Mapping Knowledge Go-Betweens in Calcutta, 1770-1820

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C h a p t e r 3

Mapping Knowledge Go-Betweens in

Calcutta, 1770–1820

K a p i l R a j

Intercultural Encounter and the P olitical Economy of Intermediation

In his pioneering panoramic survey of trade and exchange across cultural lines through world history published twenty-five years ago, Philip Curtin gives an account of how trade diasporas have transcended the barriers of locality and parochialism to link together widely separate parts of the globe. His emphasis is that mediation, brokerage, and cross-cultural communication are necessary to establish sustained exchange between disparate and different cultures and the role of ‘cross-cultural brokers’ played by these networks. Starting from the premise that ‘no human group could invent by itself more than a small part of its cultural and technical heritage,’ he adduces a plethora of examples of cultural transfer across human history to argue that the external stimulation provided by trade diasporas ‘has been the most important single source of change and development in art, science, and technology.’ However, accord-ing to Curtin, as cultural differences and communication gaps progressively closed over time, the need for cross-cultural brokerage lessened, and trade diasporas waned and finally disappeared with the spread of Western commer-cial culture throughout the modern world. Thus, merchant networks which he sees as ‘one of the most widespread of all human institutions over a very long run of time’ are nonetheless ‘limited to the long period of human history that began with the invention of agriculture and ended with the coming of the industrial age.’1

1 Philip D. Curtin, Cross-cultural trade in world history (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1984), pp. 1, 3.

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106 THe BroKereD WorlD

Although Curtin is right in identifying the origins of cross-cultural me-diation in long-distance trade diasporas, he goes on to conceive it as being historically coterminous with these networks, seeing it disappear with them in the early 19th century. However, as we shall see, a substantial body of schol-arship convincingly shows that while being closely linked with commerce, cross-cultural mediation emerged as a specialized activity in its own right, becoming increasingly differentiated and gaining autonomy from trade com-munities during the course of the second millennium ce, and giving rise to a panoply of professions upon which trading communities themselves had to depend, as too did the imperial administrations that rose during the period. Drawing on this body of work to focus on Calcutta in the 18th and early 19th centuries, this essay will argue that, far from declining in the wake of a pu-tative cultural uniformity brought about by european global capitalism and the Industrial revolution, new forms of knowledge related to cross-cultural intermediation emerged in this period of western imperial ascendancy. Fur-thermore, it will argue that the deployment of these new spaces of mediation by various individuals and groups played a crucial role in fashioning careers in science and in providing intellectual, social and cultural legitimacy to these agents. Finally, it will show that a variety of go-betweens played crucial roles not only to enable and sustain the very process of european expansion but also to negotiate the very definition of the cultural boundaries which they were to straddle, and indeed to construct and manage the cultural differences which lay at the heart of the sciences of the 19th century.

let us start with the example of the Indian ocean world, the space in which Calcutta was to develop. This region has been historically characterized by trade, based mainly on spices, dyes, medicinal drugs, metals, saltpetre, rare timbers, cotton, silk, ceramics and other manufactured and luxury goods, a part of which found their way into the Mediterranean and europe, which built up during the first half of the second millennium ce. This trade was organised around sedentary wealthy investors and brokers based in commercial, poly-glot port cities, like Aden, Calicut and Melaka, and peripatetic merchants. The whole network was in the hands of Arab, Ḥaḍrami, Iranian, Swahili, Chinese, Kashmiri, Armenian, Malay, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu merchants, investors and bankers as well as a few from Venice and North Africa. The geo-graphical spread of their origins was matched only by their religious diversity, comprising mainly of Sunnīs, Shī’is, Sufis, Bohras, Khojas, Chettiars, Baniyās, Jains, Jews, Zoroastrians, Theravada Buddhists, and Syrian Christians.2

2 Ashin Das Gupta, ‘The changing face of the Indian maritime merchant,’ Ashin Das Gupta, The world of the Indian Ocean merchant 1500–1800 (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 110–21; Denys lombard and Jean Aubin, eds., Asian mer-chants and businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 2000; originally published in French: Paris: Éditions de l’École des

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In the circumstances, it is not difficult to perceive that go-betweens were indispensable to ensure passage between the varied languages, customs and accounting techniques of the merchants and those of local communities of producers and suppliers. They were designated by special appellations, such as dallāl in Arabic, but often looked upon with contempt and suspicion, re-ferred to variously as ‘arrogant, rebellious and audacious’ or ‘shameless, bold, cunning, debauches [and] liars.’3 Nonetheless, they constituted an obligatory passage point for all transactions and, already in the 14th century, Arab mer-chants were advised to use the services of such factotums, as the following extract from an Arabic trader’s manual emphasises: ‘The merchant who ar-rives in a locality unknown to him must also carefully arrange in advance to secure a reliable representative, a safe lodging house, and whatever besides is necessary, so that he is not taken in by a slow payer or a cheat.’4 In addi-tion to translators, interpreters, moneychangers, bankers and moneylenders, the regional trade network was predicated upon specific maritime knowledge and skills. Pilots, navigators and theorists of navigation helped guide ships around maritime Asia and east Africa, thus forming yet another intermediary profession.5

hautes études en sciences sociales, 1988); roderich Ptak and Dietmar rothermund, eds., Emporia, commodities and entrepreneurs in Asian maritime trade, c. 1400–1750 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991). See also, Shelomo Dov Goitein, ‘Portrait of a medieval Indian trader: three letters from the Cairo Geniza,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50 (1987), pp. 449–64; John Middleton, African merchants of the Indian Ocean: Swahili of the east African coast (long Grove, Il: Waveland Press, 2004).3 See The encyclopaedia of Islam 2nd edition, 8 vols. (leiden: Brill, 1960– ) vol. 2, pp. 102–103. The qualifications are from Ziyā’al-Dīn Baranī (c.1285–c.1357) Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhi (Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1862), quoted in Ahsan Jan Qaisar, ‘The role of brokers in medieval India,’ Indian historical review 1 (1974), pp. 220–46, on p. 221.4 Abū al-Fādi‘ Ja‘far ibn ‘Ālī al-Dimishqī [1318], The book of knowledge of the beauties of commerce and of the cognizance of good and bad merchandise and of falsifications (in Arabic), partially translated in robert S. lopez and Irving W. raymond, Medieval trade in the Mediterranean world: illustrative documents translated with introductions and notes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 23–7, on p. 26. More gener-ally, see Qaisar, ‘The role of brokers,’ (cit. n. 3).5 Aḥmad ibn Mājid al-Najdī [c.1490], Kitāb al-Fawā’id fī uṣūl ‘ilm baḥr wa’l-ḳawā‘id, tr. Gerald randall Tibbetts, Arab navigation in the Indian Ocean before the coming of the Portuguese (london: royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1971). It goes without saying that the Indian ocean world was not unique in this respect, sharing many of the characteristics described here with the South China Sea and the Mediterranean. See, for instance, Anthony reid, South East Asia in the age of com-merce, 2 vols. (New Haven & london: Yale University Press, 1988–93); and ella-Natalie rothman, Between Venice and Istanbul: trans-imperial subjects and cultural mediation

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At the turn of the sixteenth century, west europeans thus entered a highly organized and complex economic network in the Indian ocean with well-es-tablished trade conventions, of which they had some notion through various travel accounts and reports, but over which they lacked mastery. For a start, the Portuguese—the first west european power to enter the region—had to rely on the services of different local Muslim pilots to direct them up the Swahili coast and then to Calicut, their final destination. And when, after initially carrying out armed attacks on local powers, merchants and populations, they finally embarked on establishing an empire in the region, based on fortified littoral colonial settlements, private trade, and political and commercial treaties with regional polities, their interaction with the various communities and political authorities concerned was rendered possible only through the mediation of professional go-betweens with specific literary, technical, juridical, administra-tive and financial skills. The pattern set by the Portuguese in the 16th century was to continue into the following centuries and formed the basis of subse-quent european interaction and maritime settlements in the Indian ocean.6

In the context of the relationship between maritime Asia and western europe, we can distinguish at least five major functional types of intermedi-aries—the interpreter-translator, the merchant-banker, the comprador or pro-curer, the legal representative or attorney, and the knowledge broker. In the South Asian context, each of these types could be composed of Asians, North Africans or europeans, missionaries or footloose strangers, men or women.7

in the early modern Mediterranean, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2006 [http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~rothman/rothmanDiss.pdf]. 6 Michael Naylor Pearson, ‘Brokers in western Indian port cities: their role in servicing foreign merchants,’ Modern Asian studies 22 (1988), pp. 455–72. See also, Charles rob-ert Boxer, The Portuguese seaborne empire, 1415–1825 (london: Hutchinson, 1969).7 Qaisar, ‘The role of brokers,’ (cit. n. 3), p. 230. Dejanirah Couto, ‘The role of interpret-ers, or linguas, in the Portuguese empire during the 16th century,’ E-journal of Por-tuguese history 1 (2003) [http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Portuguese_Brazilian_ Studies/ejph/html/issue2/pdf/couto.pdf]; Peter Burke, ‘The renaissance translator as go-between,’ Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels, eds., Renaissance go-betweens: cultural exchange in early modern Europe (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 17–31. For lusophones as intermediaries for other europeans, see Walter J. Fischel, ‘Abraham Navarro: Jewish interpreter and diplomat in the service of the english east India Company (1682–1692),’ Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 25 (1956), pp. 39–62. For merchant-bankers as go-betweens, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese empire in Asia 1500–1700: a political and economic his-tory (london and New York: longman, 1993), p. 60 et seq.; see also Ann Bos radwan, The Dutch in western India, 1601–1632: a study of mutual accommodation (Calcutta: Firma K.l. Mukhopadhyay, 1978), p. 17. one of the first references to compradors in Portuguese records (1507) is made by Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), governor of the Estado da India from 1510 until his death in 1515—see Afonso de Albuquer-que, Commentarios de Afonso Dalboquerque … , 2 vols. (lisbon: Impresa nacional,

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While many scholars have already remarked on most of these intermedi-ary roles without—except (to my knowledge) for one recent work—offering a formal taxonomy, little has been written about knowledge intermediaries, the focus of this essay.8 Natural, social and political knowledges were argu-ably the most crucial good that circulated in the vast Asian trade network, as the very viability of exchange depended upon them. Indeed, a knowledge of the nature, properties and quality of spices, medicinal plants, precious stones and other goods that formed a substantial part of ships’ cargoes was essential in determining the value of the merchandise and its possible clients. Along-side accounting, this knowledge constituted the core learning of the region’s merchant and maritime communities and was a closely guarded prerogative of each community. As Claude Markovits in his historical analysis of western Indian merchant networks argues:

Most crucial [for the sustained existence of merchant networks] is probably the circulation of information … This means two things: first, that ‘leaks’ have to be avoided as much as possible to the outside world, secondly, that information must circulate smoothly within the network, both spatially and temporally, as it gets transmitted from one generation to another. Although academics are generally dis-missive of the cognitive aspect of merchant activity, often deemed to consist of nothing more than the three rs, in the long run the most successful merchant networks have been those most able to process

1973; originally published: lisbon, 1576), vol. 2, p. 51. For the importance of indigenous and Mestizo women and household arrangements for mediation, see Jean Gelman Taylor, The social world of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Johan leonard Blussé, Strange company: Chi-nese settlers, mestizo women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris, 1986); and Bitter bonds: a colonial divorce drama of the seventeenth century (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002); reid, South East Asia (cit. n. 5), vol. 2, chapters 1 and 2.8 Alida Metcalf, in her recent and highly original study, Go-betweens and the coloniza-tion of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), also gives a typol-ogy of intermediaries, distinguishing between three types hierarchically arranged from the simplest to the highest form: physical/biological—those, such as sailors, passengers and slaves, who created material links between worlds by carrying flora and fauna, diseases and bearing children of mixed race; transactional—principally translators, traders or cultural brokers, who made possible communication, exchange, trade, settlement and conquest; and representational—chroniclers, priests, orators, map-makers, artists or writers, who represent the ‘other’ culture through texts, images or maps. However, recent cultural and social history of science has taught us that the three forms of activity—viz. the physical, the transactional and the representational—are inextricably intertwined and are very often practised by the same individuals.

