The Translations of Mr. Lewis Da Costa, Esq.

I was looking for one Mr. Da Costa, who is supposed to have helped W.B. O'Shaughnessy find out about the use of cannabis in Indian medical traditions. I chased a wild goose for the first half hour, but when I finally had it by its throat, it changed colour and species and became a red herring.

The first one, then. Eager as I always am to believe in the unlikeliest possibilities, I first thought that the Da Costa who had helped O'Shaughnessy in 1839 was a poet, who appears to have written ghazals. These were published in the Jam-i-Jahan Numa between April 1827 and March 1828. Jam-i-Jahan Numa is among the first Urdu newspapers to be printed in India, if not the first. In an article titled "Persian Newspapers in the Hon'ble John Company Days" (1927) by Nawabzada F.M. Abdul Ali (quoted in European Poets of Urdu and Persian), the author suggests that it was subsidized for the first five years by the Government, 'for the Royal Arms appear on the title page and the news bears official appearance.' He describes Da Costa as 'the only Anglo-Indian writer of Urdu and Persian poems'--a contemporary of Derozio and J.W. Ricketts. 'These poems were written in faultless Urdu.' He claims that Mr. Da Costa was connected with Doveton College, Calcutta, and that his descendants lived in Sooterkin's Lane, Calcutta, in modest circumstances. The same Da Costa may have been involved with Dr. E.W. Chambers in his great effort to form the Eurasian and Anglo-Indian Association in 1876.

Now for the other Mr. Da Costa.

I have been able to track few biographical details so far. We know that before 1824 he was the Registrar at Cawnpore (of what?), and that in 1844, when his wife gave birth to their son on 12 June, they were residing in Sealdah. He had by the time become Assistant Persian Translator to the Government of India.

Was his translation of the Deewan Pusund his first major work? It may well have been. It is a long treatise on agriculture in the subcontinent, which he initially intended to introduce with some of his own "observations in regard to the general state of Agriculture in this country". He decided against it, leaving it to abler hands.

The Calcutta branch of the Prayer-book and Homily Society needed a translation of their prayer book. The existing body of prayers had first been translated by one Henry Martyn. In 1817, it was augmented with additional verses by Daniel Corrie, who went on to serve as Archdeacon in Calcutta and as Bishop of Madras. A new wave of enthusiasm in the late 1820s saw the society elders desiring translations into "Eastern languages".

One G.F. Brown, esq. of the East India Company's Bengal Service, had "translated the greater part of the prayer-book into Hindoostani". The manuscript passed from him to Corrie, and inevitably, on to Mr. Lewis Da Costa, "a competent Hindoostani scholar." "Mr. Da Costa offered a complete translation of the whole prayer book, including the thirty-nine articles and rubrics, made by himself, omitting only the state prayers." Archdeacon Corrie took the lead in the publication, and after comparing two versions produced the complete edition of the prayer-book in Hindustani in 1828.

The previous year, D.C. Smyth's An Abridgement of the Penal Regulations as enacted by the Governor General in Council, for the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal, had been translated into Persian by Da Costa.

Alexander Fraser Tytler
(1747-1813)

Arguably the most acclaimed translation by this polyglot came around 1829. He was to translate into Hindustani the enormous Elements of General History in 3 volumes, by Alexander Fraser Tytler and finished by Edward Nares. The volumes that were translated under the patronage of the Bombay Native Education Society, were priced at 25 rupees a set. The very next year, the learned Mr. H.H. Wilson of the Fort William College Council requested the purchase of 30 copies of "Mr. Lewis Da Costa's translation into Hindustani of Tytler's Elements of General History".

Encouraged by the success (and no doubt numerous other projects which I have not traced yet) he wanted to translate Mukhzun ul Udwiya by one Mohammad Khosru Khan, but found no sponsor. Instead, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Vol. 6) he published an excerpt in translation "On the Properties ascribed in Native medical works to the Acacia Arabica". He signs off "Lewis Da costa, Esq." This was a teaser. "I therefore think it the wiser course in the first instance to publish a specimen by which the pharmacopeist will be able to judge the aid he might derive were the whole work (collated with others placed before him in an English translation." This is shortly after the newly formed Calcutta Medical College had propsed the formation of a Pharmacopoeia.

Is this the one that W.B. O'Shaughnessy takes up? Quite likely.