A career forged in Calcutta journalism ended in disgrace for Sandford Arnot

In his short yet eventful life, Sandford Arnot worked in a striking range of occupations. He was at various times a trader, journalist, pamphleteer, teacher, translator and secretary to one of the most influential Indian reformers of the 19th century, Ram Mohan Roy. His career unfolded across Calcutta and London, shaped by ambition, controversy and the tightening grip of the East India Company over both commerce and speech.

Arnot first made his name in India as a journalist. Between 1819 and 1823, he worked for the Calcutta Journal, a thorn in the side of the East India Company, under the newspaper’s mercurial editor, James Silk Buckingham. Arnot began by attacking the Company’s abuses of power, later reversing course and writing in its defence. In Calcutta, he also taught English, formed friendships in the city’s reformist circles, and encountered its multilingual intellectual world, laying the foundations for his later career as a translator and teacher of Hindustani.

The Company, however, had little patience for critics. After Buckingham was expelled in 1823 for criticising the appointment of a church official as the “official stationery supplier”, the governor-general Lord Amherst used the Press Ordinance to give legal cover to a wider crackdown. Under the Ordinance, the Calcutta Journal lacked a licence, and Arnot himself had no formal permission to remain in India. Arnot, the assistant editor of the Journal, protested the Company’s decision. When he tried to evade arrest by escaping to the Danish colony of Serampore, some 15 miles upriver from Calcutta, the Company tracked him down, arrested him and banished him aboard an Indiaman bound for England.

What should have been a straightforward voyage turned into a disaster. In 1824, while travelling from Bencoolen in Sumatra toward the Cape of Good Hope, his ship, Fame, caught fire after a sailor’s candle fell into an open cask of brandy. In his petition to the East India Company for compensation, Arnot described the fire in detail:

“Streams of liquid flame spread themselves in every direction so that the fire gathered strength with every rapidity as to become in a few minutes, utterly unquenchable. In less than a quarter of an hour, the whole ship’s company were obliged to fly to the boats for safety leaving the ill-fated vessel enveloped in devouring flames and without anyone being able to save a single article of property.”

Among the ship’s passengers was Sir Stamford Raffles, lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen, who lost not only personal belongings and jewels but also priceless natural history collections. The East India Company’s cargo – pepper and saltpetre worth an estimated £200,000 – was entirely destroyed.

Arnot survived, but only just. He spent weeks stranded in Bencoolen, uncertain of his future. Raffles intervened on his behalf, petitioning the Company in Calcutta. Yet when Arnot eventually returned there, he discovered that his troubles were far from over. His association with the Calcutta Journal still marked him as suspect and the Company moved to ensure that he would not be allowed to remain.

During this interlude, Arnot found refuge among a band of reformers led by Ram Mohan Roy. Roy had established the Anglo-Hindu School in Cornwallis Square in 1822, dedicating it to educating Indians in English, Sanskrit and geography. Arnot taught there for several months and formed close ties with Roy and his nephew, Gurudas Mookerji.

Together, Roy and Mookerji petitioned the Company to allow Arnot to stay on as a teacher, craving the “indulgence of the government” while arguing that they had “found it impossible to obtain a competent European teacher at a moderate salary”. The appeal was rejected. Roy himself had reason to be cautious: his Persian newspaper, the Mirat-ul-Akhbar, had been forced to close under the same Press Ordinance that had undone the Calcutta Journal.

By September 1824, Arnot was back in London, where he reunited with Buckingham, who had launched a new paper, The Oriental Herald and Journal of General Intelligence. Given this new platform, Arnot published a lengthy “memorial” in it, detailing his sufferings at the hands of the East India Company and seeking compensation. For a time, the two men were allies again. But soon enough, they became enemies. Accusations of fraud flew in both directions and Arnot emerged as the more vindictive of the two.

In 1829, after receiving £1,400 in compensation from the Company, Arnot published a scathing exposé of Buckingham. Ostensibly a history of the Indian press, the book was in fact a character assassination, portraying Buckingham as everything from a “masseur, merchant and traveller, editor, bubble company projector and director” to the “pauper general of India” and “itinerant Orator and stone quarryman”. It was a brutal settling of scores, with the objective given away by the book’s subtitle: “Proved to have been produced by the Extraordinary and Hitherto Unheard of Conduct of James Silk Buckingham.”

While engaging in mudslinging, Arnot remained productive. In London, he reinvented himself as a language instructor and translator. He taught Hindustani at the London Oriental Institution, initially assisting the renowned Orientalist John Borthwick Gilchrist, who had advocated teaching young Company cadets Hindustani over Persian and Arabic.

When Gilchrist fell out of favour with the Company, Arnot, along with Duncan Forbes, took on much of the responsibility for teaching young Company cadets. Arnot collaborated with Forbes on grammars of Persian and Hindustani and translated Persian texts into English, including A New Persian Grammar, Containing the Elementary Principles of that Language (1828) and A Grammar of the Hindustani Tongue (1844).

Among Arnot’s own translations was an unlikely but influential work: Indian Cookery as Practiced and Described by the Natives of the East (1831), a translation of a Persian cookbook with “an admixture of Hindustani phrases”. Believed to be the first Indian cookbook to be translated into English, it was intended, Arnot explained, for English women returning from India who found themselves “quite unable to give instructions how to perform the simple everyday operation of boiling rice or cooking a curry”.

In 1833, when Roy arrived in England on what would be his final visit, Arnot became his private secretary. He later claimed to have drafted petitions and addresses to leading figures on Roy’s behalf, earning himself a dubious reputation as a kind of “literary blackmailer”. Arnot died after a short illness in July 1834, a few months after Roy’s death in Bristol in September 1833. At the time of his death, Arnot was serving as secretary to Polish exiles in London, displaced after the failure of their uprising against Russian rule.

His reputation did not fare well. Supporters of Roy, including his biographer Mary Collett and the reformer Mary Carpenter, viewed him with suspicion. Yet when a centenary volume was published in Roy’s honour in 1933, his writing was included.