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George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 7/20/20
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood
Sir George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood KCIE, CSI (8 December 1832 – 28 June 1917) was an Anglo-Indian official, naturalist, and writer.
Life
The son of General Christopher Birdwood, he was born at Belgaum, then in the Bombay Presidency, on 8 December 1832. He was educated at Plymouth Grammar School and Edinburgh University, where he took his MD degree presenting the thesis "The origin of ideas"[1]. Entering the Bombay Medical Service in 1854, he served in the Persian War of 1856-57, and subsequently became professor at the Grant Medical College, registrar of the university, curator of the museum, and sheriff at Bombay, besides acting as secretary of the Asiatic and Horticultural societies.[2]
His work on the Economic Vegetable Products of the Bombay Presidency reached its twelfth edition in 1868. He interested himself prominently also in the municipal life of the city, where he acquired great influence and popularity. He was obliged by ill-health in 1868 to return to England, where he entered the revenue and statistics department of the India Office (1871–1902).[2]
While engaged there he published important volumes on the industrial arts of India, the ancient records of the India Office,
and the first letter-book of the East India Company. He devoted much time and energy to the encouragement of Indian art, on various aspects of which he wrote valuable monographs, and his name was identified with the representation of India at all the principal International Exhibitions from 1857 to 1901.[2][3] That notwithstanding, while chairing the Indian Section of the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in 1910, he declared that there was no "fine art" in India. When a particular statue of the Buddha was adduced as counter-example, Birdwood is said to have responded: "This senseless similitude, in its immemorial fixed pose, is nothing more than an uninspired brazen image. . . . A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul."[4]
His researches on the subject of incense,[5] a good example of his mastery of detail, have made his historical and botanical account of this subject a classic. Nor can his lifelong association with journalism of the best sort be overlooked. From boyhood he was a diligent contributor of special information to magazines and newspapers; in India he helped to convert the Standard into The Times of India, and edited the Bombay Saturday Review; and after his return to London he wrote for the Pall Mall, Athenaeum, Academy, and The Times; and with Thomas Chenery, the editor of The Times, and others he took the initiative (1882) in celebrating the anniversary of Lord Beaconsfield's death as Primrose Day (19 April).[2]
In the dedication to his English translation of Garcia de Orta's book, Clements Markham calls Birdwood the "Garcia da Orta of British India".[6]
He kept up his connection with India by constant contributions to the Indian press; and his long friendships with Indian princes and the leading educated native Indians made his intimate knowledge of the country of peculiar value in the handling of the problems of the Indian empire. In 1846 he was selected Sheriff of Bombay[7] In 1887 he was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire; and, besides being given his Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Cambridge, he was also made an officer of the Légion d'Honneur and a laureate of the French Academy.[2] He died in Ealing on 28 June 1917.[8]
The standard author abbreviation Birdw. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[9]
Works
• On the Genus Boswellia [Frankincense Trees] (1870)
• The Economic Vegetable Products of the Bombay Presidency (1888)
• The Industrial Arts of India (1888)
• Reports on the Old Records of the India Office (1891)
• The Register of Letters and of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies 1600-1619 (1893) with Sir William Foster
• First Letter Book of the East India Company (1895)
Notes
1. Birdwood, George Christopher Molesworth (1854). "The origin of ideas".
2. Chisholm 1911.
3. Journal of Indian Art, vol. viii. The Life and Work of Sir George Birdwood
4. Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2004, page 52. ISBN 978-0-19-515297-5.
5. Trans. Liun. Soc. xxvii., 1871; Ency. Brit. 9th ed., Incense, 1881; revised
6. Clements R. Markham (1913). Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India by Garcia da Orta. London: Henry Sotheran and Co.
7. Dictionary of Indian Biography. p. 43.
8. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1922). "Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth". Encyclopædia Britannica. 30 (12th ed.). London & New York. p. 456.
9. IPNI. Birdw.
References
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth". Encyclopædia Britannica. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 979.
Further reading
• Rao, C. Hayavadana, ed. (1915). "Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth". The Indian Biographical Dictionary.
• Cooper, Thompson, ed. (1884). "Birdwood, George Christopher Molesworth". Men of the Time (eleventh ed.).
