At the time of its foundation, this Society was named as "Asiatick Society". In 1825, the society was renamed as "The Asiatic Society". In 1832 the name was changed to "The Asiatic Society of Bengal" and again in 1936 it was renamed as "The Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal". Finally, on 1 July 1951, the name of the society was changed to its present one. The Society is housed in a building at Park Street in Kolkata (Calcutta). The Society moved into this building during 1808. In 1823, the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta was formed and all the meetings of this society were held in the Asiatic Society.
History
Old building of The Asiatic Society, c.1828, an early 19th century lithograph
In January 1784, Sir William Jones sent out a circular-letter to a selected number of British residents of Calcutta with a view to establish a society for the Asiatic studies. At his invitation, 30 British residents met in the Grand Jury Room of the Supreme Court (in Calcutta's Fort William) on 15 January 1784. The meeting was presided over by Sir Robert Chambers. At this meeting, Jones explained the aims of the Society he would establish. The Memorandum of Articles of the Asiatic Society, prepared by Jones said:[2]
The bounds of investigations will be the geographical limits of Asia, and within these limits its enquiries will be extended to whatever is performed by man or produced by nature.
Notable early members were Charles Wilkins and Alexander Hamilton (the cousin of the American statesman). Initially, the Grand Jury Room of the Supreme Court was used for the meetings of the members, who had to pay a quarterly fee of two mohurs. The members were elected through ballot-voting. On 29 September 1796, the Society decided to have its own building. J.H. Harrington, then vice-president, selected the corner of Park Street and Chowringhee Road (present location) for the Society's house. The site was granted to the Society on 15 May 1805. The original plan for the new building was prepared by Captain Thomas Preston. The French architect Jean-Jacques Pichou[3] made certain modifications to it and constructed a two-storeyed building at the site. This 15,071ft² building was built at a cost of Rs. 30,000. The first quarterly meeting of the Society for 1808 was held at its new building on 3 February 1808.[2]
From 1784 to 1828, only Europeans were elected members of the Society. In 1829, at the initiative of H.H. Wilson, a number of Indians were elected members, which include Dwarakanath Tagore, Sivchandra Das, Maharaja Baidyanath Roy, Maharaja Bunwari Govind Roy, Raja Kalikrishna Bahadur, Rajchunder Das, Ram Comul Sen, and Prasanna Coomar Tagore. On 12 December 1832, Ram Comul Sen was elected 'Native Secretary'. Later, Rajendralal Mitra became the first Indian President in 1885.[2] Both the orientalist Brajendranath De, and one of his grandsons, the historian Barun De, were for some time vice-president of the Asiatic Society.[4][5][6]
One of the main activities of the Asiatic Society was to collect the old manuscripts of India.[7] There was an enormous collection of Sanskrit manuscripts with the society.[7] At present[timeframe?], the library of the Asiatic Society has a collection of about 117,000 books and 79,000 journals printed in almost all the major languages of the world. It has also a collection of 293 maps, microfiche of 48,000 works, microfilm of 387,003 pages, 182 paintings, 2500 pamphlets, and 2150 photographs. The earliest printed book preserved in this library is Juli Firmici's Astronomicorum Libri published in 1499.[2] It has in its possession a large number of books printed in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The library also possesses many rare and scarcely available books. The library has a rich collection of about 47,000 manuscripts in 26 scripts. The most notable amongst them are an illustrated manuscript of the Qur'an, a manuscript of the Gulistan text, and a manuscript of Padshah Nama bearing the signature of Emperor Shahjahan. The number of journals in the possession of the library is about 80,000 at present.The library also has coins issued by Chhatrapati Shivaji Mahraj.[timeframe?]
The early collection of this library was enriched by the contributions it received from its members. On 25 March 1784, the library received seven Persian manuscripts from Henri Richardson. The next contribution came from William Marsden, who donated his book The History of Sumatra (1783) on 10 November 1784. Robert Home, the first Library-in-Charge (1804) donated his small but valuable collection of works on art. The first accession of importance was a gift from the Seringapatam Committee on 3 February 1808 consisting of a collection from the Palace Library of Tipu Sultan. The library received the Surveyor-General Colonel Mackenzie's collection of manuscripts and drawings in December 1822.
