of 25th February is unfortunately lost.

54 Hoernle’s letter to Stein of December 17th was, according to his register of correspondence [IOR MSS Eur F 302/13], a reply to Stein’s of September 22nd and 24th. 55 J. Bloch to Hoernle, 17 Apr. 1901: reply to Hoernle’s letters of 15 Feb, 10, 18 and 27 March. “The first installment of your MS. has arrived safely and is with the Press.” [IOR MSS Eur F 302/51].

“Pahlavi” forgery, one of thirteen books which Macartney sent to Hoernle in 1897 together with pottery, coins, and other objects from Khotan and the Takla Makan. Hoernle wrote: “In December last [1897], when I had the opportunity of showing them to Dr. Aurel Stein, who has made Iranian scripts and languages a special study, he at once recognized the Pahlavi script in verse. He even read some portions of it, though, of course, as will be readily understood by those who know the difficulties of reading unknown texts in Pahlavi, it was not possible for him, at such short notice, to determine what the purport of the text might be.” (A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, “A report on the British Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia, part I,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 68, pt. I, extra no. (1899), p. 63) [BL: Or.13873/72]

Stein wrote again from Dandan Uiliq on January 3rd 1901 (letter missing) and on March 11th from Camp Bilangan, Keriya Darya. Here he went into some detail about his discoveries at Niya and Endere, adding: “After what I wrote to you in my last letter, you will not be surprised to hear that I failed to discover the slightest trace of any books or MSS ‘in unknown characters.’ Brāhmī, Kharoshṭhī, ‘Central Asian Brāhmī’ texts on parchment, wood and paper have come to light in greater number than I could have hoped for.

Tibetan and Chinese records also duly present themselves. Only the ‘unknown scripts’ with which Kashgar and Ladakh were so liberally supplied for some years seem now to have vanished. When returning to Khotan I shall endeavour to find out what has become of them, – and those who manufactured them.” Hoernle’s anxious reply of May 15th, the day after he received Stein’s letter, is unfortunately lost.

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Stein’s final letter to Hoernle from his first expedition was written at Kashgar on May 25th. Thanking him for his letters of December 19th, February 25th and March 27th, which he had only just received, he wrote about his plans for the future, and his discovery of a large vihāra, reliefs, and sculptures at Rawak, before recounting his eventual interview with Islam Akhun in Khotan on April 25th.56 Stein wrote “I cannot enter in detail into your remarks about the forged MSS. and prints with which Islam Akhun’s factory supplied Kashgar, Ladakh and Kashmir since 1895. It would be too great a task to enumerate all the evidence which has accumulated as to these forgeries. …Turdi’s finds, mostly scraps in Brahmi and Chinese, are genuine; whatever Islam Akhun supplied, is manufactured. The sites which he mentioned to Macartney and others as his findplaces, are either fictive localities or mere ‘Tatis’, i.e. completely eroded sites of villages where the loess is covered by potsherds and similar hard débris but where the survival of papers is a physical impossibility.” Islam Akhun had made “at last a clear breast of it, and acknowledged (what everybody else among his friends knew) that he had never been beyond Aksipil, and told in detail how he commenced first to write and then to print his ‘old books’.”

56 Stein’s interview with Islam Akhun is described in detail in his Ancient Khotan: detailed report of archaeological explorations in Chinese Turkestan. 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), pp. 507-14; also in his Preliminary report on a journey of archaeological and topographical exploration in Chinese Turkestan (London, 1901), pp. 64-8.

Letter from Stein to Hoernle from Kashgar, dated 25 May 1901 [BL: IOR MSS Eur F 302/51]

Hoernle replied on June 27th to Stein, care of H. S. King & Co, Pall Mall. It was possibly this letter that Stein referred to when he wrote to his brother Ernst on July 4th that Hoernle “had accepted the undeniable [and] wants to have his report about the deciphered forgeries destroyed.”57 On July 9th: Stein wrote again to his brother from Hoernle’s garden “Understandably, he is very deeply disappointed by Islam Akhun’s forgeries, but to my satisfaction has recovered and I am spared a painful discussion.”58 Hoernle had by now received the proofs of the second part of his Report and gave them to Stein on July 17th, together with a revised manuscript introduction. Stein’s reply of July 22nd shows his desire for caution: “As my own report is not yet written and as in my preliminary account it will scarcely be possible to deal in detail with what I may well call the negative results of my tour, it is doubly necessary that the statements as to forged and

57 Jeannete Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein: archaeological explorer (London, 1977), p. 197. 58 Ibid.

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genuine pieces of the “British Collection” as far as they are made on my authority, should be precise and carefully considered. I am anxious mainly that nothing should be stated that I might subsequently on giving my own detailed account be obliged to modify or criticize.” Stein was no doubt recalling the disastrous consequences of his false identification of the “Pahlavi” forgeries in 1897. Stein’s intervention in 1901 put an end to Islam Akhun’s forging activities, though in fact it is unlikely that much had come out of his workshop after 1898 when people first began to be suspicious. However in the early 1930s a glut of forged Brahmi paper manuscripts again appeared on the market. Sold alongside genuine 8th and 9th-century Khotanese documents from the Dandan Uiliq area, they were purchased by many Europeans, most notably by Stein on his fourth expedition to Central Asia between 1930 and 1931, and by Nils Ambolt, who was part of Sven Hedin’s expedition between 1927 and 1935. This time scholars were more cautious. Photographs were widely circulated, but they remained unpublished. For a time the Iranist H. W. Bailey, who was editing the Khotanese documents of the Hedin collection, regarded them as being “in a script which, for distinction from normal Khotanese handwriting, I call script II. This writing represents a form of the usual Brāhmī script of Khotan so modified and at times so disjointed as to suggest either careless copying or even copying by a scribe unfamiliar with the script ... So different is this hand that it was a task of difficulty to work out the reading of the texts and after repeated attempts complete success has not been

attained.”59 Hoernle has been unfairly criticised for his conclusions which in hindsight may seem rather naïve, but the main difference between him and later scholars, is that he was prepared to publish the forgeries without understanding them, in the hope that someone else might be more successful.