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information into a body of knowledge susceptible of continuous refinement.9

However, in the context of the Indian ocean, with the presence of mul-tiple competitive-cum-collaborative merchant networks, leakages apart, all knowledge could not possibly be kept within individual networks. Certain types of knowledge pertaining to the goods themselves (for instance, the na-ture, properties, qualities, and potential markets of various commodities) had inevitably to be passed on to different groups along the trajectory of the com-modities in question. It is not surprising that these knowledges formed a stra-tegic part of the exchange process, and were thus an object of negotiation and mediation. As we shall see, knowledge mediation was to gain increasing status throughout the 18th century, especially in the light of the sustained european presence and eventual colonization of parts of the region.

But, more importantly, this mediation itself was to give rise to new forms of knowledge. A number of botanical and geographical treatises, mostly in Arabic, were thus written about the region and circulated widely at least since the 12th century. one of the first major works in a european language which openly acknowledges intermediation in knowledge construction is Garcia da orta’s Coloquios dos simples e drogas… da India, the first non-religious book to be printed and published, in 1563, in Portuguese Goa. A doctor of medicine educated at the university of Alcala in Spain, orta (c.1500–c.1568) spent the latter half of his life in India as a medic, shipowner and regional trader in ma-teria medica and jewels. As he readily acknowledged in his book, he depended on his Asian medical and trading partners for the botanical and medical knowledge contained in it. Accounting, geography, cartography, navigational astronomy and instrumentation, ethnography, textile production, dyeing and law were other important domains where knowledge was mediated.10

It must be stressed that this functional taxonomy of go-betweens is purely ideal-typical. Most intermediaries corresponded to more than one type. The term ‘passeur culturel’ has been used by Serge Gruzinski precisely to designate the manifold activities of intermediaries in bringing worlds together in early modern globalisation processes.11 In particular, knowledge brokerage was al-

9 Claude Markovits, The global world of Indian merchants 1750–1947 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2000), p. 25.10 Garcia da orta, Coloquios dos simples e drogas he cousas mediçinais da India … (Goa, 1563). See also Georges roques [1691], La manière de négocier aux Indes 1676–1691. La compagnie des Indes et l’art du commerce, ed. Valérie Bérinstain (Paris: Maisonneuve & larose, 1996).11 Although Gruzinski has used the term ‘passeur culturel’ for over ten years, the clear-est definition he has given of it so far is in his, ‘Passeurs y elites católicas en las cuatro partes del mundo. los inicios ibéricos de la mundialización (1580–1640),’ Scarlett o’Phelan and Carmen Salazar-Soler, eds., Passeurs, mediadores culturales y agents de la primera globalización en la Mundo Ibérico (lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica de

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most invariably not the prerogative of any specific group, but was handled on an ad hoc basis by members of those intermediary communities who dealt with the specific knowledges in question, still very closely linked to networks of trade.12

However, in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, knowledge go-be-tweens began to gain a certain degree of specialisation and autonomy from other groups of mediators, occupying a legitimate function in their own right. They too were made up of both Asians and europeans; of persons who, through changing allegiances or prolonged contact with other specialist groups, had gained valuable insights into their specific knowledges and skills; of others seeking opportunities for monetary or social gain through their skills and expertise or through the acquisition of new ones; or again of entrepreneurs, who sought to organise other skilled actors in order to create what might be looked upon as small ‘knowledge industries’ (as suggested in the example of Garcia da orta). In South Asia their activities can be noticed gaining ground, particularly in legal and diplomatic negotiations where the vakīl (used vari-ously to mean envoy, representative, attorney or lawyer) begins to appear in a significant way in the factory records of various outposts and emporia of the east India companies. Treated with suspicion and disdain, this latter profes-sion was nevertheless becoming increasingly indispensable to the functioning of these intercontinental trading corporations as they extended inland from their maritime emporia.13

Perú, 2005), pp. 13–29, on p. 16. See also Berta Ares Queija and Serge Gruzinski, eds., Entre dos mundos: fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores (Seville: eeHA, 1997), and louise Bénat Tachot and Serge Gruzinski, eds., Passeurs culturels: mécanismes de métissage (Paris: Presses universitaires de Marne-la-Vallée & Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme, 2001).12 See Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, ‘Merchant capital and knowledge: the financing of early printing presses by the eurasian silk trade of New Julfa,’ Thomas Francis Mathews and robert S. Wieck, eds., Treasures in Heaven: Armenian illuminated manuscripts (New York: Pierpont Morgan library, 1994), pp. 58–73. The nexus between trade and knowledge networks holds equally in the early modern european world: it is useful to remember that Gresham College, the forerunner of the royal Society, was founded by a group of traders, the Mercers’ Company. See also Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and marvels: commerce, science and art in early modern Europe (New York: routledge, 2002); and Harold J. Cook, Matters of exchange: commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch golden age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).13 See, for instance, British library, India office records (henceforth Bl, Ior), Cal-cutta factory records G/7/7, p. 3, letter from the Calcutta Council to one of its agents in inland Bengal, 14 December 1697: ‘The vacqueel you complain of is the best that has served ye rt: Hon:ble Comp: these many years if you manage him rightly. No doubt but he will invent & bring you one story or another to get money out of you if he finds you soft & yeilding (sic) but you must deny him and go to those persons yourself he pretends to ask money for & try whither (sic) business cannot be done without it.’

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The above typology and the various individual strategies serve as a useful grid to observe the dynamics and relative importance of the different forms of intermediation over the centuries and the kinds of knowledge these produced. It is especially of interest during the period 1770–1830 when, as this essay will try to show, knowledge go-betweens came into their own in the emerging British empire in South Asia at the same time as the function began to be em-bedded in institutions within the burgeoning colonial administration.

Calcutta provides an emblematic instantiation of this taxonomy and its dynamics, in which differential long- and short-range linkages and forms of urban praxis affected the boundaries, status and interactions of the differ-ent kinds of mediators described here. Conceived in 1690 as a contact zone between the english east India Company and its suppliers from north and east India, Calcutta grew from a ‘straggling village of mud-huts’ at the end of the 17th century to become the largest clearing-house of trade in Asia, the second-most-important city of the British empire in the 1820s, capital of Brit-ish India and the nerve centre of British expansion into the Far east and the Pacific.14 During the same period, it also emerged as a world-renowned centre of scientific knowledge making in geography, cartography, history, linguistics and ethnology, to name but a few, and a world pioneer in modern public edu-cation.

The brokered cit y: Calcu t ta, 1690–17 72

The history of Calcutta is one of a city which ought never to have existed. Until the end of the 17th century, the principal urban centres of Bengal were situated elsewhere: rajmahal and Maqsoodabad (later to be renamed Murshidabad) in the north, Nadia in the centre, and Dhaka in the east. of its two major ports, Chittagong (close to the Arakan frontier) and Satgaon, the latter (on the Hooghly, the principal distributary of the Ganges) although smaller, was better situated to draw upon the massive trade of the Ganges valley.15 It was thus in its immediate vicinity that the Portuguese set up their main trading post at Bandel in the 1530s. However, progressive silting forced a section of Sat-gaon’s residents to move, a few north-Indian and Gujarati merchants found-ing the towns of Gobindpur and Sutanati downstream, on the opposite bank. More accessible to large ships, Sutanati rapidly rose to become a major cotton

14 The expression is from Sushil Kumar De, History of Bengali literature in the nine-teenth century (Calcutta: Firma K.l. Mukhopadhyay, 1961), p. 42.15 For a contemporary description of Satgaon, see the account of the Venetian mer-chant Cesare Federici’s travels in Asia between 1563 and 1581, The voyage and trauaile of M. C. Frederick … into the East India, the Indies, and Beyond the Indies, tr. Thomas Hickock (london, 1588; originally published: Venice, 1587), ff. 22v–23r.

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market of the region.16 And if, in the course of the 17th century, the Dutch and english east India companies and, later, the French chose to build their factories (respectively in Chinchura, Hughly—a Mughal fort town and seat of the military governor of the province—and Chandernagore) on the west bank in the neighbourhood of Bandel, it was more to benefit from the commercial and financial networks that had developed around the Portuguese than for navigational convenience. This infrastructure was crucial in the light of the growing importance of Bengal, exports from which represented almost half of european trade with Asia at the beginning of the 18th century. As the his-torian of the British empire, Peter Marshall, notes, ‘Without Indian expertise, they could not obtain their goods, and without Indian capital they could not carry on their trade.’17

Having been evicted from Hughly by Mughal forces in 1686 for their bel-licose attitude, the east India Company (henceforth referred to as the Com-pany, or simply the eIC) eventually established itself in 1690 in Sutanati before moving some years later to Dihi Kalkatah, a small village situated on a slight elevation on the Hooghly between Sutanati and Gobindpur. Although the site was particularly unhealthy, earning it the dubious sobriquet of ‘the city in the

16 Charles robert Wilson, The early annals of the English in Bengal, being the Bengal Public Consultations for the first half of the eighteenth century, 3 vols. (london: W. Thacker and Co., 1895–1917), vol. 1, p. 128.17 Peter James Marshall, East Indian fortunes: the British in Bengal in the eighteenth century (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 29.

FIGUre 1 Bengal, showing the principal urban and commercial centres.Source: Author’s Collection.

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swamp’, this did not stop Calcutta from soon becoming the chief english sta-tion in Bengal and the main source of textile shipments which, by the 1720s, made up over half the Company’s exports from India. Its population multi-plied from an initial ten thousand to around 100,000 by the middle of the 18th century—another significant indicator of its prosperity.18

even more remarkable was Calcutta’s ethnic, social and cultural diversity. In addition to the north- and west-Indian merchant bankers of Sutanati and Gobindpur who soon became the Company’s official banyāns (bankers and money-lenders, famously described by one eIC merchant as ‘interpreter, head book-keeper, head secretary, head broker, the supplier of cash and cash keeper and in general also secret keeper’) Calcutta’s growing markets soon attracted other merchants—from Bengal and other parts of Asia. 19 A treaty signed in london a couple of years earlier between the eIC and the powerful Armenian diaspora of banker-merchants and diplomats—whose network coordinated from Isfahan in Safavid Iran spread from Cadiz and Amsterdam to Macao by the end of the 17th century, with a strong presence in the Safavid, ottoman and Mughal empires and in most port cities of the Indian ocean—had already brought a small group there. The Armenians were to play a central role in dip-lomatic and financial negotiations with the Mughal and Safavid authorities on behalf of the British and thus counted as indispensable go-betweens for their continued existence in the region until the middle of the 18th century. It was notably through the offices of an Armenian merchant-diplomat Khwaja Israel di Sarhat in 1698, that they obtained tāluqdārī (rent farming) rights over part of a Mughal estate within which Calcutta was situated, were allowed to fortify their settlement and were granted trading privileges.20 Maritime trade brought

18 rhoads Murphey, ‘The city in the swamp: aspects of the site and early growth of Calcutta,’ The geographical journal 130 (1964), pp. 241–256. Marshall, East Indian for-tunes (cit. n. 17), p. 44. See also Susil Chaudhuri, Trade and commercial organisation in Bengal: 1650–1720: with special reference to the East India Company (Calcutta: Firma K.l. Mukhopadhyay, 1975).19 William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs; particularly respecting the present state of Bengal, and its dependencies, 3 vols. (london: J. Dodsley, 1772–75), vol. 1, p. 84. See also D. Basu, ‘The early Banyans of Calcutta,’ Bengal past and present 90 (1971), pp. 38–40.20 ronald Ferrier, ‘The agreement of the east India Company with the Armenian Nation, 22nd June 1688,’ Revue des études arméniennes n. s. 7 (1970), pp. 427–43, on p. 439; Sebouh Aslanian, ‘Social capital, ‘trust’ and the role of networks in Julfan trade: informal and semi-formal institutions at work,’ Journal of global history 1 (2006), pp. 383–402; Bhaswati Bhattacharya, ‘Armenian european relationship in India, 1500–1800: no Armenian foundation for european empire?,’ Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient 48 (2005), pp. 277–322; and more generally, Mesrovb Seth, History of the Armenians in India from the earliest times to the present (Calcutta: The author, 1937). In addition, the english, like all other europeans, depended crucially on vakīls

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its own lot of entrepreneurs—europeans and Asians alike, from financiers to chandlers and sloop merchants—craftsmen and small businessmen from near and afar, leading to a mushrooming of specialised bazaars.21 Being an im-mense entrepôt for international commerce from China to europe, the new settlement also attracted more specialised dubhāshis (literally, speaker of two languages), sarrāfs (money changers and assay masters), dallāls and banyāns. lusophones also marked their presence, Portuguese having become a major lingua franca in the Indian ocean worlds of trade and law. luso-Asians and a handful of Portuguese thus came to constitute the second largest population speaking a european language after english.22

The commercial, social and cultural dynamics of Calcutta gave rise very early on to a cosmopolitan culture and a religious and linguistic diversity—Persian, Hindustani, Portuguese, english, Arabic, Armenian, etc. … being the most widely used languages alongside Bengali and other vernaculars spo-ken by craftspeople and petty traders.23 The settlement, set up to be a con-tact and trading zone between merchants, producers and purveyors of goods, very soon became a complex space constituted by a multitude of go-betweens, sometimes single individuals but often members of vast professional or trade diasporas linked to other parts of terrestrial and maritime Asia.

