|
1848-1862
LITERARY ACTIVITY—THE ROCK-CUT TEMPLES
A Missionary-Scholar’s Wife—The Rock-cut Temples and Monasteries—Early
attempts at an Archaeological Survey of India—Dr. Wilson’s two Memoirs
on the subject—President of the Cave-Temple Commission—Lord Canning’s
Minute—Necessity of a Corpus Inscriptionum—Colonel Meadows Taylor and
Sir Walter Elliot — The first Railway Train — The Peninsular and
Oriental Steamers — Declines to be Oriental Translator to Government —
“Only a Missionary”—Writes History of Infanticide — New Edition of
Marathee Dictionary — Researches into Caste — Most Popular Book on
Ancient India—Lectures.
Dr. and Mrs. Wilson had,
on their return to India, just completed the reorganisation of the
Mission in its college and schools, and on its female side at the
beginning of 1848, when both threw themselves into the allied work of
oriental research. To a correspondent he wrote in May 1849 :—“Mrs.
Wilson has enjoyed remarkably good health in India. She has now made
great progress in the Marathee language. She has a wide field for
usefulness here, as we have upwards of five hundred girls in our native
female schools. She is busy translating a paper on the Puranas from the
French of Burnouf, which appeared in the Oriental Christian Spectator.”
This extract from one of Mrs. Wilson’s letters further illustrates the
duties of a true missionary’s wife:—“My labours in the way of teaching
are increasing, and I find I require to spend about four hours each day
with the girls, that is from twelve to four o’clock, besides previously
preparing their work; in addition to which we have the morning Marathee
service for reading and examination of old and young, about ten, and at
eleven my moonshee comes for an hour to teach me Hindostanee. I find it
easier than Marathee, but I must not expect to get on rapidly, as I have
scarcely a moment for private study. I have a class who are learning
English, composed of some of our female teachers and some of our
day-scholars. I have also the girls of a superior class of natives, who
come to me for instruction in sewing and English, and we read the
Scriptures in Marathee, and they learn the gospel catechism. They are
knitting little boots for their baby brothers, and are much pleased with
some pieces of canvas work they have accomplished, of simple patterns.
Some of the girls in my school are now very good sewers, and can knit
stockings nicely.” .
To the same correspondent Dr. Wilson announced—“I have just drawn up,
what I suppose will ere long be printed, A Memoir on the Car e-Temples
and Monasteries, and other Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jaina Remains of
Western India. This document I have prepared in connection with the
Asiatic Society and the Government.” This introduces us to what proved
to be intellectually the most fruitful period of his career, from 1848
to 1862. “During my professional jour-neyings throughout this great
country,” he wrote in the last published words from his pen, “I have
often been brought in contact with its more remarkable antiquarian
wonders, which, in a considerable number of instances, I have been among
the first to observe and describe, though sometimes with unsatisfied
curiosity as well as with qualified information.” This is a modest
statement, not less of what he was the first to do than of the service
which he rendered to Government and the public by collecting all the
available facts on the subject in 1848, and by showing the way to such a
scientific and complete survey as that which, ever since the Mutiny
operations ceased, has been going on.