Since 1849, the Society has printed Bibliotheca Indica, a collection of rare and unpublished works belonging to or treating of Oriental literature and containing original text-editions as well as translations into English, and also grammars, dictionaries, bibliographies, and studies.
The museum of the Society was founded in 1814 under the superintendence of Nathaniel Wallich. The rapid growth of its collection is evident from its first catalogue, published in 1849. By 1849, the Society had its own museum consisting of inscriptions in stone and metal, icons, old coins, and Sanskrit manuscripts etc.[7]
The Arabic, Persian and Urdu section of the Asiatic Society.
When the Indian Museum of Calcutta was established in 1814, the Society handed over most of its valuable collections to it. The Society, however, still has a museum of its own which possesses a rock edict of Asoka (c. 250 BCE) and a significant collection of copper plate inscriptions, coins, sculptures, manuscripts, and archival records. Some masterpieces, like Joshua Reynolds’ Cupid asleep on Cloud, Guido Cagnacci's Cleopatra, Thomas Daniell's A Ghat at Benares, and Peter Paul Rubens’ Infant Christ are also in the possession of this museum.
Journal of the Asiatic Society
The Society's journal has had several changes of name, sometimes reflecting changes in the Society. It is currently called the Journal of the Asiatic Society.[9][10]
1788-1842 Asiatick Researches, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, for enquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature, of Asia
1832 The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal - James Prinsep was the founding editor
1 2 3 4 Chakrabarty, R. (2008). The Asiatic Society:1784-2008, An Overview in Time Past and Time Present: Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years of the Asiatic Society' Kolkata: The Asiatic Society, pp.2-24
↑ Sometimes written Pichon (or Jean Jacques Pissaun)
↑ "Birth Centenary of B.De Celebrated" in The Statesman, Wednesday, 24 December 1952
↑ "He Rehabilitated Persian in Bengal: Tributes to Late B.De: Birthday Celebration" in Amrita Bazar Patrika, Wednesday, 24 December 1952
Sir William Jones was a British philologist, orientalist and a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India. He is particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among European and Indo-Aryan languages, which later came to be known as the Indo-European languages.
Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernlé CIE, also referred to as Rudolf Hoernle or A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, was a German Indologist and philologist. He is famous for his studies on the Bower Manuscript (1891), Weber Manuscript (1893) and other discoveries in northwestern China and Central Asia particularly in collaboration with Aurel Stein. Born in India to a Protestant missionary family from Germany, he completed his education in Switzerland, and studied Sanskrit in the United Kingdom. He returned to India, taught at leading universities there, and in the early 1890s published a series of seminal papers on ancient manuscripts, writing scripts and cultural exchange between India, China and Central Asia. His collection after 1895 became a victim of forgery by Islam Akhun and colleagues in Central Asia, a forgery revealed to him in 1899. He retired from the Indian office in 1899 and settled in Oxford, where he continued to work through the 1910s on archaeological discoveries in Central Asia and India. This is now referred to as the "Hoernle collection" at the British Library.
The Bower Manuscript is a collection of seven fragmentary Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit treatises found buried in a Buddhist memorial stupa near Kucha, northwestern China. Written in early Gupta script on birch bark, it is variously dated in 5th to early 6th century. The Bower manuscript includes the oldest dated fragments of an Indian medical text, the Navanitaka.
John Shore, 1st Baron Teignmouth, 1st Baronet was a British official of the East India Company who served as Governor-General of Bengal from 1793 to 1798. In 1798 he was created Baron Teignmouth in the Peerage of Ireland. Shore was the first president of the British and Foreign Bible Society. A close friend of the orientalist Sir William Jones (1746–1794), Shore edited a memoir of Jones's life in 1804, containing many of Jones's letters.
Hugh Falconer MD FRS was a Scottish geologist, botanist, palaeontologist, and paleoanthropologist. He studied the flora, fauna, and geology of India, Assam, Burma, and most of the Mediterranean islands and was the first to suggest the modern evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium. He studied the Siwalik fossil beds, and may also have been the first person to discover a fossil ape.
The Indian Museum is a massive museum in Central Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It is the ninth oldest museum in the world and the oldest and largest museum in Asia, by size of collection. It has rare collections of antiques, armour and ornaments, fossils, skeletons, mummies and Mughal paintings. It was founded by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, in 1814. The founder curator was Nathaniel Wallich, a Danish botanist.