In order to maintain order and negotiate contracts in a space that com-bined elements of economies of local and regional exchange with commercial institutions imported by central- and west-Asian merchants and european long-distance trading corporations like the eIC, juridical questions were of primordial importance from the very outset.24 Besides, the tāluqdārī rights over the land in and around Calcutta entailed the obligation of administering justice. The Company’s servants thus found themselves having to run penal, civil and revenue courts. These were modelled on the system in use in the rest

in order to negotiate legal and fiscal matters with the Mughal administration as well as to defend their rights against other merchants and rival european companies in local courts. An early reference to an indigenous lawyer, lotmond Vacquelle (lakshman, Vakīl) can already be found in the first extant Diary of the Calcutta Council for the year 1703–1704, extract in Wilson, ed., The early annals (cit. n. 16), vol. 1, p. 219.21 See, for instance, Shubhra Chakrabarti, ‘The english east India Company and the sloop merchants of Bengal: Akrur Dutta and his family, 1757–1857,’ Studies in history 20 (2004), pp. 131–57.22 See Cuthbert Finch, ‘Vital statistics of Calcutta,’ Journal of the Statistical Society of London 13 (1850), pp. 168–82. See also Holden Furber, Rival empires of trade in the ori-ent, 1600–1800 (oxford: oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 298–99.23 Thomas Welbourne Clark, ‘The languages of Calcutta, 1760–1840,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18 (1956), pp. 453–74.24 For the functioning of such composite economies, see in particular Christopher Alan Bayly, Rulers, townsmen and bazaars: north Indian society in the age of British expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 52 et seq.

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of the Mughal empire.25 In addition to these, a Mayor’s Court was founded in 1727 in order to rule on litigations amongst the British population.26 However, as an examination of its records show, this latter soon found itself assailed with litigation between Asians and europeans and between various Asian communities themselves.27

Given the novelty of the situation, new laws had sometimes to be negoti-ated. Thus, knowledge go-betweens, typically Persian- and Arabic-speaking li-terati and Sanskritist pandits, made their appearance as notaries, scribes, or as minor employees in the growing administrative departments of the Company or of the city. like the other communities in this urban space, these knowledge intermediaries were also part of larger diasporic communities some of which had a long heritage in seeking cultural accommodation between the different components of South Asian society.28 However, the cosmopolitan nature of the city in no way implied an ‘age of partnership’, but rather a deft manage-ment of difference and conflict. The city’s courts thus came to constitute the core of its intellectual dynamic.29

Their crucial importance notwithstanding, the status of go-betweens (who continued to be looked upon with suspicion and disdain, by now a defining

25 reginald Craufuird Sterndale, An historical account of ‘The Calcutta Collectorate,’ ‘Collector’s Cutcherry, or Calcutta Pottah Office,’ from the days of the zemindars to the present time, with a brief notice of the zemindars and collectors of Calcutta, the ground tenure or land revenue system, town duties, excise, and stamp revenue (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885), p. 12.26 Walter Kelly Firminger, ed., Affairs of the East India Company (being the fifth report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons 28th July, 1812), 3 vols. (Calcutta: r. Cambray and Co., 1917), vol. 1, p. lxxix et seq.27 Bl, Ior, Bengal Public Consultations, Mayor’s Court records, Dec. 1727 to Dec. 1728, P/155/10. For the controversy over the jurisdiction of the Mayor’s Court and vari-ous other courts and authorities, see Proceedings for 1 and 8 June 1730, Mayor’s Court records, Jan. 1729/30 to Dec 1730, P/155/12 (no pagination); and John Browne to Court of Directors, 5 August 1749, Home Miscellaneous Series, H/420, pp. 13–21.28 on syncretic traditions in various currents of political thought in early-modern South Asia see Muzaffar Alam, The languages of political Islam: India 1200–1800 (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).29 The expression ‘age of partnership’ is taken from Holden Furber, ‘Asia and the West as partners before ‘empire’ and after,’ The journal of Asian studies 28 (1969), pp. 711–21. Compare Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The political economy of commerce: southern India, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 252–54, where he char-acterises this period as an ‘age of contained conflict’, closer to the vision portrayed in this essay. For the role of the city’s courts in organising the intellectual dynamic of Calcutta, see Kapil raj, ‘régler les différends, gérer les différences: dynamiques urbai-nes et savantes à Calcutta au XVIIIe siècle,’ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 55 (2008), pp. 70–100.

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cliché) was at all times precarious. This was in part due to fierce competition amongst the various mediating communities themselves, in part also due to distant events in an increasingly connected world which could make or break a community thousands of miles away. Thus, for example, Armenian influ-ence in Bengal and elsewhere in the world declined within decades of the col-lapse of the Safavid empire and the subsequent brutal sacking of Iṣfahān, the nodal city of the Armenian diaspora, first by Afghan troops in 1722 and again, in 1747, by Nādir Shāh (1688–1747), the Afshār-tribal-chief-turned-Persian-emperor.30

Two major events in the mid 18th century—qualified in both contem-porary Indo-Persian and english sources as ‘revolution’ (inqilāb)—were to dramatically overturn the course of the Subcontinent’s history leading to the spectacular rise of Calcutta. First, the invasion of North India and the sack of Delhi in 1739 by the same Nādir Shāh rang the death knell of the ailing Mu-ghal empire, accelerating its collapse and giving rise to a myriad of successor polities vying with each other to fill the power vacuum thus created. Secondly, the victory at Plassey in 1757 (in the first months of the Seven Years’ War) of the eIC’s army over the forces of Sirāju’d-Dawla, the nawāb of Bengal, radi-cally transformed the geopolitical complexion of the region, making Britain a major political actor in South Asia for the next two centuries. This conquest would also overturn the administrative organisation and the very character of the Company—and, indeed, the future of go-betweens and intermediation in the region.31

one of the first major acts by the Company upon conquering Bengal and assuming the diwānī (financial control) of the province in 1765 was to plunder the nawāb of Bengal’s coffers to finance its own trade, especially with China. It also began to mint its own money in the province and substantially reversed the flow of silver bullion and specie, which now started moving out of South Asia. The Company thus became less dependent on political and commercial inputs from indigenous trader-bankers and sarrāfs for navigating between a multitude of currencies, although these latter continued to play an indispens-able role because the new administration relied on them not merely to un-derpin its residual trading operations but to finance its administration and

30 For disparaging reflections on the character of Armenians, see for example roques, La manière de négocier (cit. n. 10), pp. 147–49.31 For contemporary perceptions of the times as being revolutionary, see Ghulām Ḥusain Khān Ṭabāṭabā’ī, A translation of the Seir mutaqherin: or, View of modern times, being an history of India, from the year 1118 to the year 1194 of the Hedjrah, con-taining, in general, the reigns of the seven last emperors of Hindostan, and in particular, an account of the English wars in Bengal … tr. Haji Mustafa (alias Nota-Manus), 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1789), vol. 3, p. 161; [William Watts/John Campbell], Memoirs of the Revolution in Bengal, anno Dom. 1757 (london: A. Millar, 1760); and William Bolts, Considerations on India affairs (london: J. Almon, P. elmsly and Brotherton & Sewell, 1772), p. 150.

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to guarantee the working of the land-revenue system. At the same time, the rise of British private merchants investing in inland trade under the protec-tive umbrella of the eIC meant that the intermediation of indigenous brokers shifted to these individuals, becoming more dispersed and making room for other communities of indigenous financiers to step onto the scene.32 As we shall see in the following section, this heralded a period when knowledge it-self began gaining strategic importance, and knowledge go-betweens came into their own. The aftermath of Plassey thus saw a reordering of the political economy of intermediation in the region and heralded a new regime for that of knowledge.

However, the consciousness among the British of their new role qua rul-ers of this vast territory was slow in coming, for, in the years that followed the conquest of Bengal, Company officials devoted all their attention to ruthlessly plundering and devastating the land. This led indirectly to the collapse of a number of traditional urban centres.33 Calcutta was one of the few cities that prospered—it gained a new vitality and in the space of a few years became the capital of the eIC’s territories in India. Its population and area quadrupled in a couple of decades to make it the second largest city of the British empire, outside of the British Isles.34 Indeed, such was its perceived importance that when the Mughal emperor Shāh ‘Ālam II (reigned 1761–1805) dispatched a del-egation to George III in 1766, his representative Mirzā Shaikh I’tiṣām al-Dīn (1730–1800), left from Calcutta instead of Madras, or Bombay, better situated on the sea route to london.35

But, after ten million lives, or a third of the population of Bengal (almost all peasants and artisans), had been lost in the space of three years—victims of a famine compounded by the ruthless policies of the Company’s servants—attention was turned to stabilising the internal order of the province. Under

32 For the economic consequences of the Company’s control over Bengal, see Narendra Krishna Sinha, The economic history of Bengal: from Plassey to the Permanent Settle-ment, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Firma K.l. Mukhopadhyay, 1981–84), vol. 1, pp. 221–40; rajat Datta, Society, economy and the market: commercialization in rural Bengal c. 1760–1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), pp. 342–63; and Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Conflict and col-laboration: bankers and early colonial rule in India,’ Indian economic and social his-tory review 30 (1993), pp. 283–310.33 A comprehensive list of these ‘most atrocious abuses that ever stained the name of civil government’ may be found in ‘reports from the Committee Appointed to enquire into the Nature, State and Condition of the east India Company and of the British Affairs in east India,’ Reports from committees of the House of Commons, 1772–1773, vol. 3 (london, 1803).34 P. Thankappan Nair, ‘The growth and development of old Calcutta,’ Sukanta Chaud-huri, ed., Calcutta, the living city, 2 vols. (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 10–24, on p. 23.35 Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to colonialism: Indian travellers and settlers in Brit-ain 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 87–92.

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growing pressure from the British Parliament, which culminated in the reg-ulating Act of 1773 and the institution in Calcutta of the Supreme Court of Judicature for the administration of justice in the newly acquired territories, the Company and its agents grudgingly shifted from commercial and military plunder to more orderly and permanent forms of exploitation and govern-ment. This was also the first step in the transformation of the emerging Brit-ish empire in South Asia from one held solely by brute force and terror to one held—at least in theory—by information.