Such marvels as the fifty large groups of rock-cut temples, monasteries,
and cisterns, excavated in the Western Ghauts by Buddhists, Brahmans,
and Jains, successively, during the fifteen centuries from Asoka to the
inscription of Elora in A.D. 1234, had excited the wonder and the
speculations of later Hindoos, the superstitious Portuguese, and the
early English travellers. The people saw in them the work of their
mythical heroes, the Pandavas; while the Brahmans pronounced the dhagob,
or relic-receptacle of their Buddhist foes, to be the filthy linga, and
the cenobite’s rocky chamber . to be the abode of the outcast Dlied. The
Portuguese historian De Couto magnified the hundred cells and passages
of the hill of Kanha in Salsette into thousands of caverns, reaching as
far as the mainland at Cambay, through which a priest led an expedition
for seven days without reaching the end! Faber, once thought learned,
romanced over the trimurti of Elephanta as the cavern of Noah, his three
sons and allegorical consort, reasoning that five heads are equal to
three because two could be imagined. Mr. Henry Salt, the Lichfield
artist who accompanied Lord Valentia in his travels, and was sent as an
envoy to the ruler of Abyssinia, was the first to describe the Salsette
excavations fairly in 1806. But it was not till Erskine, the “
philosophic ” son-in-law of Sir James Mackintosh, wrote his Account of
the Ccwe-Temple of Elephanta in 1813, that justice was done to the
subject, although Niebuhr had preceded him and had reproached the
English for neglecting works far greater than the Pyramids. The Danish
traveller pronounced the investigation of such antiquities an
undertaking worthy of the patronage of a prince or a nation. The
journals of his tours show how early, and how almost year by year, Dr.
Wilson devoted his little leisure to the scholarly study not only of the
caves but of the inscriptions which give them a historical as well as
architectural value. Nor was he alone in this. Commercial enterprise had
early sent to Bengal the Ayrshire youth, James Fergusson, who, after a
training in the Edinburgh High School, and ten years’ experience of
enterprise and travel among the people of India, published his
Illustrations of the Rock-Cut Temples in 1845, and has ever since been
the principal authority on this and allied subjects.
When in London, where his knowledge of the character of the cave and
other alphabets enabled him to decipher certain papers in a concealed
Indian hand, which were essential to adjusting a decision passed by the
Admiralty Court at the Cape, and which had long lain uninterpreted, Dr.
Wilson had pressed his old project of a Corpus Inscriptionum in
connection with a systematic study of the excavations. Mr. Fergusson was
not less zealous, and he was able to be more persistent. The result
seems to have been that the Royal Asiatic Society in 1844 moved the
Court of Directors to order preliminary arrangements to be made for
conducting antiquarian researches in India, as the phraseology went. In
1847 the Court finally approved of the detailed suggestions—“for
examining, delineating, and recording some of the chief
antiquities”—sent home by Lord Hardinge, the Governor-General. In the
rest of India very little was done in those days of Sikh wars, beyond
the publication of some papers by Majors Kittoe and Cunningham, and the
enriching of the old India House in Leadenhall Street with some
antiquities and drawings. But in Western and Central India Dr. Wilson
was ready. The Bombay Government called the local Asiatic Society to its
aid. On the 15th April 1848 it recommended that “ authentic information
as to the number and situation of all the monuments and cave-temples of
antiquity in the territories should be obtained;” it sketched a plan of
operations and urged immediate action. What became known as the
Cave-Temple Commission for the next ten years was accordingly appointed
by Government, consisting of Dr. Wilson, president; Dr. Stevenson; Mr.
C. J. Erskine, of the Civil Service; Captain Lynch, of the Indian Navy;
Mr. Harkness, of the Elphinstone College; Yenaik Gungaclhur Shastree;
and Dr. Carter, secretary of the Society. Acting throughout with the
authorities, and reporting also to the Society, they engaged Mr. Fallon
as artist; Lieutenant Brett to copy inscriptions, and, at a later
period, Captain Briggs to take photographs; and Vishnoo Shastree, the
pundit of scholars like Mr. Law and Mr. Wathen, of the Supreme Court
translator Mr. Murphy, and of Dr. Wilson himself, to aid in the
translation of the inscriptions. This pioneering work was arrested by
the Mutiny, and soon after a new race of critics, in ignorance of the
past, anonymously attacked the Commission, or rather its native
assistant, the Shastree. In the ten years of its active existence, its
whole expenditure did not much exceed £2350, represented by the
paintings, measurements, casts, clearing out of caves, transcripts, and
translations. For thirteen years the Commission, and Dr. Wilson above
all his colleagues, gave the work their gratuitous and zealous labours ;
and not only they, but coadjutors like Sir Bartle Frere, Sir Walter
Elliot of Madras, Colonel Meadows Taylor, Mr. Orlebar, and Dr. West, C.E.