*****************************
George Birdwood [Sir George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood]
by The Open University: Making Britain
Accessed: 7/20/20
Date of birth: 08 Dec 1832
City of birth: Belgaum
Country of birth: India
Date of death: 28 Jun 1917
Location of death: London, England
About:
George Birdwood was born in India into what might be described as typical ‘Anglo-Indian’ family circumstances. The son of a soldier, General Christopher Birdwood, and Lydia Birdwood, the daughter of a Reverend of the London Missionary Society, Birdwood, like so many children of the British Army in India, was sent back to Britain to complete his education (schools in Plymouth and Scotland, and a degree from the University of Edinburgh), becoming a surgeon in 1857 and returning to India as an assistant surgeon with the Bombay medical service. Something of a Victorian polymath, Birdwood’s interests lay not only within the medical field. He was heavily involved in the cultural affairs of Bombay and became the Registrar of the newly-founded University of Bombay. It was, however, as a cultural administrator that Birdwood had most visible and lasting impact, occupying the posts of curator of the government art museum, Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society and Sheriff of Bombay.
His return to England in 1868 (due to ill health) did not lead to a quiet retirement, but a continued vigorous involvement in Indian cultural affairs, especially in the form of international exhibitions and the museological display of Indian art and artefacts. He was appointed keeper of the Indian Museum at South Kensington (now incorporated into the Victoria and Albert Museum collections). His reputation as an authority on Indian art and manufacture was firmly established with the publication of The Industrial Arts of India which championed the production of Indian arts and crafts in heavily paternalistic tones and praised small-scale village organization and traditions for the production of crafts. This tome influenced a large number of British designers and craftsmen, including William Morris and Owen Jones.
In 1879 he was appointed to a specially created post in the India Office, publishing work on its historical records and retiring in 1905. He was knighted in 1881 and made KCIE in 1887. Birdwood kept up a close correspondence with M. M. Bhownaggree, in the lead up to Bhownaggree's election as a Conservative MP in Bethnal Green in 1895. His reputation as a champion of Indian art was somewhat challenged at a now infamous event which took place whilst chairing the Indian Section meeting of the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Arts on 13 January 1910. After a paper given by the former colonial arts administrator and writer on Indian art, E. B. Havell, Birdwood made the claim that India possessed no 'fine art' which he had come across in all his years in India, and that a ‘boiled suet pudding would serve equally as well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul.’ This prompted a wave of counter claims and protest, most notably a letter sent to The Times in February 1910 penned by William Rothenstein and counter-signed by twelve other prominent cultural figures, and led to the foundation of the India Society.
Connections:
Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree, Manchershaw Pithawala (Birdwood wrote an article in appreciation of Pithawala in 1911).
India Office, Royal Asiatic Society.
Involved in events:
Empire of India Exhibition, 1895
Comment at Royal Society of Arts talk regarding lack of Indian fine art led to outrage from Havell, Rothenstein and others and to formation of India Society, 1910
Published works:
Handbook to the British Indian Section, Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 (London, 1878)
Report on the Government Central Museum and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Western India, for 1863, in Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government (Bombay, 1864)
The Industrial Arts of India (London, 1880)
Clarke, Caspar Purdon and Birdwood, George C. M., Catalogue of the Collection of Indian Arms and Objects of Art presented by the Princes and Nobles of India to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, on occasion of his visit to India in 1875-1876, now in the Indian Room at Marlborough House (London, 1898)
Contributions to periodicals:
'To the Temple’, Journal of Indian Art and Industries (January 1898)
Secondary works:
Chirol, Valentine, ‘Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth (1832–1917)’, rev. Katherine Prior, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31896]
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Mitter, Partha, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Mitter, Partha, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
Archive source:
Mss Eur F 216, correspondence and papers, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras
Correspondence with Lord Kimberley, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Correspondence with Lord Hardinge, Cambridge University Library
********************************
Sir George C.M. Birdwood, K.C.I.C., C.S.I., M.D., LL.D.: His Life and Work
by Louis Mallet
The Journal of Indian Art, 1886-1916; London Vol. 8, Iss. 61-69, (Jan 1900): [119]-[156].
George Christopher Moleworth Birdwood was born at Belgaum, in the Bombay Presidency, on the 8th December, 1832. He is the eldest son of the late General Christopher Birdwood. He received his education at the Plymouth New Grammar School, and at Edinburgh University, where in 1854 he took the degree of M.D. In December of the same year he was appointed by the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company to their Medical Service in Bombay: Dr. Birdwood representing the fourth generation of his family, in the direct line, which has been connected with British India.