The organisation and nature of brokered knowled ge, 17 72–1800

It was in this context that the Court of Directors of the eIC in london were prevailed upon in 1772 to appoint Warren Hastings (1732–1818)—a senior em-ployee of the Company who had already served for 15 years in Bengal—gover-nor-general of the province with the brief to take over and directly control the nizāmat, that is, the whole civil (police and criminal) administration of the province. The diwānī (or the office for revenue administration) was transferred to Calcutta which from a contact zone between Asian and european hetero-geneous networks organised mainly around trade and urban administration now became a locus of control and coordination of vast networks of territorial administration. New institutions, such as the Munshikhānā (secretariat of the provincial administration) employing a few dozen members of the Persianate service élite, sprung up, alongside the Surveyor’s office (very closely linked to the army) which, until then was the only major institution to have been set up in the 1760s. The various revenue and judicial officials inherited from the Mughal and other princely administrations, continued to act in their official capacity as intermediaries between the British and local populations.36

In addition to taking over the entire management of the province’s rev-enues, Hastings also set about planning a kind of Domesday Book of the Com-pany’s territories: ‘every accumulation of knowledge,’ he wrote, ‘and especially

36 See r. N. Nagar, ‘employment of Indians in the revenue administration of the N. W. P., 1801–1833,’ Journal of the United Provinces Historical Society, XIII (1940), pp. 66–73; ‘The subordinate services in the revenue administration of the North Western Prov-inces, 1801–1833,’ Journal of the United Provinces Historical Society, XV, part II (1942), pp. 125–34; ‘The tahsildar in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, 1801–1833,’ Uttar Pradesh historical quarterly, II (n.s.), part I (1954), pp. 25–34. See also Bernard Samuel Cohn, ‘The initial British impact on India: a case study of the Benares region’ and ‘The British in Benares: a nineteenth-century colonial society,’ Bernard Samuel Cohn, An anthropologist among the historians and other essays (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 320–42 and 422–62, respectively; and Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exer-cise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state … ’37

37 Warren Hastings to Nathaniel Smith, Chairman of the east India Company, 4 octo-ber 1784, reprinted in ‘Preface,’ The Bhagvat-Geeta, tr., Charles Wilkins (london, 1785), p. 13; also reprinted in Peter James Marshall, ed., The British discovery of Hinduism in the eighteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 184–92, on p. 189.

FIGUre 3 ‘An european Gentleman with his Moonshee, or Native Professor of languages,’ from Charles Doyley, The European in India (london, 1813)Source: © British library Board. All rights reserved

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Along with taxation and law, this knowledge was to include natural history and antiquities, local customs, diet and general living conditions, in short all that was, in the coming decades, to go under the name of statistics. Giving a high priority to a knowledge of the region’s languages—Hastings himself had gained a certain proficiency in Urdu and Persian—he simultaneously devised a policy of handsome monetary incentives to those of his european officials who were willing to study the languages and other aspects of South Asian society.38

In order to bring this vast and highly ambitious project to fruition, the ad-ministration had to closely depend on the indigenous literati, some of whom already worked in the civilian and military institutions of the Company. Many of them had had a ‘classical’ education which, apart from discretion and vir-tuosity, consisted not only of a rigorous learning of scriptural knowledge—Qur’ānic, and Biblical (the old Testament being part of the common heritage of the three Abrahamic religions) for the Persianate elite, and Vedic and Upanishadic for the more Sankritized pandits—but also of Persian, Arabic, sometimes Sanskrit, disputation, accounting, law, politics, history, poetry and literary criticism. Some were even trained in mathematics, logic, astronomy and astrology.39 Hastings’ long years of experience—from 1750 (at the age of 17) to 1765—as a merchant in upper Bengal and Calcutta had indeed taught him that without the intermediation of the literati and merchant communities, any sustained form of interaction and successful government in the region was well nigh impossible. As a matter of fact, in those early years, he himself had been a go-between: as the eIC’s agent in the important commercial town of Kassimbazar, he had had to deal not only with the trade but also as political agent to represent the Company’s interests at the nawāb of Bengal’s court in neighbouring Murshidabad and oversee a fair exchange rate at the hands of the Jagat Seth (literally, the banker of the universe) the nawāb’s banker and master of the provincial mint. These responsibilities he successfully executed mainly thanks to his personal banyān, Kṛṣṇa Kānta Nandy (c.1720–1794), a man of great wealth and property and a major silk and salt merchant in his own right. It was even because of the latter’s intervention that Hastings, who

38 Hastings’ familiarity with Urdu and Persian are attested to in Cuthbert Collin Davies, ed., ‘The Benares Diary of Warren Hastings,’ Camden miscellany xviii (1948), pp. 25–6; and the translator’s preface to Ṭabāṭabā’ī, Seir mutaqherin (cit. n. 31), p.1.39 on the education of elites in early modern South Asia, see Mirzā ‘Abd al-laṭīf Shushtarī [1801], Tuḥfat al-‘ālam; va, Zayl al-tuḥfah, ed. Samad Muvahhid (Tehran: Kitabkhanah-i Tahuri, 1984), extracts translated in Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim perceptions of the west during the eighteenth century (Karachi: oxford University Press, 1998), p. 101. See also Maulānā Khair-ud-Dīn Muhammad, Tazkirat-ul-ulama or a memoir of the learned men of Jaunpur, ed. and tr. Muhammad Sana Ullah (Calcutta: Abul Faiz & Co., 1934); Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The making of a munshi,’ Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2004) pp. 61–72.

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FIGUre 4 Warren Hastings, as painted by the miniaturist Mir Qamar al-Din, c. 1782.Source: © British library Board. All rights reserved

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had been taken prisoner by Sirāju’d-Dawla, owed his freedom—and perhaps his very life.40 He accordingly set about creating structures that would encour-age an ordered and mediated interaction between the Company’s employees and the local populations.

These policies, and the institutions created or developed in their wake, were to play a crucial role in structuring knowledge intermediation. The de-mand for indigenous collaborators for language teaching as well as for ad-ministrative needs, particularly for the administration of justice, naturally attracted members of the service gentry who, dislocated in the midst of the fast-collapsing Mughal empire, were seeking to regroup within the new ad-ministrations of its successor states, like Awadh and Hyderabad, or to carve out new niches in the fast-expanding departments of the eIC. Thus, men such as Tafazzul Ḥusain Khān (1727–1800)—one of the main protagonists of Simon Schaffer’s essay in this volume—the diplomat ‘Abd al-laṭīf Shushtarī (1758–1806), the historian Ghulām Ḥusain Khān Ṭabāṭabā’ī (1727–1806) and I’tiṣām al-Dīn, Shāh ‘Ālam’s erstwhile ambassador to George III, as well as the pandits rādhākānta Sarman ‘Tarkavāgīsa’ (‘master of dialectics’) (d. 1803) and Jagannātha Tarkapanchānan (d. 1807) settled in Calcutta associated, to vary-ing degrees, with the Company’s administration. on his return from england, France, Portugal, egypt and West Asia in 1778 after a three-year voyage to acquaint himself with the new learning of the West, Mīr Muhammad Ḥusain Iṣfahānī ‘Arastu-i Islām’ (Aristotle of Islam) (d. 1790) chose to do the same. However, none could hope for emoluments in any way comparable to those of european go-betweens—at best they received as pay only a fraction of the latter’s bonuses.

It was the city’s courts—already, as we noted earlier, at the heart of Cal-cutta’s intellectual dynamism—that began to play a central role in the organi-sation and construction of knowledge. In 1781, the Hastings administration established a Madrassā in the city centre, a mile to the north-east of Fort Wil-liam. This was in response, on the one hand, to a request from ‘a consider-able number of Musselmen of credit and learning’ to promote institutions of traditional learning which ‘had been the pride of every polished court and the wisdom of every well regulated government both in India and in Persia [but of which] in India only traces … now remain, the decline of learning having accompanied that of the Mughal empire’ and, on the other, ‘with a view … to the production of officers for the courts of justice.’ The subjects taught were

40 For Kṛṣṇa Kanta Nandy, see Somendra Chandra Nandy, Life and times of Cantoo Baboo (Krisna Kanta Nandy) the banyan of Warren Hastings, 2 vols. (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1978–81). For his role in Hastings’ liberation from prison, see vol. 1, p. 13. And, indeed, as alluded to in the opening lines of the introduction to the present vol-ume, edmund Burke was quick to seize upon Hastings’ role as a go-between in the case he made for the latter’s indictment proceedings before the British Parliament in the following decade.

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Arabic, Persian and Islamic law, with later additions, such as natural philoso-phy, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, logic, rhetoric and oratory—‘all accord-ing to Islamic culture.’41

In the same year, in the wake of the military overthrow of the raja of Benares, Chait Singh (reigned 1770–1781), the city and its surrounding re-gion were annexed and administered by the eIC. This had a direct impact on Benares’ thriving intellectual community and learned institutions which progressively came under the control of the new colonial regime. In 1792, the Company’s administration sponsored a Hindu College in Benares for ‘the preservation and cultivation of the laws, literature and religion of the Hin-dus.’ The course consisted in ‘theology, ritual, medicine, music, mechanic arts, grammar, prosody, sacred lexicography, mathematics, metaphysics, logic, law, history, ethics, philosophy and poetry.’42

Both the Madrassā and the Hindu College were rapidly to become major centres of training and production of legal knowledge, in tune with the new complexities emerging from the necessity to take into account the multitude of legal—criminal, civil, fiscal and commercial—traditions required to admin-ister the country and to regulate commercial exchanges between the different communities. The Supreme Court, instituted through the same regulating Act that appointed Warren Hastings governor-general, was henceforth to adju-dicate according to British law. Two other courts, the Sadr Diwanī ‘Adālat and the Sadr Nizāmat ‘Adālat, were created respectively for dispensing civil and penal justice for indigenous inhabitants according to their respective tra-ditions.43 However, the jurisdictional boundaries between these institutions proved impossible to maintain and the purview of the Supreme Court was modified by a new Parliamentary Act in 1781 which recognised Hindu and

41 Warren Hastings, ‘Minute’ dated 17 April 1781, Henry Sharp, ed., Selections from educational records, Part I: 1781–1839 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Print-ing, 1920), pp. 7–9, 30; reprinted in lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, The great Indian education debate: documents relating to the orientalist-anglicist controversy, 1781–1843 (london: Curzon, 1999), pp. 73–5. For the petition, see Calendar of Persian correspon-dence, 11 vols. (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1919–1949), vol. 6, p. 89 and vol. 7, p. 2; S. C. Sanial, ‘History of the Calcutta Madrassa,’ Bengal past and present 8 (1914), pp. 83–112, 225–51.42 Thomas Fisher, ‘Memoir dated 7 February 1827 … showing the extent to which aid has been afforded by the local Governments in India towards the establishment of native schools in that country … ,’ Selections from educational records (cit. n. 41), pp. 186–87.43 Committee of Circuit’s plan for the administration of justice in Bengal, 15 August 1772,’ Bl, Ior, Home Miscellaneous Series, H/420, pp. 43–55, especially Articles V–VIII. Also, Warren Hastings, ‘A Plan for the Administration of Justice, extracted from the Proceedings of the Committee of Circuit, 15 August, 1772,’ George William Forrest, ed., Selections from the state papers of governors-general of India, Warren Hastings, 2 vols. (london: Constable & Co., 1910), vol. 2, pp. 295–96.

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Muslim laws and usages in matters relating to ‘inheritance and succession to land rent and goods and all matters of contract and dealing between party and party.’44 Hindu and Muslim savants, often employed as law officers and clerks in these institutions, were given the further task of writing new laws in the three official languages of the colony. These were then translated into english for the use of British judges. But the translation process worked from english to the region’s languages as well: one William Chambers (interpreter to the Supreme Court) translated the Chief Justice, elijah Impey’s code of pro-cedure for the district courts into Persian, and Jonathan Duncan (1756–1811), future resident (the eIC administration’s principal representative) in Benares, translated the same into Bengali—against handsome rewards from the gov-ernment.45

This complex translation and knowledge-making enterprise in which english began to play an increasingly important role had already started before Hastings’ arrival as governor-general with men like the freebooter, William Bolts (1739–1808) who had acquired an impressive proficiency in Bengali, the Company merchant and revenue expert Charles Boughton rouse (1747–1821)—who was involved in translating portions of the celebrated Ā’īn-i Akbarī compiled at the end of the 16th century by the publicist Abū ‘al-Fazl ibn Mubārak (1551–1602) which detailed the state of the Mughal empire during the reign of the emperor Akbar—and the surveyor James rennell (1742–1830). Under Hastings’ governorship, it drew an increasing number of Britons, not least because of the pecuniary incentives, but also because responding to Hast-ings’ enthusiasm was a way to winning his favour and picking up new skills which might be put to profit upon their return to Britain. Many, like George Bogle (1746–1781), David Anderson (1751–1825), Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), Jonathan Scott (1753–1829) and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–1830) were al-ready in the eIC’s service in India before Hastings’ appointment, but some who were already recognized men of science, reuben Burrow (1747–1792) and William Jones (1746–1794) for instance, were drawn to Calcutta later precisely because of the material and pecuniary possibilities that these knowledge-making policies opened.46

44 Quoted in John Duncan Martin Derrett, Religion, law and the state in India (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 1999; originally published: london: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 236.45 George robert Gleig, ed., Memoirs of the life and writings of Right Honourable War-ren Hastings 3 vols. (london: richard Bentley, 1841), vol. 1, p. 380.46 on reuben Burrow, his biographers write: ‘In an interesting letter to Hastings, Bur-row said that he wished to make money in order to have leisure for research, that he is interested in ancient geometry, as proved by his Apollonius, and wanted to investigate Hindu and other oriental literature.’ leslie Stephen and ruth Wallis, ‘reuben Burrow (1747–1792),’ Oxford dictionary of national biography, online ed., oxford University Press, oct 2008 (henceforth ODNB), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4110, accessed 31 March 2009]; and, more generally, Simon Schaffer’s essay in this volume.

