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Philip Meadows Taylor

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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PHILIP MEADOWS TAYLOR (1808-1876), Anglo-Indian administrator and novelist, was born at Liverpool on the 25th of September 1808. At the age of fifteen he was sent out to India to become a clerk to a Bombay merchant. On his arrival the house was in financial difficulties, and he was glad to accept in 1824 a commission in the service of his highness the nizam, to which service he remained devotedly attached throughout his long career. He was speedily transferred from military duty to a civil appointment, and in this capacity he acquired a knowledge of the languages and the people of Southern India which has seldom been equalled. He studied the laws, the geology, the antiquities of the country; he was alternately judge, engineer, artist and man of letters, for on his return to England in 1840 on furlough he published the first of his Indian novels, Confesssions of a Thug, in which he reproduced, with singular vivacity and truth, the scenes which he had heard described by the chief actors in them. This book was followed by a series of tales, Tippoo Sultaun (1840), Tara (1863), Ralph Darnell (1865), Seeta (1872), and A Noble Queen (1878), all illustrating periods of Indian history and society, and giving a prominent place to the native character, for which and the native institutions and traditions he had a great regard and respect. Returning to India he acted from 1840 to 1853 as correspondent for The Times. He also wrote a Student's Manual of the History of India (1870). About 1850, Meadows Taylor was appointed by the nizam's government to administer, during a long minority, the principality of the young raja of Shorapore. He succeeded without any European assistance in raising this small territory to a high degree of prosperity, and such was his influence with the natives that on the occurrence of the mutiny in Bengal he held his ground without military support. Colonel Taylor, whose merits were now recognized and acknowledged by the British government of India - although he had never been in the service of the Company - was subsequently appointed to the deputy commissionership of the Western ceded districts, where he succeeded in establishing a new assessment of revenues at once more equitable to the cultivators and more productive to the government. By indefatigable perseverance he had raised himself from the condition of a half-educated lad, without patronage, and without even the support of the Company, to the successful government of some of the most important provinces of India, 36,000 square miles in extent and with a population of more than five millions. On his retirement from service in 1860 he was made a C.S.I. and given a pension. Taylor died at Mentone on the 13th of May 1876.

See Meadows Taylor's The Story of My Life (1877).