But to Dr. Wilson alone is it due that the enlightened orders of Lord
Hardinge and the Directors bore fruit at all. In truth, from the first,
in north-eastern and southern, as well as in western India, a scholar
like the honorary president of the Asiatic Society, or an architectural
authority like Mr. Fergusson, should have been set apart for the sole
duty, with a staff of skilled assistants, instead of a beggarly
expenditure at the rate of £200 a year.
Hence it became necessary, the moment the state of the country after
1857 allowed of action, to renew the enterprise, taught by the
experience of the past. When, towards the end of 1861, engaged at
Allahabad in completing his reorganisation of the North-Western
government, Lord Canning resolved to appoint Colonel A. Cunningham
Director of the Archaeological Survey of India. From the young Duke of
Wellington’s time, at the beginning of the century, the East India
Company had liberally carried out trigonometrical as well as
topographical and revenue surveys of the peninsula. On the basis of
this, now approaching completion, Lord Dalhousie had created a
Geological Survey in 1856. And Lord Canning added to the good work by
thus rescuing for all time the fast perishing memorials which form the
only history of India before the time of our own battle of Hastings,
outside of the vague hints of philology and of a literature that defies
historical criticism. The Archaeological Survey has since been extended
to Bombay, where it is following up the investigations of Dr. Wilson and
Mr. Fergusson on a uniform scale, and with the best results.
Dr. Wilson’s Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, forming some
seventy pages of Volume III. of the Journal of the Bombay Asiatic
Society, was circulated by the Government to all the district and
political officers in and around the province, including great States
like the Nizam’s country. These were directed to afford the Commission
all the information and assistance in their power in the prosecution of
researches. The result was the publication by Dr. Wilson of a second
Memoir in 1852, recording the new discoveries, for which Government had
offered pecuniary rewards also, and embodying the results of the
Commission’s work on the larger caves like Elephanta. The Memoir had set
many observers to work, with results of the most striking interest, such
as those reported by Colonel Meadows Taylor from the Nizam’s
principality of Shorapoor, and by Sir Walter Elliot from Southern India.
Henceforth, year after year, no new Governor-General, Governor, or
Member of Council, landed at Bombay, and no traveller from Europe or
America passed through it, 'without seeking the guidance of Dr. Wilson
on a visit to one of the neighbouring groups of excavations. In velvet
skull-cap and with long wand, the enthusiastic scholar, with the air of
an old knight, would lead his friends through the caves, pouring forth
his stores of knowledge with unflagging courtesy, and charming all by
the rare combination of goodness and grace, historical and oriental
lore, poetic quotation and scientific references, genial remark and
childlike humour, till visitors, like the accomplished Lady Canning,
declared they had never met such a man. Nor would he allow his
guests—for he too often provided the luncheon—to go unprepared by study.
He had written a lecture on the subject for the Bombay public, to whom,
at the request of the Mechanics’ Institute, he delivered it in the Town
Hall. By the year 1864, when the present writer for the first time
visited Bombay, the manuscript was well worn, and he solicited
permission to publish it in the Calcutta Eevieiv. All were expected,
and, as a rule were glad, to master the contents of this popular
treatise, of which it was Dr. Wilson’s last literary. work to prepare a
somewhat enlarged edition for the use of the Prince of Wales.
Very different from the debased art of the Brahmanical caves of
Elephanta are the excavations at Karla, on the crest of the Western
Ghauts, a few miles from Khandalla, near the head of the Bhore Ghaut,
where Dr. Wilson heard Sir John Malcolm boast that he had made the first
road, and saw not very many years after the magnificent works by which
the present railway has ascended the heights on its way to Madras.
Standing there, looking down on rich Bombay and round on the plains
which stretch away to the Dekhan till they dip into the Bay of Bengal,
the traveller, as he recalls the glories of Asoka’s reign, feels that in
these two thousand years Brahmanism and Muhammadanism have together
denied to Southern Asia the splendour and the happiness which Buddhism
then vainly promised, and Christianity now renders possible.
