James Fraser (Orientalist)

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Title page of the second edition of the History of Nadir Shah (1742)

James Fraser (* 1712 / 1713 ; † 21st January 1754 at Inverness ) was a Scottish employee of the East India Company and Orientalist . He gained fame as the author of a biography on Nader Shah and as a collector of Indian and Islamic manuscripts .

Life

On behalf of the East India Company, James Fraser worked from 1730 to 1742 as a scribe in Mocha in Yemen and in Surat in West India . Fraser was friends with John Cleland , who had come to India as early as 1728 and was also employed as an employee of the British trading post in Surat. Cleland reported that around 1737 Fraser gave him a photo album with miniatures of Indian rulers. Cleland sent the album to Alexander Pope , who donated it to the Bodleian Library .

Upon his return, Fraser married Mary Satchwell in London in July 1742. With Mary he fathered Edward Satchell Fraser (1751-1835), who was a slave owner and planter in Guyana in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

In 1743, Fraser returned to Surat for the East India Company, accompanied by Mary. Here Fraser fell out with the governor of Bombay William Wake and his protégé Jagannathdas Laldas Parekh, who belonged to the Bania caste. In January 1748 Fraser was recalled from Surat by the East India Company and transferred to Bombay as a punishment. In December 1749 he returned to Great Britain and settled in Scotland.

History of Nadir Shah

James Fraser published his only work on the life of the Persian ruler Nader Shah in 1742 in London. Since Fraser was stationed in Gujarat during his first visit to India, he was unable to report as an eyewitness to Nader Shah's conquest of northern India, which culminated in the sack of Delhi in 1739. Instead, Fraser presents himself as a connoisseur of “oriental manuscripts”, which “from 1730 to 1740 were acquired with considerable labor and expense in Surat, Khambhat and Ahmedabad in East India, with the exception of a few [texts] that I found in Mocha in Arabia Persians on their pilgrimage to Mecca. ”Fraser reports that in Surat he learned Persian from a Parsen and a mullah named“ Fakhr o'dîn ”. In Khambhat he learned Islamic law from “Shekh Mahommed Morad” and Sanskrit from the Brahmin “Srî Nât Veaz”.

In the History of Nadir Shah, the Indian historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam attests to Fraser's openness to the Indian worldview that only a few of the later British Orientalists possessed: “In the world of James Fraser, the East India Company certainly played a role, but it still practiced no real power in South Asia yet. It can be argued that his behavior matched this perfectly, and that an openness to other epistemologies was apparently possible as long as the relationships did not consist of conquerors and conquered. "

Collection of Asian manuscripts

At the end of the History of Nadir Shah book, Fraser lists over 200 manuscripts that he had acquired as an employee of the East India Company in Surat, Khambhat and Ahmedabad . Most of the manuscripts are written in Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic. Fraser's collection also contains some manuscripts in Turkish, Gujarati, and Hindi. Fraser described his manuscripts written in "Sanskerrit" as the "first such collection that was ever brought to Europe".

After Fraser's death, his widow sold the collection to the Radcliffe Library in Oxford. The collection has been owned by the Bodleian Library since 1872. Much of Fraser's manuscripts were printed in the first and second volumes of the Edition Catalog of the Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and Pushtu manuscripts in the Bodleian Library .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ William Dunn Macray: Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with a notice of the Earlier Library of the University . 2nd Edition. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1890, pp. 215-217 (English).
  2. ↑ David Alston: 'Very Rapid and Splendid Fortunes'? Highland Scots in Berbice, Guyana in the Early Nineteenth Century . In: Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Invernes . tape 63 , 2006, p. 208–236, here: p. 223 (English, academia.edu ).
  3. ↑ Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Europe's India. Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA / London 2017, ISBN 978-0-674-97226-1 , pp. 180-185 (English).
  4. ↑ James Fraser: The History of Nadir Shah, Formerly Called Thamas Kuli Khan [...] 2nd edition. A. Millar, London 1742, p. vi (English).
  5. ↑ Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Europe's India. Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA / London 2017, ISBN 978-0-674-97226-1 , pp. 211 (English).
  6. ↑ Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic manuscripts collected by James Fraser. In: Archive Hub. Accessed August 26, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Eduard Sachau, Hermann Ethe (ed.): Catalog of the Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and Pushtu manuscripts in the Bodleian Library . tape 1 . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1889 (English, archive.org ).
personal data
SURNAME Fraser, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish employee of the East India Company and orientalist
DATE OF BIRTH around 1712
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1754
Place of death at Inverness