Colebrooke

Colebrooke, HENRY THOMAS, the pioneer of Sanskrit scholarship in Europe, was born in London, 15th June 1765, the son of Sir George Colebrooke, banker, and eventually chairman of the board of directors of the East India Company. He was educated at home, and early showed a strong disposition for mathematical studies. In 1782 his father's influence procured him a writership in the Bengal service. He was a voracious reader, and his alert mind found its relaxation in the change from administrative to scientific labour. His duties as revenue officer at Tirhut led him to make a minute study of the state of husbandry in Bengal, and his Remarks thereon (Calcutta, 1795, privately printed) formed so searching a criticism of the existing policy that the work could not be published in England. At Purneah his legal functions led him to study Indian law and learn Sanskrit; and he began in 1794 publishing essays on Indian religion, poetry, and science in the Asiatic Researches of the recently founded Asiatic Society of Calcutta. His removal in 1795 to the magistracy of Mirzapur gave him the opportunity of cultivating the acquaintance of the learned men of the neighbouring Sanskrit college at Benares, and with this advantage he brought out his Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions (translated from the Sanskrit, 1798, 4 vols. Calcutta). A mission to Nagpur (1799-1801) interrupted his work, and on his return he was appointed a judge of the new court of appeal at Calcutta, and at the same time honorary professor of Hindu Law and Sanskrit at the college of Fort William. Yet he contrived during this busy period to publish the first (and only) volume of his Sanskrit Grammar (1805), based upon Pāṇini and the native commentators, to write his famous articles on the Vedas and on the sect of Jains, besides many other valuable essays for Asiatic Researches, and also to supplement his Digest by Two Treatises on the Hindu Law of Inheritance (1810). Before this he had reached the eminence of a seat on the governor-general's council (1807), and was using his influence earnestly in the direction of administrative reform and the encouragement of oriental studies. He retired in 1814, and devoted himself to scholarly work in England, especially to eastern science. Several of his essays in Asiatic Researches related to Hindu astronomy, meteorology, mathematics, geology, and botany. He contributed also to the Transactions of the Astronomical Society, to The Quarterly Journal of Science, the Linnæan and the Geological Societies, as well as, more especially, to the Royal Asiatic Society, which he helped to found in 1823. His last years were troubled by care, blindness, and much bodily suffering, endured with fortitude; and on 10th March 1837 he died at the age of seventy-two. His translation of the Sāṅkhya Kārikā was posthumously edited by Professor H. H. Wilson. His work as a Sanskrit scholar possessed the highest merits of extreme conscientiousness and caution, scientific accuracy, and a stern repression of the tendency to fanciful exaggeration which marked the early theories of European scholars on Indian science and religion. His life has been well written by his son, Sir T. E. Colebrooke (1873), and his immense services to Sanskrit scholarship are lucidly criticised in Max Müller's Biographical Essays (1884).