THE YEAR of Rebellion in north India, 1857–8, saw the completion of the first volumes of each brother’s historical magnum opus, by John in Edinburgh, and by William in Agra. By then both brothers had already published, as we have seen, some shorter historical works in Sanskrit and Urdu, choosing to call them works of itihas or tarikh (history). John’s five-volume Original Sanskrit Texts (referred to hereafter as the OST) he defined in the subtitle to the first volume as studies ‘on the origin and progress of the religions and institutions of India’. In later volumes, but with no explanation, ‘history’ was substituted for ‘progress’ in the title. William’s Life of Mahomet was intended to provide as well as a biography, a ‘history of Islam’ in early seventh-century Arabia. In this chapter the brothers’ qualifications for such exercises in religious history and the methodologies they employed will be assessed, leaving consideration of their views on particular historical questions that were sensitive to their Hindu and Muslim readers to Chapter Six. Discussion focuses on the first editions of their histories, publication of which commenced in the late 1850s, though comment is also drawn from later editions and from some later works on similar themes where relevant.

Both John’s OST and William’s Life of Mahomet were published in English, but according to the authors were written primarily for an Indian readership, the Sanskrit Texts, as its frontispiece proclaimed, ‘chiefly for the use of students’. The ‘plan’ to John’s first volume described his potential Indian readers as ‘those Hindus who wish to become critically acquainted with the foundation on which their ancestral religion reposes’. He surely had his former pandit students at Benares particularly in mind, to whom he had lectured in Sanskrit some 15 years earlier on subjects such as the ‘common origin’ of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, but given that he was now publishing in English, the Hindu students too of India’s recently opened English-medium universities. His intentions were spelled out more fully in the preface to the second volume as being to ‘assist the researches of those Hindus who desire to investigate critically the origin and history of their nation, and of their national literature, religion, and institutions’.