Frederic Growse

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Frederic Growse
Born
Frederic Salmon Growse

1836
Suffolk, England
Died19 May 1893 (aged 56–57)
Haslemere, Surrey, England
OccupationDistrict magistrate and collector for Indian Civil Service
Years active1860–1890
Known for
Notable work
  • English translation of the Ramayana of Tulsidas
  • Bulandshahr; or, Sketches of an Indian district; social, historical and architectural
     (1884)

Frederic Salmon Growse CIE (1836 – 19 May 1893) was a British civil servant of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), Hindi scholar, archaeologist and collector, who served in Mainpuri, Mathura, Bulandshahr and Fatehpur during British rule in India.

He studied Indian literature and languages, and founded the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart and the Government Museum, both at Mathura. Between 1876 and 1883, he published in series, the first English translation of the Ramayana of Tulsidas. He also wrote Mathurá: A district memoir (1880) and a description of the district of Bulandshahr (1884) and of its new architecture (1886).

Described as "never a

persona grata to his superiors", he was nonetheless gazetted CIE in 1879.[1] At Bulandshahr between 1878 and 1884 he caused a number of buildings to be constructed using local designs and craftsmen. In 1882, he donated a collection of Indian pottery to the British Museum
.

Early life and education

Frederic Growse (also spelled Frederick)

Catholicism and was described as a "zealous observer of its precepts" but "without any bigotry".[7]

Career

Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, Mathura[8]
Collector's House, Bulandshahr, 19th century[9]

Having joined the Indian Civil Service in 1860,[1] Growse went to India in either 1860[7] or 1864.[10] He was posted to the North-Western Provinces, one of the regions of British India, where at first he studied Indian literature and languages.[1] In 1868, he was a district assistant in Mainpuri (western UP)[11] and in the 1870s he was appointed district collector at Mathura,[12] the birth place of Krishna.[13] There he built the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, paying for a third of its cost.[1][7] Its design was based on John Ruskin's principles of architecture, and it was built using local craftsmanship,[13] but was unfinished at the time of his transfer out of the district.[8] He also founded the Government Museum there in 1874.[12]

He was subsequently

Calcutta University.[14] In 1878 he commissioned Mainpuri craftsmen to produce reredos for a Catholic church in Suffolk.[15] At the time, the wife of Robert Moss King, district collector of Meerut, visited Growse in Bulandshahr and noted some detail of the reredos production in her memoirs.[16][a]

At Bulandshahr between 1878 and 1884 he caused a number of buildings to be constructed using native designs and craftsmen which he saw as more in keeping with his "Gothic principles" than the utilitarian colonial buildings preferred by the Public Works Department (PWD).[10] According to Gavin Stamp, Growse so irritated the PWD that they had him moved to another district.[10][18] In May 1884, at a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts, Purdon Clarke, keeper of Indian art at the South Kensington museum, was one of the first to commend the work of Growse in Bulandshahr, crediting particularly his efforts on the Bulandshahr Chowk.[19] He encouraged and assisted in the construction of the Bathing Ghat, Garden Gate and the Town Hall.[19][20] He was one of a few self-professed historians who held the view that Indian architecture was produced through patronage, and achieved by trust rather than written contracts.[21] His work was praised by John Lockwood Kipling in The Journal of Indian Art (1884).[22]

Growse was district magistrate and collector at Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, from 1885 to 1886 where he produced a supplement to the Fatehpur Gazetteer paying particular attention to architecture and archaeology which had been largely ignored by the author of the original gazetteer in 1884 who Growse thought had probably not visited any of the places about which he had written, relying instead on native informants who were not equipped to comment on such matters.[23]

He donated a collection of Indian pottery to the British Museum in 1882.[24]

Writing

In 1868 at Mainpuri, Growse produced an article on the Prithviraj Raso, a poem about the 12th-century Hindu Emperor, Prithviraj Chauhan.[11][25]

In 1874, six years after the first local text on the subject was published,

Buddhist archeology, and chapters on Hindu sects and the origin of place names.[1]

In Mathura, he became intrigued by the popularity among its ordinary people of the Ramayana of Tulsidas.[27] In 1876 he published his translation into English[14][26] of the original text by Tulsidas. Growse published a revised version in 1880 as a four-volume second edition and published a full version in 1883.[28] It was the first illustrated version of the complete English translation of the Ramcharitmanas,[28] which he completed in Bulandshahr.[14] He writes in the introduction that the epic Sanskrit Ramayana of Valmiki had been translated into several languages including English, but the more popular Hindi version, a retelling of Rama's life, titled Ramcharitmanas by Tulsidas, previously had not been translated into English.[14]

In 1884 he published

Musulman population, when the requirements of a bureaucratic regime compelled his removal".[1]

