India In Edinburgh

1750s to the Present

Roger Jeffery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367204037
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000556612
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Roger Jeffery in this book has brought together 10 original, well-researched and well-written essays which bring to life the presence of India in the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh. On the surface Edinburgh is a purely Scottish city: its 'India' past is not easily visible. Yet, from the late 17th century onwards, many of Edinburgh's young men and women were drawn to India. The city received back money and knowledge, sculpture and paintings, botanical specimens and even skulls! Colonel James Skinner, well-known for establishing Skinner's Horse, brought his sons to Edinburgh for their schooling. Though Sir Walter Scott visited India only in his imagination (and tried to stop his own sons going there) he crafted a dashing India tale involving Tipu Sultan. The money from India helped create Edinburgh's New Town, Edinburgh's internationally-renowned schools (whose former pupils careers ranged from tea-planters to Viceroys) and people who came to Edinburgh from India established Edinburgh's second women's medical college. There are many such hidden stories of Edinburgh's India connections. In this path-breaking book they are brought to life, using novel approaches to look at Edinburgh's past, to see it as an imperial city, a city for which India held a special place. Focusing on the interactions between individual lives, social networks and financial, material, cultural and social flows, leading experts from Edinburgh's history provide fascinating detail on how Edinburgh's links to India were formed and transformed.

Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

1
India in Edinburgh

1750s to the Present

ROGER JEFFERY AND DUNCAN MONEY

Introduction

Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from presenting actualities and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon these two imperial cities? (Said 1993: 19)

EDINBURGH IS AN IMPERIAL CITY. ITS BUILT ENVIRONMENT, INSTITUTIONS, HISTORY, cultural treasures and inhabitants have been thoroughly imbued with Britain’s imperial connections. This is especially true of Edinburgh’s lengthy, on-going engagement with India, the subject of this volume. The impact of this connection has been persistently under-appreciated, and the implications of Edward Said’s stimulus has not percolated very far into histories and understandings of Edinburgh. In taking seriously Said’s question, this volume aims to provide new understandings of Edinburgh’s history and the significance of India’s place within it.

It should be noted at the outset that this volume does not focus on the presence of people of South Asian origin living in Edinburgh, on which much has already been written (e.g. Nye 2013). Shompa Lahiri (2000: 137–40) describes the tussle at the beginning of the 20th century over control of the Edinburgh Indian Association, the first association of Indian students in Britain. Edinburgh attracted many Indian medical students from the 1880s until the first World War, and they formed most of those people of Indian origin living in the city up to the 1960s. While relationships between Indian students and other city residents were generally peaceful on the surface – and some led to marriages with local women – a dispute arose in the 1920s when Indian students were refused admission to restaurants and dance halls. This was aired in the House of Commons in 1927 and the debate revealed racist attitudes towards the Indian students as well as some support for their cause (Mukherjee 2010: 59; Scotsman 1 June 1927). In recent times, and compared to Glasgow or Dundee, Edinburgh does not have a large South Asian origin population. In general, Edinburgh residents are probably no more welcoming to South Asians than those in other parts of Scotland or the UK (but see Chapter 10 of this volume). We return to this at the end of this opening chapter.

‘Edinburgh in India’ has been well-studied. Edinburgh played several key roles in the growth of the (English) East India Company (EIC) into the dominant imperial power in the Indian sub-continent by the middle of the eighteenth century, when the EIC was transformed from its trading origins into an institution that, by 1858, directly governed two-thirds of the land area and three-quarters of the population and indirectly controlled the rest. Scots played a crucial role in this process. It is well-known that they were over-represented in the Indian army, among officers, civil servants, doctors and other scientists, missionaries, teachers and some parts of the commercial operations that developed (Bryant 1985).

