2 - Preparation for Empire: Haileybury College

Summary

ALL FOUR Muirs would leave Haileybury College for India having gained, during less than two years study, the rudiments of the classical learning that would turn the eldest and the youngest into leading ‘orientalists’. Their years at the college in the late 1820s and 1830s coincided with a dispute over the languages required for educational and administrative purposes in India usually known as the ‘Anglicist-Orientalist’ controversy. Yet even when the substitution of English and the vernacular languages for Persian and the classics was imminent, Haileybury continued to provide Sanskrit and Arabic teaching as well as Persian. Since, in addition to linguistic skills, the college’s founders also aimed to instil particular values in its pupils, the Muir brothers, like other Scots Presbyterian recruits, experienced there a predominantly Anglican atmosphere and a unique form of ‘general education’ that, in the view of a recent commentator provided a ‘means of cultural inoculation’ before proceeding to India. This family’s experiences at Haileybury, religious and social as well as academic, are the concern of this chapter.

Haileybury College was 20 years old when John Muir made his pledges in 1826, its establishment in rural Hertfordshire the result of the East India Company’s resolve in 1804 to improve the preparation of its civilian recruits. The site chosen for the new college was in the English countryside close to the town of Hertford, about 20 miles north of London. Praised as ‘a landmark in the history of English taste’ marking the beginning of the Greek architectural revival, Haileybury’s classical façade eventually fronted a quadrangle surrounded by the functional buildings associated with English academia: lecture rooms, chapel, dining hall and a committee room. Rooms for the principal and professors were interspersed among 25 relatively luxurious student bed-sitting rooms. When architectural taste turned rather quickly against Haileybury one former student dismissed the Grecian façade as merely hiding a ‘mean and shabby three-sided addendum of bricks and mortar’. A newspaper advertisement for the college, in 1828, admitted that apart from the façade, the college was ‘not handsome’. Yet, set in its slightly rising, carefully landscaped grounds, the East India College was certainly imposing: an imperial statement in English Portland stone (fig. 2).