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FIGUre 6 The old Court House, one of the main sites of knowledge mediation in Calcutta. Apart from a number of the city’s courts, it also housed an english language school and the Asiatic Society of Bengal in its early years.Source: © British library Board. All rights reserved

one area where this new knowledge played a particularly important role was in the administration of civil law, in part because of the rising flood of litigation between South Asians and europeans ever since the new territorial conquest, and in part because British courts offered new legal possibilities to indigenous litigants.47 Following the Mughal example, the British perceived a duality in the South Asian legal system—one for the Muslims and another

For William Jones, see for instance his letter to lady Georgiana Spencer, dated 28 February 1774, William Jones, The letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Garland Hampton Cannon, 2 vols. (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 143 and 271. More gener-ally, on this whole British milieu in Calcutta, see Kapil raj, ‘Christian confessions and styles of science in nineteenth-century Bengal: their impact on the emergence of the social sciences in Britain,’ Patrick Petitjean, ed., Colonial sciences: researchers and institutions (Paris: orSToM editions, 1996), pp. 285–97.47 Warren Hastings, ‘A plan for the administration of justice, extracted from the pro-ceedings of the Committee of Circuit, 15th August, 1772’, George William Forrest, ed., Selections from the state papers of governors-general of India, (1) Warren Hastings, 2 vols. (london: Constable & Co., 1910), vol. 2, pp. 295–96.

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for the Hindus. And if Islamic law was fixed through religious texts, in Arabic but more often in Persian (the official language of the Mughal state), Hindu law varied according to region and caste. Moreover, it was rarely based on legal texts but rather on normative texts. New texts thus had to be urgently written. John Derrett, an authority on Indian legal history, estimates the number of legal treatises produced for the British at about fifty.48 Hastings chose his friend Halhed to translate the crowning piece of orientalist policy, a code of laws commissioned from a committee of pandits which was to serve as the basis for the administration of civil justice to Hindus. As Halhed had no knowledge of Sanskrit, the language in which the committee actually com-posed their text, he had to first have it translated in the form of an abstract into Persian, from which he translated it into english (Halhed had learnt the latter language while at oxford between 1768 and 1771). The topics contained in Halhed’s Code of Gentoo laws, first published to much attention by the eIC in 1776, were understood to confirm what Hastings believed was needed to ef-fectively govern: debt, inheritance, civil procedure, deposits, sale of stranger’s property, partnership, gift, slavery, master and servant, rent and hire, sale, boundaries, shares in the cultivation of lands, cities and towns and fines for damaging crops, defamation, assault, theft, violence, adultery, duties, women, and miscellaneous rules (including gaming, finding lost property, sales-tax and adoption).49

In similar fashion, a translation into Persian of two of the principal sources of Islamic law in India—al-Fatāwā al-Ālamgīriyya (a compendium in Arabic of Ḥanafī law compiled by the order of the Mughal emperor Aurung-zeb in the latter half of the 17th century) and the Hidāya (a 12th-century com-mentary also composed in Arabic)—was commissioned under the direction of four maulavis, including Muhammad Ḥusain Iṣfahānī.50 This in turn was rendered into english by David Anderson, one of Hastings’ coterie who, as a revenue administrator in upper Bengal since his arrival in India in 1767, had gained sufficient proficiency in Persian legal and fiscal terminology as well as in matters of revenue and diplomacy. It was because of this latter skill that Hastings despatched him with Tafazzul Ḥusain Khān to negotiate peace with the Marathas. Tafazzul Ḥusain acted as the principal negotiator and the treaty

48 For a list of expressly commissioned works, see John Duncan Martin Derrett, ‘San-skrit legal treatises compiled at the instance of the British,’ Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft 63 (1961), pp. 72–117.49 Ibid., p. 86. For a more recent assessment, see Nandini Bhattacharyya-Panda, Appro-priation and invention of tradition: the East India Company and Hindu law in early colonial Bengal (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 2007).50 Mohammed Ashraful Hukk, Hermann ethé and edward robertson, A descriptive catalogue of the Arabic and Persian manuscripts in Edinburgh University library (edin-burgh: University of edinburgh, 1925), p. 150.

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of Salbai, signed in May 1782, ended the First Anglo-Maratha War, ushering in a period of precarious peace.51

legal knowledge was not the only form sought after. Disputes over the jurisdiction of the various courts, for instance, gave rise to major controversies over the scope of British law in the new colonial context and, indeed, over the uncertain constitutional status of the eIC’s dominions.52 The translation en-terprise thus expanded to include gazetteers and other documents used by the erstwhile Mughal administration for tax collection, logistical needs, and gov-ernment in general. A proposal to translate the Ā’īn-i Akbarī was presented to the Court of Directors of the Company by Francis Gladwin (c. 1744–1812), an eIC soldier-turned-Calcutta-revenue-official, in the 1770s. The translation, made with the collaboration of many of the city’s Asian court officials and of reuben Burrow who supplied the astronomical notes, and published between 1783 and 1786 in three volumes in Calcutta, was widely acclaimed by contem-poraries as embodying, in the words of Gladwin’s generous patron Warren Hastings, ‘the original constitution of the Mogul empire, knowledge of which would enable British administration to return to ‘first principles’’ and ‘most easy and most familiar to the minds of the people.’53

The Ā’īn-i Akbarī served other purposes as well: Boughton rouse who, as tax collector in central Bengal, had developed a deep interest in the nature of property and its relationship with taxation and state revenue, had begun to have the relevant portions of the Ā’īn-i Akbarī translated into english many years before Gladwin. Already a recognized authority on questions of taxa-tion and land tenures in Bengal in the 1770s and an important protagonist in contemporary Indian and British debates on the subject, he published his im-pressive knowledge of taxation and land tenures in a Dissertation concerning the landed property of Bengal in london in 1791.54 Terrestrial surveying and mapmaking constituted another domain of intermediated knowledge, and James rennell, as we shall see shortly, was to use bits of rouse’s translation in compiling his ‘Map of Hindoostan’, the first large territorial map made until then by any Briton.

51 David Anderson to lawrence Dundas Campbell et al., editors of the Asiatic annual register, undated, included in ‘An account of the life and character of Tofuzzel Hussein Khan, the vakeel, or ambassador, of the nabob vizier Asof-ud-Dowlah, at Calcutta, during the government of Marquis Cornwallis,’ Asiatic annual register for the year 1803 (london, 1804), ‘Characters,’ pp. 2–4, on p. 3.52 See robert Travers, Ideology and empire in eighteenth-century India: the British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).53 Warren Hastings’ Minute on the publication of Gladwin’s translation of the Ayeen Akbari, or, The Institutes of the Emperor Akbar, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1783–86): vol. 1, p. ix, and Bl, Ior, Bengal Public Consultations, 2 June 1783, P/2/61, ff. 187–88.54 Charles William Boughton rouse, Dissertation concerning the landed property of Bengal (Calcutta, 1791). See also, ranajit Guha, A rule of property for Bengal: an essay on the idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963), pp. 54–59.

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A part of this brokered knowledge had to do with encounter itself. one such work, perhaps the best known, is the Siyar al-Muta’akhirīn, or a ‘review of modern times’, written by the historian and self-proclaimed go-between, Ghulām Ḥusain Khān Ṭabāṭabā’ī. Completed in 1781, it was almost imme-diately translated into english by a Turko-French resident of Calcutta called Monsieur raymond (also variously known as Haji Mustafa and Nota Manus) and published in the city in 1789. This work, whose author, advertised as ‘an Indian Nobleman of high rank, who wrote both as an Actor and Spectator’, spent many years in close contact with the British in Benares, lucknow and Calcutta, was written for Indian as well as european audiences. It attempts to provide a critical analysis of South Asian history during the 18th century—the fall of the Mughal empire, British successes in their face-off with the successor states, the French, the Dutch, contrasting these with their defeat at the hands of the Americans (Yenghi-Dunians—New Worlders—as he calls them) and the Marathas—and was to have a great influence on 19th-century British histori-ans like James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay.55

As Ṭabāṭabā’ī’s work suggests, the British were not the only ones under whose initiative these translation and knowledge-making exercises were being undertaken. While Tafazzul Ḥusain was translating Newton’s Principia mathematica into Arabic in Calcutta, another scholar-administrator Mir Mu-hammad Ḥusain Iṣfahānī (born in lucknow), ‘a man of great subtilty (sic) of mind and great extent of knowledge’—among others an authority in unānī medicine—had, in 1775, left on a three-year tour of europe, in order ‘to acquire knowledge, to see the world, and to inquire into those discoveries which the learned of those parts had made in the science of astronomy, in the choice of simple medicines, and the art of compound ones; in the qualities of plants, and the functions of heavenly bodies.’56 It was his interaction with the Com-pany’s British officials in Calcutta (where his wanderings in search of employ-

55 Ṭabāṭabā’ī, Seir mutaqherin (cit. n. 31), vol. 3, sections 2, 3, 4. The author’s description is taken from the title page of this edition. on Ṭabāṭabā’ī as a source of knowledge on Mughal India, see Henry Meirs elliot, The history of India, as told by its own histori-ans, 8 vols. (london: Trubner, 1867–1877), vol. 8, p. 198. Mention must also be made of at least a dozen other histories composed by self-conscious go-betweens, on which see Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘History as self-representation: the recasting of a political tradition in late eighteenth-century eastern India,’ Modern Asian studies 32 (1998), pp. 913–48. See also Simon Digby, ‘An eighteenth century narrative of a journey from Bengal to england: Munshi Isma’il’s new history,’ Christopher Shackle, ed., Urdu and muslim South Asia: studies in honour of Ralph Russell (london: School of oriental and African Studies, 1991), pp. 49–65.56 For Muhammad Ḥusain Iṣfahānī as an author of unāni medical texts, see Hastings to Muhammad razā Khān, 30 April 1782, Calendar of Persian correspondence (cit. n. 41), vol. 7, p. 164, acknowledging receipt of two of the former’s books. The quotation is from Ṭabāṭabā’ī Seir mutaqherin (cit. n. 31), vol. 2, pp. 462–63.