59 Unpublished report [Ancient India & Iran Trust, Cambridge, Bailey Archive/155].

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OPENING THE CHEST OF NEPAL’S HISTORY: THE SURVEY OF B. H. HODGSON’S MANUSCRIPTS IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY AND THE ROYAL

ASIATIC SOCIETY, LONDON DR RAMESH K. DHUNGEL

RESEACHER, HODGSON MANUSCRIPT PROJECT, SOAS - CNAS/TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY [Updated version of a paper delivered at the 72nd Conference of SAALG, the British Library, London, 26

November 2004]

INTRODUCING HODGSON Brian Hodgson was a long-serving British diplomat in Nepal. After an initial educational training at Haileybury College in England, he travelled to Calcutta in 1818 and continued his oriental studies at Fort William College, Bengal (Calcutta). The focus at Haileybury was on preparing young Englishmen for employment overseas, particularly with the East India Company, and during his time there Hodgson achieved Distinction in Bengali language, as well as in several other subjects including classics and political economy. He had begun his study of the classical languages of India with the intention of earning an Honours Degree, but he was unable to complete this due to ill-health relating to a liver complaint. However, his time at Fort William College afforded him good exposure to Sanskrit, as well as the opportunity to gain proficiency in the Persian language.60

Hodgson was just nineteen years old when he was appointed Assistant Commissioner in Kumaun, an area recently taken by the East India Company

60 Rajendra Lal Mitra, The Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1882); William Wilson Hunter, Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson: British Resident at the Court of Nepal (London: John Murray, 1896 (Indian reprints available)), p. 32.

from the control of the Gorkhali authority of Nepal. About a year later, in 1820, he was promoted to the position of Assistant Resident Representative and transferred to Nepal. He was not expecting to work in Nepal long-term, at least not during those early days of his diplomatic service. On the contrary, he was ambitious to attain a higher and more challenging position in Calcutta or elsewhere and in 1822 he was transferred from the Residency in Nepal to the Persian Department of the Foreign Office in Calcutta as Acting Deputy Secretary. Although there was ample scope for promotion from this job, his weakening health did not allow him to remain on the plains, particularly in and around Calcutta, and he was advised by well-wishers and doctors either to return to England or to move to a hill station. Unable to afford the former, he decided to go back to Nepal.

Hodgson arrived in Kathmandu at the beginning of 1824, accepting the job of postmaster. This was a post considerably lower than that of Assistant Resident or

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Dr Ramesh Dhungel poses before a portrait of Brian Hodgson, which is currently hanging in the Board

Room of the British Library

Deputy Secretary in the Foreign Office. Yet for him, leaving the East India Company’s service had not been an option – his salaried income was the main source of livelihood for his large family of three sisters, three brothers and parents in England. Since his previous post was at this time occupied by somebody else, he had to wait for more than a year before getting it back in 1824 and he went on to hold this position until 1829, when he was promoted to Acting Resident. In 1831, Hodgson was appointed British Resident to the Kingdom of Nepal and he served in this capacity until late 1843, when a harsh decision taken against him by Governor-General Edward Law (the Earl of Ellenborough) forced him to leave. So deeply did he feel the insult of his appointment by

Ellenborough to the lower post of Assistant Sub-Commissioner in Simla that he resigned from the British Indian Civil Service.61 At least during the initial stages of his posting as a diplomat in Nepal, this was not the job of Hodgson’s choice. He had accepted it only because of his health and financial situation, and had sought advice from friends and well-wishers as to whether or not to continue with the appointment. He received timely counsel from one of his experienced friends, William Butterworth Bayley, at that time a Member of the Supreme Council of the Governor-General of India. Bayley seems to have been a source of inspiration for Hodgson, particularly with relation to plans for pioneering studies of Nepal and Himalayan subjects. W. W. Hunter quotes Hodgson in his biography:

Having listened attentively to my statement (seeking advice) Bayley replied: “true, Nepal is in every sense peculiar, and in the present quiet times you can learn little there. But we have had one fierce struggle with Nepal, and we shall yet have another. When that event occurs there will be very special need for local experience. Go back and master the subject in all its phases, and then, despite your youth and the many men your seniors in the service who will try to get the embassy, you will have a fair chance of succeeding.”62

61 Hunter, pp. 232-233. 62 Ibid., p. 94.

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Bayley was also the one to prepare for Hodgson a questionnaire, comprising of 36 questions, for the study of “military tribe in Nepal.”63

It was in a state of confusion, anger and frustration that Hodgson voyaged back to England, where he found himself unable to let go of his passion for research on Nepal and the Himalaya. He decided to go back to India and continue his endeavours in oriental studies, and in 1845, after less than a year in England, he sailed to Calcutta and attempted to return to Nepal. The British authorities, however, denied him permission to do so in a private capacity on the grounds that he had served there in a position of prestige and power for more than two decades. Finally, he decided to settle in Darjeeling, where he continued his research, returning to England for good in 1857.

