Henry Thomas Colebrooke

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Henry Thomas Colebrooke
A bust of Henry Thomas Colebrooke currently owned by the Royal Asiatic Society
Born	June 15 1756(1756-06-15) London, England
Died	April 10 1837 (aged 80) London, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Orientalist
Known for	Sanskrit scholar, one of the founders of the Royal Asiatic Society

Henry Thomas Colebrooke (June 15, 1765 - March 10, 1837) was an English orientalist.

Biography

Early Years

Henry Thomas Colebrooke, third son of Sir George Colebrooke, a Second Baronet, was born in London. His father was a banker and a director of the British East India Company and Chairman from 1769 to 1773. Colebrooke was educated at home; and when only fifteen he had made considerable attainments in classics and mathematics. From the age of twelve to sixteen he lived in France following the collapse of his father's finances.

Service with the East India Company

In 1782 he was appointed to a writership with the East India Company, following the footsteps of his older brother. He sailed to India in 1782. About a year after his arrival he was placed in the board of accounts in Calcutta; three years later he transferred to Tirhut as assistant collector (deputy chief administrative officer). In 1789 he was placed in charge of a survey of the resources in the Purneah district. It was there that he wrote his Remarks on the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal, privately printed in 1795, in which he advocated free trade between Great Britain and India. In 1793, he was transferred to Nator. When Sir William Jones died in 1794 he was commissioned to produce a summary of Hinduism law and moved from the revenue to the judicial branch. In 1795 he was appointed district magistrate in Mirzapur, which is near Varanasi. In March 1799 he was sent to Nagpur as a member pro tempore of the diplomatic corps to negotiate a treaty with the Rajah of Berar. He remained in Nagpur for the next two years before returning to his post at Mirzapur. Although no treaty was finalized, Colebrooke was commended for his efforts and rewarded with a seat on the new superior court of appeal in Calcutta. By 1805 he was chief justice and by 1807 he was a member of the governor-generals council serving for five years, the usual term. The highest office open to civilians, this was usually achieved towards the end of an individual's service in India. This was followed by a brief return to the court of appeal and membership of the board of revenue before he retired from India in 1814. He also served a term as President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded by Jone's in 1784. He published twenty papers in the Society's journal.

Scholarship

In 1805, Lord Wellesley, the governor-general appointed Colebrooke honorary professor of Hindu law and Sanskrit at the college of Fort William. This did not involve teaching; "He seems to have been a director of studies rather than an actual professor, but" writes F. Max Müller he rendered valuable service as examiner in Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindustani, and Persian." During his residence at Calcutta he wrote his Sanskrit Grammar (1805), some papers on the religious ceremonies of the Hindus, and his Essay on the Vedas (1805), for a long time the standard work in English on the subject. This established that Buddhism post-dated Brahmanism. His work on Jainism pioneered the study of that tradition by non-Indians. His work on Sanskrit has been described as "monument marking the beginning of the study of traditional Sanskrit linguistics (vyakarana) by non-Indians." His interests ranged widely across geography, mathematics and biology. One area of research was the origin of the Hindy caste system. He was encouraged throughout by correspondence with his father, whose initial inquiry about Indian religion stimulated Colebrooke's interest. When he first arrived in India he did not want to stay. However, as his scholarly interests developed his attitude changed. F. Max Müller identifies him as a pioneer in the field of Comparartive Philology, commenting that "the range of his comparisons was very wide, and embraced not only Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin with their derivatives, but also the Germanic and Slavonic languages."Max Müller, regarded by many as the founder of the scientific study of religion, describes Colebrooke as the "father and founder of true Sanskrit scholarship in Europe." He engaged in debate with James Mill on the "antiquity of Indian scientific knowledge" arguing that the Arabs adapted "a division of the Zodiac familiar to the Hindus." Banerjee adds that Colebrooke's inquiries in the field of Indian astronomy was so detailed that comparatively little was left for later researchers.

Royal Astronomical and Royal Asiatic Societies: Co-Founder

After returning to England, Colebrooke was a co-founder of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was present at the inaugaral dinner and meeting on January 12 1820 when the Astronomical Society was founded. In 1822, he became the second President of the Astronomical Society.

Colebrooke was also instrumental in founding the Royal Asiatic Society, chairing all of its early meetings, the first of which took place in his home on January 9, 1823. He served as the first Director of the Society; he did not consider himself sufficiently distinguished to assume the Presidency, which went to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn. He was a friend of Horace Hayman Wilson, who succeeded him as Director of the Society. Colebrooke regarded himself as having picked up the torch of scholarly interest in India's culture, religions and languages from Jone's and as passing this on to Wilson, to whom he wrote in 1827:

Careless and indifferent as our countrymen are, I think, nevertheless, you and I may derive more complacent feelings from the reflection that, following the footsteps of Sir W. Jones, we have, with so little aid of collaborators, and so little encouragement, opened nearly every avenue, and left it to foreigners, who are taking up the clue we have furnished, to complete the outline of what we have sketched. It is some gratification to natural pride that the opportunity which the English have enjoyed has not been wholly unemployed.</ref>Max Müller, page 265.

In 1818 he donated 2749 manuscripts to what is now the India Office Library, London. Max Müller describes this as a "treasury from which every student of Sanskrit has since drawn."

Wilson became Oxford's first Boden Chair of Sanskrit in 1832.

Selected Works

• Henry Thomas Colebrooke. 1807. "Observations on the Sect of the Jains. Calcutta. Asiatick Researches Vol. 9. pp 287-322. Retrieved February 7, 2009.
• Henry Thomas Colebrooke, ed. (1807). Kosha, Or Dictionary of the Sanscrit Language by Umura Singha with an English Interpretation and Annotations by H.T. Colebrooke. (3rd edition, 1891). Calcutta: Haragobinda Rakshit. Retrieved February 7, 2009.
• Henry Thomas Colebrooke. (1837). Miscellaneous Essays.Retrieved February 7, 2009. London: W.H. Allen & Company.
• Henry Thomas Colebrooke. (1858). On the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus. London: Williams & Norgate. Retrieved February 7, 2009.

Marriage

Colebrooke married Elizabeth Wilkinson in 1810. She died two months before Colebrooke retired from India. Of their three sons, only Sir Thomas Edward Colebrooke survived. He wrote his father's biography, The Life of H. T. Colebrooke in 1873.

I do think, with him, that

COLEBKOOKE. 265

as much has not been done by the English as might have been expected from us. Excepting you and me, and two or three more, who is there that has done anything? In England nobody cares about Oriental literature, or is likely to give the least attention to it.'

page 265-6.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Banerjee, Gauranga Nath. 1920. Hellenism in ancient India. Calcutta: Butterworth & Co. OCLC 4470101.
• Chakrabarti, Pratik. 2004. Western science in modern India: metropolitan methods, colonial practices. Delhi: Permanent Black. ISBN 9788178240787.
• Colebrooke, T. E., and H. T. Colebrooke. 1873. The life of H.T. Colebrooke. London: Trübner. OCLC 7437790
• Gombrich, Richard F. 2004. "Colebrooke, Henry Thomas." 531 in Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Howard Harrison. Oxford dictionary of national biography: in association with the British Academy: from the earliest times to the year 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198614111.
• Max Müller, F. 1904. Chips from a German Workshop: Biographical Essays. Volume I. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

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