An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Lucy Deacon (Centre for Research Collections Fellow, University of Edinburgh)
The University of Edinburgh Library holds over 700 manuscripts pertaining to the Islamicate world and South Asia, the vast majority of which were procured in India by Scottish employees of the East India Company, or the British Raj. Around half come from the collections of just three individuals: David Anderson (EIC clerk and official between 1767 and 1785) and James Anderson (EIC soldier and Persian interpreter between 1774 and 1786), and John Baillie of Leys (active in India 1790 to 1816 as an EIC soldier, professor at Fort William College, Kolkata, and political agent at Lucknow). The Anderson brothers were part of the inner circle of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal. These men gathered their manuscript collections during the decades following the Battle of Buxor (1764), when the EIC had extracted from the Mughal Emperor the right to run the treasury and collect taxes in the prosperous provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa (now Odisha). Whilst the period spanning our Scotsmen’s EIC activities was marked by a surge of scholarly interest in Indian culture and civilisation amongst EIC officials, it was a period of violent and reckless abuse of the local population and resources. The exploitation of the weavers of the Bengali textile industry; the lack of a relief effort and unrelenting taxation during the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1770; and the widespread plantation of opium poppies in place of subsistence crops from the 1790s, are but a few examples.
This paper considers the manuscripts of the Anderson brothers and Baillie as evidence of their cultural preoccupations and reflections of their interactions with the host population. It examines the tension between their scholarly interest in Indian/Mughal cultural heritage and the rapacious practices of the organisation that they represented. Research is ongoing, with a particular focus on acquisition methods and the custodial history of the items in question. Where they had previously belonged to other libraries or individuals, were they bought, gifted, or stolen? And what was the relationship between the former owner and the Scottish collector? Where they are commissions, what did the collector order and why?
Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2