Within this relationship, Edinburgh provided a node that operated in two directions. Until recruitment to the EIC was opened up on the basis of merit, Scots from throughout the country came to Edinburgh for school and university education, for medical training, and to curry favour with those whose influence might get them valuable – but very risky – positions as Company servants of one kind or another. While some died before they returned from India and others settled elsewhere in Britain on their return, many diligently maintained links with Edinburgh. They wrote about their experiences, in letters and journals, some of which were published (often by the big Edinburgh publishing houses), while others remained in private circulation, among friends, families, kirk missionary societies or scientific associations. Their acquired wealth transformed parts of the city and its institutions. Some of those who returned came to Edinburgh, not only for a few years of quiet retirement but often also to engage in commercial activities, political and academic debate and social reform. Others brought or sent back riches of a different kind – collections of art, archaeological prizes, the spoils of war and commerce conducted on unequal terms, or explorers’ reports and scientific specimens that were used for teaching or as examples to fuel intellectual debates in the University, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, or – after 1884 – the Scottish Geographical Society. These institutions had, and continue to maintain, strong links with Indians trained or otherwise connected with Edinburgh members; for example, 43 Fellows of the Royal Society, and 26 honorary degree-holders from the University have Indian names, eleven of the latter since 2010.

The links between Edinburgh and India in the long nineteenth century thus provide an apt and revealing contribution to the contemporary refocusing of imperial history. Historical understandings of Scotland and of British cities have increasingly considered the imperial and global influences on their development and daily lives, but none of this local turn has examined the history of Edinburgh. Moreover, while the contribution of Scotland and Scottish people to British imperialism is widely accepted by historians, the influence of this imperial contribution on Scotland itself – and in particular, of specific parts of the Empire at different periods in different ways on different cities – has yet to be appreciated. Edinburgh is not only a ‘Scottish’ city but, in some important ways, an ‘Indian’ one. In this Introduction we attempt to justify these claims about the relative absence of India from the histories of Edinburgh and of Scotland, as well as of Edinburgh’s absence from accounts of imperial cities. What follows is an overview of India’s involvement in the development of Edinburgh, providing a context for the rest of this book, concluding with a brief overview of the sequence of chapters and how they relate to each other.

Histories of Edinburgh

Existing histories of Edinburgh have hardly considered the impact of imperial or other non-European influences on the city’s development. When mentioned at all, imperial influences are often treated in a cursory or even dismissive manner. The only mention of India in Michael Fry’s history of Edinburgh, for instance, is an unsourced claim that the Indian connection contributed to heavy drug consumption in the city as opiate drugs ‘arrived with Scots who had served in India’ (Fry 2010: 337). In part this reflects the dearth of academic interest in nineteenth century Edinburgh. Much of what has been written about the city focuses on the eighteenth century, which is usually regarded as being more important in the city’s history. This is made explicit in Robert Houston’s work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Edinburgh where he argued that ‘both the appearance and the social values of nineteenth-century Edinburgh were made during the years between c.1720 and c.1760 (Houston 1994: 12).¹ Robert Morris and Graeme Morton call this ‘the Edinburgh problem’ and argue that Glasgow increasingly dominates Scottish historiography after 1800 (Morris and Morton 1994: 94).

¹ Houston’s major study of eighteenth century Edinburgh has no counterpart for the nineteenth century.

The histories of Edinburgh which do exist largely place developments in the city firmly within a Scottish context, a tendency perhaps expressed most clearly in Alexander Youngson’s influential The Making of Classical Edinburgh (1966). Youngson begins his original preface by claiming that Edinburgh ‘owes its singular character to the late and sudden flowering of Scottish culture’, and that ‘Edinburgh is the visible expression’ of a distinctively Scottish post-eighteenth-century history (Youngson 1988: ix). In the preface to the 1988 edition, he does concede there might have been some wider influences, namely it is ‘not unlikely’ that the Enlightenment and influential men returning from Italy and Italian landscape painting could have inspired Edinburgh’s New Town (Youngson 1988: xiii-xiv). There is little on international links in the book, however, and why someone might have named India Street from 1819–23 or India Place in 1823 passes without comment (Youngson 1988: 208, 214).

Subsequent historical work has continued in a similar manner and has emphasized first and foremost influences of Scotland on Edinburgh, along with a supporting, though less important, role for European developments. The volume on urban change in Edinburgh and Glasgow from 1730–1830 edited by Thomas Markus with Honor Mulholland examines the effects of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution on urban development in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but the essays in it primarily ‘explore the significance of certain Scottish developments’ (Markus and Mulholland 1982: 6). George Gordon’s edited volume is even clearer, tracing a distinctively Scottish urban experience and placing nineteenth and twentieth-century Edinburgh in a comparative framework with only Aberdeen, Glasgow and Dundee. Essays on a disparate range of topics, including poverty, literature, residential segregation, architecture, politics and conservation, say little on influences from outside Britain (Gordon 1985).