Hodgson seems to have been celibate until the age of thirty-two. By 1833, he was involved in an affair with a local Muslim lady – possibly the widow of a Kashmiri trader based in Kathmandu – with whom he had two children, a son and a daughter. Until 1843, Hodgson appears to have enjoyed life as though married and settled. Both of his children were being raised in the lavish environment of the Residency, whilst his mistress, Meharunnisha (derogatively nicknamed “Musī -dwāre” in several official documents) was with him, taking care of the children and household. Although Hodgson and Meharunnisha faced criticism for their relationship, they were as husband and wife. Hodgson took both his children with him to England and, prior to leaving England for India in 1845, to Holland.64

63 Hodgson MSS 09/17/107-144. 64 David Waterhouse (ed.), The Origins of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Nepal and

Here, proper care and arrangements for their education were made under the guardianship of Hodgson’s sister, Fanny, who was established and influential due to her husband’s position as Provincial Governor in Arnem.

The happy life of Hodgson and his family in Nepal appears to have turned to tragedy after his enforced departure. Custom dictated that he was unable to take his beloved Meharunnisha back to England, even had he wanted to, and he was compelled to leave her behind in Kathmandu. At the same time, he was unsure as to what he was going to do with his future. His mistress might well have been the reason why he later wanted to return to Nepal as a private researcher. In addition to this, he had to cope with the deep pain of losing both his children at a young age – Sarah dying from tuberculosis in Holland in 1851, Henry in Darjeeling in 1856, probably from lingering malaria.

Even though they were “brown in colour” and had been born from the womb of a “non-white” or “brown” woman, Hodgson had been eager to give his children a European elitist kind of an education and social exposure. He encouraged Henry to stay in England. Henry, however, did not find it a suitable or particularly attractive place to be and decided to go back to India and become a zamindar. He finally returned there, arriving in Calcutta, in 1853.65 Thus between 1845 and 1849, Henry was in Holland, moving to England by 1849 or 1850. He was already in England by the time of the official visit there of Nepal’s Prime Minister Jangabahadur and had a meeting with him. He also benefited from Jangabahadur’s special help

Darjeeling 1820-1858, (London: Routledge Curzon (Indian reprint available), 2004), p. 10. 65 Ibid., pp.13-14.

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(possibly both financial and social), something which Hodgson very openly acknowledges in a letter to Jangabahadur. This special help was later reciprocated by Hodgson when he arranged, and perhaps even sponsored, the English education of Gajarajsing Thapa, Jangabahadur’s son-in-law, in Darjeeling.66 Around 1855, when Hodgson’s son Henry was staying at Titaliya or Khersang for health reasons, arrangements were also been made for him to give Gajaraj English lessons. Garjaraj himself reports to Hodgson in Darjeeling about his progress in learning English from Henry,67 from which it can be understood that Henry Hodgson was Captain Gajarajsing Thapa’s English tutor from the time of his arrival in Darjeeling until his death in 1856.

Little is known about what became of Meharun-nisha. She appears to have been in contact with Hodgson until around 1853.68 It seems that in 1846 she was exiled from Nepal for her involvement in a conspiracy before, during or immediately after the Kot-massacre of 1846. The list of people executed or punished after the massacre includes her nickname as one of those convicted of conspiracy and ousted.69 It is therefore possible that she visited Hodgson in Darjeeling whilst she was in exile. It is also interesting why she, a low-caste woman, escaped capital punishment. Did Hodgson intervene in some way, or were Jangabahadur and his party uneasy about this particular case because

66 Ramesh Dhungel, “External intervention brought by internal court-conspiracy” (text in Nepali), Himal Khabar Patrika, no. 142 (27 Feb.-13 March, 2005), pp. 64-68. 67 Hodgson MSS 22/06/104-105. 68 Hunter, p. 86. 69 P. S. Rana, Rāṇājīharuko saccā itihās (Kathmandu, 2003).

of their links with Hodgson? This is a serious question, but it remains unanswered because of a lack of proper historical evidence. A personal letter from Hodgson’s son, Henry, addressed to his mother has been found, but it is difficult to say whether this was to his own mother or to his stepmother, Anne Scott.70 The letter, sent from somewhere called Meneherpur (Manoharpur?), doesn’t have a complete date, but gives the day and time of writing as “8 a.m. Saturday”. This may be the name of a local place in the area called Titaliya near Khersang, where Hodgson’s friend, Dr Campbell, had suggested that Henry should stay for health reasons.71 Anne had married Hodgson in 1853 and went to Darjeeling with him later that year. Another interesting question regarding Hodgson’s family life is why, having left Meharunnisha in Nepal, he didn’t marry for about a decade, and why it was only in 1853 that he married Anne? Was he simply not interested in getting married whilst Meharunnisha was still alive until around 1852-53? Did his decision to marry Anne signify Meharunnisha’s death? All these are important questions, but are again unanswered because of an absence of proper evidence.

