Brian Houghton Hodgson - India

India

At the age of seventeen (1818) he travelled to India as a writer in the British East India Company. His talent for languages such as Sanskrit and especially Persian was to prove useful for his career. He was posted as Assistant Commissioner in the Kumaon region during 1819-20. The Kumaon region had been annexed from Nepal and in 1820 he was made assistant to the resident in Nepal but he took up a position of acting deputy secretary in the Persian department of the Foreign office in Calcutta. Ill health made him prefer to go back into the hills of Nepal. He took up position in 1824 as postmaster and later assistant resident in 1825. In January 1833 he became the British Resident at Kathmandu. He continued to suffer from ill health and gave up meat and alcohol in 1837. He studied the Nepalese people, producing a number of papers on their languages, literature and religion. In 1853 he made a brief visit to England and Holland. He married Anne Scott in the British Embassy at the Hague. She died in 1868. In 1870 he married Susan Townshend of Derry.