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ment had taken him) that had prompted this intercontinental voyage, by sea to england and overland on return via France, egypt and Arabia. He writes:

During my long social interaction and discourses, meetings and conversations I discovered about new thought and fresh discoveries, about celestial mechanics, heavenly bodies, the nature of the terres-trial globe, and life on earth, discoveries of innumerable, hitherto unknown islands on the southern quarter of the globe and the new world of America. Therefore, I attempted to elaborate upon some of these, such as the nature of the fixed stars and of the planets, the na-ture and shape of the planets, etc. At first sight, this knowledge might cause a lot of bewilderment, especially to those who were steeped in Greek philosophy and cosmology whose rules were embodied in the Almagest. Since the mysteries and principles of the new sciences were not yet diffused in India, I undertook to tour europe in order to directly access this mine of ideas and knowledge.57

In addition to writing an all-too-brief account of his travels in Persian and Arabic, the Mir settled in Calcutta, establishing very close links with other Shi’ite scholars living there—Tafazzul Ḥusain Khān and others such as Abū Tālib Khān, Ghulām Ḥusain Khān Ṭabāṭabā’ī and ‘Abd al-laṭīf Shushtarī, a young Iranian immigrant who, looking for work in India arrived in Calcutta in 1786 and after some searching was appointed the Nizām of Hyderabad’s vakīl to Calcutta. earning a meagre living from translating Arabic legal texts as mentioned earlier, Muhammad Ḥusain spent the rest of his life trying to form a community of scholars to work within the ‘new sciences’ with which he had now acquainted himself at first hand. This he did mainly through his fabled oratory skills. He also proposed a large-scale project to Hastings, simi-lar in scale to the one on Islamic and Hindu law, to translate Newtonian phys-ics and recent european other works in astronomy and medicine into Persian. Much to his regret, and that of his friend Ṭabāṭabā’ī, the proposal did not ma-terialize, although the Mir himself was made the governor-general’s personal agent at the Nizām’s court in Hyderabad.58

But more generally, as a brokered space par excellence, Calcutta also pro-vided the possibility to bring together diverse european skills, thus producing novel practices. James rennell, who was to make his name as ‘the first great english geographer’ and earn the royal Society’s Copley Medal, provides an ex-cellent example. Beginning his career as an ensign in the royal Navy operating off the coast of Brittany at the start of the Seven Years’ War, he picked up the art

57 Mīr Muhammad Ḥusain, Risālah-i aḥwāl-i mulk-i Farang u Hindustān, translated in Khan, Indian Muslim perceptions (cit. n. 39), p. 93.58 Ṭabāṭabā’ī, Seir mutaqherin (cit. n. 31), vol. 2, p. 463; Hastings to the Nizam of Hyderabad, 17 December 1785, Calendar of Persian correspondence (cit. n. 41), vol. 7, p. 137.

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of coastal and harbour surveying, skills he was able to use to great advantage from 1764 to 1777 when he managed, through the many contacts he had by then made, to procure himself a place as a surveyor in Bengal. Apart from draw-ing plans of fortifications, rennell was to survey the Ganges and Brahmaputra delta. Here he used the navigable distributaries of the system in the same way as one would a sea coast, thereby tracing in outline the myriad islands that made up the delta. The result, the first detailed map of Bengal, Bihar and orissa, was thus in part the product of a translation of marine surveying techniques to terrestrial ones—as well as of a long process of negotiations between a series of intermediaries mainly within the nascent judicial and survey institutions.59

But, it was also much more: in order to compile his ‘Map of Hindoostan’, material for which was garnered within the institutional context of the Sur-veyor’s office and later in london, he enjoyed not only the close collaboration of Boughton rouse, but also benefited from his relations with a fellow army officer, robert Barker (c.1732–1789) who, in the course of his military cam-paigns in Bengal and the Philippines and sundry private trade enterprises, had acquired a sizeable fortune and skills of mediation which gave him privileged access to various knowledge milieux ranging from Benares astronomer-pandits to the increasingly dispersed Mughal Persianate literati, and eventually to the royal Society (to which he was elected in 1775, on his return to england). others helped procure relevant information for him from other parts of the subcontinent, such as the map of Gujarat made by ‘a Brahmin of uncommon genius named Sadānand’ or the route map from Bengal to the Deccan made by a sepoy, Ghulām Muhammad.60 The intermediaries also included Frenchmen turned ‘Turk’, such as Antoine Polier and Claude Martin. In addition, identi-fying contemporary place names (with their pronunciations varying between different groups of speakers) and establishing a correspondence between their appellations with those known in Greek and Ptolemaic geography meant dab-bling in philology, which he got from William Davy (d. 1784) who, as an en-sign in the Company’s army, had learnt Persian and whose latinized system of orthography was subsequently adopted not only by the India Surveys, but also in faraway oxford, for english transcriptions of Persian. Jonathan Scott, who during his years as an ensign in the eIC’s army in the 1700s had also learnt Persian and Hindustani and on his return to england translated and pub-lished the memoirs of a late Mughal nobleman in 1786, provided rennell with

59 James rennell, A Bengal atlas: containing maps of the theatre of war and commerce on that side of Hindoostan (london, 1780).60 James rennell, Memoir of a map of Hindoostan, or the Mogul empire 3rd ed. (lon-don, 1793), p. 185, n. 6. For rennell in Bengal, see Thomas Henry Digges la Touche, ed., The journals of Major James rennell, first surveyor-general of India, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1910), pp. 95–248; Andrew S. Cook, ‘Major James ren-nell and A Bengal atlas (1780 and 1781),’ India Office Library and Records, Report 1976 (london: HMSo, 1978), pp. 4–42.

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an invaluable source for writing the political geography of Hindustan for the 1788 edition of the Memoir of a map of Hindoostan. Without their mediation, it is hard to imagine rennell gaining access to any of the knowledge circuits so crucial to the compilation of his innovative map.61

As the foregoing discussion suggests, this vast enterprise mobilised Asian and european go-betweens in highly entangled relationships, and cannot be understood simply as a concatenation of individual schemes of intermedia-tion initiated by one or another of the members of Hastings’ coterie. Indeed, it can only be properly conceived as a series of closely intertwined projects of intermediation which could not have existed independently of each other, nor elsewhere than in this contact zone. In this sense, following edwin Hutchins’ notion of ‘distributed cognition’—the idea that cultural knowledge is not to be found in single individuals but distributed throughout society—we could perhaps speak in this case of ‘distributed intermediation’ which encompasses not only different people involved in a single task but includes the mediation of others who have contributed to the development of the brokered knowledge that results.62

For instance, when, in the 1770s, in order to provide the company’s re-gional administration with the ability to understand local accounts (which were maintained in Bengali and not in Persian or Hindustani) Halhed com-posed his well-known Grammar of the Bengal language—again with what he acknowledged as, ‘the intermediate agency of Bengal Interpreters’—he found it impossible to have the book printed in Britain, because:

It was no easy task to procure a writer accurate enough to prepare an alphabet of a familiar and proportionate body throughout, and with that symmetrical exactness which is necessary to the regular-ity and neatness of a fount. Mr. [William] Bolts (who is supposed to be well versed in this language) attempted to fabricate a set of types for it, with the assistance of the ablest artists in london. But as he has egregiously failed in executing even the easiest part, or primary alphabet, of which he has published a specimen, there is no reason to suppose that his project when completed, would have advanced beyond the usual state of imperfection to which new inventions are constantly exposed.

It was finally with Charles Wilkins, another of Hastings’ protégés, in the printing press that had just set up at Hughly that Halhed with the help of

61 James rennell, ‘Preface,’ Memoir of a map of Hindoostan, or the Mogul’s empire (london, 1783), p. vi; and ‘Introduction,’ (london, 1788), p. lxiii et seq. on Barker see also Simon Schaffer’s essay in the present volume.62 See edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), chap-ter 4.

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FIGUre 7 Cartouche from rennell’s map of ‘Hindoostan’, 1782, showing Brahmins handing their sacred manuscripts (Shastras) to Britannia, with the go-between rennell represented through his surveying instruments in the foreground, between the Brahmins and Britannia.

Bengali scribes who provided him with a set of alphabets from which type could be practically produced, and Wilkins’s blacksmith-cum-printer em-ployee, Panchānan, were able to cast a set of Bengali type. However, Halhed acknowledged only his friend Wilkins—‘his success has exceeded every ex-pectation,’ he wrote in the preface to the Grammar—in much the same way as

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lise Meitner’s pioneering work in nuclear fission in the early 20th century was rewarded by a Nobel Prize—for her partner otto Hahn. In the case at hand, at any rate, not only did the successful mechanical reproduction of Halhed’s text require the coordination of a number of actors, it also blurred conventional distinctions between head and hand and, indeed, between the knowledge of the colonizer and that of the colonized.63

The intellectual production in Calcutta relied on a rising number of book-shops for european books and numerous libraries which had sprouted all over the city, containing manuscripts from all over the subcontinent and from cen-tral Asia, collected, but often pillaged by the British during their campaigns of conquest. Many of these collections were to be centralised in the library of the College of Fort William established in 1800. The casting of Bengali and Devanāgarī fonts in the early 1780s, which we spoke of earlier, gave rise to a number of printing presses—more than 40 in 1800.64 Baptist missionary activity from the neighbouring Danish colony of Serampore accelerated the publication and diffusion of printed texts, greatly expanding the number and roles of knowledge go-betweens who now entered the world of material culture through which locally constructed knowledge could be widely circulated.

Not all brokered knowledge was made in institutions run directly by the eIC’s administration, or rather not all of it was certified as knowledge within them and disseminated by them to wider publics. In 1784, under the patron-age of Warren Hastings, William Jones along with a handful of other British residents of Calcutta, many mentioned in this essay, founded the Asiatic So-ciety of Bengal. Modelled on the royal Society of london and located in the newly built Court House which stood at the heart of the imperial city, this Society was to rapidly become an extremely efficient agency for the worldwide diffusion of its ‘brokered’ intellectual production which ranged from botany, linguistics, philology and antiquities to mathematics, astronomy, geography and economics. Its members, drawn almost exclusively from amongst the european knowledge go-betweens, met regularly to discuss and validate the

63 Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, ‘Preface,’ A grammar of the Bengal language (Hoogly, 1778), respectively, pp. xv and xxiii. For Halhed’s Bengali scribal collaborators, see Muhammad Abdul Qayyum, A critical study of the early Bengali grammars: Halhed to Haughton (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1982), chapter 3. For Panchanan, see Katharine Smith Diehl and Hemendra Kumar Sircar, Early Indian imprints (New York & london: Scarecrow Press, 1964), pp. 37–38; for his later career as a key figure and patriarch in the emergence of Bengali typography see Fiona G. e. ross, The printed Bengali character and its evolution (richmond: Curzon, 1999), pp. 11–12, 24, 42, 45–46, 60, 121. Halhed’s Grammar is additionally remarkable in that it is the first book to have been printed in Bengal.64 Graham Shaw, Printing in Calcutta to 1800: a description and checklist of printing in late 18th-century Calcutta (london: Bibliographical Society, 1981), p. 3. See also Dennis everard rhodes, The spread of printing. Eastern hemisphere: India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Thailand (london: routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 21–31.

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different forms of knowledge they were constructing in the Company’s admin-istrative, military and judicial institutions through these multi-linguistic and intercultural projects. The Society’s journal Asiatick researches was a powerful agency for publicizing its results—its audience ranging from India and europe to North America. The seven hundred copies of the first edition shipped from Calcutta to england in 1789 sold out almost immediately, with pirated editions being brought out within years.65

Living to gether separately: strategies and status of British and South Asian go-bet weens

Although this panoply of administrative and learned institutions provided an umbrella for all these intrinsically interrelated enterprises, individual actors worked with varying and diverse strategies. As remarked on earlier, many Britons saw in this form of activity a window of opportunity to gain the approval of influential members of the Company’s hierarchy, or of the governor-general in order to acquire a recognized expertise which they could capitalize on upon their return to Britain—the eIC had indeed long served as a privileged space within which aspiring Britons could realise their private ambitions. They served within the hierarchy of the Company’s burgeoning colonial administration, making use of its infrastructure in order to build new connections between the specialized practices of the different worlds that met in the composite space of Calcutta and the territories under its control. This strategy earned some, such as robert Barker, Charles Boughton rouse and James rennell, their election to the royal Society and some, like the first two, even knighthoods and seats in Parliament. Boughton rouse also served for a time as secretary to the Board of Control, the body set up by the 1772 act of Parliament to supervise the general policies of the eIC; rennell’s career and contributions to geography and exploration are too well-known to be dwelt on here, except to remark that they were in fact crucially built on intermediation and explicitly advertised as such in the prefaces to the early editions of his cartographic work.66

However, not all met with such luck: in spite of his groundbreaking work on Hindu law and the Bengali language, Halhed’s achievements were not crowned by any recognition by any european learned society and his repu-tation was, indeed, ruined when, as a member of Parliament at the turn of

65 Centenary review of the Asiatic Society of Bengal from 1784 to 1883, 4 parts (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1885), pt. 1, pp. 47–48. See also William Jones to Charles Wilkins, 27 February, 1789, Jones, Letters (cit. n. 46), vol. 2, p. 828.66 Kapil raj, Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chapter 2.

