The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company.

• Author: Trautmann, Thomas R.
• Position: Book review

The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. By ROSANE ROCHER and LUDO ROCHER. Royal Asiatic Society Books. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2012. Pp. xv + 238, 5 plates. $145.

Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) has had to wait a couple of centuries to get biographers with the level of Indological knowledge and skills of historical research that are needed to assess his life and works in depth. It has been worth the wait. Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher seem to have been preparing themselves to write this book through a lifetime of Indological scholarship in many fields, above all law (Dharmasastra) and the Sanskrit grammarians (Vyakarana), in which Colebrooke made fundamental contributions; and also through the work of Rosane Rocher on two other of the Calcutta Indologists, Nathanial Brassey Halhed and Alexander Hamilton. In many ways this book is the culmination of decades of preparation and accomplished scholarship in Indology and its history. The result is magnificent.

Disciplinary specialization makes it hard for us to fully assess the polymaths of an earlier age, and Colebrooke's interests ran in many directions. A short list of the main fields would be, for Indology proper, law, grammar, religion, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and epigraphy. He wrote a hundred-page article on Sanskrit and Prakrit poetry, but it was really about prosody exclusively; poetry was one of the few lacunae in Colebrooke's wide-ranging reading and writing. He also wrote at length on policy regarding agriculture and commerce; geography and geology (origin of the Ganga; height of the Himalaya; Himayalyan glaciers; variable depth of the ocean; structure of the earth); botany; and meteorology. There are eighty-five items in the list of his publications, and not only have the biographers read them all, they comment on each one.

Colebrooke wrote all these pieces while working full time for the East India Company, mainly as a judge, but in various other capacities as well; at the summit of his career he was made a member of the supreme council in Calcutta. He was also president of the Asiatic Society. His scholarship had to be fitted in after hours of a busy official life, but his offices supported it as well, by a generous salary and access to Indian scholars who were on the Company payroll as court pandits or, between postings, were maintained by Colebrooke himself out of pocket. He also maintained copyists, building up an exceptional...