My ‘Oriental Read’ may be stretching the bounds of what you might expect. The book in question was not published when
I first encountered it, and eventually appeared only because I edited and
published it myself I have been interested in genealogy all my adult life.
In part this was because my mother’s family kept a large number of
letters and diaries most of which are now held by the Bedfordshire
Archives and Records Service (BARS).
Back in the 1980s I edited for publication one of these diaries, of a minor
landowner in the 1840s. My next task had to be the diary of John Hatfield
Brooks, in the India Army 1843-1863. and I needed to understand how
the Indian army worked, the social life of an officer and his family, and
the history of the Sikh Wars and the ‘Mutiny’. Diaries in my view need
to be tackled prosopographically. I apologise for this word but what it
means is pursuing the life of every single person mentioned to find as
much about them as possible. Some of course may have got into the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography but for the majority it means
individual research and a lot of reading. The result of my studies was a
picture, I hope reasonably accurate and rounded, of life in military
cantonments in this period. The military exploits of course have to be
covered, but so too do such matters as the voyage out in an East
Indiaman, the work of chaplains, the ‘step’ - i.e. the system of
promotion, freemasonry in India, amateur dramatics, the low morale of
the Bengal Army after the ‘Mutiny’ (Brooks spent some time seeking a
transfer to the Bombay Army which was largely unaffected by the
‘Mutiny’), and so forth. Having learnt how to use the records in the
British library, the works of the late Anthony Farrington, PJO Taylor and
many others, and of course BACSA books, I then turned to other of my
forebears who had connections with India - a two greats grandfather who
was an officer in the East India Company’s maritime service, a
grandfather who was a tea planter, etc. Another ancestor was responsible
for the worst British defeat in India in the 18th century resulting in the
Treaty of Wargaon 1779, whereby he (the ancestor) undertook on behalf
of the Company to part with half of British India to the Marathas. Warren
Hastings chose to deal with this humiliation by simply ignoring it. The
absorbing work goes on with (if I manage to finish it) a book on Scottish
Merchants in Calcutta, Singapore and Batavia in the early nineteenth
century.
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