James Forbes archive

James Forbes (1749-1819) was born in London and educated at Hadley, Middlesex, in basic commercial skills before joining the East India Company and sailing for India. Once in South Asia, Forbes served in various capacities, including chaplain and secretary to Company forces involved in the First Anglo-Maratha War (1775-1782). Following these postings, Forbes returned to England to recover his health, though he travelled again to India in 1777, assuming a position in the province of Gujarat, where he oversaw revenue and agricultural production. His sister Elizabeth (1753-1812) accompanied him and married his close friend John Dalton (1748-1782), a connection which Forbes celebrates in his letters. After the Treaty of Salbai in 1782, the East India Company gave up control over Gujarat, a move which Forbes found tragic. His post no longer in existence, Forbes left with his sister for England, never to return to India.

Back in England, Forbes settled in Great Stanmore, Middlesex, married, and, in 1788, had a daughter. He installed a collection of Hindu religious sculpture on the grounds, one of the (if not the) first of its kind in England. He traveled throughout England and the continent, and spent much of his time transcribing and illustrating his letters from India in a series of 150 folio volumes. These manuscripts served as the basis for Forbes’s illustrated Oriental memoirs (published in 4 volumes, from 1813 to 1815), but do not seem to have survived. It appears likely that he dismantled them, copying text as he needed, and cutting out drawings and watercolors, either for an engraver to copy for publication or for remounting in other volumes, such as the set he presented to his daughter Elizabeth on her twelfth birthday (the present collection).

Forbes’s daughter eventually married Marc René de Montalembert, a Frenchman who had served in the British army, and who was later appointed the French ambassador to Württemberg. Forbes joined his son-in-law on his journey to his new post but, at Aix-la-Chapelle, grew sick and died.

Forbes had joined the East India Company during a period of volatility and change. His involvement with the Company occurred prior to Charles Cornwallis’s reforms—the latter’s appointment to the Bengal Presidency began in 1786—which attempted to institute stricter regulation of Company practices, such as the restriction of private trade. Prior to this, however, Company officials regularly engaged in private trade, various forms of corruption, and more fluid interactions with indigenous populations. Some British officials married Indian women, many of whom acted as critical mediators between the Company and local rulers. Forbes also describes his involvement in the First Anglo-Maratha War at length, a conflict which foreshadowed the coming dominance of the English in India’s military, economic, and political spheres. This dominance, however, was not yet entirely achieved: for example, Tipu Sultan (1750-1799), the “Tiger of Mysore,” would continue to offer armed resistance to British expansion until his death in combat in 1799.

Forbes’s return to England would also have come during a period of uncertainty and transition regarding public attitudes towards India and British imperial ambitions. Between 1788 and 1795, the attempted impeachment of Warren Hastings, former Governor-General of India, spurred widespread debate over precisely what role India would play in British life. The prosecution alleged widespread corrupt practices in India, a sentiment reflected in a general distaste for the new wealth that flowed back to the metropole, illicitly acquired by Company officials caricatured as “nabobs” (after the Indian term nawab).