HODGSON MANUSCRIPTS ON NEPAL AND HIMALAYAN

STUDIES It is well-known that Brian Hodgson was a man of versatile calibre and incomparably painstaking character. His position as a brilliant master of research on Nepal and Himalayan studies is indisputable. He has been credited with being the pioneering researcher/ scholar in numerous areas relating to Nepal and the Himalaya. It would seem

70 Hodgson MSS 22/06/149. 71 Hodgson MSS 22/06/110.

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that his sudden dismissal from the job in Kathmandu left his future research plans badly affected, whilst in Nepal, too, the King and one of the two major factions of the ruling elite missed him terribly. There were basically two main reasons why this faction were affected: 1) they were deprived of a major source of knowledge and learning, and 2) they had lost the support for their political power that they were getting, as well as other benefits, direct and indirect, from British India.72

Hodgson’s dismissal from Nepal also had a negative impact on his grand project of writing a comprehensive history of Nepal. Through his unpublished manuscripts, as well as published sources, we can assess that in Darjeeling (1845-1858) Hodgson’s studies were confined mainly within the periphery of Himalayan languages, ethnography and flora and fauna. It seems that during his time in Darjeeling, his long-term research projects relating to studies of Nepali history and Buddhism were left virtually untouched. In Kathmandu (1920-1943) Hodgson conducted his studies with two main purposes in mind: 1) to report on Nepal and Tibet as a colonial agent, and 2) to lay the foundations for his own scholarly expertise. Bayley’s suggestion to Hodgson had been based more on the colonial ambition of acquiring information and gaining command over various remote parts of the world than on disciplined, scholarly study. Hodgson heeded Bayley’s advice, yet even during his diplomatic service in Nepal, his studies went far beyond

72 King Rajendra’s letter to the Governor-General and Guru Ranganath’s letter to Hodgson from the Royal Asiatic Society Collection; Bhaktabir Khabas’s letter, Hodgson MSS Vol. 56, f. 2.

merely reporting for British colonial interest. After he settled in Darjeeling, he appears to have been more of a disciplined research scholar than a colonial officer.

Hodgson also seems to have greatly missed his close association with Buddhist Newars. Pandit Amritananda had already died by the time he left Nepal and, even before he arrived in Darjeeling, Hodgson was in search of another learned Newar Buddhist Pandit who could translate Newar and Sanskrit Newar texts on Buddhism and Nepali history. Although his early publications were on the fauna of Nepal, Hodgson claims that he had begun to collect information on Buddhism as soon as he arrived in Kathmandu in 1821.73 Despite his best efforts, however, he doesn’t appear to have found a Newar Buddhist translator to work as his research assistant whilst in Darjeeling.74 Thus we can interpret Lord Ellenborough’s forceful action of sacking Hodgson from the position of British Resident as a travesty for the future of Nepali historical and cultural studies. The vast body of his-torical material collected by Hodgson in Nepal and Darjeeling remained unused for almost two centuries.

Having examined the Hodgson collections at the British Library and the Royal Asiatic Society, it is now known that besides being the co-discoverer of Mahayana Buddhism and a pioneering

73 Waterhouse, p. 255; B. H. Hodgson, Essays on the Languages, Literature, and Religion of Nepal and Tibet, Together with Further Papers on the Geography, Ethnology, and Commerce of those Countries (London: Trubner (first Indian publication of 1971 and reprints available), 1874), p. 35. 74 Ranganath’s letter to Hodgson in Darjeeling, deposited at the RAS, London.

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contributor to the field of the study of flora and fauna – focusing on the birds and mammals of the Himalayas, as well as plenty of other things – Hodgson was also the first researcher to be in a position to collect original historical material. This included medieval and modern inscriptions, dozens of chronicles and historical accounts and other written documents from Nepal. He was the first person to gain access to the great record book (baḍāḍhaḍḍa) of the Royal Palace, as well as to the records of the inner apartment (bhitri-khopi).75

Out of 106 volumes of Hodgson manuscripts (in boxes and scrolls), 104 volumes have been found, all of which have been read and catalogued. Files containing volumes and item label data have been created by employing the xml.editor program.

Volumes 1-23 of the manuscripts are in English; volume 24 contains manuscripts in both English and Nepali and the manuscripts in volumes 25-74 are mainly in Nepali, although they also include some Sanskrit, Hindi, Newari, Tibetan, Hindi/Hindustani, Avadhi (written in Kaithi Script) and other ethnic languages. After volume 74, the manuscripts are mainly in Lepcha and Lumbu, whilst volumes 93-104 are primarily in Persian and Urdu, the majority being translations and summaries of Sanskrit and Nepali originals. Regarding scripts, besides Latin, Nagari, Kiranti (Sirjanga), Lepcha, Tibetan, Prachalit, Newari, Persian, and Kaithi, there are also a few examples of Ranjana, Bengali and Mongolian/Chinese.

Of the volumes written in 19th century Nepali, volumes 39-60 are dominated by local chronicles and genealogies. Volumes 61-71 contain revenue accounts, taxation and state expenditure, covering details of the land tax of three of the Valley’s cities

75 Hodgson MSS vol. 55/12/78-90.

– Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan – and the expenses of the royal family and the military. Volume 72 is the literary text of Ḳriṣṇacaritopākhyānanāṭaka (in Hindi), and volumes 73-75 are ethnic languages and vocabularies. Volumes 33-34 and 82-83 are unpublished Newari dictionaries, vocabularies and grammars written for Hodgson by Khardar Jitmohan and Pandit Amritananda. Volumes 84-92 contain Lepcha and Limbu language material. Volumes 93-102 are Persian and Urdu manuscripts (translations and originals). Volumes 103 and 104 are again chronologies and genealogies.