On Dr. Birdwood's arrival in India, early in 1855, his first charge was the Southern Mahratta Horse, at Kalludghee. Later in the same year he was transferred to the 1st Company 2nd Battalion of the Artillery, at Sholapore, where he was also at different times in medical charge of the 8th Madras Cavalry, the 3rd Bombay Infantry, and the Civil Station, which included a large Jail. About the close of 1856 he was sent to the Persian Gulf in medical charge of the Honourable Company's S.S. "Ajdaha," and of the detachment of H.M. 64th Regiment on board, and was present at the bombardment of Mohammarah, for which he received the medal and clasp given for the Persian War of 1856-57.
When he returned to Bombay, in April 1857, he was appointed Acting Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Grant Medical College, and from that date he continued his connection with the College, almost without interruption, in the chairs successively of Anatomy and Physiology, and Botany and Materia Medica, until he left India.
The late Lord Elphinstone, who took a great interest in the Government Central Museum, which he had established, and who had been pleased with the large collections of stuffed birds and dried plants, and of economic produce which Dr. Birdwood had sent to it from Belgaum, Kalludghee, and Sholapore, while he was on general duty in those places in 1855-7, appointed him its Secretary and Curator. This led, through Dr. Birdwood's initiative, ably and zealously seconded by the late eminent Hindoo physician and scholar, Dr. Bhawco Dhajee, to the establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Victoria Gardens, at a cost of upwards of £ 200,000. The undertaking was largely subscribed to by the people of Bombay as a loyal memorial of the transfer of the possessions of the East India Company to the direct administration of the British Crown; and with the effect of giving such an impulse to the public spirit of the natives of Bombay, and of Western India generally, that every educational institution throughout the Presidency reaped the benefit of it, particularly the local branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the University. It was for the Victoria Gardens that the former Gaekwar of Baroda, the Maharajah Kunderow, ordered through Dr. Birdwood the canopied statue of the Queen, by Noble, now placed on the Esplanade, at a cost, we believe, of £ 35,000. About this time Dr. Birdwood published his learned and valuable "Catalogue of the Economic Products of the Presidency of Bombay," which went through two editions before he left India. It was most favourably noticed not only in India, but in England, and, by the late Professor Garcin de Tassy, in France. It has been used as the foundation of all catalogues of Indian vegetable produce at subsequent exhibitions, and the classification he adopted in it has ever since been followed in India.
On the resignation of the distinguished naturalist, Surgeon-Major H.J. Carter, F.R.S., Dr. Birdwood was elected honorary secretary to the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, which he resuscitated, and entirely reorganised. He was at the same time appointed in succession to Carter, Secretary to the Elphinstone Funds, the educational fund of Bombay; and on the death of Surgeon Haines he was appointed by Sir Alexander Grant, and subsequently twice re-elected by the Senate, Registrar of the University of Bombay, his exertions for which had secured some of its most valuable endowments. These varied public duties were in a measure acknowledged by Dr. Birdwood being appointed, in 1864, Sheriff of Bombay. In March, 1867, he was sent by Sir Bartle Frere, at the express desire of the leading merchants of Bombay, as Special Commissioner for that Government to the Universal Exhibition held at Paris in that year. On being forced to finally leave India through permanently broken health in 1868, Dr. Birdwood's many valuable public services to the Western Presidency were recognised by the addressed presented to him by the Royal Asiatic Society, the Agri-Horticultural Society of Western India, the University, and the students of Grant Medical College. The cover of the address of the Agri-Horticultural Society, which was designed by Mr. John Griffiths, of the Bombay School of Art, is given in Plate 46.
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 7/20/20
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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TIBETAN REFUGEES
Sir. – Recent devastating events in Tibet caused over 15,000 Tibetans to cross the perilous Himalayas into India. It may be a long time before these unfortunate people can safely return to their overrun country. Our own consciences should allow us neither to neglect nor forget them.
The Indian Government has manfully coped with this addition to its own problems at home. In this country we are bound in honour to help relieve needs of the Tibetan refugees, because from 1905 to 1947 there was a special relationship between Tibet and the United Kingdom – a relationship handed on to the new India.
On balance we think it wisest to concentrate chiefly on collecting money which can be used for the benefit of the refugees, not least in the purchase of necessary antibiotics and other medicaments. The Tibet Society has opened a Tibet Relief Fund for which we now appeal in the hope of a generous response. Donations should be sent to the address below or direct to the National Bank Ltd. (Belgravia Branch), 21 Grosvenor Gardens, S.W.I.