TO MR. BUCHAN OF KELLOE.
“Bombay, 12th September 1853.—During the past year the railway system
has been introduced into India. It is certainly calculated to promote
the interests of civilisation, but its desecration of the Sabbath is a
sad drawback. We are anxious about the improvement of the steam
navigation to Bombay, as various disasters have occurred in consequence
of bad arrangements, and this monsoon a whole mail was lost on board a
pilgrim ship, which went down with the loss of 186 souls. We have had a
public meeting on the subject called by the Sheriff, and from the humane
aspect of the snbject I felt constrained to yield to the request of our
merchants that I should take a part in the proceedings. We petition the
Lords of the Treasury and the Directors of the East India Company.”
Apart from the humane aspect of the question Dr. Wilson was in his right
place as a leader in such a meeting, and no similar assembly for
discussing questions involving the moral and material good of the people
of India or the prosperity of Bombay was held without him. It was in
1773 that a Mr. Holford had navigated the first English ship
successfully from its harbour up the Red Sea to Suez. Niebuhr then
wrote, “ The passage has been found so short and convenient that the
regency of Bombay now send their couriers by the way of Suez to
England.” Not till 1830 did Lord William Bentinck succeed in despatching
the small Government steamer, the “Hugh Lindsay,” from Bombay to Suez,
after the failure of rewards to quicken the Cape voyage and open up the
Euphrates route. But even that spent a month during March and April on a
voyage which is now done regularly in twelve days, and will soon be
accomplished in nine or ten.1 In 1843 the Peninsular and Oriental
Company ran its first steamer from Suez to Calcutta. The development of
railway communication in India was more rapid, thanks to Lord Dalhousie,
who had been paramount at the Board of Trade during the mania of 1848.
What Lord Ellenborough had pronounced “moonshine” in 1843, when Sir M.
Stephenson in eastern, Mr. Chapman in western, and Mr. Andrew in
north-western India projected the railways which now pay from five to
nine per cent, and are revolutionising native society and commerce,
became an accomplished fact on the 16th April 1853. Then the first
section completed in Asia was opened under a royal salute and the
strains of the National Anthem, and the first train ran from Bombay
island on to the mainland to Tanna, a distance of twenty-one miles. The
twenty-one have now become nearly eight thousand.
The “Kaisar-i-Hind” steamer made the passage in nine days twelve hours
with the Bombay mail of 16th December 1878, which reached London in
sixteen days twelve hours on the 2d January 1879.
Soon after his return from Great Britain the Bombay Government expressed
its anxiety to secure the services of Dr. Wilson as President of the
Committee for the examination of civilians and officers in the native
languages, vernacular and classical. The request recognised the
missionary as the first scholar in Western India, and as better fitted
than any of the members of the services, civil or military, for the
responsible duty of controlling examinations by which, long before those
of the Civil Service Commissioners in this country, promotion and
patronage in India had been wisely regulated. "Such an influential
position might have been of use to him in various ways,” Mrs. Wilson
wrote to a friend in 1849, “and the services required would not have
been for more than ten or twelve days in a year. However, he has
declined, as he wishes to be quite free to give all his time and
strength to missionary operations.” In 1855 the proposal was received in
a different, and to him unobjectionable, because temporary form.
Associated with Major G. Pope and Mr. Harkness, Principal of the
Government College, he gave himself to the work of inquiry with
characteristic thoroughness before reporting on the Civil and Military
Examination Committee. The constitution of the similar Examining Boards
in Madras and Calcutta—the latter created by Lord Wellesley, and
consisting of Dr. Sprenger, the first Arabic scholar and biographer of
Muhammad ; Dr. K. M. Bannerjea, Dr. Duff’s first convert; and Colonel K
Lees—was carefully studied in the light of his experience of the Bombay
languages, people, and officials. The result was a report, submitted on
the 15th August 1856, which has since regulated the professional
examinations of Western India in the Oriental languages and literatures.
