Fort William College - Eminent Scholars

Eminent Scholars

Fort William College was served by a number of eminent scholars. They contributed enormously towards development of Indian languages and literature. Some of them are noted below.

• William Carey (1761–1834) was with Fort William College from 1801 to 1831. During this period he published a Bengali grammar and dictionary, numerous text books, the Bible, grammar and dictionary in other Indian languages.
• Matthew Lumsden (1777 - 1835)
• John Borthwick Gilchrist (June 1759 - 1841)
• Mrityunjay Vidyalankar (1762?–1819) was First Pandit at Fort William College. He wrote a number of text books and is considered the first ‘conscious artist’ of Bengali prose. Although a Sanskrit scholar he started writing Bengali as per the needs of Fort William College. He published Batris Singhasan (1802), Hitopodesh (1808) and Rajabali (1808). The last named book was the first published history of India. Mrityunjoy did not know English and as such the contents were possibly provided by the English-knowing scholars of Fort William College.
• Tarini Charan Mitra (1772–1837), a scholar in English, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic and Persian, was with the Hindustani department of Fort William College. He had translated many stories into Bengali.
• Lallulal (also spelt as Lalloolal or Lallo Lal), the father of Hindi Khariboli prose, was instructor in Hindustani at Fort William College. He printed and published in 1815 the first book of old Hindi literature, Tulsidas’s Vinaypatrika.
• Ramram Basu (1757–1813) was with the Fort William College. He assisted William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward in the publication of the first Bengali translation of the Bible.
• Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–91) was head pandit at Fort William College from 1841 to 1846. He concentrated on English and Hindi while serving in the college. After discharging his duties as academician, and engagements as a reformer he had little time for creative writing. Yet through the text books he produced, the pamphlets he wrote and retelling of Kalidas’s Shakuntala and Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors he set the norm of standard Bengali prose.
• Madan Mohan Tarkalankar (1817–58) taught at Fort William College. He was one of the pioneers of text book writing.