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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2023
As a case study of the changing mentalities that emerged in colonial India, this article analyses a discussion that took place among several munshis (secretaries trained in Persian to run the affairs of princely states), and also provides a translation and edition of the text. The subject was a short polemical letter refuting the immortality of the soul, published around 1850 in the Simla Akhbār (Simla News). The main question entertained in this correspondence was not the merit of the sceptical argument, based in part on modern medical findings, but the potential public impact of dismissing a religious doctrine that sustains morality. Two of the participants in this conversation, Shivaprasad and Sital Singh, displayed the full range of changes that made the nineteenth century so extraordinary, and the way they responded illustrates some of the salient features and stages of this process, including the difficulty of foreseeing the elimination of much of the system for which munshis were trained.
1 Early discussions of these issues include Robinson, Francis, ‘Technology and religious change: Islam and the impact of print’, Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993), pp. 229–251CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, Francis, ‘Islamic reform and modernities in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 42 (2008), pp. 259–281CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Without attempting to list all the literature on this subject, one can point to the writings of Vasudha Dalmia, Francesca Orsini, David Lelyveld, Margrit Pernau, and Avril Powell, among others.
2 Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘The making of a munshi’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2004), pp. 61–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Garcin de Tassy, La langue et la littérature hindoustanies de 1850 à 1869: discours d'ouverture du cours d'hindoustani, 2nd edn (Paris, 1874), p. 88, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3466989 (accessed 20 June 2023). Although in Urdu the name of the town is spelled Shimla, the English form ‘Simla’ is retained here for simplicity.
4 The only copy I have traced is the issue of 15 April 1848, in the Archives of the Royal Asiatic Society (GB 891 HME/6/2).
5 A. Shakespear et al., ‘On the native press in the North-Western Provinces’, in Selections from the Records of Government, North Western Provinces, vol. 4 (Allahabad, 1868), pp. 16, 57, 83.
6 L. M. (ed.), ‘The native press in the N.W.P.’, Ledlie's Miscellany and Journal for the North West 1 (September 1852), p. 208.
7 Ibid.; de Tassy, La langue et la littérature hindoustanies de 1850 à 1869, p. 227; Cunningham, Alexander, Archaeological Survey of India: Reports 1862–1884, vol. 5 (Calcutta, 1875), p. 180Google Scholar.
8 Auer, Blain, ‘Early modern Persian, Urdu, and English historiography and the imagination of Islamic India under British rule’, Études de lettres 2–3 (2014), doi.org/10.4000/edl.710Google Scholar; Diamond, Jeffrey M., ‘“Calculated to be offensive to Hindoos”? Vernacular education, history textbooks and the waqi'at controversy of the 1860s in colonial North India’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Series 3, 24.1 (2014), pp. 75–95, doi:10.1017/S1356186313000606Google Scholar.
9 Powell, Avril, ‘History textbooks and the transmission of the pre-colonial past in NW India in the 1860s and 1870s’, in Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, (ed.) Ali, Daud (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 91–133Google Scholar; Stark, Ulrike, ‘Through subaltern eyes: Shivaprasad at Simla, 1846–1852’, Summerhill: IIAS Review 17.1 (2012), pp. 23–33Google Scholar.
10 The manuscript is IO Islamic 4085, fols. 97–101, British Library, London. Ganga Bishan is credited with a couple of other compositions, a Persian lexicon (MS 1440, Asiatic Society of Bengal) and a miscellany with notes on Hindu mythology and Sufism in Persian and Urdu (MS 1717, Asiatic Society of Bengal, dated 1818–1825). He is not to be confused with another munshi, Ram Sita Singh, who also used the pen name ‘Fikrat’.
11 Kurawi, Mazhar Hasan, Tārīkh-i Banāras, 1st edn, vol. 2 (Benares, 1926), pp. 543–544Google Scholar.
12 Ernst, Carl W., ‘A Persian philosophical defense of Vedanta’, in Voices of Three Generations: Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, (eds) Mohammad H. Faghfoory and Katherine O'Brien (Chicago, 2019), pp. 11–37Google Scholar.
13 Shakespear et al., ‘On the native press’, p. 79.
14 Sital Singh ‘Bīkhwud’, Dīwān, (ed.) Shivaprasad (Benares, 1272/1857), pp. 70–71.
15 The later career of Sital Singh is discussed in: Carl Ernst, ‘The end of Persianate Hinduism’, in The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Muslim Relations, (ed.) Peter Gottschalk (forthcoming).
16 Sital Singh is incorrectly listed as author of a treatise on the principles of printing entitled Qanūn al-intibāʿ (Delhi, 1848), in J. F. Blumhardt, Catalog of the Library of the India Office, vol. 2, part 2, Hindustani Books (London, 1900), p. 2. The actual author is Budh Singh Khatri, who describes himself on p. 2 as ‘the least of the students of the master and guide to truth, the absolute prayer direction and Kaʿba, the source of emanation, who is connected to sanctity, Munshi Sital Singh sahib, may God extend his shadow’.
17 Fihrist: Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from the Islamicate World, https://www.fihrist.org.uk/catalog/manuscript_18125 (accessed 20 June 2023).
18 Shivaprasad, Babu, Memorandum: Court Characters in the Upper Provinces of India (Benares, 1868), p. 5Google Scholar.
19 Shivaprasad was actually the great-grandson of Dalchand.
20 In other contexts, ‘annihilation’ (fanā) can be a Sufi concept of eliminating the ego, but here it is the ephemeral character of ordinary existence.
21 This widely quoted saying is the second line in the late yoga text known as the Amritabindu Upanishad. A marginal gloss adds: moksha (in Devanagari), najāt (Persian for ‘salvation’).
22 Sital Singh was commonly referred to by this epithet, ‘without self, but with God’.
23 This verse is not found in the writings of Sadi.
24 The following pages consist of a diplomatic edition that follows the original manuscript as closely as possible. This includes red ink for headings and certain terms, traditional punctuation with verse markers for poetry and triple dots as separators (please note that the red ink is only visible in the online version of this article); minimal modern punctuation has been added. Pagination of the manuscript is given in square brackets. The Nandinagari characters ‘na’ and ‘ksh’ are replaced here with standard Devanagari equivalents. The undotted Urdu nasalised ‘nūn’ is not used in the manuscript, so the dotted ‘nūn’ appears instead.
25 Superintendency (sic).
26 पु न र ज 
در آمدن روح بقالب دیگر تا جزا یابند (marginal note).
27 مراد از سکھ نزد راقم (marginal note).
28 वे द ام الکتاب هنود (marginal note).
29 मो 
نجات (marginal note).
30 (Marginal insertion).
Please note a has been issued for this article.