The document, which called forth an expression of the thanks of
Government, contains not only much information regarding such
examinations, but a scheme for checking an arbitrary judgment on the
part of examiners, which we commend to the Civil Service Commissioners,
as sorely needed in the India competitions at least.
Meanwhile, the Government of 1849 having failed to induce Dr. Wilson to
act as official and permanent president of this Examination Committee,
the Government of 1854 had thus tried, most honourably, to attract to
the public service what would have been the leisure time of most other
men. The great Carey had long held a similar office, first as Professor
in Lord Wellesley’s College of Fort-William, and then as translator and
examiner, while the same translatorship is to this hour worthily filled
by a Baptist minister, the son of one of his colleagues. Connected with
no society, early thrown upon their own resources for the spread of
Christianity in Bengal, Carey, Marshman, Ward, and Mr. J. C. Marshman,
C.S.I., contributed some £60,000 of their own earnings during half a
century for missionary purposes, maintaining at one time so many as
twenty-six agents besides themselves. In the case of the Scottish
Churches the circumstances are very different, but the temptations held
out to the] ablest missionaries by the various departments of Government
are not less specious and attractive. The Private Secretary thus
addressed Dr. Wilson, whose reply may be imagined from his letter to Dr.
Tweedie :—
“Parell, March 11, 1854.
“My dear Sir—I am desired by tbe Governor to acquaint you of his
intention, should it be acceptable to you, of appointing you Oriental
Translator to Government. The appointment lias been created on the
occasion of doing away with the Deputy Secretaryship in the Persian
Department.”
TO DR. TWEEDIE.
“14th April 1854.—We have lately had favourable accounts from Abyssinia.
Our native converts consider the agency there as primarily their
mission, contributing to its support to their utmost ability, though it
is principally, from their lack of adequate means, dependent on other
resources. Their duty of contributing to the spread of the Gospel is
amply recognised by them, though most of them are in some capacity or
other themselves missionary agents. We are anxious to have an industrial
establishment instituted for the converts and catechumens in Bombay, as
a counteractive of the combinations and excommunications of caste. A
regular source of legitimate missionary revenue in the case of all our
Institutions, we see in the encouragement of the natives in general to
contribute, partially at least, to the education of their children. In
this way we have, from the commencement of our Institution here, got a
small sum annually from this source, which we have applied
discretionally for its benefit from time to time, especially in
providing prizes and school equipments. But something, I am persuaded,
of a more systematic nature may easily be accomplished, and that without
injury to the distinctly evangelistic feature of our operations.
Self-expansion is a desideratum in every Christian institution.
“In connection with what I have now stated to you, I ought perhaps to
mention that our new Governor, Lord Elphinstone, within the last few
weeks made the offer to me of the superintendence of the work of
Government Oriental Translation, which would occupy only a definite
portion of my time, without interfering substantially with my missionary
engagements, and at the same time secure a remuneration by which I could
support a couple of additional missionaries, or enable me to contribute
directly to the missionary cause the equivalent of the average annual
income of our Auxiliary Society, which receives from us much care, and
makes a considerable demand on our time for correspondence with
Christian friends in various parts of the country. Without consulting
any friend, I at once declined the proposal, with grateful
acknowledgment of the kindnesses in which I know it originated. I did
this because I believe that it is not the duty of any minister of the
Gospel to assume any secular engagement, however productive to the cause
of Christ in a pecuniary point of view, while the Christian Church is
willing to give him fair support in devoting himself wholly to the
ministry of the Word and prayer, and to efforts subordinate and
auxiliary to this ministry; and because I am of opinion that all our
exertions in stirring up our brethren to contribute to the missionary
cause, even when we could by a partial secularisation of ourselves,
maintain or extend the operations already in existence, are themselves
of a spiritual character—the calling upon Christian men to discharge a
Christian duty. On my mentioning this to Mr. Moles worth—the author of
our admirable Marathee Dictionary, one of the most devoted Christians in
India, and whose views of Church order generally agree with those of the
brethren at Plymouth—he at once said, ‘ You have done quite right; no
amount of pecuniary compensation can be put in the scale with the
entirety of your missionary service.’ I think we would be unanimous in
our mission in a cause of this kind. For the extension of the missionary
enterprise both at home and abroad we must trust to the promises, and
providence, and Spirit of God. Though respected brethren in all the
Churches may tell us that they ‘ see a limit ’ to their benevolent gifts
or the spread of the blessed Gospel, we must, like Nelson, turn our
blind eye to this signal of intermission, and act as if it were never
made. The more our souls sympathise with the risen and exalted Saviour,
who now travails in ceaseless intercession for the accomplishment of the
number of His elect and the establishment of His kingdom, the more
readily shall we write Holiness to the Lord on all our possessions and
acquirements. You will see from our report that last year we raised Rs.
