A molly-cuddled boy of 17, Brian Houghton Hodgson travelled to India as a writer in the British East India Company. It was a hard-won opportunity for the young man who had distinguished himself at Haileybury, a specialised school meant to train civil servants for the Company. (He would prove his genius again, this time at Fort William College in Calcutta, where he would complete the coursework that normally required two years of study in nine months and stand at the top of his class.) But more than that, the job gave the Hodgsons an opportunity to redeem their economic status, which had been on a tailspin ever since a bad financial decision made by Hodgson senior, for the Company job was the best paid in the world. The young Brian Hodgson, it seems, understood this rather well.

Given his ill health and frail constitution, which barred him from working in the scorching heat of the plains of north India, Hodgson started out as an assistant commissioner in the recently annexed Kumaon region. Within a span of five years, he became assistant resident in Kathmandu (finally, in January 1833, he became the British resident in Kathmandu).

Thus began the intellectual journey of a man who started out as a family breadwinner but went on to become the pioneer of Himalayan studies. Hemmed in by hostile political forces in Kathmandu, which still eyed the British with extreme suspicion, and troubled by Bhimsen Thapa’s vacillating, often unpredictable attitude, Hodgson found solace in studying different facets of the country.

One of his early intellectual flirtations, which eventually turned into a lifelong hobby, involved the beasts and birds of the Himalayan kingdom. As Allen notes, Hodgson overcame his boredom by hunting and visiting the royal menagerie. But his keen eyes and curious mind meant that he also started studying the fauna that inhabited the region. This became easier after he became the British resident in Kathmandu, when he turned his home into an artist’s workshop cum library where a number of artists worked on the sketches of animals that caught his fancy (all paid by Hodgson himself), and eventually led to him being credited with the discovery of 22 new species of Himalayan mammals.

The restless young intellect was not to limit itself in dissecting and drawing dead carcasses though. Hodgson was living in times often considered the Golden Age of Orientalism, when young, bright-eyed Europeans full of intellectual vigour and curiosity struck out on their own into the territory of colonised countries, especially in Asia and Africa, trying to decipher the past of those places. And his next great contribution was to be in the field of Buddhism.

The efforts of these amateur European scholars had already led to some sensational discoveries. In 1822, French scholar and philologist Jean-François Champollion had finally cracked hieroglyph after decoding the Rosetta Stone. A little more than a decade later, Sir Henry Rawlinson, an officer to the British East India Company army assigned to the Shah of Iran, scaled the steep cliff at Mount Behistun to copy the inscriptions left by Darius the Great, which contributed to understanding the cuneiform script. At around the same time when Rawlinson was busy decoding cuneiform, James Prinsep, an assay master at the mint in Benares and a scholar of Indian coinage systems, was busy unfolding the world of the Buddha and Ashoka to the delight of his peers in India and abroad.

Prinsep’s discovery not only opened the door for the study of pre-Muslim India, it also contributed to the study of Buddhism. But if he was the Columbus in search of uncharted territory, Hodgson was his man Friday, providing context and interpretation to the newly legible lines. The latter’s work on Buddhism, primarily the Vajrayana sect, was already recognised by then; his fame cemented by works such as Sketche of Buddhism and Notices.  

The charting of Hodgson’s intellectual growth in the book does not come at the cost of missing out on the polymath’s life in Nepal. He took a Muslim wife in Kathmandu and had two children from her (both of them died young). He found a close friend in Pandit Amritananda (a Newar Buddhist priest), who helped him in understanding Buddhism, and Raj Man Singh, his head painter. While a resident, he nearly became a victim of an assassination plot for his perceived liking of the Thapa clan and in one bizarre instance, he was forced to witness an ugly slugfest between the then king Rajendra and his heir, the unruly prince Surendra.

Subsequently, a disagreement with the new Governor General of India Edward Law forced him out of the post. He left Kathmandu, sailed to Europe for a sojourn, met with his relatives and ended up coming back to the hills. This time, he found a new abode in Darjeeling and named it Brianstone. Here he turned his attention to the ethnographic study of hill tribes in the region, which became his last major work.

Allen not only presents Hodgson as an indefatigable scholar, hopping from one discipline to another and leaving his mark in all, but portrays him as a humanist who stood for the people he was sent to govern. This becomes evident in Hodgson’s disagreement with the English Education Act of 1835 (popularly known as Macaulay’s Minute), which formally established English as a medium of instruction in Indian academic institutions and encouraged Indians to study in the language of the British Empire, his love for native words which he used in naming new species and his respect for native scholars and artists like Amritananda and Raj Man Singh.

Though the book is a light read as compared to some of Allen’s other works (here I have in my mind  Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor and God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad), it is an intimate and honest tribute to a great scholar who often found himself in the shadows of his peers and whose achievements were largely played down and neglected even in his lifetime, except by those who truly understood his importance. For them Hodgson was not just a scholar of Buddhism but a Buddhist himself, not by birth but by deed. And Max Muller’s letter to Hodgson pretty much sums up his life: “Karma = work done, which is, after all, the real satisfaction of life—everything else is like the foam on the sea—so the Buddhists say”.