Brian Houghton Hodgson (1 February 1801 – 23 May 1894) was a British diplomat, naturalist and ethnologist who spent most of his life in India and Nepal, serving as a British resident in the latter. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himalayas, and several birds were named after him by others such as Edward Blyth. He was a scholar of Newar Buddhism and wrote extensively on a range of topics relating to linguistics and religion. He was an opponent of the British proposal to introduce English as the official medium of instruction in Indian schools.

Early life

thumb|left|upright|Aged 17

Hodgson was the second of seven children of Brian Hodgson (1766–1858) and his wife Catherine (1776–1851), and was born at Lower Beech, Prestbury, Cheshire. His father lost money in a bad bank investment and had to sell their home at Lower Beech. A great-aunt married to Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London, helped them but the financial difficulties were great. Hodgson's father worked as a warden of the Martello towers and in 1820 was barrack-master at Canterbury. Brian (the son) studied at Macclesfield Grammar School until 1814 and the next two years at Richmond, Surrey under the tutelage of Daniel Delafosse. He was nominated for the Bengal civil service by the East India Company director James Pattison. Hodgson's son Henry was sent to tutor the son-in-law of Jung Bahadur Rana of Nepal. In 1857 he influenced Viscount Canning to accept Jung Bahadur Rana's help in 'suppressing' the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In the summer of 1858, he returned to England and would not visit India again. He lived initially at Dursley in Gloucestershire but in 1867 moved to Alderley in the Cotswolds.

Ethnology and anthropology

During his posting in Nepal, Hodgson became proficient in Nepali and Newari. Hodgson was financially pressed until 1837, but he maintained a group of research assistants at his expense. He collected Buddhist texts in Sanskrit and Pali and studied them with his friend Pandit Amritananda. He believed that there were four schools of Buddhism and wrongly assumed that the Sanskrit texts were older than those in Pali. He however became an expert on Hinayana philosophy. who he claimed were unique to India. Hodgson obtained copies of ancient Buddhist texts, the Kahgyur and the Stangyur. One copy was gifted to him by the Grand Lama. These were rare Tibetan works based on old Sanskrit writings (brought originally from the area of the Buddha's personal teachings in Magadha or Bihar in India) and he was able to offer them to the Asiatic Society and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 1838. The Russian government purchased part of the same book for £2000 around the same time.

In 1837 Hodgson collected the first Sanskrit text of the Lotus Sutra and sent it to translator Eugène Burnouf of the Collége de France, Paris.

Educational reform

During his service in India, Hodgson was a strong proponent of education in the local languages and opposed both the use of English as a medium of instruction as advocated by Lord Macaulay as well as the orientalist view that supported the use of Arabic, Persian or Sanskrit. From 1835 to 1839, Hodgson, William Adam, Frederick Shore and William Campbell wrote against Macaulay's idea of education in the English medium. Hodgson wrote a series of essays for the journal of the Serampore Mission The Friend of India that argued for the education in the vernacular. The essays were republished in 1880 in his Miscellaneous Essays Relating to Indian Subjects.

Ornithology and natural history

thumb|The Residency, Hodgson's home in Nepal

Hodgson studied all aspects of natural history around him including material from Nepal, Sikkim and Bengal. He amassed a large collection of birds and mammal skins which he later donated to the British Museum. As a result of an order by the Nepalese court he was unable to travel outside Kathmandu while living there and he therefore employed local hunters to collect his specimens for him. One of them was Raj Man Singh, but many of the paintings are unsigned. Most of them were subsequently transferred to the Zoological Society of London and the Natural History Museum.

His studies were recognised and the Royal Asiatic Society made him a member in 1828 and the Linnean Society of London elected him as a fellow in 1835. The Zoological Society of London sent him their diploma as a corresponding member. The Société Asiatique de Paris and the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle also honoured him. Around 1837 he planned an illustrated work on the birds and mammals of Nepal. The Museum d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris and other learned bodies came forward as supporters, three hundred and thirty subscribers registered in India, and in July 1837 he was able to write to his father that the means of publication were secured: "I make sure of three hundred and fifty to four hundred subscribers, and if we say 10 per copy of the work, this list should cover all expenses. Granted my first drawings were stiff and bad, but the new series may challenge comparison with any in existence." He hoped to finish the work in 1840.