In my opinion, the best way to introduce the British Library’s Hodgson collection would be as “an uncategorised encyclopaedic 18th/19th century record of Nepal and some other Himalayan territories.” It is difficult to place the manuscripts within a limited scope of subject categories, yet despite this, one might tentatively group them as follows:

diplomatic correspondence, Nepal’s politics and administration, the military system, the land system, agriculture, geography, natural resources, routes and trails, revenue and taxation, trade and commerce, state expenditure, ethnic studies, Buddhism (Newari and Tibetan), Buddhist art and iconography, traditional Buddhist and Hindu architecture, the Nepali legal and judicial system, border problems and disputes, Himalayan and hill languages (including grammars, dictionaries, vocabularies, epigraphy-script and alphabets), Sanskrit-Buddhist literary texts, genealogical accounts, chronicles, institutes or social reforms by different

rulers, general and historical accounts of Nepal, prominent temples and deities, accounts of military campaigns and territorial expansion (including details of wars with Tibet and China), original and copies of academic correspondence, copies of Sanskrit and Newari inscriptions, palm-leaf manuscripts and medieval and modern royal orders (lālamohar and sanad).

Besides manuscripts, the collection also includes copies of Hodgson’s published articles, together with notes on the articles and other related material.

In order to gain a better understanding of the Hodgson manuscripts at the British Library and to enable cross-checking, a couple of days were devoted to examining the manuscripts deposited at the Royal Asiatic Society, as well as those at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is now known that in many cases, the manuscripts held at the Royal Asiatic Society, the Bodleian Library, the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens and a few other places, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, are very complementary to those at the British Library. Similarly, most of the sketch drawings and textual descriptions of original art objects collected by Hodgson and now deposited in various places, including the Royal Asiatic Society, the Natural History Museum, and the Library of the Zoological Society, London, can also be found in the British Library’s collection.

Besides five-or-so boxes of manuscripts of a general nature at the Royal Asiatic Society, there is also a very large bound volume known as the “autograph book”, which contains a couple of hundred important original manuscripts relating to

Hodgson’s personal and official life. This volume includes material eulogising Hodgson, letters with the royal seal, official letters from prime ministers, chautariyās and kājis (courtiers or high-ranking officials), state orders, etc. A large number of these are in Nepali, but there are also letters and certificates in European and other Indian languages, i.e. English, French, Hindi, Kaithi. Amongst this material, manuscripts detailing internal court conflicts in Nepal are of particular importance, as are letters such as farewell eulogies to Hodgson by King Rajendra and Crown Prince Surendra, a letter to the Governor-General requesting Hodgson’s reinstatement as Resident to Nepal, and letters from the Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief Jangabahadur, and his son, Captain Gajarajsingh Thapa.

Apart from the work of cataloguing the Hodgson manuscripts, many previously unknown facts relating to Nepali history and cultural studies and the history of relations between Nepal and Britain have been explored through the current project. The most significant of the findings from Hodgson’s boxes are: several unknown historical accounts, genealogical accounts, two dictionaries (Pandit Amritananda’s and Khardar Jitmohan’s), the Newar grammar of Pandit Amritananda, Amritananda’s field report from Bodhgaya, correspondence between Hodgson and academic contacts, documents relating to the royal social reforms of Siddhinasimha Malla, Vishnu Mall, Ranabahadur Shah and Rajendravikram Shah, Hodgson’s note on the Ashokan pillar, dozens of early Sanskrit and Newari inscriptions from the Kathmandu Valley and palm-leaf manuscripts from late-medieval Nepal. Amongst the most important details to have come to light are those relating to Hodgson’s personal and professional life – his

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family, his research assistants, informants and field workers, his methods of gathering information and his dispute with other scholars relating to research credit (Alexander Csoma de Koros,76 for example) – as well his place within Nepal’s politics and his relations with Nepali learned elites. Equally significant are further details relating to subjects as diverse as the history of P. N. Shah, the authentic antiquity of the Limbu script and the Newar theatrical tradition, with special reference to the performance of the Kaṃśabadhanāṭaka.

One of the most regrettable facts to have emerged from this project relates to the distortion of the manuscripts’ provenance. There were various changes in the India Office Library between the date when the manuscripts were acquired and the time at which they were processed in the early 20th century. Also, serious mistakes were made in the so-called “re-classification” and permanent binding of the manuscripts. Rather than employing people with the appropriate language expertise, this re-classification was done according to size. This in itself caused more damage to the order of the manuscripts than any of the dispersion and admixtures which occurred from 1864-1919 and has become the main problem in reading and using the collection. Although the manuscripts at the Royal Asiatic Society have not been bound into volumes, their provenance, too, has been distorted. In many cases, this makes it difficult to understand their historical relevance and importance.

PROGRESS REPORT ON THE HODGSON MANUSCRIPT

CATALOGUING PROJECT The Project is conducted by the School of

Oriental and African Studies, University of London,

76 Hodgson MSS.vol. 97.

and funded mainly by the Leverhulme Trust (2003-2006), with the additional support of Michael Palin (2006) and the British Library (2007).

