Francis Wilford

Francis Wilford (1761–1822) was an Indologist, Orientalist, fellow member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and constant collaborator of its journal – Asiatic Researches – contributing a number of fanciful, sensational, controversial, and highly unreliable articles on ancient Hindu geography, mythography, and other subjects.

He contributed a series of ten articles about Hindu geography and mythology for Asiatic Researches, between 1799 and 1810, claiming that all European myths were of Hindu origin and that India had produced a Christ (Salivahana) whose life and works closely resembled the Christ of Bible. He also claimed to have discovered a Sanskrit version of Noah (Satyavrata) and attempted to confirm the historicity of revelation and of the ethnology of Genesis from external sources, particularly Hindu or other pagan religions. In his essay Mount Caucasus – 1801, he argued for a Himalayan location of Mt. Ararat, claiming that Ararat was etymologically linked with Āryāvarta – a Sanskrit name for India.

Biography Born in 1761 at Hanover and was a Hanoverian by birth – There was a persistent and unproven belief among his contemporaries and later commentators that he was of Swiss or German descent. He arrived in India as an ensign of the East India Company army in 1781[as a Lieutenant colonel with the Hanoverian reinforcements to the British troops in India], and he stayed for four decades in India. He married Khanum Bibi, an Indian woman, and their daughters later married East India Company soldiers. Nigel Leask identifies this as a colonial construction of racial hierarchy to subordinate Egypt to India : This subordination of Egypt to India in terms of chronological priority is accompanied by a distinctly colonial construction of racial hierarchy in which the inhabitants of contemporary Africa are equated with the aboriginal inhabitants of India, both descended from the proscribed family of Ham, Charma, or Hasyasilas('the laughter').

Wilford, based on Indian texts [Sanskrit texts in Manuscripts] tried to prove that India and Egypt from ancient times had a close contact and their religions came from a common source – Noah's Ark. For this, Wilford had employed some Indian assistants – Pandits, and made them look for precise set of topics, namely, the deluge, the name of Noah and his sons, and so forth.

According to Bayly, in the edited volume Perspectives of mutual encounters in South Asian history, 1760–1860, Wilford tried to find three types of links or analogue between the ancient Indian wisdom of the Vedas and Puranas; and the knowledge of the ancient Egyptian, Israelites, and Greeks. First, he believed, he would discover the traces of an ancient Indo-European mother tongue as confirmed by William Jones. Second, the inheritance of common store of sacred lore- underlying unities in human mythology, Biblical, and Classical – Wiford thought, he saw a link between the stories of Bacchus, Osiris, and the Hindu Purusha. Third, as ancient Eurasian and African society had developed links of trade to complement the ancient patterns of pilgrimage – Wilford believed many historic people had physically migrated over large distances – With no surprise, groups of Indians migrated to Egypt and Ethiopia.

Wilford claimed that the "coming of a saviour from the West is foretold," based on Sanskrit texts in procured manuscripts (both Puranas and Vedas) – This he claimed, by identifying White Isles with the geographical British Isles. For this, he asserted that the Brahmins proclaim that "every man after death must go to 'Tri-Cuta' and Sweta...there to stand trial before the king of justice, the Dharma-raja" – signifying, the British Isles are "the beginning and the end of the worldly pilgrimage.". The Puranas also declare "the White Isles to be the home of Vishnu, from whence Krishna (like Noah and Dionysus, apparently originally British national) brought the Vedas. Vyasa, the first who presumed to write the Vedas down in a book, resided so long in the White Isles that he was nicknamed Dwaipayana, he who resided in the islands." Furthering this, he asserted that "the light of revelation came from the west, and the vedas reside in the White Islands in human shape," as they are not written, instead orally delivered.

According to Nigel Leask, Wilford narrated the story of Salivahana that the child had born to a virgin and a carpenter, later became a mystic, and finally crucified in a Y-shaped plough. In 1805, Wilford had confessed publicly that some of the manuscripts he had been working were, in fact, forged, though, he didn't specifically refer to the Salivahana story; later, when he had published in 1807 – 2 years after his confession -, he preceded it with a disclaimer as:The Salivahana story 'is a most crude and undigested mass of heterogeneous legends taken from the apocryphal gospel of the infancy of Christ, the tales of the Rabbis and Talmudists concerning Solomon, with some particulars about Muhammed...jumbled together with...the history of the Persian kings of the Sassanian dynasty. yet he denounced Wilford; later, for his fanciful temerity as: the fanciful temerity of a Wilford was bringing discredit on the Indian researches—a temerity which would necessarily provoke a re-action, and lead, as in some recent instances, to a prosaic narrow-mindedness, that would seek to bring down the whole system of Indian civilization to the dull level of its own vulgar conceptions.

Nigel Leask, summing up all of Wilford's putative discoveries and later disavowing them for having been based on forged documents, Leask describes Wilford's work as: an orientalized (in Edward Said's sense of the word) version of British national and imperial ideology.