Retrospective from Late Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh

WHILE SAIYID Ahmad spent the last quarter of the nineteenth century working from Aligarh for the educational advance of India’s Muslims, William, after some years on the Council of India in London, eventually followed John back to Edinburgh, there to continue like his brother before him the religious, historical and educational interests that had marked his Indian career. These active Edinburgh years of the Muirs, belying many popular caricatures of Indian retirement in Cheltenham, or in Scotland’s favoured city of St Andrews, provide a context in which to evaluate from a longer-term perspective some of the issues this study has raised concerning Scottish Orientalism and Empire, Enlightenment and Evangelicalism, and the Muirs’ interfaces with Indian scholars. Sharing many ‘causes’ though they did, the temperamental and intellectual differences between John and William were accentuated in retirement, though they seldom commented on their disagreements. John, relieved to be free of administrative duties, had returned to Scotland in 1853 to live with his mother and sisters, sharing responsibility for the growing brood of nephews and nieces sent home for schooling by William. In Edinburgh he relished the quiet life of a private scholar, working very energetically and often from behind the scenes, for several religious, Indological and educational causes. These included the campaign, provoked by the events of 1857, to end government patronage of temple practices already noted in Chapter Seven, the promotion of comparative religion and philosophy as well as Sanskrit studies, movements for a more liberal approach to biblical interpretation and, rather more vociferously, for the reform of Scottish higher education and Scottish candidacy for the new Indian Civil Service. John occasionally arranged introductions for Indians visiting Britain, notably for the Brahmin convert to Christianity, Nehemiah Goreh, with whom he continued to correspond intermittently. But that he had to rely for information on Goreh’s activities from the Cambridge Sanskritist, E. B. Cowell, suggests they were not very close. Probably Goreh, ‘plagued with life-long struggles with doubt’ himself, would have derived little comfort from John’s own latter-day spiritual trajectory. John corresponded too with Rajaram, ‘my old pandit in Benares’, receiving Sanskrit manuscripts from him and news of his own writing and publishing activities .

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