Until September 2005, the main focus was on reading, translating and summarising manuscripts in languages other than Sanskrit, Nepali and Tibetan, i.e. Persian, Urdu, Lepcha and Newari. In the case of Urdu and Persian, the task was an unusual one. Not only did I have to work with the person hired for this, but I also had to write – with extra speed – summaries for the content of each item. Although the Urdu/Persian manuscripts in the Hodgson collection are written in three different types of script, the language employed makes them extremely difficult to understand even by an expert, for whom the heavy use of Hindu and Buddhist philosophical terms and concepts, and sometime even sentences, causes problems. A further complication is the addition of Sanskrit, Newari, Nepali and Hindi words. A total of 11 volumes containing over 200 items and 1000 folios of Urdu/Persian manuscripts were to be read and summarized within 15 working days. From January-March 2006, I spent much of my time re-working and completing the details for the volume and item level descriptions of the entries for these manuscripts.

From April-May 2005, I concentrated on entering the content summary of translated Lepcha manuscripts. About 60% of these were translated in Sikkim and Nepal from January-March 2005. The remaining 40% were so difficult that they had to be left in Sikkim to be studied by an expert with the ability to read and understand the most ancient form of the Lepcha script and language. In many cases, they also had to be rewritten for a better reading and understanding of their content. I even had to employ a Lepcha lecturer to go into the

remarks. To date, I have received editorial comments on approximately 60% of the cataloguing work completed so far. Digital images of selected manuscripts have been taken by library technicians and will be adjusted and added to the final version in February 2007.

remote villages of Sikkim and find a reader of ancient Lepcha with whom to work. Fortunately, the summaries and translations of these difficult Lepcha manuscripts arrived safely from Sikkim. In the meantime, I consulted another scholar of the Lepcha language in the Netherlands and October-November 2005 were spent in verifying the work done by the latter, as well as the native translations arriving from Sikkim.

The British Library has provided funds for the Project to be extended for another 6 months, taking it to June 2007. Efforts are being made to find funding for a further year (July 2007-June 2008) with the intention of including the catalogue of Hodgson manuscripts deposited at the Royal Asiatic Society.

In June and July 2006, I worked with a Newar expert from Nepal on the task of reading and translating Newar manuscripts written in the Nagari or Newari script. I entered the resulting details of content in August and September 2006.

Technical work relating to languages, dates, references, etc. has been in progress since December 2005. This now focuses on the rewriting of content, the preparation of a final list of references, bibliography and glossary, the introductory text, as well as editorial

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PUBLICATION OF THE PUNJAB GOVERNOR’S REPORTS LIONEL CARTER

At present I am engaged in publishing in their entirety the fortnightly reports which the Governors of the Punjab sent the Viceroy from late 1936 (when the series began) until the end of British rule in August 1947. The volumes are being published in India by Manohar and besides the actual reports they also include other important documents which the Governors or their Secretaries sent to New Delhi.

The series of Governors’ Reports was started because both the Viceroy and the India Office were concerned that they would receive insufficient information on developments in the eleven Provinces of British India as a consequence of new constitutional arrangements established by the 1935 Government of India Act. Procedures had long been in place whereby the Secretariats of the Provincial Governments sent the Home Department in New Delhi fortnightly appraisals of local developments. However with the beginning of Provincial Autonomy early in 1937, it was clear that the new Cabinets made up of politicians would greatly influence the content of the appraisals. What the Viceroy and India Office now required were frank, confidential and personal reports on the situation by the Governors themselves together with reflections on general trends. We have, therefore, a series which reveals some of the deeper official thinking of the last days of the Raj.

So far two volumes have appeared in the Punjab series and a third will be published shortly. The first volume, entitled The Start of Provincial

Autonomy (8173045682), covers the years 1936-1939. Unlike the majority of Provinces which were under Congress rule during these years, the Government of the Punjab was run by a Unionist coalition Ministry and in many respects business continued as it had done in the old days. The Premier was a distinguished Muslim, Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, who was also a major statesman on the all-India stage. His activities dominate the first volume and of particular interest are his negation of a pact with M. A. Jinnah in October 1937 and his talks with Congress in the summer of 1939 aimed at bringing about a constitutional settlement. The second volume in the series, Strains of War (8173046263), documents the years 1940-1943. The Punjab now became of crucial importance in the Second World War. It was the largest source of recruits to the Indian Army and also a major supplier of food in India. Sikander again had a part to play in the various constitutional discussions which took place but one has the feeling that his star was beginning to set. Nonetheless his sudden death from a heart attack in December 1942, aged fifty, was a major tragedy. Had he lived, he may well have eased some of the heartbreak of partition even if he had been unable to prevent it. His successor as Premier, Nawabzada Khizar Hyat Khan, quickly established himself.

The third volume carries the title Last Years of the Ministries (817304662X) and takes the record from 1 January 1944 to 3 March 1947. These were momentous years for the Punjab when, following a

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split between the Unionists and Jinnah’s Muslim League in 1944, the League went on to win the allegiance of the vast majority of the Punjab’s Muslims. In elections in early 1946 it secured 75 seats in an Assembly of 175 seats and was the largest single party. Notwithstanding this fact, Khizar continued to lead a coalition now made up largely of Congress and Sikh members with just a handful of Unionist Muslims. The eleven months that this Ministry held office were marked by extreme communal tension and, ultimately, violence. It fell early in March 1947 and for the remainder of British rule the Punjab was administered directly by the Governor.