7542 for our Bombay Mission. When the contributions for Poona and Satara
are added, we perceive that we have had here a missionary income of
£1200, exclusive of £400 raised for the purposes of the Free Church
congregation to which we minister during the vacancy. Even this
liberality may be much increased. It is the principal source of the
support of our educational establishments. The permission which you give
us, in your last most acceptable letter, of proceeding with the
ordination of Mr. Narayan, will be acted upon as soon as possible. What
our hopes are in connection with his ministry you well know. ”
When alluding to the offer of this appointment in a letter to Miss
Douglas, Dr. Wilson wrote, “I declined acceptance, as I wish to be, what
I have been since the beginning, only a missionary.” Next to his
ministrations to the spiritual needs of the people of India, his
philanthropic interest in the efforts of the Government to save their
bodies came hardly second. From the discovery of the practice of the
murder of their female children by the proud and poor Rajkoomars of
Benares by Jonathan Duncan in 1789, and the same Governor’s attempts to
put down the crime in Kathiawar, to which the Greek and Latin writers on
India had drawn his attention as prevalent then ai Barygaza or Broach,
Dr. Wilson had joyously chronicled the facts down to the successful
efforts of his early friend Colonel Walker. These had been more recently
followed by the measures wisely devised by Sir J. P. Willoughby,
Colonels Lang and Le Grand Jacob, and Mr. Malet and other officers,
whose humane administration Dr. Wilson was in the habit of illustrating
in lectures to the natives and in the press as “gratifying records of
British benevolence.” . Thus he created a healthy native opinion on the
crime, and stimulated Government to renewed vigilance, while he did
justice to some of the most solid triumphs in the history of
philanthropy in the East. On the 27th April 1857 he officially addressed
Sir J. P. Willoughby. The result was, as he wrote to Dr. Tweedie, that
Lord Elphinstone’s Government submitted to impartial Christian review “
the whole proceedings from first to last in connection with the great
philanthropic, political, and judicial efforts for the suppression of
the awful crime of infant murder.” The Court of Directors warmly
encouraged the undertaking, at a time when the question of what proved
to be the last renewal of their Charter—that of 1853—was about to come
before Parliament, and works like Sir John Kaye’s history of its
administration were being prepared in its defence. It was well that the
Company enjoyed, on this side at least, the aid of one whose advocacy
was all the more effectual that it was purely disinterested and
non-political.