The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, commonly known as the Royal Asiatic Society, was established, according to its royal charter of 11 August 1824, to further "the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia." From its incorporation the society has been a forum, through lectures, its journal, and other publications, for scholarship relating to Asian culture and society of the highest level. It is the United Kingdom's senior learned society in the field of Asian studies. Fellows of the society are elected regularly and include highly accomplished and notable scholars of Asian studies; they use the post-nominal letters FRAS.
Horace Hayman Wilson was an English orientalist who was elected the first Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University.
Colonel Colin Mackenzie was Scottish army officer in the British East India Company who later became the first Surveyor General of India. He was a collector of antiquities and an orientalist. He surveyed southern India, making use of local interpreters and scholars to study religion, oral histories, inscriptions and other evidence, initially out of personal interest, and later as a surveyor. He was ordered to survey the Mysore region shortly after the British victory over Tipu Sultan in 1799 and produced the first maps of the region along with illustrations of the landscape and notes on archaeological landmarks. His collections consisting of thousands of manuscripts, inscriptions, translations, coins and paintings, which were acquired after his death by the India Office Library and are an important source for the study of Indian history. He was awarded a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 4 June 1815.
Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a subset of Asian studies.
James Prinsep was an English scholar, orientalist and antiquary. He was the founding editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is best remembered for deciphering the Kharosthi and Dhammalipi scripts of ancient India. He studied, documented and illustrated many aspects of numismatics, metallurgy, meteorology apart from pursuing his career in India as an assay master at the mint in Benares.
Pierre-Médard Diard was a French naturalist and explorer.
Alfred Duvaucel was a French naturalist and explorer. He was the stepson of Georges Cuvier and travelled in India and Southeast Asia as a collector of specimens for the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
Fort William College was an academy of oriental studies and a centre of learning, founded on 18 August 1800 by Lord Wellesley, then Governor-General of British India, located within the Fort William complex in Calcutta. Wellesley started the Fort William College to train the European administrators. He backdated the statute of foundation to 4 May 1800, to commemorate the first anniversary of his victory over Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam. Thousands of books were translated from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu into English at this institution.
Hashtnagar is one of the two constituent parts of the Charsadda District in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The name Hashtnagar is derived from the Sanskrit अष्टनगरम् Aṣṭanagaram, "eight towns", from Sanskrit aṣṭa, "eight" and नगर nagara, "settlement, locality, town". There was an unrelated town of the same name near Kabul in the 17th century. It was home to the Roshani Movement. The descriptive was later influenced by the Persian هشت hasht, "eight". The etymology "Eight Towns", refers to the eight major settlements situated in this region. These are:
The Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), founded on 1 July 1916 by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change of the Government of India as a premier Indian organisation in zoological research and studies to promote the survey, exploration and research of the fauna in the country.
James Atkinson was a surgeon, artist and Persian scholar — "a Renaissance man among Anglo-Indians".
The Calcutta School-Book Society was an organisation based in Kolkata during the British Raj. It was established in 1817, with the aim of publishing text books and supplying them to schools and madrasas in India.
In the last quarter of the 18th century, Calcutta grew into the first major centre of commercial and government printing. For the first time in the context of South Asia it becomes possible to talk of a nascent book trade which was full-fledged and included the operations of printers, binders, subscription publishing and libraries.
The Weber Manuscript, also called Weber Manuscripts, is a collection of nine, possibly eleven, incomplete ancient Indian treatises written mostly in classical Sanskrit that were found buried within a Buddhist monument in northwestern China in late 19th-century. It is named after the Moravian missionary F. Weber who acquired the set from an Afghani merchant in Ladakh, and then forwarded it to the German Indologist and philologist Rudolf Hoernlé in Calcutta. The manuscripts consist of 76 page-leaves, written in Northwestern Gupta and Central Asian Nagari scripts. They were copied before the end of 7th-century, likely in the 5th-century or the 6th–century. The original texts that were copied to produce these manuscripts were likely considerably older Indian texts, at least one between 3rd-century BCE and pre-2nd-century CE. The Weber Manuscript is notable for having been written on two types of paper – Central Asian and Nepalese, attesting to the spread of paper technology outside of interior China and its use for Indian religious texts by the 5th– or 6th-century.
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