The Punjab series can be purchased from Manohar Publishers, 4753/23 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi, 110 002, India. (E-mail sales@manoharbooks-.com). In the UK, it is distributed by Motilal (UK) – Books of India, P.O. Box 324, Borehamwood, Herts, WD6 1NB. (E-mail: info@MLBDUK.com). It is envisaged that two further volumes will be needed to complete the series.

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NEWS THE BRITISH LIBRARY 1. Dipali Ghosh retired as Curator for North Indian Languages in December 2005. She is greatly missed by colleagues in the South Asian section, as well as by the many visiting scholars who benefited so much from her tireless cataloguing, advice and research during the seventeen years in which she held the post. We wish her a long and very happy retirement. 2. Members of the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) contributed articles highlighting specific treasures within their collections to A Cabinet of Oriental Curiosities, a volume to commemorate Graham Shaw’s career of over thirty years at the British Library and his continuation as APAC’s Director. Organised and edited by Annabel Teh Gallop, the Head of APAC’s South and South East Asian Collections, this was published by the British Library in 2006 and is available at the British Library Shop. 3. Reference Services in the APAC Reading Room have been reduced from a working team of 7 to one of 5. The team’s work continues to be much appreciated. The first of Tim Thomas’ Family History Study Days this year is scheduled for Saturday 17 March. 4. Sacred, a major exhibition on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, will be on display in the British Library’s Pearson Gallery from 27 April-23 September 2007. Featuring the finest examples of

sacred texts held by the Library, as well as those lent by other institutions, this will look at the production, interpretation and use of sacred texts, exploring points of commonality and difference between and within these religions. It will also look at the different aspects of faith today. Over the summer of 2007, a small exhibition in the British Library’s Folio Society Gallery entitled Banned: the printed backdrop to South Asian Independence will mark the 60th anniversary of freedom from British rule for India and Pakistan. Drawing upon the British Library’s rich collection of books and ephemera in South Asian languages and English banned by the Government of India under the Indian Press Act of 1910 – and interspersed with relevant India Office records, drawings and photographs – this exhibition will provide an alternative take on the Indian freedom movement during the final crucial decades leading up to 1947. 5. Cathy Collins, Programme Administrator of the Endangered Archives Programme, reports that the following projects relating to South Asia continue to progress well:

- Survey, conservation and archiving of pre-1947 Telegu printed materials and paintings in India.

- Archiving texts in the Sylhet Nagri script.

- Preservation of historic and rare Nepali monographs and periodicals.

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- Preserving Marathi manuscripts and making them accessible.

- Endangered Urdu periodicals: preservation and access for vulnerable scholarly resources.

- Digital documentation of manuscript collection in Gangtey.

- The digital documentation of manuscripts at Drametse and Ogyen Choling.

For further details on any of these, please see the EAP website: http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangerarch. Leena Mitford THE CENTRE OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY

OF CAMBRIDGE 1. We regret to report the very sad news that the Centre's Director, Dr Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, died suddenly on 23 April 2006, whilst attending a conference in the States. In addition to having been Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Dr R. S. Chandavarkar had been Reader in History and Politics of South Asia, and Fellow of Trinity College, 1979-1983, 1988-2006. For an excellent potted biography of his career by Subho Basu and Douglas Haynes, please see the Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006, p. 2061-2063. Dr Gordon Johnson (his predecessor as Director of the Centre) was appointed Acting Director until 31 December 2006. Professor C. A. Bayly has been appointed Director as from 1/1/2007.

2. The future of the study of the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and the Ancient Near East in the University of Cambridge, including the restructuring of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, is to be discussed in the University's Senate House on 23/1/2007. 3. Oral History Archive: Digitisation Project. The Centre was awarded a Resource Enhancement Grant by the AHRC, with which it plans to digitise and transcribe

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the Centre's 400 tape-recorded interviews and thereby archive them for posterity. Project outcomes will include a web-searchable database and webstreamed interviews. Ivan Coleby, chief researcher on the project, would welcome communication with any interested researchers, archivists or librarians. Please email the Centre's Archivist, Kevin Greenbank, on kmg23@-cam.ac.uk. It is envisaged that the project will take three years to complete. 4. Centre of South Asian Studies. Occasional Papers series (ISSN:1476-7511), 6 issues for just £18. Forthcoming issues include papers by William Gould, A. R. Venkatachalapathy, Sean Lang, Yunas Samad and Eleanor Newbigin. 5. Sydney Bolt's memoir, of wartime India, Pseudo Sahib, was published on 5 December 2006 by Hardinge Simpole Publishing: http://www.hardingesimpole.co.uk Copies are available from the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. Please see the Centre's website for details: http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk Delegates at last summer's SAALG conference in Cambridge enjoyed listening to Sydney Bolt reminiscing about his time as a Communist on the Burma front. The following anecdotes are taken from his memoir:

When the Japanese threatened to invade Assam a group of Indian Army officers was despatched to prevent civilian panic. Their founder, Colonel Billy Short, was too original to last. In the dining room of the Delhi Gymkhana Club, having told a

sceptic that the best way to crack a walnut was to throw it at a picture, he demonstrated this on the framed portrait of George VI hanging in the entrance shattering the glass to the horror of the assembled diners.