Yours faithfully,
... Birdwood ... The Tibet Relief Fund, 58 Eccleston Square, S.W. I., Letter to the Times, July 31, 1959, p.7.
-- Tibet Society, by tibetsociety.com
George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood
Sir George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood KCIE, CSI (8 December 1832 – 28 June 1917) was an Anglo-Indian official, naturalist, and writer.
Life
The son of General Christopher Birdwood, he was born at Belgaum, then in the Bombay Presidency, on 8 December 1832. He was educated at Plymouth Grammar School and Edinburgh University, where he took his MD degree presenting the thesis "The origin of ideas"[1]. Entering the Bombay Medical Service in 1854, he served in the Persian War of 1856-57, and subsequently became professor at the Grant Medical College, registrar of the university, curator of the museum, and sheriff at Bombay, besides acting as secretary of the Asiatic and Horticultural societies.[2]
His work on the Economic Vegetable Products of the Bombay Presidency reached its twelfth edition in 1868. He interested himself prominently also in the municipal life of the city, where he acquired great influence and popularity. He was obliged by ill-health in 1868 to return to England, where he entered the revenue and statistics department of the India Office (1871–1902).[2]
While engaged there he published important volumes on the industrial arts of India, the ancient records of the India Office,
The India Office Records are a very large collection of documents relating to the administration of India from 1600 to 1947, the period spanning Company and British rule in India. The archive is held in London by the British Library and is publicly accessible.
The records come from four main sources: the English and later British East India Company (1600–1858), the Board of Control (1784–1858), the India Office (1858–1947), and the Burma Office (1937–48). The collection also includes records from many smaller related institutions. Overall, the collection is made up of approximately 175,000 items, including official publications and records, manuscripts, photographs, printed maps and private papers. These items take up approximately nine miles of shelving units.
-- India Office Records, by Wikipedia
and the first letter-book of the East India Company. He devoted much time and energy to the encouragement of Indian art, on various aspects of which he wrote valuable monographs, and his name was identified with the representation of India at all the principal International Exhibitions from 1857 to 1901.[2][3] That notwithstanding, while chairing the Indian Section of the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in 1910, he declared that there was no "fine art" in India. When a particular statue of the Buddha was adduced as counter-example, Birdwood is said to have responded: "This senseless similitude, in its immemorial fixed pose, is nothing more than an uninspired brazen image. . . . A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul."[4]
His researches on the subject of incense,[5] a good example of his mastery of detail, have made his historical and botanical account of this subject a classic. Nor can his lifelong association with journalism of the best sort be overlooked. From boyhood he was a diligent contributor of special information to magazines and newspapers; in India he helped to convert the Standard into The Times of India, and edited the Bombay Saturday Review; and after his return to London he wrote for the Pall Mall, Athenaeum, Academy, and The Times; and with Thomas Chenery, the editor of The Times, and others he took the initiative (1882) in celebrating the anniversary of Lord Beaconsfield's death as Primrose Day (19 April).[2]
In the dedication to his English translation of Garcia de Orta's book, Clements Markham calls Birdwood the "Garcia da Orta of British India".[6]
He kept up his connection with India by constant contributions to the Indian press; and his long friendships with Indian princes and the leading educated native Indians made his intimate knowledge of the country of peculiar value in the handling of the problems of the Indian empire. In 1846 he was selected Sheriff of Bombay[7] In 1887 he was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire; and, besides being given his Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Cambridge, he was also made an officer of the Légion d'Honneur and a laureate of the French Academy.[2] He died in Ealing on 28 June 1917.[8]
The standard author abbreviation Birdw. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[9]
Works
• On the Genus Boswellia [Frankincense Trees] (1870)
• The Economic Vegetable Products of the Bombay Presidency (1888)
• The Industrial Arts of India (1888)
• Reports on the Old Records of the India Office (1891)
• The Register of Letters and of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies 1600-1619 (1893) with Sir William Foster
• First Letter Book of the East India Company (1895)
Notes
1. Birdwood, George Christopher Molesworth (1854). "The origin of ideas".
2. Chisholm 1911.
3. Journal of Indian Art, vol. viii. The Life and Work of Sir George Birdwood
4. Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2004, page 52. ISBN 978-0-19-515297-5.
