The uncanny genius of Leitner
The role of the Orientalists in formulating our socio-historical sensibilities is highly contested in social sciences and humanities. Such divergence regarding our discursive understanding of Orientalism was institutionalised by Edward Said in his book of the same title.
We learnt from Said that the concept of native was constituted through a construction of the Other (native) as against the Self (coloniser), two diametric opposites. Orientalism helped the colonisers ascribe a peculiar and different identity to the colonised by producing a typical sort of knowledge about the later. However, looking at the modern history of the Punjab/Lahore, one Orientalist who seems an aberration to the norm was Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (1840-1899). It is really intriguing that someone of East European Jewish extraction contributed so much in the nurturing of Punjab’s academic culture and milieu. Not only was Leitner the first principal of Government College Lahore, the first institution conceived and set up by the British in North India, he was also the registrar of the Punjab University at its establishment and also the first principal of Oriental College.
It is important to mention here his zealous campaign to establish the Oriental College for promotion of the vernacular languages. Last but not the least was the Anjuman-i-Punjab, which, according to Tariq Rahman, was "a zealous advocate of oriental studies" and became a platform for a new experiment by bringing modernist sensibilities into Urdu literature.
Along with C.M. Mcleod, Lieutenant Governor of the Province, and Colonel Holroyd, the Director Public Instruction, Dr Leitner exhibited special interest in the promotion of Urdu language and literature. Importantly, Leitner’s vision markedly digressed from the education policy envisaged by Lord Macaulay in his famous minutes presented in 1835. Contrary to Macaulay’s assertion that Indian education should be remodelled in the light of Western epistemic traditions, Leitner wholeheartedly advocated local literary traditions and languages and strived for their promotion.
Interestingly, he accorded substantial importance to Punjabi in parallel with the growth of Urdu. In this article, it will be pertinent to furnish some of his biographical details which are scantily available to the students and general readers of the history of the Punjab.
Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (1840-1899), as described in the Dictionary of National Biography published by the Oxford University Press as "an enlightened Hungarian and a naturalized Britisher" was born to a Jewish family in Pest. He was still a toddler when his father Leopold Saphir died and "possibly for reasons connected with the failure of 1848 revolution in Hungary, his widow moved with her two children to Constantinople". There she married a medical missionary, Dr. Johann Moritz Leitner (1800-1861). He had converted from Judaism to Protestantism and was attending to the Jews of the Ottoman Empire under the auspices of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. He adopted his wife’s children and Gottlieb and his sister Elisabeth always referred to him as their real father.
Leitner was naturally endowed with the uncanny ability to learn and master different languages. At a very young age he undertook a sojourn to Constantinople (currently Istanbul) to learn Turkish and Arabic, and in two years time he had mastered both of these languages. His abilities were so remarkable that the Times in its obituary (25 March 1899) stated that "as a linguist he probably had no living rival in the area of his knowledge".
Leitner subsequently worked as an interpreter in Crimea during the war (1853). After the war ended, he went to King’s College London with the intent of receiving a certificate in divinity in April 1859. In the same year, he secured a position of a lecturer at a very tender age of 19. By the time he was twenty-three, he found himself in possession of a coveted professorship in Arabic and Muslim Law. Soon afterwards, he was awarded MA and PhD degrees from Freiburg (Germany). He also gained admission to the Middle Temple in November 1869 and was called to the bar in November 1875, but never contemplated practising Law.
In 1864, when Government College, Lahore was founded, Leitner was appointed its first principal, a position that he retained until his retirement from Indian service in 1886. During his stay in Lahore, Leitner made a telling contribution in many areas: he started various journals in different languages such as English, Urdu and Arabic. The best known among these, founded in Lahore as Indian Public Opinion, changed its name to the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG). The distinctive feature of CMG was that none other than Rudyard Kipling was once its assistant editor and it carried many of his earlier verses and stories.
Leitner authored many books and reports. History of Indigenous Education in Punjab came out in 1882 and is still considered to be the primary source on the state of education in 19th century Punjab. Similarly, he published several other treatises and books including The Languages and Races of Dardistan in 1889. Pritchett maintains, while drawing on Muhammad Sadiq’s biography of Muhammad Hussain Azad, that Leitner was "somewhat autocratic by temperament, but a most effective popularizer and shaper of opinion".
Leitner breathed his last on March 22, 1899 in Bonn where he had gone to take the waters at the Godesburg spa. While there, he contracted pneumonia which proved fatal. Leitner left behind several lasting legacies besides his scholarly works. Here we are concerned with the associations that he conjured up. As Emmett Davis reveals in her Press and Politics in British Western Punjab: 1836-1947, "just within a year he had established three associations for the advancement of learning, two within and one outside the college". Those were the Societies for Debating and Essay Writing, which were necessary for the students for their improvement in English composition and conversation, a matter to be desired in government educational institutions.
The society that he established outside Government College was Anjuman-i-Punjab, which soon became very influential. In a bid to establish Anjuman-i-Punjab, he acquired the services of Muhammad Hussain Azad who became a pivotal figure in nudging the Urdu literary tradition in a new direction through that organisation. That will be taken up in the next column.