BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 24 of 142

Correct — B, 1800 CE to train civil servants in Indian languages. Fort William College was founded at Calcutta in 1800 by the Governor-General, Lord Wellesley, and its purpose was practical and administrative. The East India Company recruited its junior civil servants — known as writers — as teenagers in England and sent them out to govern districts whose languages, laws and customs they knew nothing about. Wellesley's view was that men who could not speak the vernaculars could not govern, and the College was his remedy: a training institution at the seat of government where new arrivals would study Bengali, Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit, Arabic and later other Indian languages, along with Hindu and Muslim law, revenue administration and Indian history, before being posted. Option (b) states exactly that. The date is equally fixed at 1800 — the order establishing the College was issued in July of that year, though Wellesley dated its foundation to the previous 4 May, the anniversary of the fall of Seringapatam, which gives the institution a characteristically imperial birthday. What the College actually produced went far beyond its brief. To teach Indian languages it had to have textbooks, and to have textbooks it employed Indian scholars — pandits and munshis such as Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Ramram Basu, Lallu Lal and Sadal Mishra — alongside the Baptist missionary William Carey. Their prose primers, written to be readable by beginners rather than ornamental, are the starting point of modern Bengali prose and of Khari Boli Hindi prose. An institution built to make British administration workable became, incidentally, one of the nurseries of modern Indian literature.

• (a)1800 CE to train Indian civil servants — The right year with the wrong object, and the most dangerous option on the page because half of it is correct. The students were the Company's young British writers, not Indians. Indians were not admitted to the covenanted civil service at all in 1800 — that came only after the Charter Act of 1833 in principle and the competitive examination of the 1850s in practice. Indians were present at Fort William College as teachers, not as trainees.
• (c)1802 CE to understand Indian culture and tradition — Wrong on both counts. The year is 1800, not 1802; and while the College certainly deepened British knowledge of Indian culture, that was a by-product rather than its founding purpose. The institution set up specifically to study Indian culture and antiquities was the Asiatic Society, founded at Calcutta in 1784 by William Jones — a different body with a different aim.
• (d)1802 CE for historical research in Indian languages — Wrong year again, and wrong purpose again. Fort William College was a training school for administrators, not a research institute. The confusion is understandable, because the College's scholars did produce grammars, dictionaries, translations and printed editions in quantity — but those were teaching materials for civil servants, not the object of the enterprise.

British educational policy in India passed through three phases and Fort William College belongs to the first. Until the 1810s the Company's interest was in equipping its own officers and in conciliating Indian learned opinion, which produced the Calcutta Madrasa founded by Warren Hastings in 1781, the Sanskrit College at Benares founded by Jonathan Duncan in 1791, and Fort William College in 1800 — the Orientalist approach. The Charter Act of 1813 then set aside a sum for education and created the General Committee of Public Instruction in 1823, opening the Orientalist–Anglicist controversy over whether that money should support classical Indian learning or English education. Macaulay's Minute of 1835 settled it for English. The third phase begins with Wood's Despatch of 1854, which laid out a complete system from vernacular primary schools to universities, recommended English as the medium of higher instruction, stressed female education and grants-in-aid, and led to the founding of the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857.

Two moves settle this question fast. First, split the options by year: two say 1800 and two say 1802, and the College is firmly 1800, which halves the field before any judgement about purpose is needed. Second, read the object of the training. 'Indian civil servants' and 'civil servants in Indian languages' differ by one preposition and by the whole political fact of the period — in 1800 the covenanted service was closed to Indians, so an institution to train Indian civil servants could not have existed. Wherever a colonial-education question offers a nearly identical pair like that, the difference is where the answer is. It is also worth knowing how the College ended, because it explains why it is less famous than its output deserves: once the East India College at Haileybury opened in England in 1806, the language training was increasingly done before departure, Fort William's role shrank to a finishing school in the vernaculars, and it was abolished in 1854 — the same year as Wood's Despatch, which replaced the whole Orientalist apparatus with a public education system.

• Fort William College was founded at Calcutta in 1800 by Lord Wellesley, Governor-General from 1798 to 1805, to train the East India Company's young British civil servants — the writers — in Indian languages, laws and customs.
• Its teaching staff included the Baptist missionary William Carey and Indian scholars such as Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Ramram Basu, Lallu Lal and Sadal Mishra.
• The prose textbooks written there are landmarks in the development of modern Bengali prose and of Khari Boli Hindi prose.
• The East India College at Haileybury in England, opened in 1806, took over much of the training; Fort William College was abolished in 1854.
• Related colonial-era institutions: the Asiatic Society founded by William Jones at Calcutta in 1784, the Calcutta Madrasa by Warren Hastings in 1781, and the Sanskrit College at Benares by Jonathan Duncan in 1791.

• Reading 'to train Indian civil servants' as the same thing as 'to train civil servants in Indian languages'. In 1800 the covenanted service was closed to Indians.
• Dating the College to 1802. The order establishing it was issued in 1800, though Wellesley backdated the foundation to 4 May that year.
• Attributing Fort William College to Arthur Wellesley. The founder was his elder brother Richard, Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General; Arthur was the soldier who later became Duke of Wellington.

BPSC compresses institution, year and purpose into a single option, so that two of the four differ only in a preposition — a format that punishes half-knowledge harder than any other on the paper. UPSC prefers pair-matching or statement lists on the same material, asking which institution goes with which founder, or what led to the introduction of English education, so the same chronology has to support several different questions.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Fort William College at Calcutta was founded by

  • (a)Warren Hastings
  • (b)Lord Cornwallis
  • (c)Lord Wellesley
  • (d)Lord William Bentinck

  Answer(c) Lord Wellesley — Richard Colley Wellesley, Governor-General from 1798 to 1805. Warren Hastings founded the Calcutta Madrasa in 1781; Bentinck's contribution to education was to accept Macaulay's Minute in 1835.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Asiatic Society, established at Calcutta in 1784 for the study of Indian antiquities and languages, was founded by

  • (a)William Carey
  • (b)William Jones
  • (c)James Prinsep
  • (d)Max Müller

  Answer(b) William Jones — a judge of the Calcutta Supreme Court, whose demonstration of the kinship of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin founded comparative philology. James Prinsep, who deciphered Brahmi in 1837, was a later secretary of the same Society.