THIS STUDY breaks new ground in several ways. Unusually for a study of empire, it begins and ends in Scotland rather than the imperial metropolis in London. The Indian context is set by following the careers of some Scots serving in the East India Company’s administration of north-west India in the decades following British annexation of the heartlands of the former Mughal empire in the early nineteenth century. The emphasis is not on administration per se, however, but on the after-office pursuits of a pair of Scottish ‘scholar-administrators’ who chose to spend their leisure hours in the study of India’s classical languages, the writing of histories of India’s religions and in activities supportive of missionary goals.

These North-Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, annexed several decades later than the Lower Bengal delta region, have been well studied already from many perspectives. Yet processes of religious and cultural interaction have not yet had the attention that Calcutta and other longer established colonial enclaves have received from this particular perspective. This is despite the living significance of the northwest’s many historical centres of religious study, worship and pilgrimage in the so-called ‘twilight’ years following Mughal political decline, and the continuation of patronage to religious, educational and cultural institutions in some new as well as older centres of scholarship. That the particular pair of scholar administrators who engaged in the religious history of the region divided their interests between Sanskrit and Arabic, between Hinduism and Islam, explains why both main religious traditions are, unusually, the concern of a single study.

Although a biographical structure has been adopted, this is not a conventional biography, for the focus is on a family of scholars not an individual. The family in question, the Muirs of Kilmarnock, in West Lowlands Scotland, had been active in the late eighteenth century in the commercial and civic concerns of their town during a period of rapid industrialization. The sequence of events that transformed this family’s hitherto only indirect commercial interests in empire (through relatives’ activities in the Americas and India) into career opportunities in the East India Company’s administrative service for its suddenly impoverished next generation, commences the study.