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New Lights on Raja Krishnachandra and Early Hindu-European Intellectual Exchange

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2020

JOSHUA EHRLICH Open the ORCID record for JOSHUA EHRLICH [Opens in a new window]
JOSHUA EHRLICH*
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Abstract

This article presents and analyses two previously unknown sources on Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia (1710–83). While the raja has long been famed in Bengal as a patron of brahmans, scholarship on him has had to contend with a lack of evidence. The two new sources, reports of conversations between Krishnachandra and Europeans, furnish insights into his mind and milieu. They support recent arguments that he used brahmanical patronage to buttress his authority, and deception to deal with the ascendant East India Company. Their greatest contribution, however, is to reveal that the raja sought an active engagement with foreign intellectual traditions. They suggest that eighteenth-century Hindu learning, far from being inherently hidebound or insular, was amenable to outside influences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 159 - 171
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2020

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Joel Bordeaux, David Curley and Anand Venkatkrishnan for many helpful comments and suggestions.

References

1 Curley, David L., ‘Maharaja Krisnacandra, Hinduism, and Kingship in the Contact Zone of Bengal’, in Rethinking Early Modern India, (ed.) Barnett, Richard B. (New Delhi, 2002), pp. 85–117Google Scholar; Dasgupta, Ratan, ‘Maharaja Krishnachandra: Religion, Caste and Polity in Eighteenth Century Bengal’, Indian Historical Review 38 (2011), pp. 225–242Google Scholar; Radhamadhab Saha, ‘British Administration in a Bengal District: Nadia 1785 to 1835’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Calcutta, 2016), Chapter 11.

2 Joel Bordeaux, ‘The Mythic King: Raja Krishnacandra and Early Modern Bengal’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2015).

3 See notes above. The first and most influential biography of Krishnachandra was written two decades after his death, but scholars have doubted its reliability. Mukhopadhyaya, Rajiblochan, Maharaja Krishnachandra Royasya Charitram (Serampore, 1808)Google Scholar. Major recent studies that acknowledge Krishnachandra's significance, but quickly exhaust the sources on him, include McLane, John R., Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, 1993), especially pp. 214–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sinha, Samita, Pandits in a Changing Environment: Centres of Sanskrit Learning in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Calcutta, 1993), pp. 1–4Google Scholar; McDermott, Rachel Fell, Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kālī and Umā in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal (Oxford, 2001), pp. 64–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dodson, Michael S., Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bhattacharya-Panda, Nandini, Appropriation and Invention of Tradition: The East India Company and Hindu Law in Early Colonial Bengal (Oxford, 2007), pp. 24–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, Kumkum, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal (New Delhi, 2009), pp. 81–82, 99–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ganeri, Jonardon, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 54–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDermott, Rachel Fell, Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The Fortunes of Hindu Festivals (New York, 2011), pp. 14–23 passimCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bhatia, Varuni, Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal (Oxford, 2017), pp. 181–183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Additionally, one short poem has been attributed to Krishnachandra. Translation in Bordeaux, ‘Mythic King’, p. 189.

5 For Orme's biography, see Asoka SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda, ‘“Nabob, Historian and Orientalist.” Robert Orme: The Life and Career of an East India Company Servant (1728–1801)’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, King's College London, 1991).

6 Hill, S. C., Catalogue of Manuscripts in European Languages Belonging to the Library of the India Office, vol. 2, part 1 (London, 1916), pp. 142, 153, 155Google Scholar.

7 Kyd, an engineer in the Company's Bengal Army, has been remembered largely as the founder and first superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden. Extant writings reveal, however, that Kyd had wide-ranging scholarly and political interests. See especially Robert Kyd, ‘Some Remarks on the Soil and Cultivation on the Western Side of the River Hooghly’ (1791), Robert Kyd Papers, British Library, Mss Eur F95/1, ff. 15r-118v.

8 One of these was likely the Bengal administrator Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, a favourite of Governor-General Warren Hastings. In a work of 1778, Halhed displayed a familiarity with Krishnachandra and with his claims of a link between India and Egypt, recorded in Text 1. Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, A Grammar of the Bengal Language (Hoogly, 1778), p. vGoogle Scholar.

9 The texts all come from volumes described by Orme as containing “Original Manuscripts given to me.” Hill, Catalogue, xv.

