John Borthwick Gilchrist (1759-1841), graduate of George Heriot’s Hospital, Edinburgh, assistant surgeon in the East India Company’s Medical Service, landed at Bombay in 1782, then traveled overland with the troops to the east of North India. He halted with them when they finally settled in the indigo plantation center about 500 miles northwest of Calcutta—and unsuccessfully managed a plantation.

            Unable to talk to field hands, village neighbors—or even to Indians in the army concerning their ailments—he began studying the language known as Hindustani: we call it Urdu. By 1785 he requested, in 1787 was granted, a year’s leave from duty to work on his language dictionary. He never returned to the Medical Service. Instead, language study, writing, and dictionary publication, while resident so far from his Calcutta printers, took all of his time and more than all of his money. The first advertisement (1786) announced A Dictionary English and Hindoostanee. To which Is Prefixed a Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language. By John Gilchrist . . . Calcutta: Printed by Stuart and Cooper. M.DCC.LXXXVI. Government promised to take 150 sets at forty rupees each: the price rose eventually to sixty rupees. Distributed by fascicles, it was completed in 1798, transliterated and in persian letters.

            Mr. Gilchrist had moved to Calcutta and continued writing other books to help young men (mostly teenagers) arriving to join the Company’s service. Meanwhile he had begun teaching them, very successfully; Government took notice and became interested. The governor-general, Marquis Wellesley, and the Company officers at Fort William agreed to organize an institution to be known as The College of Fort William [in Bengal], signifying it by a document dated 10 April 1801 at Fort William. The East India Company directors in London had not been notified: the subsequent confusion was settled and the college continued.

            Classes in Asian languages dominated: Arabic, Hindustani (Urdu), Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali; and later Marathi and even Chinese were added. Translation departments were organized with, at times, far more than one hundred local linguists employed regularly—plus servants of several ranks.

            The resulting translations had to be published but the Hon’ble Company’s Press was too small to handle the additional load, so manuscripts were sent, on a job basis, to whichever local printer had time and types. English, Persian/Arabic/Urdu works were printed in Calcutta; those in Sanskrit, Bengali, and other languages using devanagari types were usually sent to Serampore Mission Press.

            For teaching purposes the College of Fort William was accumulating a library of old manuscripts (from all over South Asia) and was adding multiple copies of its own imprints. Every book added was marked on verso of title page by a rubber stamp impression containing the institutional name transliterated into three languages: Persian, Hindustani in nagari, Bengali. “The Library, College of Fort William” was also handwritten, using good ink, in English.

            A parallel institution, The East India College at Haileybury (England), established in 1807, soon reduced the number of students who would otherwise attend beginning language classes at Fort William College. For many reasons—retirement or death of the original faculty, growing literacy among local residents, fluctuating insistence on vernacular competency, plus Haileybury’s competition—the Calcutta college showed signs of deterioration by 1815. Ten years later it received a slight fresh lease on life—witness the bookplate. Again there came a slump. This time they even gave away their library, which became the nucleus of the newly formed Calcutta Public Library, now the National Library of Calcutta and the major unit in Government of India’s system. For approximately fifteen more years the college limped along, but was forced to purchase lesson books on the local market as replacement copies! By late 1852 College of Fort William buildings, faculty, students were nonexistent. In January 1853 what had been a flourishing institution, founded on the proven necessity that government’s agents must be able to talk to the governed, was dissolved.

            The trilingual stamp impression with manuscript English ownership marks has been seen on books from the earliest years of Indian printing, on books that had once belonged to the College of Fort William, now mostly at the National Library—but I have also found them elsewhere.

            The bookplate, representing a resurgent period, is unique in my notes. The date can be understood, but who was responsible? Why was it so seldom used? Or had the post-1825 books been the most easily disbursed?

            This lone example is on a book printed 1829 at Serampore Press, and is in the Rare Book Section, National Library: Anecdotes of Virtue and Valour . . . . It is a small anthology, translated into Bengali, and printed in bengali letters: neither compiler nor translator is named. I’ve recorded no other copy, not even at the Carey Library, Serampore College, the home of the press that produced it (and also a college organized by an unsuccessful indigo planter—William Carey).

Katharine Smith Diehl

Seguin, Texas

 

Bookplate and stamp courtesy of the National Library of India, Calcutta

 

[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 466-468.]