Later life

Due to ill-health, Growse retired to England in 1890,

Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History.[29] He updated and revised their volume of materials on the history of the Suffolk parish of Bildeston in 1891 which was published in 1892.[30]

Death and legacy

Growse memorial St Mary's Church Bildeston

Growse died from tuberculosis at Haslemere, Surrey, on 19 May 1893.[1] Probate was granted to Lydia Catherine Growse on an estate of £5,224.[31] Growseganj Gate, one of Bulandshahr's four gates is named for him.[32][33]

In 2014, a seminar was given at the

Nehru Memorial Museum & Library titled "Familiarity with the Familiar: Frederick Salmon Growse's Fragmentary Visions of the Architecture of Bulandshahr, 1878–1886".[34]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Elizabeth Augusta Moss King accompanied her husband to India, and on their second tour wrote diaries published in two volumes in 1884.[17]

Selected publications

Articles

Books

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.1017/S0035869X0014359X
  2. ^ Surrey, England, Electoral Registers, 1832-1962. England and Wales Register (1939)
  3. ^ a b c d "Growse, Frederic Salmon – Persons of Indian Studies by Prof. Dr. Klaus Karttunen". 13 February 2017. Archived from the original on 24 January 2021. Retrieved 13 April 2021.
  4. ^ Luzac's Oriental List and Book Review. Luzac & Company. 1894. p. 118.
  5. ISBN 978-93-91028-47-3
    .
  6. ^ Frederic Salmon Growse England Births and Christenings, 1538–1975. Family Search. Retrieved 15 April 2021. (subscription required)
  7. ^
    The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record
    , New Series, Vol. VI, Nos. 11 & 12 (1893). pp. 223–225.
  8. ^ a b Growse, Frederic Salmon (1883). Mathurá: A district memoir. Allahabad: North-western provinces and Oudh government Press. pp. 160–162.
  9. ^ a b "Indian Architecture of To-day as Exemplified in the New Buildings of Bulandshahr District, Part II · Highlights from the Digital Content Library". dcl.dash.umn.edu. Archived from the original on 16 April 2021. Retrieved 15 April 2021.
  10. ^
    Journal of the Royal Society of Arts
    , Vol. 129, No. 5298 (May 1981), pp. 357–379. (subscription required)
  11. ^
    ISBN 978-1-107-11856-0
    .
  12. ^ a b Government Museum, Mathura - Vrindavan. Retrieved 15 April 2021.
  13. ^
    ISBN 0-19-280596-7
    .
  14. ^ a b c d Growse, F. S. (1883). "Inside cover and introduction". The Ramayana of Tulsidas. Allahabad. pp. i–xx.
  15. JSTOR 41374508
    .
  16. ^ King, Augusta Moss (1884). The diary of a civilian's wife in India, 1887-1882. p. 122.
  17. ^ "Robert Moss King 1832-1903". www.natgould.org. Retrieved 13 March 2023.
  18. ISBN 978-0-87413-973-0
    .
  19. ^
    ISBN 978-0-300-04636-6
    .
  20. ^ "Bulandshahr". The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, Art, and Finance. 59 (1, 536). Saturday Review, Limited: 457–458. 4 April 1885.
  21. ISBN 978-0-7546-7880-9
    .
  22. ISBN 978-1-135-10687-4
    .
  23. ^ "Preface" in F. S. Growse. (1887) A Supplement to the Fatehpur Gazetteer. Allahabad: Government Press. pp. 1–3 (p. 1).
  24. ^ "Frederic Salmon Growse". www.britishmuseum.org. Retrieved 13 April 2021.
  25. ISBN 978-1-107-11856-0
    , retrieved 19 April 2021
  26. ^
    ISBN 0-521-57085-9
    .
  27. ISBN 978-3-0343-0564-8
    .
  28. ^ a b "The Ramayana of Tulsi Das. Tulsi Das; Frederic Salmon Growse, translator". www.booksofasia.com. Archived from the original on 19 April 2021. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  29. Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History
    , Vol. VIII (1894), Part I, pp. iii–ix (p. v.)
  30. ^ "Parish: Bildeston otherwise Bilston". p.7
  31. ^ 1893 Probate Calendar. p. 256.
  32. ^ "Census of India 2011: Bulandshahr village and town directory". Series 10, PART XII-A.
  33. ^ Nevill, H. R. (1922). District Gazetteers Of The United Provinces Of Agra And Oudh Bulandshar Vol-V. Lucknow: Government Branch Press. pp. 204–208.
  34. ^ 49th Annual Report 2014-2015. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2015. p. 28.

Further reading

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Frederic Growse.
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Wikiquote has quotations related to Frederic Growse.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frederic_Growse&oldid=1216492407"