More recent work continues in the same vein, giving primacy to developments within Scotland. Richard Rodger’s The Transformation of Edinburgh is one of the few works dealing explicitly with Edinburgh in the nineteenth century, though the book ranges from the 1590s to 1914. Rodger is interested in how legal and institutional structures shaped Edinburgh. He stresses the role of the ‘distinctive elements of Scottish society [which] became more deeply embedded’ after the Act of Union in 1707. Urban development and change in Edinburgh are seen as closely related to dynamics within Scotland and England (Rodger 2001: 12–13, 507). Rodger’s chapter on the nineteenth century in the 2005 edited collection Edinburgh: The Making of a Capital City follows the same argument, as does the other chapter on the nineteenth century in this collection by Lou Rosenburg and Jim Johnson on the Old Town (Rodger 2005; Rosenburg and Johnson 2005). Developments within Edinburgh and Scotland and their influence on the production of the particular characteristics of Edinburgh are explored, but there is no interest in the role of influences from outwith Scotland.

Even where the international connections of Edinburgh in the nineteenth century are brought in, the focus tends to be on European connections. John Lowrey, for instance, examines the links between Edinburgh’s development, classical Greek ideas and landscape paintings (Lowrey 2001). Lowrey touches on some individuals who propagated the idea of Edinburgh as the ‘Athens of the North’ after returning to the city after travelling in Italy and Greece, but the same line of argument could be made for those who sojourned in India before coming to live in Edinburgh – who quite possibly numbered as many as those who undertook Grand Tours. Similarly, Sian Reynolds used Edinburgh’s French connections to contest the idea that Edinburgh was, culturally, in the doldrums in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Reynolds 2007). She unpicks how Edinburgh’s intellectual climate, buildings and art were influenced by connections with Paris. There is little on India in the book – perhaps because Indian influences were almost entirely visible within buildings, rather than in their external design.² In parenthesis we note that one of the key figures Reynolds identifies as making and sustaining the connections between Edinburgh and Paris – Patrick Geddes – was not only a Francophile but also had a deep interest in India, spending several years living in Bombay before moving to the South of France and continuing to communicate extensively with Rabindranath Tagore (Fraser 2005, Chapter 10 in this volume).

²

We are grateful to Clare Sorensen, of Historic Environment Scotland, for this insight.

There appear to be no substantive references to Indian influences on Edinburgh in the existing literature. Similarly, histories of significant institutions in Edinburgh have been examined within a Scottish context, with international influences left unexplored (see, for example, Prior, 1998, on the National Gallery). So, in his history of the formation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783, Steven Shapin argued that it was ‘the result of a complex nexus of local political, social and institutional forces’ (Shapin 1974: 36). Even more surprisingly, Elspeth Lochhead attributed the success of the Scottish Geographical Society (SGS) in the late nineteenth century, to ‘the general intellectual clima...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface & Acknowledgements
• Contributor biographies
• List of Tables
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• 1. Introduction – India in Edinburgh: 1750s to the Present
• 2. The Benefits to Edinburgh and Leith from East India Company Connections: c. 1725–c. 1834
• 3. Orientalist collecting of Indian sculpture
• 4. India associations in Scotland’s National Galleries: From Tipu to the Trenches and Simla to Surrealism
• 5. A history of Indian collections at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: In 22 Objects
• 6. The Skull Room: Craniological past of Edinburgh and India
• 7. Edinburgh schools: Suppliers of men for Imperial India in the long 19th century
• 8. Edinburgh University, the Indian Civil Service and the ‘Competition-Wallahs’
• 9. Medical Education for Women in Edinburgh: The India Connection, 1869–1914
• 10. Afterword: An Indian in Edinburgh
• Appendix: Some prominent Edinburgh families with Indian connections
• Index