MANY YOUNG civilians relished service in the North-Western Provinces, the region to which John, James, Mungo and William Muir were appointed in their turns. In the late 1820s, prior to the annexation of the Punjab, this was still the ‘frontier’ province of the Bengal Presidency offering, it seemed to such recruits, both excitement and opportunity, and attracting younger to follow older siblings as did the Muir brothers. Remote and ‘backward’ the region might seem from the Company’s capital in Calcutta, yet only just over a century earlier it had been the administrative and cultural heartland, with its capital at Delhi, of an extremely powerful, Muslim-ruled Mughal empire extending over much of India.

Mughal political authority had disintegrated in the eighteenth century, but many of the cultural and religious institutions that had thrived under the imperial umbrella managed to survive. The Mughal family, despite losing all real power to the British after the Company’s seizure of Delhi in 1803, continued to patronize the learned classes’ traditional cultural interests, artistic, literary and religious. Much has been made of a Mughal aura felt far beyond the old imperial heartlands in the northwest that would last into the mid-nineteenth century despite obvious ‘decline’, until that family’s fatal decision to provide leadership to the ‘rebel’ cause in 1857 would finally wipe this symbolic royal piece off the north Indian chessboard.

If the ‘Mughal’ factor was still omnipresent during the Muir brothers’ formative years in the north-west in the 1830s and 1840s, recent studies argue that other factors also contributed to the upkeep of traditional forms of scholarship, both religious and secular, both Hindu and Muslim. Much attention has been paid to the Muslim-ruled state of Awadh in the eastern part of the region, whose rise to short-lived local power allowed its capital, Lucknow, to exert some strong, if idiosyncratic, cultural influences over the whole region until gradual British inroads finally resulted in its annexation in 1856. The Company itself contributed to such continued patronage not only directly, as a patron itself of artists and poets and also of ‘oriental’ education, but also indirectly through the creation, for its own strategic and diplomatic reasons, of some new or revived foci of indigenous authority. In Benares, in particular, a newly created raja-ship provided new sources of support for Hindu religious interests and scholarship.