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the 19th century, he defended the millenarian tracts and prophecies of rich-ard Brothers and Joanna Southcott. Nonetheless, Halhed eventually regained some credibility when he was appointed civil secretary to the eIC in london and was able to devote part of his spare time consulting the vast collection of Persian manuscripts in the Company’s library.67 of course, many were not particularly seeking scholarly recognition, their contributions as key knowl-edge go-betweens notwithstanding. Such was the case, for instance, of David Anderson who had not only gained recognition as a revenue expert, but had acquired great skills in Persian, and sought to remake his life as a ‘nabob’ upon his return to Scotland, where he spent the last forty years of his life living off the tidy fortune of £50,000 he had amassed as a go-between in India. As he wrote to his role model and mentor, that ‘Nabob of the North’ Sir lawrence Dundas (1712–1781) the way to a fortune lay in ‘studying the different branches of the Company’s affairs’ and ‘gaining the friendship of my superiors by as-siduity and diligence.’ However, Anderson continued to act as a relay between his ‘literary friends at edinburgh’ and India, regarding the ancient astronomy of the Hindus—using his close relationship with Tafazzul Ḥusain Khān.68

While some sought to make their future careers by serving in the Com-pany’s India administration, others used the infrastructure and protection af-forded by the eIC to set up their own knowledge making enterprises, much as many had done, and indeed were continuing to do, as private traders in the Company’s employ. As entrepreneurs, men like Francis Gladwin and Charles Wilkins, two of the most prominent of broker-orientalists, employed their own indigenous specialists in order to translate, edit and publish new works. In 1784, while at the same time holding responsibility for the management of Calcutta’s revenue department, Gladwin bought the eIC’s printing press for a considerable sum of money and launched the Calcutta gazette, the city’s first weekly for publishing private advertisements and government notifications. He compiled a number of ‘compendious’ dictionaries of Islamic law, revenue terms in use in the Mughal empire, dissertations on Persian prosody, poetry and rhetoric in addition, of course, to the famous ‘Ayeen Akbery’. He edited, translated or wrote thirty works, thus making him the most widely published author in late 18th century Calcutta and, indeed, a key go-between of the pe-riod. He also worked towards the cutting of type fonts ‘in the oriental Char-acters’ which he presented to the College of Fort William in 1801 soon after it opened. Gladwin enjoyed the generous patronage of Hastings and also of the

67 rosane rocher, Orientalism, poetry and the millennium: the chequered life of Nathan-iel Brassey Halhed (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983).68 For his wealth on leaving India, see David Anderson to James Anderson, 4 Febru-ary 1785, Bl, Anderson MSS, Add. MS 45437, f. 17; for his attitude towards learning, see Anderson to lawrence Dundas, 12 october 1772, Bl, Add. MS 45438, f. 85. For his continued contact with Tafazzul Ḥusain, see Anderson to the editor, Asiatic annual register (cit. n. 51), p. 4

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east India Company who subscribed to dozens of each of his publications. However, in spite of this largesse, Gladwin was chronically in debt, was de-clared bankrupt in 1787 and his property assigned to his creditors. In his later years, he was forced to take on a petty job in the Company’s administration in Patna where he died a pauper in 1812.69 William Bolts, whose career is evoked in the introduction to this volume, provides an even more striking example of the perilous destiny of the freebooting go-between.

The fortunes of Charles Wilkins—who, as we saw, also invested in print-ing in Bengal, setting up the first printing press in the province, in Hughly—could not have been more dissimilar. After successfully printing Halhed’s Grammar, he lost little time in extending his printing activities by establish-ing a press in Calcutta to print the standard forms and documents for the various government departments in english, Persian (nasta’līq) and Bengali. Although a private enterprise, the press was heavily subsidized by the Calcutta government—Gladwin only went so far as to seek subsidy for his books—as Wilkins claimed he could not be expected to gain much financially from it.70 A keener entrepreneur than a serious scholar, he was always quick to recog-nize and cash in on promising openings—for instance, establishing himself as the undisputed authority on Sanskrit when all his other colleagues were fix-ated on Persian—but never fully realizing them. He only partially realized the three major scholarly projects he undertook—a Sanskrit grammar, a Sanskrit dictionary and a translation of the Mahābhārata. Yet, this did not stand in the way of his election to the royal Society in 1788—within two years of returning to england—mainly on the strength of the only publication he had until then, the Bhagvat-Geeta, published in london in 1785—at the expense of the east India Company. He also gained a knighthood in 1833.

If european knowledge intermediaries framed their strategies mainly in one of these two ways, the options were not the same for Asian go-betweens. Unlike their european counterparts, they were not already eIC employees prior to involving themselves as accredited go-betweens. In fact, those who sought employment precisely in the capacity of knowledge intermediaries—for there were many other forms of intermediation it must be remembered

69 As there is no scholarly work on Francis Gladwin, the information presented here is largely based on original documents held in the British library, in its manuscript col-lection, in the Asia and Africa Collections and in the India office records, two short biographical notes—‘Baptisms in Calcutta—Biographical notes,’ Bengal past and pres-ent 28 (1924), pp. 206–207 and Peter James Marshall, ‘Francis Gladwin (c. 1744/5–1812),’ ODNB (cit. n. 46) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10788, accessed 31 March 2009]—and scant references to him in Thomas roebuck, The annals of the College of Fort William, from the period of its foundation by Richard, Marquis Wellesley on the 4th May, 1800, to the present time (Calcutta, 1819), p. 27. For an inventory of Gladwin’s estate see Bl, Ior, l/AG/27/48. See also Shaw, Printing in Calcutta (cit. n. 64).70 extract from Bengal Consultations, 13 November 1778, Bl, Ior, Home Miscella-neous Series, H/207, pp. 463–74.

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and many other niches where they might have been gainfully employed—had to convince the european administration of their bona-fides, having to seek client-patron relations with the British by devising means to gain the trust of their potential employers. This was no simple task, many having to volunteer to fight, or negotiate, on the side of the British against the forces of one or another of their own kin from the successor states to the Mughal empire. This was particularly true of the Persianate scholar-bureaucrats, as ‘there was no differentiation between civil and military employment’ in the Mughal state service which continued to serve as a model for their norms of comportment.71 Almost all the Persianate go-betweens mentioned in this essay took part in military campaigns and diplomatic negotiations for the British in order to prove their ability as competent intermediaries, although this did not always land them suitable employment.

one might be tempted to view them as ‘renegades’, simply as those who ‘desert a party, person, or principle, in favour of another’, and be inspired by Georg Simmel’s insightful reflections on the renegade who ‘exhibits a char-acteristic loyalty to his new political, religious, or other party. The awareness and firmness of this loyalty (other things being equal) surpass those of persons who have belonged to the party all along … renegade loyalty is so strong be-cause it includes what loyalty in general can dispense with, namely, the con-scious continuance of the motives of the relationship.’72 But these were no simple times, and the ultimate victor in this age of instability set off in the wake of the collapse of the Mughal empire and British conquest was certainly not clear: ‘Heaven knows what would be the eventual upshot of this state of things,’ wrote, with some anxiety, the go-between and author of the Riyāẓu-s-Salātīn (a history of Bengal), Ghulām Ḥusain ‘Salīm’ Zaidpurī, in 1786.73 These

71 William Harrison Moreland, ‘rank (mansab) in the Mogul state service,’ Muzaf-far Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal state 1526–1750 (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 1998; original Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1936), pp. 641–65), pp. 213–33, on p. 213; and John F. richards, ‘Norms of comportment among imperial Mughal officers,’ Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Moral conduct and authority: the place of adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 255–89.72 The definition is from The Oxford English Dictionary online ed. [http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed 31 March 2009]. Georg Simmel, ‘Faithfulness and gratitude’, The sociology of Georg Simmel, tr. and ed. by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press of Glen-coe, 1964), pp. 379–95, on pp. 383–4.73 Ghulām Ḥusain ‘Salīm’ Zaidpurī, Riyāẓu-s-Salātīn, a history of Bengal, tr. Maulavi Abdus Salam (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1902–4), p. 414. British supremacy over the whole Subcontinent was at the time anything but a foregone conclusion. As ren-nell wrote: ‘I believe there are many who think that the British might have extended their possessions in Hindoostan.’ But, he cautioned, ‘we got possession of Bengal and the Circars, under circumstances particularly favourable: such as may never occur again.’ ‘Introduction,’ Memoir of a map of Hindoostan, 3rd ed. (london, 1788), p. cv.

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elites thus found themselves having to constantly change allegiances in the unstable world of the late 18th century.

Thus I’tisām al-Dīn participated under Major Martin Yorke, son-in-law of John Zephaniah Holwell—one of the originators of the ‘Black Hole of Cal-cutta’ myth—in a campaign against in the raja of Birbhum in 1760, before trying his luck with another with a whole string of army officers, at one point even fighting against the combined forces of the Mughal emperor and the nawābs of Awadh and Bengal. All the while he did not sever ties with other

FIGUre 8 The go-between Mirza Shaikh I’tisam al-Din (1730–1800), as portrayed in the frontispiece of the first edition of his Shigurf namah i Velaët, tr. James edward Alexander (london, 1827).

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members of the Mughal service elite and, when Shāh ‘Ālam’s royal ministers in Calcutta decided to send an envoy to George III to plead for the monarch’s restoration to his throne and adequate protection against his enemies, they chose I’tiṣām al-Dīn whom they reckoned had established sufficient credibility among the British to successfully carry out the mission. Similarly, Abū Ṭālib Khān (1752–1802), the author of the poem that opens Simon Schaffer’s essay, having lost his employment in the court of Awadh, worked as a revenue assis-tant under the British resident there before being deputed to suppress a revolt by a local raja. This, however, did not help Abū Ṭālib procure any employment for the rest of his life, which he spent in dire poverty. Nonetheless, with the help of his friends, Tafazzul Ḥusain Khān and ‘Abd al-laṭīf Shushtarī, he un-dertook his well-known journey to europe, revelling in being advertised as a ‘Persian prince’ in the British press. Tafazzul Ḥusain himself spent much time negotiating on behalf of the eIC with various regional powers and the rest of his life in Calcutta as the nawāb of Awadh’s vakīl (representative). In the pay of another regional power, he nonetheless formed part of Calcutta’s intellectual milieu of european and Asian go-betweens.74

However, changing allegiances carried its own risks, since each potential patron expected hopefuls to provide sensitive information from the adverse camp. Some even had to walk the tightrope of the double agent. Thus, in his monumental Siyar al-Muta’akhirīn, Ghulām Ḥusain Khān Ṭabāṭabā’ī details the risks he undertook to pass information from Mīr Qāsim, the nawāb of Bengal’s camp to the eIC and vice versa and the (well-founded) suspicions his doings engendered.

Sitting between two stools did carry some advantages, though. In his short autobiography, Ṭabāṭabā’ī recounts of the time he felt called upon to meet John Bristow, the eIC’s resident in lucknow, to mediate in favour of General Thomas Goddard, his english patron, so that the latter could leave the Com-pany’s service to join that of the nawāb of Awadh.75 Go-betweens, inasmuch as they are strangers to at least one of the two societies they seek to connect, thus served not only to make different cultures communicate, but sometimes also parts of the same culture which could not, or did not, communicate with each other, using what Simmel in his well-known essay, ‘The stranger’, refers to as their ‘objectivity’. The stranger, he tells us, ‘is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore

74 Mushirul Hasan, ed., Westward bound: travels of Mirza Abu Taleb, tr. Charles Stew-art (New Delhi: oxford University Press, 2005; originally published: london, 1810), p. 96. For the biographical details of these go-betweens, I have relied on the valuable information based on primary sources provided in Khan, Indian Muslim perceptions (cit. n. 39).75 ‘An account of Gholaum Hossein Khan, author of a very valuable and interesting work, entitled ‘Seir Mutakharin, or a view of modern times,’ translated from the Persic original; interspersed with anecdotes of the late General Godard (sic),’ Asiatic annual register for the year 1801 (london, 1802), ‘Characters’ pp. 28–32, on pp. 30–31.

