Excerpt from Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson, British Resident at the Court of Nepal, Member of the Institute of France: Fellow of the Royal Society; A Vice-President of the Royal Asiatic Society, Etc I have referred at some length to the public aspects of Brian Hodgson's career. For no man recognised more keenly than he that an Indian civilian must be judged, first of all, by his public work. Nor would any one have more despised a scholarly reputation gained by the neglect of official duties. But his many-sided activities made themselves equally felt in his public and in his private life. Condemned by ill-health to isolation in the Himalayas throughout his whole Indian career, far away from books, and shut Off from the inspiring sympathy of brother students, he used his solitude as a vantage-ground for original research. The Situation which would have been another man's despair, he turned into an unique opportunity. He proved to all who may come after him that neither loneliness nor ill-health, nor personal peril, nor harassing public cares, need preclude a true worker in India from rendering great services to scholarship and winning an enduring fame. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A history of the rediscovery of India's history... Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Western world had very little knowledge - or an extremely distorted view - of the glorious and fascinating history of the Indian subcontinent. In fact, with little of the region's 3000-year-old heritage formally preserved and documented, it was widely believed that the country's history had begun with the reign of the Mughals. When the British gained control over the subcontinent, the scholars, explorers and Indophiles among them discovered things and areas of great historical wonder but found few answers. Armed with great intellectual curiosity, they set out to uncover things no one had given a thought to earlier. From William Jones who identified Chandragupta Maurya as 'Sandrocottus' mentioned in Greek sources and set the first chronological point of reference for recorded Indian history to Charles Wilkins who designed the first typeface of the Bengali script; from Henry Colebrooke who shone light on the wonders of ancient Indian scientific knowledge to Alexander Cunningham, the father of Indian archaeology, who led the first excavation of the Harappa site in the Punjab - Forgotten Civilizations brings together the intriguing stories of fifteen intrepid Englishmen who dedicated their lives to rediscovering India's ancient heritage and redefining the significance of its pluralistic and sophisticated culture to the rest of the world.