The History of the Suppression of Infanticide in Western India under the
Government of Bombay, including notices of the Provinces and Tribes in
which the Practice has prevailed, was published early in 1855, and
obtained a wide circulation. When, in 1870, the outbreak of the crime in
Northern India led Sir William Muir to prepare, and the Government of
India to pass, Act VIII. of that year, and the census of 1871 supplied
new facts, Dr. Wilson was invited by the Bombay Government to review the
state of the districts to which the preventive legislation was to be
applied. A few months before his death he accordingly wrote a preface to
Mr. H. B. Cooke’s report. In Kathiawar, it was proved, the crime had
ceased as a custom of the Jadejas, the proud descendants of the Yadavas
of the Mahabharat epic. But the number of girls unbetrothed and
unmarried was increasing, because no Rajpoot tribe in India will take a
wife from its own proper or paternal clan, and the
Jadejas were unpopular because of occasional intermarriage with
Muhammadans. To the advance of an education and a civilisation which
recognise the place of unmarried females in well-being and well-doing in
the general community, Dr. Wilson looked for a permanent remedy while
suggesting local ameliorations. But the only immediate check on the
crime must be based on a general registration of births and deaths, such
as the coming decennial census of 1881 should make a preliminary attempt
to render possible amid so vast and varied and suspicious a population.
Sir H. L. Anderson, when secretary to the Bombay Government, expressed
to Dr. Wilson the congratulation of the Governor in Council on “the very
able and successful” manner in which he had turned to account his access
to the records connected with infanticide.
In 1848 Dr. Wilson had been consulted by the Government as to the
publication of a revised edition of the Marathee and English dictionary
compiled by Mr. Molesworth and George and Thomas Candy twenty years
before. In Marathee as in Bengalee, and to a less degree in the other
vernaculars of India, the influence of a detailed knowledge of the
people, English administration and education, and the progress of
scholarship in the classical tongues from which the popular dialects are
fed, had developed the vocabularies, and somewhat revealed or modified
the grammatical expression of these vernaculars. Dr. Wilson replied that
Mr. Molesworth’s “unequalled attainments in the Marathee language, his
experience in lexicography, and his acquaintance already with some
thousands of unrecorded words,” pointed him out as best qualified for
the undertaking. In truth Dr. Wilson had, in his tours and his
intercourse with the peasantry as well as the learned Brahmans of
Maharashtra, himself made extensive collections of words new to printed
literature, which he had freely communicated to Mr. Molesworth. The
result was the appearance in 1857 of the massive quarto which forms the
second edition of a work pronounced to stand in the very first rank of
dictionaries. Dr. Wilson was the more anxious to see Marathee thus
satisfactorily placed among the few languages of men of which a
satisfactory lexicon has been made, that the wants of Government and the
public in connection with Goojaratee might be supplied. This was done by
the Parsee convert Shapoorjee Eduljee eleven years afterwards, in an
octavo volume of some nine hundred pages. But it should not be forgotten
that in Marathee, as in forty of the languages of our Indian subjects
and Chinese neighbours, Carey had first provided a dictionary in 1810,
as well as a grammar and translation of the Scriptures. Besides his
indirect contribution to the Marathee Dictionary of nearly a thousand
quarto pages, Dr. Wilson prefaced it with what even the Germans would
pronounce a model monograph, under the title of “ Notes on the
Constituent Elements, the Diffusion and the Application of the Marathee
Language.” A wealth of learning and information is scattered over the
text and notes, while the summary with illustrative extracts of the four
periods of Marathee literature is delightfully readable. He passes in
review the early poetry, associating the popular gods of Western India
-with a modified pantheism, which preceded the rise of Sivajee ; the
brilliant era of Tukaram to the rise of the Peshwas ; the strains of the
priestly Moropant and the beginnings of prose chronicles under the
Peshwas ; and finally the British period, which began in 1818. As the
Serampore missionaries created a Bengalee language and literature, in
the literary sense, so religion and philanthropy were the moving powers
in generating and extending what may be denominated the reformed
authorship of Maharashtra, from Mountstuart Elphinstone to his nephew
Lord Elphinstone, and the present day. “Its most valuable monument ” Dr.
Wilson declared to be “the translation of the whole of the Bible, by
several hands, into the language of the people.” The Notes thus conclude
—“The reformed Marathee literature, and the introduction of typography
and lithography into the West of India, have brought about a reaction in
the native mind. There has been a reproduction of the olden literature.
This result will not ultimately prove injurious to the cause of truth.
