Since 1992 an elegant cable-stayed bridge has spanned the River Hooghly, linking the suburb of Howrah and the city of Kolkata, the former Calcutta. Officially known as the Vidyasagar Sethu but usually referred to as the ‘second Hooghly bridge’, it is named after Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a key figure in the Bengali Renaissance. At the bridge’s southern (Kolkata) end its overpass skirts the western bastions and the water gate of Fort William, the old EICo citadel that today serves as the headquarters of the Indian Army’s Eastern Command. This was where Lord Wellesley’s Fort William College was sited and where in 1841 Vidyasagar became the head Sanskrit pandit, being then but twenty-one years of age and already renowned for his learning. While Vidyasagar went on to greater things the college went into decline, although it survives as a centre of education in the form of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Government School.
Also overshadowed by bridge and overpass is another memorial to the past: a curious Palladian-style structure made up of a number of classical columns supporting a flat roof. It stands on what was once the landing place where young Britons coming out to seek their fortunes in Bengal were ferried ashore from the ships moored in the river. Once erected, it came to be used as a sort of unofficial gateway of India, welcoming incoming viceroys and other dignitaries, being especially conspicuous during the royal visits of 1875, 1905 and 1910. But that was never the structure’s intended purpose. This is set out in large letters of bronze laid out across one face of the building. They declare: ‘Erected in the honour of JAMES PRINSEP by his fellow citizen’ – the final ‘s’ fell off some years ago and was never replaced. No date is given but the memorial is known to have been erected in 1843.
The intervening years were not particularly kind either to the man or his memorial. The area originally known as Prinsep’s Ghat became known as Princep Ghat and even Princes Ghat. Indeed, the little railway station beside the river is today called Princep Ghat. If the site was known at all it was as a romantic ruin that frequently served as a backdrop for advertising or movie shoots.
That has changed in the last decade thanks to the efforts of INTACH, a national body charged with the preservation and conservation of India’s national heritage. Despite a shortage of funds INTACH has helped alter the perception in India that monuments associated with the departed British are unworthy of preservation. In the case of the Prinsep memorial INTACH proposed that this would make a marvellous venue for cultural events – as an arena whereon India’s own native traditions could work in harmony with its colonial past. In January 2008 that vision was realised with the launch of the first Prinsep Ghat dance festival, made possible with the support of an international bank and the goodwill of the Indian Army.
It was here that twenty-year-old James Prinsep was brought ashore in September 1819 and almost exactly twenty years later carried down to the river in a litter to begin his journey home, but as ‘an entire wreck … His overstrained mind … covered in desolation … his body sunk into debility.’
Prinsep never recovered his mind or his health and died in England in April 1840. But tragic as his death was, Prinsep’s twenty crowded years in India were well spent, and he was particularly fortunate in being in good company as the youngest of three remarkable Englishmen, born within months of each other at the turn of the century, who between them changed the course of Indian studies. Despite their shared interests and exchanged correspondence and the influence they exerted on each other, the three never actually met face to face.
George Turnour was the eldest of the three by a matter of months. The next in seniority was Brian Houghton Hodgson, who came out to join the EICo’s civil service in Calcutta in 1818. Hodgson’s superiors soon discovered that his fragile state of health was no match for the Indian Hot Weather and found a post for him as Political Assistant and Secretary to the British Resident in Kathmandu in Nepal. Here he would remain almost without a break for the next twenty-six years, initially as a subordinate but from 1829 onwards as the Resident.
The youngest of the three and the last to arrive in the East was James Prinsep, born in Bristol of a father who had made a fortune in Bengal only to lose it in England, as a result of which he was raised in such straitened circumstances that for a time he and a younger brother had to share one pair of breeches. With his blue eyes, pale complexion, blond hair, slight frame and what his sister Emily described as his ‘constitutional shyness … and a timidity of speech’, the teenage James appeared to be an unlikely genius. Forced by poor eyesight to give up studying architecture he turned down the offer of a civil service cadetship in India and was eventually offered a post at the EICo’s Bengal Mint. Here Prinsep learned all the necessary skills of a metallurgist under the eyes of the Calcutta Mint’s Assay Master, Horace Hayman Wilson, the great Sanskritist and grand panjandrum of the Asiatic Society.
Eighteen months later Prinsep was posted upriver to manage the EICo’s second Mint at Benares, where he turned his scientific expertise to good use in making a census of the city’s inhabitants and drawing the first detailed map of the city. He also honed his architectural skills in a series of ambitious civil engineering works, which included building a three-arched bridge, restoring the foundations of the great mosque built by Aurangzeb beside the Ganges and constructing a deep underground tunnel that drained a large swamp in the centre of Benares and became the centrepiece of the city’s new drainage system. Prinsep was also a talented artist, and the skills he developed in Benares in etching and lithography were to stand him in very good stead in later years.
The enthusiasm with which Prinsep threw himself into every sort of project for the improvement of the city won him friends in all sections of the community, so that when in 1830 the two main sects within the Jain community were locked in dispute they turned to him for help. Their argument was over whose remains were buried within the great dome-like monument that stood just outside the city boundaries at Sarnath. This might be resolved if he were to use his engineering skills to open the structure, ‘that it might be ascertained to which party (Digambari or Swetambari) the enclosed image might belong. My departure from Benares alone prevented my satisfying their curiosity in 1830.’ The Jains’ request had come too late – but it was not forgotten.
Meanwhile in Kathmandu Brian Hodgson had been using his leisure hours to pursue a quite breathtaking range of intellectual pursuits. The hostility of the rulers of Nepal towards their old enemies, and what Hodgson saw as ‘the jealousy of the people in regard to any profanation of their sacred things by a European’ meant that throughout his time in Nepal Hodgson was a virtual prisoner within the grounds of the British Residency on the outskirts of Kathmandu. He overcame this restriction as far as he could by recruiting a number of local Nepalis and training them to act as his researchers and artists, all paid for out of his own pocket.
One of Hodgson’s earliest objects of enquiry was the Buddhism practised in Kathmandu Valley. It led him to Amrita Nanda Bandya, ‘the most learned Buddhist, then or now, living in this country’, who soon came into conflict with Hodgson’s own pandit, a Brahmin from Benares, after he brought Hodgson a Buddhist text attacking ‘the Brahmanical doctrine of caste’. One outcome of their long and fruitful relationship was a growing collection of ancient Buddhist scriptures written in Sanskrit gathered by Amrita Nanda in response to Hodgson’s request for information on the Buddhism practised in Nepal.
~~Ashoka: The Search For India's Lost Emperor -by- Charles Allen
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