In 1845, he presented 259 bird skins to the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle upon Tyne.

After retiring to Darjeeling he took a renewed interest in natural history. During the spring of 1848 he was visited by Sir Joseph Hooker. He wrote to his sister Fanny:

He wrote in 1849 on the physical geography of the Himalayan region, looking at the patterns of river-flows, the distributions and affinities of various species of mammals, birds and plants while also looking at the origins of the people inhabiting different regions.

thumb|Bust of Hodgson at the Asiatic Society Museum in Calcutta by [[Thomas Thornycroft]]

Allan Octavian Hume said of him:

Many birds of the Himalayan region were first formally described and given a binomial name by Hodgson. The list of world birds maintained by Frank Gill, Pamela Rasmussen and David Donsker on behalf of the International Ornithological Committee credits Hodgson as the authority for 29 genera and 77 species.

Charles Darwin in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, when discussing the origin of the domestic dog, mentions that Hodgson succeeded in taming the young of the race primaevus of the dhole or Indian wild dog (Cuon alpinus), and in making them as fond of him and as intelligent as ordinary dogs. Darwin also cited a 1847 article by Hodgson on the varieties of sheep and goats in the Himalayas.

Personal life and death

thumb|View from Hodgson's home in Darjeeling as seen by J.D. Hooker in 1854

In 1839 he wrote to his sister Fanny that he did not eat meat or drink wine and preferred Indian food habits after his ill health in 1837. Due to his strict vegetarian diet he required the nickname "Hermit of the Himalayas".

During his life in India, Hodgson fathered two children (Henry, who died in Darjeeling in 1856, and Sarah, who died in Holland in 1851; a third child possibly died young) with a Kashmiri (possibly, although recorded as a "Newari") Muslim woman, Mehrunnisha, who lived with him from 1830 until her death around 1843. Worried about the abuse and discrimination in India of 'mixed-race' children, he had his children sent to Holland to live with his sister Fanny, but both died young. He married Anne Scott in 1853 who lived in Darjeeling until her death in January 1868. He moved to England in 1858 and lived at Dursley, Gloucestershire, and then at Alderley (1867, where his neighbours included Marianne North). In 1869 he married Susan, daughter of Rev. Chambré Townshend of Derry, who outlived him. He had no children from his marriages. He died at his home on Dover Street in London on 23 May 1894 and was buried at Alderley churchyard in Gloucestershire.

Hodgson refers to the ornithologist Samuel Tickell as his brother-in-law. Tickell's sister Mary Rosa was married to Brian's brother William Edward John Hodgson (1805 – 12 June 1838). Mary returned to England after the death of William Hodgson and married Lumisden Strange in February 1840.

Honours

Hodgson was awarded the DCL, honoris causa by Oxford University in 1889. His friend Joseph Hooker named the genus Hodgsonia (Cucurbitaceae), Magnolia hodgsonii, and a species of rhododendron, Rhododendron hodgsoni, after him. Several species of bird including Hodgson's hawk-eagle, Hodgson's hawk-cuckoo, Hodgson's bushchat, Hodgson's redstart, Hodgson's frogmouth and Hodgson's treecreeper are named after him. Other animals named after him include the Hodgson's bat, Hodgson's giant flying squirrel, Hodgson's brown-toothed shrew and Hodgson's rat snake.

He is commemorated in the scientific name of the snake species Elaphe hodgsoni (synonyms: Gonyosoma hodgsoni, Orthriophis hodgsoni) and the plant genus Hodgsonia Hook.f. & Thomson (1854) (Cucurbitaceae).

Selected publications

References

Sources

Further reading

  • Index to the Hodgson collection at the British Library
  • Zoological Society of London An introduction to Brian Houghton Hodgson Hodgson and birds Hodgson and mammals transcriptions