10 Additionally, a reference to the “Collector” Jacob Rider dates the events of Text 1 to no earlier than 1772, when Rider took up that position. It is unclear from the verb tense whether he still held it at the time of the meeting. The position was abolished in 1774. See Garrett, J. H. E., Bengal District Gazetteers: Nadia (Calcutta, 1910), pp. 106–107Google Scholar. Rider has been little studied, but see ‘The First Judge and the First Collector of Ghazipur’, Pioneer Mail and Indian Weekly News 47 (19 November 1920), pp. 28–31.

11 Three questions in particular suggest this: first, whether Krishnachandra would permit “the Governor's copyists” to transcribe histories in his possession; second, what measures were necessary “on the Part of Government” to restore Nadia's colleges; and, third, what information the raja could provide about “the Gold Coins sent up by the Governor”.

12 For this interest see also ‘History of Kissen-nagur, the Zemindary of Raja Kisten-Chund’, Hastings Papers, British Library, Add MS 29210, ff. 25r-50v.

13 On Hastings’ administration, see especially P. J. Marshall, ‘Hastings, Warren’ (2004), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 100–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. 5 (Calcutta, 1930), p. 111.

15 On Nadia's fiscal woes, see Dasgupta, ‘Maharaja Krishnachandra’, pp. 227–230.

16 See Hastings to Court of Directors, 21 February 1784, in Gleig, G. R., Memoirs of the Life of the Right Hon. Warren Hastings, 3 vols. (London, 1841), p. 3:158Google Scholar; Kasinath, Petition (1801), translated in Surendranath Sen and Umesha Mishra, introduction to Sanskrit Documents: Being Sanskrit Letters and Other Documents Preserved in the Oriental Collection at the National Archives of India, (eds.) Sen and Mishra (Allahabad, 1951), pp. 1–64, 58. These plans came to fruition in 1791, six years after Hastings’ retirement.

17 The allowance was still 100 rupees a century later. See Hunter, W. W., A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. 2 (London, 1875), p. 155Google Scholar.

18 Curley, ‘Maharaja Krisnacandra’, pp. 111–113; Dasgupta, ‘Maharaja Krishnachandra’, pp. 236–239.

19 On debates surrounding these subjects in British India, see Trautmann, Thomas R., Aryans and British India (Berkeley, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ramaswamy, Sumathi, Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (Chicago, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 No coeval Indian accounts of Alexander are now known to exist.

21 Nathaniel Brassey Halhed seems to have described this conversation in 1778: “The Raja of Kishenagur … has very lately affirmed, that he has in his own possession Shanscrit books which give an account of a communication formerly subsisting between India and Egypt; wherein the Egyptians are constantly described as disciples, not as instructors, and as seeking that liberal education and those sciences in Hindostan, which none of their own countrymen had sufficient knowledge to impart”. Halhed, Grammar, p. v.

22 Orientalists long conjectured the existence of ancient links between India and Egypt. Their theories would be put to rest only in the nineteenth century, following Jean-François Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

23 Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, who was likely to have been one of the Europeans in question, later described Krishnachandra as “by much the most learned and able antiquary which Bengal has produced within this century”. Halhed, Grammar, p. v.

24 Six months earlier, the Bengal councilor Philip Francis reported similarly that Krishnachandra was “in a state of beggary and misery not to be believed”. But a recent scholar has concluded that the raja was putting on an act: “no doubt this is what Krisnacandra meant Francis to see”. Francis, 15 April 1777, in Parkes, Joseph and Merivale, Herman, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, K.C.B., 2 vols. (London, 1867), p. 2:84Google Scholar; Curley, ‘Maharaja Krisnacandra’, p. 110.

25 Curley, ‘Maharaja Krisnacandra’, p. 112.

26 In these respects, Krishnachandra resembled and may have emulated the earlier Rajput ruler Jai Singh II (r. 1699-1743), who consulted Muslim and Jesuit as well as Hindu astronomers and astronomical texts. Another, later point of comparison is Serfoji II of Tanjore (r. 1798-1832), a Hindu ruler whose patronage and interests ranged widely across intellectual traditions. See recently Nair, Savithri Preetha, Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore (New Delhi, 2012)Google Scholar; Raina, Dhruv, ‘Circulation and Cosmopolitanism in 18th Century Jaipur: The Workshop of Jyotishis, Nujumi and Jesuit Astronomers’, in South Asian Cosmopolitanisms: Sources, Itineraries, Languages (16th–18th Century), (eds.) Lefèvre, Corinne, Županov, Ines G. and Flores, Jorge (Paris, 2015), pp. 307–329Google Scholar.

