Francis Wilford (1761–1822) was an Indologist, Orientalist, fellow member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and constant collaborator of its journal – Asiatic Researches – contributing a number of fanciful, sensational, controversial, and highly unreliable articles on ancient Hindu geography, mythography, and other subjects.
He contributed a series of ten articles about Hindu geography and mythology for Asiatic Researches, between 1799 and 1810, claiming that all European myths were of Hindu origin and that India had produced a Christ (Salivahana) whose life and works closely resembled the Christ of Bible. He also claimed to have discovered a Sanskrit version of Noah (Satyavrata) and attempted to confirm the historicity of revelation and of the ethnology of Genesis from external sources, particularly Hindu or other pagan religions. In his essay Mount Caucasus – 1801, he argued for a Himalayan location of Mt. Ararat, claiming that Ararat was etymologically linked with Āryāvarta – a Sanskrit name for India.
Biography Born in 1761 at Hanover and was a Hanoverian by birth – There was a persistent and unproven belief among his contemporaries and later commentators that he was of Swiss or German descent. He arrived in India as an ensign of the East India Company army in 1781[as a Lieutenant colonel with the Hanoverian reinforcements to the British troops in India], and he stayed for four decades in India. He married Khanum Bibi, an Indian woman, and their daughters later married East India Company soldiers.
Between 1786 and 1790, he worked as an assistant to the Surveyor General; accordingly, he did surveying and created Military route maps in Bihar and then moved with his section to Benares. During this period, he met Mughal Beg, a Muslim, whom Wilford later described as his "friend"; Mughal Beg appears to have been a Pundit or Pandit – native surveyor -, an aide for the survey involved in carrying out large scale exploration for Wilford in North-western India-Southern Punjab and Bawalpur -, in the late 1790s.
He became the member of the Sanskrit scholars and Orientalists circle associated with Asiatic Society of Bengal that included William Jones, Charles Wilkins, H.H. Wilson, and H.T. Colebrooke. He retired from army in 1794 and then settled in Benares where he became the Secretary to the committee of Sanskrit College, Varanasi – recently founded by British resident Jonathan Duncan in the city – funded by East India Company for the training of Pandits in Sanskrit language and literature. Wilford exercised great influence in the college, including efforts to get his own nominee for the position of Chief Pandit, just before his death too.
Construction of Hindu geography and mythography Wilford employed a large staff of Indian assistants – Pandits [copyists, translators, surveyors]. Throughout the 1790s, he laboriously combed Puranic and other Sanskrit sources for geographical materials. He extracted his geographical material from the historical poems or legendary tales of the Hindus collected for him by his staff.
Christopher Bayly, writing in a collection edited by Jamal Malik, also observes that Wilford, like some contemporaries, used cruder means of linguistic correlation. According to Bayly, the preferred method of Wilford was to sit in the company of Pandits and other Hindus, recite together with them stories from puranic and western mythology, scripture and history, finding matches and points of similarity. This correspondence was a key to find a linguistic match between similar words; thus, Misra in the Puranas was Al-Misr – ancient name for Egypt.
Nigel Leask, an author, in his Francis Wilford and the colonial construction of Hindu geography, 1799–1822 says "properly speaking, there was no such thing as ancient 'Hindu geography', Wilford was led to admit that his work was more in the nature of a construction than a simple translation of his sources." Leask points that: Sanskrit Cosmography had been metamorphosed into geography by 'follow[ing] the track, real or imaginary, of [Hindu] deities and heroes; comparing all their legends with such accounts of holy places in the regions of the west...preserved by Greek mythologists; and endeavouring to provide the identity of the places by the similarity of the names and remarkable circumstances'.
According to Leask, by proceeding in this manner, Wilford was simply following the methodology of William Jones and other Orientalists of the 18th century in syncretising Sanskrit with Classical and Biblical narratives, establishing transcultural correspondences by means of often crude conjectural etymologies. Albeit, Wilford's reputation did not win the scientific respectability for his proposed theories, his work[s] did exert a lasting influence in early 18th century antiquarians and Romanic poets like S.T. Coleridge, Robert Southey, Percy Shelley, and Tom Moore.
Wilford claimed to have discovered the Sanskrit version of the story of Noah (who had three sons – Japheth, Ham, and Shem) named Satyavrata (in Sanskrit) and his three sons Jyapeti, Charma, and Sharma from a Vedic scripture titled Padma-puran. The actual scriptural text does not attest Wilford's version. As unearthed by Nigel Leask, the story goes this way—Aftermath the dispersion of Babylonian, the sons of Sharma had emigrated to the banks of Nile or Cali. The Negro sons of Charma – cursed as he scoffed at Noah -, had emigrated to India and then from there to Egypt. Wilford claimed to have found proof of this based on the fact that "the very ancient statues of Gods in India have crisp hair, and the features of Negroes," in contrast to modern denizens. In Egypt, the Semites – sons of Sharma -, by now well-settled, had expelled the Hasyasilas – sons of Charma -, into the desert, from there they populated and spread the entire African continent. Nigel Leask identifies this as a colonial construction of racial hierarchy to subordinate Egypt to India : This subordination of Egypt to India in terms of chronological priority is accompanied by a distinctly colonial construction of racial hierarchy in which the inhabitants of contemporary Africa are equated with the aboriginal inhabitants of India, both descended from the proscribed family of Ham, Charma, or Hasyasilas('the laughter').