5. Trans. Liun. Soc. xxvii., 1871; Ency. Brit. 9th ed., Incense, 1881; revised
6. Clements R. Markham (1913). Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India by Garcia da Orta. London: Henry Sotheran and Co.
7. Dictionary of Indian Biography. p. 43.
8. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1922). "Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth". Encyclopædia Britannica. 30 (12th ed.). London & New York. p. 456.
9. IPNI. Birdw.
References
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth". Encyclopædia Britannica. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 979.
Further reading
• Rao, C. Hayavadana, ed. (1915). "Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth". The Indian Biographical Dictionary.
• Cooper, Thompson, ed. (1884). "Birdwood, George Christopher Molesworth". Men of the Time (eleventh ed.).
*****************************
George Birdwood [Sir George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood]
by The Open University: Making Britain
Accessed: 7/20/20
Date of birth: 08 Dec 1832
City of birth: Belgaum
Country of birth: India
Date of death: 28 Jun 1917
Location of death: London, England
About:
George Birdwood was born in India into what might be described as typical ‘Anglo-Indian’ family circumstances. The son of a soldier, General Christopher Birdwood, and Lydia Birdwood, the daughter of a Reverend of the London Missionary Society, Birdwood, like so many children of the British Army in India, was sent back to Britain to complete his education (schools in Plymouth and Scotland, and a degree from the University of Edinburgh), becoming a surgeon in 1857 and returning to India as an assistant surgeon with the Bombay medical service. Something of a Victorian polymath, Birdwood’s interests lay not only within the medical field. He was heavily involved in the cultural affairs of Bombay and became the Registrar of the newly-founded University of Bombay. It was, however, as a cultural administrator that Birdwood had most visible and lasting impact, occupying the posts of curator of the government art museum, Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society and Sheriff of Bombay.
His return to England in 1868 (due to ill health) did not lead to a quiet retirement, but a continued vigorous involvement in Indian cultural affairs, especially in the form of international exhibitions and the museological display of Indian art and artefacts. He was appointed keeper of the Indian Museum at South Kensington (now incorporated into the Victoria and Albert Museum collections). His reputation as an authority on Indian art and manufacture was firmly established with the publication of The Industrial Arts of India which championed the production of Indian arts and crafts in heavily paternalistic tones and praised small-scale village organization and traditions for the production of crafts. This tome influenced a large number of British designers and craftsmen, including William Morris and Owen Jones.
In 1879 he was appointed to a specially created post in the India Office, publishing work on its historical records and retiring in 1905. He was knighted in 1881 and made KCIE in 1887. Birdwood kept up a close correspondence with M. M. Bhownaggree, in the lead up to Bhownaggree's election as a Conservative MP in Bethnal Green in 1895. His reputation as a champion of Indian art was somewhat challenged at a now infamous event which took place whilst chairing the Indian Section meeting of the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Arts on 13 January 1910. After a paper given by the former colonial arts administrator and writer on Indian art, E. B. Havell, Birdwood made the claim that India possessed no 'fine art' which he had come across in all his years in India, and that a ‘boiled suet pudding would serve equally as well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul.’ This prompted a wave of counter claims and protest, most notably a letter sent to The Times in February 1910 penned by William Rothenstein and counter-signed by twelve other prominent cultural figures, and led to the foundation of the India Society.
Connections:
Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree, Manchershaw Pithawala (Birdwood wrote an article in appreciation of Pithawala in 1911).
India Office, Royal Asiatic Society.
Involved in events:
Empire of India Exhibition, 1895
Comment at Royal Society of Arts talk regarding lack of Indian fine art led to outrage from Havell, Rothenstein and others and to formation of India Society, 1910
Published works:
Handbook to the British Indian Section, Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 (London, 1878)
Report on the Government Central Museum and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Western India, for 1863, in Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government (Bombay, 1864)
The Industrial Arts of India (London, 1880)
Clarke, Caspar Purdon and Birdwood, George C. M., Catalogue of the Collection of Indian Arms and Objects of Art presented by the Princes and Nobles of India to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, on occasion of his visit to India in 1875-1876, now in the Indian Room at Marlborough House (London, 1898)
Contributions to periodicals:
'To the Temple’, Journal of Indian Art and Industries (January 1898)
Secondary works:
Chirol, Valentine, ‘Birdwood, Sir George Christopher Molesworth (1832–1917)’, rev. Katherine Prior, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31896]
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Mitter, Partha, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Mitter, Partha, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
Archive source:
Mss Eur F 216, correspondence and papers, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras
Correspondence with Lord Kimberley, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Correspondence with Lord Hardinge, Cambridge University Library
********************************
Sir George C.M. Birdwood, K.C.I.C., C.S.I., M.D., LL.D.: His Life and Work
by Louis Mallet
The Journal of Indian Art, 1886-1916; London Vol. 8, Iss. 61-69, (Jan 1900): [119]-[156].
