Europes India : Words, People, Empires, 1500 - 1800 (9780674977556) by Subrahmanyam Sanjay

Author:Subrahmanyam, Sanjay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Nadir Shah was assassinated by members of his own entourage in late June 1747 in Khurasan, some five years after this text was published. The news would surely have reached James Fraser while he was still at Surat, embroiled in his dispute with the Bombay government.

Conclusion

Some seven years after the death of James Fraser, the up-and-coming French orientalist and traveler Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron found himself in Portsmouth in November 1761, while on his return from a long voyage to India, where he had lived since August 1755.131 Arriving on an English vessel, the Bristol, Anquetil was somewhat disagreeably surprised to find himself a prisoner in the context of the Seven Years’ War, despite the fact that he carried letters of accreditation from the English Company’s Bombay Council, which—he now noted sourly—“had no worth in England.” A trunk containing precious books and manuscripts he had acquired in India for the Bibliothèque du Roi was seized at Portsmouth customs, but Anquetil eventually was able to move to Wickham under a rather loose form of arrest. Within some weeks, after he had exerted influence through his connections, an order arrived ordering his release. But Anquetil was determined, he states, “not to quit England without having seen Oxford.” Arriving there via Winchester on January 17, 1762, he made his way to the Bodleian Library, where he was keen to consult the celebrated Zoroastrian manuscript, the Vendidad Sadé. Once he had done so, he communicated to John Swinton, one of his hosts, his desire “to see the manuscripts of Mr Hyde and Mr Fraser.” He had apparently not mentioned to his hosts that he had long followed the activities of James Fraser as a collector in Surat. Anquetil writes that he had come to know that “a councillor at Bombay [sic], Mr Frazer, a Scotsman, known for the life that he produced of Tamaskoulikhan, had in Surat gone in search of what he believed he could recover of works attributed to Zoroaster. His project succeeded in so far as he purchased two zend books, the Izeschné [Yasna] and the Ieschts [Yasht], and several other Indian and Persian manuscripts. But he could not get the priests to teach him either zend or pehlvi, or to give him the key to the Zend-Avesta, so that, dissatisfied with his voyage, he returned to England where he died thereafter.”132 Anquetil for his part had been in Surat twice on his own voyage, between mid-1758 and early 1761. In late 1758, he was apparently told by some of the Zoroastrian dastūrs (or priests) in the port “of the considerable sums that Mr Fraser had offered them to get hold of pehlvi manuscripts.” He notes, however, that “the destour Sapour [Shapur] informed me of these particularities in Surat, while assuring me that this Englishman knew neither zend nor pehlvi, and that he could only speak a little modern Persian.”

His hosts in Oxford seem to have brought out the worst in Anquetil-Duperron’s competitive instincts. Introduced to Thomas Hunt, a well-known Arabist and

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