Who Remembers Raja Rajendralal Mitra, India’s First ‘Scientific’ Historian?

Part 2: In an age when our country’s history was written by Europeans, Mitra showed that Indians could interpret their antiquities for themselves.

In the mid-19th century, when the writing of India’s history was largely a colonial enterprise, a solitary Bengali polymath set about proving that Indians could marshal scholarship no less rigorous than their European interlocutors.

Raja Rajendra Lal Mitra (1822-91) was a shining example of how early Indian scholars could quickly imbibe Western historical ideas and methodology and how, working on their own, they could carry the bounds of knowledge much further than the early Western explorers.

He was neither an archaeologist by training nor a product of Europe’s universities. Yet he became one of the earliest Indians to claim the right to interpret his country’s antiquities. Mitra’s career began at the Asiatic Society, the citadel of Orientalist knowledge founded by Sir William Jones in 1784.

For decades it had been dominated by European administrators, philologists, and antiquarians.

In ‘Historians and Historiography of India’ (1973, ed. by S.P. Sen), Dr. Sisir Kumar Mitra, in his trenchant appreciation of Raja Rajendralal, succinctly sums up the latter’s gargantuan contribution to Indian historiography by calling Mitra as “one of those pioneer Indologists who may very well be credited with having laid the true foundations of scientific historiography in modern India.”

Yet, how is it that a figure who helped lay the very foundations of India’s historical consciousness has slipped so quietly into obscurity?

Born in Calcutta to a Kayastha family of modest means, Rajendralal was fortunate to be educated in both Indian and Western idioms at a time when English schooling was becoming a ladder for social mobility. His career took shape in 1846, when he joined the Asiatic Society as assistant secretary and librarian. Surrounded by manuscripts, inscriptions and artefacts, he absorbed the methods of comparative philology and ‘scientific’ history then in vogue among Orientalists. But unlike his European peers, he brought to the task an insider’s familiarity with India’s languages and traditions.

In 1853, Rajendralal edited the Chaitanya Chandrodaya Nataka - a Sanskrit drama encapsulating the tenets of the Bhakti movement. Far from being a sectarian intervention, this was an attempt to show how devotional traditions could be studied historically through their literature. Around the same time, he began contributing to the Bibliotheca Indica series, the Asiatic Society’s flagship publishing venture. His 1854 translation of the Chhandogya Upanishad, one of the most intricate Vedic texts, was hailed as evidence of his mastery of Sanskrit philology. He followed it with editions of Brahmanas and Aranyakas, the dense prose tracts of Vedic ritualism and speculation.

His appetite for philosophy never waned. Three decades later, he produced a critical edition of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras with Bhoja Raja’s commentary Rajamartanda. It was among the first such efforts in India, part of a larger project by the Society to publish the canonical works of the six darsanas, or schools of Hindu philosophy.

Rescuing Buddhism

Nor was he confined to just Brahmanical texts. When Brian Hodgson, a British civil servant in Kathmandu, discovered a trove of Buddhist manuscripts in Nepal, Rajendralal took up the task of making sense of them. He edited Lalitavistara (1853), an early Mahayana text in a hybrid Sanskrit-Prakrit, and later the vast Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita (1888). He also compiled Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal, a descriptive catalogue of Hodgson’s collection that remains a touchstone for scholars of Buddhist philology. At a time when Indian Buddhists were a memory more than a living community, his work rescued their textual heritage from oblivion.

While his philological output would have sufficed to secure a scholarly reputation, Rajendralal’s archaeological and literary labours expanded his stature. His magnum opus, Antiquities of Orissa (1875, 1880), was the fruit of fieldwork among the temples of Bhubaneswar, Puri and Konark. Across two volumes, illustrated with painstaking line drawings and lithographs, he described the evolution of Orissan temple architecture, its sculptural idiom, and the social and religious context that produced it. The work was not merely descriptive but analytical: Rajendralal sought to interpret the symbolism of carvings, trace stylistic shifts, and situate local traditions in a pan-Indian frame.

He brought the same zeal to Buddha Gaya: The Hermitage of Sakyamuni (1878), a comprehensive and imaginative study of the shrine long associated with the Buddha’s enlightenment. While earlier visitors like James Fergusson and Alexander Cunningham had noted the site’s ruins, it was left to Rajendralal to synthesise their reports and reconstruct the temple’s history. His account helped cement Bodh Gaya’s status as a focal point of Buddhist archaeology, years before the Sri Lankan writer Anagarika Dharmapala (a major figure of Buddhist revivalism) and others made it a symbol of revival.

In his papers scattered across Journal of the Asiatic Society, Mitra’s comparative studies of art - Graeco-Bactrian relics from Rawalpindi, Hellenistic motifs in Mathura and depictions of foreigners in the Ajanta murals - revealed a historian unafraid to cross disciplinary boundaries.

Rajendralal’s grasp of epigraphy and numismatics was no less formidable. He pored over inscriptions from the Gahadavalas of Kanauj, the Chandellas of Bundelkhand, and the Kachchhapaghatas of Gwalior, teasing out chronology and succession. The Bhagalpur inscription of Narayanapala enabled him to revise Pala history. On knotty questions such as the starting points of the Śaka and Gupta eras, he ventured corrective readings that rivalled those of Prinsep or Cunningham.

His essays on Arakanese issues of the late 19th century remain models of numismatic description.

Yet Rajendralal was never content with dynastic reconstructions alone. He also probed the social life behind texts and artefacts. Essays like ‘Beef in Ancient India’ and ‘Spirituous Drinks in Ancient India’ displayed his readiness to confront taboos, reflecting his conviction that history must be written ‘from the bottom up’ and not just royal edicts. 

Perhaps his most unglamorous but indispensable contribution was as cataloguer. From the 1870s he prepared reports and catalogues of Sanskrit manuscripts in Oudh, Bengal and Bikaner. A Report on Sanskrit Manuscripts in Native Libraries (1875) and A Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Library of H.H. the Maharajah of Bikaner (1880) provided the infrastructure without which future scholarship would have floundered.

In 1865, the Royal Asiatic Society in London elected him a fellow - the first Indian so honoured. He was later made Rai Bahadur in 1877), a Companion of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire (C.I.E.) in 1878, and conferred with the title of ‘Raja’ in 1888.

Yet such laurels did not protect him from a certain condescension with European Indologists often treating him as a diligent editor rather than an original thinker while later historians of the Nehruvian era and beyond, more focused on theories and ideological duelling, found little use for his painstaking antiquarianism.

However, there was little doubt of the tremendous esteem in which he was held by his peers – both Indian and European. He worked within colonial institutions but resisted being pigeonholed. Sir Arthur Hobhouse, conferring a degree on him at Calcutta University, noted that there was “no European society of Oriental scholars” in which Mitra was not known. His influence crossed cultural lines: he was a pandit by training, but also a critic and historian in the European sense.

For anyone taking the trouble to read Rajendralal’s splendid works today, one notices a subtle form of political assertion coursing through them: namely that Indians could interpret their own antiquity without European tutelage.

It is a supreme irony that a man who gave his country such a glorious sense of its past has been all but forgotten in the present.