His successor was Colonel A. J. M. Kilroy,

O.B.E. Whenever he addressed Assamese civilians he would include a warning against excessive expenditure on marriages. “My own marriage”, he would confide, “cost less than twenty pounds.” At the end of his speech on one occasion he asked his Assamese interpreter: “Did you tell them about my marriage expenses?” “Oh Sir!” was the reply, “I could not tell them such a shameful thing.”

Rachel Rowe THE LIBRARY OF THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF

MUSLIM CIVILISATIONS, AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY

(INTERNATIONAL) IN THE UK The Library will be hosting the 76th Conference of SAALG in January 2007. Further details will therefore be included in the next Newsletter. Stefan Seeger THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND 1. The NLS are almost ready to launch a new website, “A medical history of British India: a collection of official documents”. This will contain volumes from our India Papers collection, digitised last year with a £19,000 grant from the Wellcome

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Trust. The site will be aimed at the academic study of the history of medicine, but should also interest social historians, and anyone interested in Empire, or colonial history. We were also recently awarded a further £62,000 grant from the Trust, to digitise more material from the collection, this time to include items on the health of the army, reports from medical institutes and medical teaching establishments, and the supply of medicines in India during the colonial period. 2. On 23-26 July 2007, the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for South Asian Studies and School of History & Classics will be holding a conference to mark the 150th Anniversary of the Indian Uprising of 1857. Jan Usher ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY LIBRARY 1. During the summer of 2006 the RAS moved from its temporary office near Kings Cross into its new premises at 14 Stephenson Way, near Euston. Building work has been ongoing since we moved in, so it was some time before we could install the library, and that process is still not quite complete. The new building has provided us with secure storage for all the collections – something which was impossible in our old premises at Queen’s Gardens. Material is brought to readers in the first floor reading room, where we can accommodate up to 8 readers at a time, which is double the number we could have in the Queen’s Gardens reading room. Since the library re-opened in late October we have had a steady stream of visitors. As we had hoped, the new location, within easy walking

distance of the British Library, SOAS and the Wellcome Library, is proving more convenient than Bayswater (our previous home) for many of our visitors. Over the next few months we will be continuing to sort the library collections – the books are on the shelves, but not necessarily in the right order! – and looking at ways of funding the retroconversion of our catalogues over the next few years so that our new library system includes records for all our materials – books, journals, manuscripts, paintings and drawings, personal papers, photographs – in a single catalogue. 2. The RAS has a new website too, with more information about the library and all the Society’s other activities, at : www.royalasiaticsociety.org. Kathy Lazenbatt SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES LIBRARY 1. SOAS is in the process of a strategic review and the Library will have to respond to changes and developments in the direction of the School’s teaching and research. Marina Chellini and Nicholas Martland, representing the Library, are involved in ongoing discussions with SOAS South Asia academic colleagues about the South Asia collections in the Library. All parties have acknowledged that there are different needs and priorities, as well as financial and staffing constraints. We are therefore discussing the appropriate size and subject coverage of the languages we collect.

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2. In late 2006 the Library received a consignment of Nepali publications. This included linguistic and literary works, but also material covering politics, development studies and anthropology, reflecting current research interests. 3. The Library continues to acquire English, and other European language material, published both in South Asia and also in the UK, elsewhere in the EU and North America, on a broad range of subjects. We are maintaining and developing our traditional areas of interest, such as linguistics, literature, history, art and archaeology, religious studies, anthropology, politics and economics. We are also developing the collections in newer areas of interest such as film and media studies (including a collection of South Asian films on video and DVD), development studies, gender studies, diaspora studies (with particular emphasis on South Asia communities in the UK); and South Asian literatures in English. 4. In January 2007 Mr Burzine Waghmar was appointed part-time cataloguer for South Asian languages. Mr Waghmar has expertise in a range of South Asian and central Asian languages and is initially concentrating on cataloguing a backlog of Urdu language material as well as assisting in selecting Urdu material for acquisition. Nicholas Martland SOUTH ASIA UNION CATALOGUE The University of Chicago recently received a three year grant of approximately $250,000 from the

National Endowment for the Humanities for the South Asia Union Catalogue program. The new project will create an electronic catalogue of publications produced during the 19th and 20th centuries in eastern India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and colonial Burma, covering a range of South Asian languages that includes Assamese, Bengali, Burmese, English, Oriya, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu. The Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences, Calcutta, will take the lead in the subcontinent as the database is produced. The Catalogue will fill a much-needed gap in scholars' ability to find materials about South Asia. At present, scholars must rely upon hard-to-find printed bibliographies to assess what materials were published. After determining that a printed edition exists, it is even more difficult to locate a copy unless it is held by a major research library. Once the Catalogue is completed, however, scholars will be able to query a single database and determine what materials exist and where publications are available. Special emphasis will be given to the representation of holdings in South Asia because the combined strength of the collections in the subcontinent vastly outstrip those in the United Kingdom and the United States. All disciplines in the humanities will benefit in clearly measurable ways from this project through the greater number of publications made visible and improved efficiency in locating the texts important to scholars. The South Asia Union Catalogue may have an impact upon South Asian studies comparable to that of the English Short-Title Catalogue for the study of the Anglophone world. A minimum of 140,000 unique bibliographic and 20,000 new authority records will be created and contributed to the Online Computer Library Center at the end of project.

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James Nye