It has furnished the means of comparison and judgment; and it will only
enhance the victory when, by a higher influence than that of man, it is
eventually secured.”
For some time Dr. Wilson had contemplated a new work on Muhammadanism,
to take the place of his early Refutation ; but he seems to have been
soon drawn entirely to an attempt to grapple with the only enemy he had
not yet directly attacked in the press. At every turn, as a missionary,
a scholar, and a man, in closer social intercourse with the natives than
any other foreigner, he was met by Caste. He had early set himself to
the mastery of its origin and the secret of its power, and he had in his
multifarious reading of the Hindoo literature noted the passages on the
subject, from the Uig-Vetla to the latest Poorana. He contemplated the
early publication of an elaborate work on the subject, and in 1857 he
was able to put to press the first volume. But his missionary work was
too exacting, and his own ideal of an exhaustive treatment of the
question on which Hindooism hangs in the last resort, was too high to
permit him to yield to the solicitations of his friends not to delay.
The prospect of the taking of the first census of the people of India,
finally accomplished only in 1871-2, was a further reason, to his mind,
for toiling at a work, for the perfecting of which he maintained a large
correspondence with learned Brahmans for many years, from the venerable
Kada Kishn, ltunjeet Singh’s pundit at Lahore, to the Namboories of
Travancore. The result was that in publication he was anticipated by
other scholars, notably by Mr. John Muir, D.C.L., in the invaluable
Sanskrit Texts, and death left his work a splendid fragment. The first
volume, virtually prepared and printed at this period, is a careful
review of the origin and development of Caste as seen in Sanskrit,
Buddhist, and Greek literature. The second volume, which begins a
description of the castes as they are, does not proceed further than the
most important of them all, the Bralimanical. The criticism of the book
by so competent a writer as Mr. Khys Davids may be accepted — “ The
thoroughness of the work he has done gives rise to the regret that he
should have been unable to complete the inquiry.” What contemporary as
well as subsequent criticism, however, has recognised as the ablest of
all the publications that Dr. Wilson threw off as mere bye-works almost
every year, is his India Three Thousand Years Ago, or the social state
of the Aryas on the banks of the Indus in the times of the Yedas, which
appeared in 1858. Mr. Max Muller’s Chips was then unknown, and his
History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature was only promised in the preface
to his edition of the liig-Veda. To the English reading public, both in
India and elsewhere, this popular treatise of some ninety pages was the
first revelation of what has long since become commonplace. It was
written with a grace as well as a power which so charmed all, that the
most competent critic, in the Friend of India of that day, thus took the
author to task—“We wish some of the thousand friends of Dr. Wilson would
compel him to do the public and himself a little justice. With a pen of
unequalled clearness and learning, of which few are competent to measure
the extent, he persists in wasting his strength on erudite little
essays. . . . The world is craving for a painting with the details all
filled in and bright with life and colour. It is Dr. Wilson’s duty to
supply the want, and he has no more right to leave the work to inferior
artists than Titian to sell studies as finished productions.” But Dr.
Wilson was so much the Christian philanthropist that even his learning
is saturated with his love for man in the highest sense, as expressed
sometimes after a curious fashion. This is a note to this very
treatise—“ The MS. copy of the liig-Veda, in my possession for many
years, and which I originally acquired for J. S. Law, Esq., of the
Bombay Civil Service, is a Christian trophy surrendered by a Brahman
convert to Christianity, baptized at Bankote by the Bev. James
Mitchell.” Dr. Wilson would never have written his best book but for the
public good. He prepared the nucleus of it as one of a course of
lectures to the Bombay Mechanics’ Institute, projected under “ the
considerate and vigorous government ” of Lord Elphinstone. Other public
lectures which belong to this period, but have not yet seen the light in
a complete form, are those on the “Progress of Oriental Research in
connection with Religious Inquiry,” and on “The Six Schools of Indian
Philosophy,” delivered at the request of the Bombay Dialectic
Association. |