Sara Suleri, an author and professor, in her essay Burke and the Indian Sublime has described "the central representational unavailability that Indian cultures and histories, even in sheer geography....pos[ed] to the colonizing eye." On account of this discursive difficulty, Wilford's projects appears to be inspired by a will to "assimilate the cultural heterogeneity of India into the metanarratives of European universal history and geography."
MSS for H.H.Wilson research In Benares, Wilford procured many MSS – Manuscripts by employing a large staff of Pandit copyists and translators; He sent those MSS and their copies to H.H. Wilson and other Orientalists associated with Asiatic Society of Bengal. He also built up his own library, and had been maintained and managed by his wife – Khanum Bibi, after his death in 1822. The findings and observations of Wilford's MSS were used as a base for Wilson's own researches in Sanskrit grammarians – especially Pāṇini.
After the death of Wilford, Edward Fell, a Panini Scholar and Superintendent of the Sanskrit College, wrote to Wilson in irritation as : Mother Wilford[Khanum Bibi] is forming a catalogue of her books(the Mss. are reckoned too sacred for any inspection, excepting from her Mohammedan paramours!!)
His claims
In 1788 Wilford claimed to have found innumerable references to ancient Egypt, its Kings and holy places in Puranas by publishing a long text of baroque complexity in Asiatic Researches; He inferred that a group of Indians had settled on the banks of Nile, Egyptian and Hindu learning had been linked, and what the Western learning transmitted through Greeks was consequence of partly Hindu origin. However, Wilford was forced to admit with a humiliating note in the same journal that he had been systematically duped by his head Pandit between 1793 and 1805.
During the 1790s, for some years, rumours circulated about Wilford's discoveries evincing the relationship among Hindu traditions, Bible, and the ancient British antiquities in Orientalist and antiquarian circles in Bengal. In an article on Hindu Mathematics published by Ruben Burrow for Asiatic Researches, Ruben announced the Wilford's work as the "first true representation of scriptural and Hindu geography." Ruben even deduced from Wilford's evidence saying "the Druids of Britain were Brahmins is beyond the least shadow of doubt."
In 1799 Wilford published his first essay entitled On Egypt and Other countries adjacent to the Cali [Ca'li'] River or Nile of Ethiopia from the ancient books of the Hindus, claiming to have discovered Sanskrit version of Abyssinia (Ethiopia – modern nation or Cushadweepa – Sanskrit name for Abyssinia or Ethiopia) and the river Nile which corroborated some of the proposed theories of James Bruce, a Scottish traveller and writer, that the site of the terrestrial paradise was the source of Nile in the unexplored mountains of Ethiopia.
According to Nigel Leask, in Francis Wilford and the colonial construction of Hindu geography, 1799–1822, Wilford published an essay in 1799 entitled On Egypt and Other countries adjacent to the Cali [Ca'li'] River or Nile of Ethiopia from the ancient books of the Hindus claiming to have found a Sanskrit version of the story of Noah – Satyavrayata, and his three sons Jyapete, Charma, and Sharma. Regina Akel, an author of Maria Graham: a literary biography, says Maria Graham played a part in this "Colonial myth building that justified Colonialism by pointing common historical and religious roots between East and West." Regina further observes that Maria Graham in his Letters on India, repeated many of the theories proposed by Wilford; however, she added a proviso that she was not convinced of their veracity. Regina points that Graham's strategy was to build up the Wilford's image as a learned scholar and also in ignoring the scandal that erupted in India in 1805, following Wilford's own confession in Asiatic Researches.
Wilford, based on Indian texts [Sanskrit texts in Manuscripts] tried to prove that India and Egypt from ancient times had a close contact and their religions came from a common source – Noah's Ark. For this, Wilford had employed some Indian assistants – Pandits, and made them look for precise set of topics, namely, the deluge, the name of Noah and his sons, and so forth.
According to Bayly, in the edited volume Perspectives of mutual encounters in South Asian history, 1760–1860, Wilford tried to find three types of links or analogue between the ancient Indian wisdom of the Vedas and Puranas; and the knowledge of the ancient Egyptian, Israelites, and Greeks. First, he believed, he would discover the traces of an ancient Indo-European mother tongue as confirmed by William Jones. Second, the inheritance of common store of sacred lore- underlying unities in human mythology, Biblical, and Classical – Wiford thought, he saw a link between the stories of Bacchus, Osiris, and the Hindu Purusha. Third, as ancient Eurasian and African society had developed links of trade to complement the ancient patterns of pilgrimage – Wilford believed many historic people had physically migrated over large distances – With no surprise, groups of Indians migrated to Egypt and Ethiopia.
In words of Bayly, though Wilford's reasoning could be applied to the history of all humanity and much of it was not specifically generated to further the British conquest of India, yet some stories and legends narrated by him were meant for naturalising the British presence in the subcontinent – suggesting Political agenda. Most of Wilford's works were filled with traces of Alexander the Great and with references to Arien.