Later Mughals v1.c4.s1: His Career
Later Mughals v1.c4.s1
- Language
- English
His Career
v1.c4.s1.1
William Irvine, the son of a Scotch advocate, was born in Aberdeen on 5th July, 1840. He came to London when quite a child, and after leaving school at the early age of fifteen he went into business, until he obtained an appointment in the Admiralty at nineteen. He stayed there for a year or two; but having acquired a very good knowledge of French and German, he eventually resigned, went to King's College, London, to complete his studies, and entering for the Indian Civil Service he passed very high in the examination of 1862.
v1.c4.s1.2
Arriving in India on 12th December, 1863, he was attached to the North-Western Provinces Civil Service in the following June, as Assistant Magistrate of Saharanpur. After spending nearly a year there, he was sent to Muzaffarnagar, for four years (April 1865—July 1869). A long furlough to Europe consumed more than two years, 1872 and 1873. He next served in Farrukhabad (June 1875—April 1879), where he rose to be Joint Magistrate. He had already begun to study Indo-Muhammadan history with scholarly seriousness, and the first fruits of his work in this line were an accurate and luminous account of the Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad published in the *Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal*, 1878—79, and partly incorporated in the *Gazetteer of the Farrukhabad District*, edited by Mr. Atkinson (Government Press, 1880). In it he utilized not only the formal Persian histories but also the large collection of unedited family papers and letters of the local Nawabs.
v1.c4.s1.3
But Ghazipur was the district with which he was connected longest, namely for seven years. Here he first served as Revenue Settlement Officer and then as Collector, and left a memorial of his work in a blue-book, *The Settlement Report of Ghazipur District*, printed in 1886. His keenness in revenue work and his application to detail are evidenced by his article on Canal Rates versus Land Revenue published in the *Calcutta Review*, 1869, and a volume entitled *The Rent Digest* or the Law of Procedure relating to Landlord and Tenant, Bengal Presidency, 1869.
v1.c4.s1.4
His literary attainments and painstaking exertions as a revenue officer, did not, however, bring him any of the prize posts in the Civil Service, for which an officer of his unusual parts might have reasonably hoped. So, he retired as soon as he qualified for pension, leaving the service on 27th March 1888, as Magistrate of Saharanpur,—curiously enough, the same district that he had joined at the beginning of his official career. Out of his twenty-five years of service, almost exactly one-fifth was spent on leave.