Afterword

Summary

Many differences have been observed in the personalities and intellectual stances of two scholars who, though they shared some formative influences from their home and their Scottish and Haileybury educations, finally came to disagree strongly on religious matters. How far such differences were linked to differing understandings of Scottish identity has not been addressed specifically. Neither Muir brother felt inclined to consider publicly at his career’s end whether the markers that George Campbell, William’s younger colleague, associated with Scottish identity, notably language and religious adherence, had been affected in his own case by long years in an Anglicized colonial environment.

Some pointers to contrasts between them on questions of identity may be drawn out however. For while William was prone, at one level, to utilize some very passionate appeals to markers of Scottishness in order to further particular agendas, at another more significant level, he was scarcely touched intellectually by what are usually considered the legacies of Scottish Enlightenment intellectualism. He liked to employ Scottishness as a very conscious rhetorical tool, often drawing analogies between qualities such as the ‘hardiness’ and ‘simplicity’ he associated with Scottish character and some similar qualities he discovered in the Hindustanis of ‘his’ North-Western Provinces. Worthy characteristics such as these he compared in numerous speeches with an effeteness and over-sophistication he associated both with England’s southern counties and with Bengal. The context was usually educational, the purpose being both to encourage Hindustanis and Scots to emulate Calcutta and Oxbridge’s privileged elites, and to draw attention to the perceived neglect of both India’s and Scotland’s deprived, sometimes ‘backward’, northern regions. That a Hindustani youth from a mofussil college proved able for the first time to outdo all of Calcutta’s examinees signified for him ‘a triumph of the North-West’. That Scots candidates failed to achieve places in the ICS was the fault of rules that favoured the alumni of southern English universities to the detriment of northerners and must be redressed. Yet despite his recourse to such rhetorical devices, William was much more Anglicized in his own practice than he cared to admit in principle. With an eye to their futures, he educated his own sons in English schools, in spite of publicly urging the need to support the Scottish system.