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approaches them with the specific attitude of ‘objectivity.’ But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure com-posed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.’76

If members of the Persianate service gentry often chose to change alle-giances in order to gain their place as knowledge go-betweens, the strategies adopted by the Sanskritized elite, who were also conversant in Persian, seem to be quite different.77 We have no examples, for instance, of any of them taking part in martial activities. In any case, there were far fewer Sanskritic knowledge intermediaries in the Calcutta space before the 19th century—one of the reasons adduced by the British being their unwillingness to let strang-ers into their fold—and even fewer have been studied. We do, however, have a remarkable study on one of the most prominent representatives of this elite, rādhākānta Sarman ‘Tarkavāgīsa’. His pathway to a career in knowledge in-termediation passed through patronage by various members of the Hindu rul-ing class and the nouveau riche indigenous elite. Nabakṛṣṇa Deb (c. 1718–1797) the self-styled ‘Maharaja’ of Sobha Bazar in north Calcutta, who amassed a fortune as ‘political banyan’ (diplomatic go-between) for the British, was quick to see that patronage of culture and learning would help his own status grow, playing a central role in the ascension of rādhākānta. Nabakṛṣṇa granted the latter a large tract of land, prevailed upon the Mughal empreror to con-fer upon rādhākānta the title of ‘panditapradhāna’ (foremost among pandits) and eventually presented him to the governor-general. Unlike the Persian elite who had to struggle in order to find a suitable niche, rādhākānta had the lux-ury of having Warren Hastings purchase for him a piece of land which yielded a decent annual revenue before accepting to start what turned out to be one of the most significant collaborations between the Sanskritic literarti and the British—the composition in Sanskrit of the Purānārthaprakāsha (a digest of Indian antiquities) and the supervision of its translation into Persian, one of William Jones’ primary sources for Hindu chronology.78

76 Simmel, ‘The stranger,’ The Sociology of Georg Simmel (cit. n. 72), pp. 402–408, on p. 404. See also Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘The stranger effect in early modern Asia,’ leonard Blussé and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, eds., Shifting communities and iden-tity in early modern Asia (leiden: CNWS, 2003), pp. 181–202.77 The Tagores, a prominent family of banyāns to various european companies and individuals in the 18th century, are a typical example of this Sanskritized, polyglot elite. See Uma Das Gupta, ‘Tagore family (per. 1690–1951),’ ODNB (cit. n. 46) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/94946, accessed 31 March 2009].78 rosane rocher, ‘The career of rādhākānta Tarkavāgīsa, an eighteenth-century pandit in British employ,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 109 (1989), pp. 627–33. See also rocher, ‘radhakanta Sarman (d. 1803),’ ODNB (cit. n. 46), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63550, accessed 31 March 2009]. I owe the epithet ‘political banyan’ to Somendra Chandra Nandy in his entry for ‘Nabakrishna,’ ibid. For another account which throws light on the training and trajectories of Sanskri-tized elites, although from the Tamil region, see Teruveradu Mutiah, ‘An account of

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Go-bet weens and the knowled ge order, 1800–1830

These differences nothwithstanding, a lot united Asian and european go-be-tweens—not only because, as we saw, none could function without the other, but also because knowledge of, or provided by, the ‘other’ was essential to the understanding of the present, an asset in one’s own world in this age of revo-lution. ‘Salīm’ Zaidpurī concluded his history of Bengal with the following couplet:

All wranglings between Christianity and Islam, after all, lead to the same place:

The dream of empire is one and the same, only its interpretations vary.79

However, it was not only the interpretations of the dreams of empire that varied, so too did the means to manage empire. If Tafazzul Ḥusain Khān and his friends Mīr Muhammad Ḥusain Iṣfahānī and ‘Abd al-laṭīf Shushtarī iden-tified Newtonian science as the key to european imperial success, most British and a host of other South Asians thought it lay in an understanding of the Mughal institutions, practices and civilities through which power had hith-erto been exercised; hence the intense interest in law, history, fiscal policy, languages and linguistics, surveying, geography, chronology and ethnogra-phy that comprised the content of the various knowledge-making enterprises. These, many thought could also form the basis for political reform to shape the future of British society itself.

At any rate, mediation in Calcutta had far-reaching consequences, affect-ing and shaping knowledge across the British empire including the metropolis itself, serving either as a positive or as a negative model. The Asiatic annual register, started in 1799 and modelled on edmund Burke’s Annual register, was an effective instrument to diffuse throughout Great Britain, ‘the man-ners and customs of its [India’s] inhabitants … a tract of country considerably larger than France, and inhabited by thirty-two millions of civilized people.’ At a time when the United Kingdom was itself being constructed from its constituent parts, it aimed to give the British public ‘a general knowledge of her eastern Provinces. A connected History of the rise and progress of these Provinces, and of the east-India Company’s commercial concerns, has never been attempted.’ In their prospectus, the editors thus proposed ‘to offer to the Public, in the first part of their Miscellany, a connected Historical Memoir

the life of Teruveradu Mutiah, a learned Hindû, a native of the Carnatic. Written by himself in the english language,’ Asiatic annual register … 1801 (cit. n. 75), ‘Characters’, pp. 13–15.79 ‘Salīm’ Zaidpurī, Riyāẓu-s-Salātīn (cit. n. 73), p. 414.

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of British India, from the foundation of the company’s establishments on the coast of Coromandel, to the present plenitude of their power.’ The other parts comprised a chronology of public, civil and military events in Asia; biographi-cal accounts of prominent Asians and europeans ‘from the earliest period of authenticated history, to the present times’; travel accounts; essays on Asian arts, sciences and general literature; and a review of publications dealing with the east. The Register ran for 12 years, appeared annually between 1799 and 1811, with almost a thousand regular subscribers and often went into a second edition. It definitively ceased publication a few years after the death of one of its main editors, lawrence Dundas Campbell (d. 1807), and because of the chronically unsound financial status of its publisher, John Debrett (1753–1822) of Debrett’s Peerage of England, Scotland and Ireland fame.80

Social, political and scientific knowledge from India not only helped shed light on the past of europe’s modern sciences and legitimize them, as Simon Schaffer’s essay so convincingly argues, they also provided a template for the future of British society. But, although this vast enterprise of intermediation was conducted through official encouragement and within the broad institu-tional framework of the eIC’s colonial administration, it still relied until the end of the 18th century on individual initiatives albeit bolstered by lucrative incentives and hopes of a career in the world of knowledge. The 19th century in the context of British India was to see the progressive institutionalisation and broad dissemination of this effort through a number of collective official and private initiatives. This, of course, entailed the induction of South Asian go-betweens into subaltern ranks of the new institutions, in no way implying the disappearance of intermediation, but rather its routinisation.

The most significant of these new institutions was the College of Fort Wil-liam established in Calcutta in 1800. The end of the 18th century saw Great Britain and its empire under severe threat from revolutionary France, both through its military strength and the force of its egalitarian ideals. In order to counter the propagation of ‘erroneous principles’ of the French revolution among its european employees, lord Wellesley (1760–1842), governor-general in Calcutta from 1797 to 1805, founded a college there to inculcate in them the ‘sound and correct principles of religion and government’. In order to do this, junior recruits to the Company (writers) were instructed in european learning as well as in the languages, sciences, and philosophies of South Asia and the

80 Plan of an Asiatic register, or proposals for publishing annually, a view of the history, politics, commerce, and literature, of Hindustân; together with a connected detail of the principal occurrences, civil, military, and commercial, of British India (london, 1798). Compare with ‘Preface,’ The annual register, or a view of the history, politicks, and literature, of the year 1758, ed. edmund Burke (london, 1759), pp. iii–vi. The Asiatic annual register appeared annually from 1799 until 1811 when, due to the death of one of main editors, lawrence Dundas Campbell, and the chronically unsound financial status of its publisher, John Debrett, the publication definitively ceased. I am in the process of preparing a short historical analysis of the annual.

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hierarchised structure of its society. They had as teachers not only many Brit-ish, but also a number of South Asian go-betweens, and when, in 1806, part of the teaching was shifted to Haileybury in england, some of the Indian teach-ers were also moved to teach alongside the likes of the political economist, Thomas Malthus. A knowledge of Indian social organisation would then be capital in organising modern British society itself.81

Indeed, hierarchy in society, as exemplified in South Asia and verified in nature, were to become the founding principle of many scientific and social organisations of 19th-century Britain, such as The royal Institution created in london in 1799 by private shareholders, including a third who were associ-ated with the eIC.82 In addition to providing scientific expertise to the Board of Trade and the eIC, the royal Institution had an ambitious programme to provide scientific lectures for the general public and a laboratory for public demonstrations. In his inaugural address, the Institution’s ‘wizard experimen-talist’ Humphry Davy (1778–1829) assured his audience that ‘the unequal divi-sion of property and of labour, the difference of rank and condition amongst mankind, are the sources of power in civilized life, its moving causes, and even its very soul.’83 Conversely, brokered knowledge from India, especially texts such as Ṭabāṭabā’ī’s Siyar al-Muta’akhirīn, were also to furnish a model for British society of how not to be: both Macaulay and Mill used these in shaping their own ‘anglicist’ positions.

Although intermediation flourished and showed no signs of declining at the dawn of modernity and the Industrial revolution, the lot of go-betweens themselves (as individuals or even as groups) continued to be a precarious one. The Calcutta go-betweens of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were no exceptions. one of the indirect consequences of the Cornwallis Code (bet-ter known as the Permanent Settlement) of 1793, turning tax farmers into tenure-holding rentiers, was a mass influx into Calcutta of the new Bengali landlords from the countryside. In the decades that followed, this new, agrar-ian, Bengali-speaking middle class edged out the older Persianate groups of their privileged status within the colonial administration. With one foot now firmly entrenched in the Permanent Settlement, the Bhadralok (Bengali for propertied, respectable people), as they came to style themselves, set out to se-cure the other foot in the new urban structures—the offices, judiciary, schools and other professions opened up by the colonial administration. In the course

81 richard Wellesley, ‘Notes on the foundation of a college at Fort William, 10 July 1800,’ The despatches, minutes and correspondence, of the Marquess Wellesley, K.G., during his administration in India, ed. robert Montgomerie Martin, 5 vols. (london: W. H. Allen & Co., 1836), vol. 2, pp. 325–55, on p. 346. See also, raj, Relocating modern science (cit. n. 66), chapter 4.82 Morris Berman, Social change and scientific organization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 78.83 Humphrey Davy, The collected works of Sir Humphrey Davy, Bart. ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (london: Smith, elder & Co., 1839–40), vol. 7, p. 83.

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of time they turned their attention to acquire ‘european’ learning and sci-ence, through english language education. In 1817, they opened a school in Calcutta—the Hindu College—to learn reading, writing, grammar, and arith-metic in both english and Bengali as well as history, geography, chronology, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and other sciences. Various Britons who had come to Calcutta seeking employment taught these subjects. Indeed, it was the first of its kind outside europe and North America, and served as a model for the subsequent creation of schools and colleges elsewhere in the Subcontinent. Already in the early 1830s, many graduates from Hindu College had begun emigrating to the rest of south Asia, many establishing educational institutions there. It was clearly part of their strategy to establish themselves as the new indigenous elite, with a clear identity as cultural and knowledge intermediaries between the european and indigenous populations. As english and other vernaculars from the subcontinent progressively replaced Persian in the colonial administration, the older Indo-Persian literati were relegated to subaltern jobs in the various lower courts of the city and the provinces which continued to use the latter language, and lost their place of prime go-betweens they had enjoyed until the beginning of the 19th century.

Tafazzul Ḥusain’s and Iṣfahānī’s dreams of regenerating a Persianate sa-vant élite around european learning—and through this, perhaps empire as well—clearly did not work for their kinsmen. However, they finally found an unlikely but highly successful taker, the bhadralok, a class of dynamic Bengali- and english-speaking go-betweens, to carry their project to fruition, but in a more polarized world in which winners and losers were more clearly visible.

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Mapping Knowledge Go-Betweens in Calcutta, 1770-1820

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