THROUGHOUT THEIR Indian careers and Scottish retirements both John and William were deeply involved with education. Their various service roles brought them into contact with many educational projects, but particularly with the teachers and students of some new government colleges in which the teaching of their ‘Oriental’ and ‘English’ departments under one roof was either already happening or planned. Some colleges were recently founded, but others were grafted on to existing or defunct colleges of traditional Hindu or Islamic learning in cities such as Benares, Agra and Delhi. The Muir brothers had connections also with some Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic and Persian ‘indigenous’ elementary schools in their mofussil postings, notably in Azamgarh and Fatehpur districts. The links between their practical experiences of the classical and indigenous Indian educational systems and their own understandings of Indian religions and societies are explored in this chapter since the histories of Vedic and Islamic civilizations they would soon simultaneously publish were directed primarily to a readership of teachers and alumni of these same colleges. John explicitly addressed the first volume of his Original Sanskrit Texts to ‘the use of students and others in India’. If such a category of elite readers was an imagined rather than an actual readership, the nature of the personal contacts he and William established with some identifiable members of the pandit and ‘ulama classes with whom they had frequent official contacts allows some evaluation of their perceptions of these wider, generic ‘learned classes’.

Engagement with Indian educational and scholarly networks

John’s closest Indian contacts were with various pandits associated with Sanskrit education in the centres of Hindu scholarship where he was posted, particularly at the Benares Sanskrit College during his year’s principalship from 1844 to 1845. Pandit Rajaram Shastri, who had previously studied at the college, John then employed as his munshi or translator, maintaining contact with him for the next 30 years, well into his own retirement. Rajaram later published himself on subjects ranging from Sanskrit grammar to Hindu remarriage, contributing to what has recently been described as ‘a veritable explosion of newly inflected, Sanskritic cultural-intellectual activity’.