George Christopher Moleworth Birdwood was born at Belgaum, in the Bombay Presidency, on the 8th December, 1832. He is the eldest son of the late General Christopher Birdwood. He received his education at the Plymouth New Grammar School, and at Edinburgh University, where in 1854 he took the degree of M.D. In December of the same year he was appointed by the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company to their Medical Service in Bombay: Dr. Birdwood representing the fourth generation of his family, in the direct line, which has been connected with British India.
On Dr. Birdwood's arrival in India, early in 1855, his first charge was the Southern Mahratta Horse, at Kalludghee. Later in the same year he was transferred to the 1st Company 2nd Battalion of the Artillery, at Sholapore, where he was also at different times in medical charge of the 8th Madras Cavalry, the 3rd Bombay Infantry, and the Civil Station, which included a large Jail. About the close of 1856 he was sent to the Persian Gulf in medical charge of the Honourable Company's S.S. "Ajdaha," and of the detachment of H.M. 64th Regiment on board, and was present at the bombardment of Mohammarah, for which he received the medal and clasp given for the Persian War of 1856-57.
When he returned to Bombay, in April 1857, he was appointed Acting Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Grant Medical College, and from that date he continued his connection with the College, almost without interruption, in the chairs successively of Anatomy and Physiology, and Botany and Materia Medica, until he left India.
The late Lord Elphinstone, who took a great interest in the Government Central Museum, which he had established, and who had been pleased with the large collections of stuffed birds and dried plants, and of economic produce which Dr. Birdwood had sent to it from Belgaum, Kalludghee, and Sholapore, while he was on general duty in those places in 1855-7, appointed him its Secretary and Curator. This led, through Dr. Birdwood's initiative, ably and zealously seconded by the late eminent Hindoo physician and scholar, Dr. Bhawco Dhajee, to the establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Victoria Gardens, at a cost of upwards of £ 200,000. The undertaking was largely subscribed to by the people of Bombay as a loyal memorial of the transfer of the possessions of the East India Company to the direct administration of the British Crown; and with the effect of giving such an impulse to the public spirit of the natives of Bombay, and of Western India generally, that every educational institution throughout the Presidency reaped the benefit of it, particularly the local branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the University. It was for the Victoria Gardens that the former Gaekwar of Baroda, the Maharajah Kunderow, ordered through Dr. Birdwood the canopied statue of the Queen, by Noble, now placed on the Esplanade, at a cost, we believe, of £ 35,000. About this time Dr. Birdwood published his learned and valuable "Catalogue of the Economic Products of the Presidency of Bombay," which went through two editions before he left India. It was most favourably noticed not only in India, but in England, and, by the late Professor Garcin de Tassy, in France. It has been used as the foundation of all catalogues of Indian vegetable produce at subsequent exhibitions, and the classification he adopted in it has ever since been followed in India.
On the resignation of the distinguished naturalist, Surgeon-Major H.J. Carter, F.R.S., Dr. Birdwood was elected honorary secretary to the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, which he resuscitated, and entirely reorganised. He was at the same time appointed in succession to Carter, Secretary to the Elphinstone Funds, the educational fund of Bombay; and on the death of Surgeon Haines he was appointed by Sir Alexander Grant, and subsequently twice re-elected by the Senate, Registrar of the University of Bombay, his exertions for which had secured some of its most valuable endowments. These varied public duties were in a measure acknowledged by Dr. Birdwood being appointed, in 1864, Sheriff of Bombay. In March, 1867, he was sent by Sir Bartle Frere, at the express desire of the leading merchants of Bombay, as Special Commissioner for that Government to the Universal Exhibition held at Paris in that year. On being forced to finally leave India through permanently broken health in 1868, Dr. Birdwood's many valuable public services to the Western Presidency were recognised by the addressed presented to him by the Royal Asiatic Society, the Agri-Horticultural Society of Western India, the University, and the students of Grant Medical College. The cover of the address of the Agri-Horticultural Society, which was designed by Mr. John Griffiths, of the Bombay School of Art, is given in Plate 46.