27 The starting point for this history has previously been located as 1789, when the Indo-Persian Shi'ite scholar Tafazzul Husain Khan translated Principia into Arabic. See Schaffer, Simon, ‘The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy’, in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, (eds.) Schaffer et al. (Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2009), pp. 49–104Google Scholar.

28 For the prevailing view that Hindus were incurious about Europe and Europeans into the nineteenth century, and that “traditional” Hindus remained so for longer, see Halbfass, Wilhelm, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY, 1988), pp. 177–375, 434–442Google Scholar; and Raychaudhuri, Tapan, ‘Europe in India's Xenology: The Nineteenth-Century Record’, Past and Present 137 (1992), pp. 156–182CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other studies of early modern Indian perceptions of Europe and Europeans have held back from endorsing this view, while nonetheless relying almost exclusively on writings by non-Hindus. E.g. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2017), pp. 286–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 The example of Krishnachandra might be used to backdate some of the accommodationist strategies carefully examined in Young, Richard Fox, ‘Receding from Antiquity: Hindu Responses to Science and Christianity on the Margins of Empire, 1800–1850’, in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500, (ed.) Frykenberg, Robert Eric (Grand Rapids, 2003), pp. 183–222Google Scholar; Young, Richard Fox, ‘Empire and Misinformation: Christianity and Colonial Knowledge from a South Indian Hindu Perspective (ca. 1804)’, in India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on Understanding—Historical, Theological, and Bibliographical—in Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg, (ed.) Young, Richard Fox (Grand Rapids, 2009), pp. 59–81Google Scholar.

30 Nadia.

31 “Sanskrit” is spelled inconsistently in the two texts.

32 Jyotisha Shastra, any one of a number of classic texts on Hindu astronomy and astrology.

33 The legendary Indian ruler Vikramaditya, who reputedly established the Vikram calendar.

34 Probably the Zij-i Muhammad Shahi compiled by the Rajput ruler Jai Singh II (1688–1743). For details, see Sharma, Virendra Nath, Sawai Jai Singh and His Astronomy (Delhi, 1995), pp. 234–252Google Scholar.

35 The Timurid astronomer and ruler Ulugh Beg (1394–1449).

36 The English orientalist Thomas Hyde published Ulugh Beg's tables in 1665; they appeared again in a 1767 edition of Hyde's works.

37 From this point on the text is in a different hand, which continues in Text 2 and its duplicate.

38 The seventeenth-century French traveller François Bernier, whose account of Mughal India enjoyed a long popularity in Europe.

39 Assam.

40 On this flexible tripartite geographical division between Ashvapati, Gajapati, and Narapati see Cynthia Talbot, ‘Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-colonial India’, in India's Islamic Traditions, 711–1750, (ed.) Richard M. Eaton (New Delhi, 2003), 83–117, 97–99.

41 Yuga.

42 The ancient epic Mahabharata.

43 Kannauj, further east than Alexander is now thought to have reached.

44 The Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719-48).

45 Cf. the figure of 600 rupees mentioned in Text 2.

46 Jacob Rider, the Collector of Nadia from 1772 to 1774.

47 The Mughal Empire, of which Bengal still nominally formed a part.

48 Probably the Brahma Sutra. See helpfully, Jessica Patterson, ‘Enlightenment, Empire and Deism: Interpretations of the “Hindoo Religion” in the Work of East India “Company Men”, 1760-1790’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2017), Chapter 3.

49 Robert Kyd, who held the rank of Captain in the Bengal Engineers from 1768 to 1780.

50 Embrasures.

51 Rajavali, probably the fifteenth-century Sanskrit history of Kashmir by Jonaraja.

52 Rajatarangini, a twelfth-century Sanskrit history of Kashmir by Kalhana.

53 Robert Chambers, a judge in Bengal from 1774 to 1798.

54 Possibly Goverdoon Chool, a pandit whom Chambers employed to copy texts. Curley, Thomas M., Sir Robert Chambers: Law, Literature, and Empire in the Age of Johnson (Madison, 1998), p. 413Google Scholar.

55 The following terms correspond to the Sanskrit Vyakarana, Nyaya Dharshana, Smriti or Dharma Shastra, Sankhya, Jyotisha, and Alankara.

56 The French military adventurer Claude Martin, who surveyed Cooch Behar for the Company in the early 1770s. See Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin 1766–1800, (ed.) Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie (Delhi, 2003), p. 19Google Scholar.

57 The work in question is Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey (trans.), A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits (London, 1776). For the list, see pp. 26–8Google Scholar.

58 The last two lines are not in the duplicate text.