24. Colonel James Tod. 25. Colonel Colin Mackenzie. 26. E. B. Havell. 27. Sir William Jones. 28. Lord Curzon. 29. B. H. Hodgson. 30. General Sir Alexander Cunningham. 31. Sir George Everest by William Tayler.

32. Mohenjo-daro Giri.

33. Seals from the Indus Valley civilization.

The author and publisher are grateful to the following for their kind permission to reproduce the above illustrations: the India Office Library, British Museum for nos. 1–5, 7, 11, 13–16, 19, 22, 25–30; the Victoria & Albert Museum for nos. 6, 9, 17, 18, 23 and 24; the British Museum for nos. 10 and 33; the Werner Forman Archive, London for no. 12; the British Architectural Library, RIBA for no. 20; the National Portrait Gallery no. 31; and the National Museum, New Delhi for no. 32. Illustration no. 8 is reproduced from
Archaeological Survey of India, Report of a Tour in the Central Provinces Lower Gangetic Doab 1880–81
by Alexander Cunningham, Vol. XVII, Plate xxi.

Introduction

Some day the whole story of British Indology will
be told and that will assuredly make a glorious,
fascinating and inspiring narrative.

A. J. Arberry,
British Orientalists
(1943)

Two hundred years ago India was the land of the fabulous and fantastic, the ‘Exotic East’. Travellers returned with tales of marble palaces with gilded domes, of kings who weighed themselves in gold,
and of dusky maidens dripping with pearls and rubies. Before this sumptuous backdrop passed elephants, tigers and unicorns, snake charmers and sword swallowers, pedlars of reincarnation and magic, long-haired ascetics on beds of nails, widows leaping into the pyre. It was like some glorious and glittering circus – spectacular, exciting, but a little unreal.

Now, in place of the circus, we have
the museum. India is a supreme cultural experience. Instead of the rough and tumble of the big top, we have meditation and the subtle notes of the sitar. It is temples and tombs, erotic sculpture, forlorn palaces and miniature masterpieces. Hinduism is studied in deadly earnest; the ascetic no longer needs a bed of nails to ensure an audience. Even the elephants and tigers have become too important
to be fun; they too must be carefully studied and preserved.

This dramatic change in attitude was principally brought about by a painstaking investigation of all things Indian. No subject people, no conquered land, was ever as exhaustively studied as was India during the period of British rule. It is this aspect of the British affair in India which forms the subject of this book.

The nineteenth
century was the age of enquiry. It was perhaps inevitable that India should have its Darwin, its Livingstone and its Schliemann. There was also something in the paternalistic nature of British imperialism that attracted the scholar and the scientist. The men who discovered India came as amateurs; by profession they were soldiers and administrators. But they returned home as giants of scholarship.

And then, above all, there was India itself, exercising its own irresistible fascination. The more it was probed the greater became its antiquity, the more inexhaustible its variety, and the more inconceivable its subtleties. The pioneers of Indian studies, described in this book, rose to the challenge. ‘Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other’ would be the field
of their enquiries.

The results, even in an age of discoveries, were as sensational as the country and the scope of the undertaking. For a start, Indian history was pushed back two thousand years, roughly from the age of William the Conqueror to a millennium or so before that of Tutankhamun. In the process two great classical civilizations were discovered, and one of the richest literary traditions
was revealed to the outside world. So were the origins of two of the world’s major religions. What Lord Curzon called ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’ was rescued from decay, classified and conserved. Ancient scripts were deciphered, dated and used to disentangle the history of kings and emperors. Coins and paintings by the hundred were discovered, and their significance charted.
Western sensibilities struggled to come to terms with the discovery of erotic sculptures in places of worship. In the natural sciences one of the most exciting flora and fauna was studied and catalogued; so too was the incredibly rich human miscellany of racial, linguistic and religious groups. The entire sub-continent was surveyed and mapped; in the process the world’s highest mountains were
measured. And so on. In short the modern image of India was pieced together.

In tracing this process, I have tried to convey something of the wonder of each new discovery and the excitement of each new deduction. The men who stumbled upon sites like the temple complex of Khajuraho or the painted caves of Ajanta, felt as if they had suddenly come upon the Uffizi swathed in creepers, swarming with
bats and unvisited for a thousand years. It is not hard to understand their astonishment. Parts of India are still littered with monuments and ruins that have never attracted the attention of conservationists. Herdsmen bivouac in royal palaces, mirror-work mosaics crunch underfoot, and bees’ nests hang from painted ceilings. It is one of India’s perhaps ironic glories that, in addition to the
more popular and spectacular sites, she still has real ruins, untended, still crumbling, still succumbing to the rains and the vegetation.

The discovery of these varied and magnificent monuments stimulated curiosity about India’s past. It is hard to appreciate now that as late as the end of the eighteenth century nothing whatsoever was known of Indian history prior to the Mohammedan invasions.
‘It is at this epoch
[AD
1000]’, wrote Thomas Twining in 1790, ‘that we come to a line of shade beyond which no object is distinctly discernible. What treasures might not be discovered if the light of science should ever penetrate this darkness.’ To Twining, Indian history was like some deep Aladdin’s cave. The outer chambers were well lit thanks to recent Mohammedan chroniclers, but beyond them
the cave was in darkness. How far back it went no one could tell. There was just one uncertain clue – the invasion of Alexander the Great in 326
BC.
By exploring every possible source, and by combining guesswork with some brilliant deduction, the orientalists successfully penetrated this darkness. The excitement when, deep in the gloom, some new light was shed, was tremendous. But much remained
in the gloom; whole centuries defied illumination.

For all the excitement and the very considerable achievements, Indian history is still far from complete. There are almost no ancient historical works to provide a framework, no chronologies to provide the dates and, above all, no contemporary chronicles to provide the detail. It is devoid of almost everything that traditionally makes history
palatable for the general reader. There are no anecdotes, no scandals, no well-documented campaigns and no personalities. A chronological approach soon becomes an incredibly confusing list of dynasties and kings, reigning in obscurity, to whom neither reliable dates nor defined kingdoms can be attributed.

To some extent the same goes for Indian art and architecture. The artists, builders and
sculptors are mostly anonymous and so, in many cases, are their patrons. We know little about how they worked and nothing of the problems they encountered. In Indian painting, for example, there is a near hiatus of some 1000 years which makes any discussion of the subject highly conjectural.

In this book I have concentrated more on the historians than the history, more on the Indologists than
India. The careers of men like Sir William Jones, James Prinsep, Sir Alexander Cunningham, James Fergusson – and many more – reveal almost as much about British India as about the centuries that preceded it. Moreover, the problems and prejudices they had to surmount in coming to terms with a very alien art and culture are the same as those that any non-Indian unfamiliar with the subject has still
to face. The story of the pioneers makes an excellent guidebook to an understanding of India.

To appreciate this story it is not necessary to be in sympathy with the British raj. The government’s role in it was the usual one of too little too late. It was a constant source of shame that, whereas other European governments generously supported research on Indian subjects, the British authorities
displayed little interest. The field was left to individual initiative. The men who took up the challenge were no more enlightened or liberal in their attitudes than other British officials of the day. Some were deeply respectful of all things Indian. They criticized government policy and were themselves pilloried as ‘Brahminized’. Others, perhaps the majority, regarded contemporary Indians as
quite unworthy of their glorious heritage. Either they attributed all that was finest in Indian culture to outside influences, or they portrayed Indian history as one of steady decline towards cultural bankruptcy and moral degeneracy.

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