A Dictionary, Sanscrit and English: Translated, amended and enlarged, from an original compilation prepared by learned authors for the College of Fort William. by Wilson, Horace Hayman - 1819

Calcutta: printed by Philip Pereira at the Hindoostanee Press, 1819. First edition. Folio, 32 x 24 cm; pp.iv, l, 1061, [1, blank]. Contemporary calf, gilt and blind tooled; unsympathetically rebacked, boards variously worn; but internally a crisp, clean copy. The first etymological dictionary of Sanskrit, unsurpassed until the St. Petersburg lexicon more than thirty years later. It was compiled to answer the East India Company's urgent appeal in 1816 for a new dictionary for use in the Colleges at Fort William and Haileybury to replace Colebrooke's edition of the Amarakosha (Serampore, 1808). Wilson initially relied on a compilation from various Sanskrit dictionaries prepared for the College of Fort William by Pandit Raghumani Bhattacharya, but closer scrutiny revealed that the work was unreliable. Other pandits then had to repeat the exercise of collating several Sanskrit manuscript lexicons into a single text. Wilson condensed these sources into a "more commodious form", employing Colebrooke's 1808 Calcutta edition of the Amarakosha. A second edition of Wilson's dictionary was published in 1832. Horace Hayman Wilson (1786-1860) went to India in 1808 as an Assistant Surgeon at the East India Company's Bengal establishment. His knowledge of metallurgy secured him an appointment at the Calcutta Mint as assistant to the Assay Master, John Leyden. Inspired to study Sanskrit by the example of Sir William Jones, Wilson published his first work, a free English verse translation of Kalidasa's poem, the Meghaduta, in 1813. This established his reputation as a Sanskritist and gained him the East India Company's patronage for his dictionary. He was elected the first Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, and subsequently succeeded Charles Wilkin as librarian to the East India Company. See David Kopf, British orientalism and the Bengal renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp.167-169.