My beautiful Anglo-Bengali great great grandmother, Sophia Pattle. She had quite a life: born in Chandernagar, educated in Versailles and married in Calcutta, she brought up her children in Little Holland House in Kensington, then a village outside London.
In Little Holland House she lived with her sister, Sarah, Sarah's husband Henry Prinsep, a Sanskritist who opposed Macaulay's Anglicising reforms & wrote the first English-language history of the Sikhs.
Also living in Little Holland House was the painter GM Watts, then known as 'England's Michelangelo' who came to lunch and stayed for 35 years.
Another of her sisters was the pioneering photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who used Little Holland House as an open air studio
In Little Holland House Julia would dress up Alfred Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Vaughan as King Arthur and Lancelot, and make them sit still for her 15 minute exposures.
Sophia was a muse not just to Watts, who painted her often, but also to Burne-Jones, who fell in apparently unrequited love with her, and also Rossetti.
She moved briefly to Scotland with her husband, but found it too cold and on his early death moved to Monte Carlo

1,2,3, 6&7 by Watts
In her old age in Monte Carlo she played Spanish guitar and entertained her great niece, Virginia Woolf.
I've written a little about her here:

Kolkata, my ancestors, and me - bbc.co.uk/news/world-asi…

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More from @DalrympleWill

6 Sep
Clive's loot

The loot which Clive lifted from Murshidabad after winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757 made him the richest self-made man in Europe. In 2004, a Qatari royal bought a jade flask from his descendants for £3m. Its now in Islamic Museum in Doha. ImageImage
The same Qatari prince also bought a flyswatter for £800,000, and most of Clive’s hookah, which is currently on display at the V&A. The rest of the hookah remains with Clive's other loot in a cabinet at Powis Castle. ImageImage
The rest of Clive's loot, including Tipu Sultan's Campaign Tent and Siraj ud Daula's abandoned palanquin, remains with Clive's descendants in Powis. Tragically, there is no comparable collection of late Mughal treasures left anywhere in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh. ImageImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets
31 Jul
Strange synchronicities: I spent the day reading about Roman trade w India- which was far more substantial than its minimal trade with China along the Silk Road. The best evidence for this are the figures given by Pliny, whose villa was at Bellagio, right across the lake from me
The demand for silk & spices by the Roman aristocracy moved Pliny to remark that “India is brought near by lust for gain.. India is the sink of the world’s precious metal.. There is no year in which does not drain our empire of at least fifty five million silver sesterces… "
"So manifold is the labour employed & so distant is the region is the region of the globe drawn upon," Pliny continued, "to enable the Roman matron to flaunt transparent raiment in public." During the 1stC CE, at least 120 Roman ships sailed every year from the Red Sea to India.
Read 6 tweets
31 Jul
A fine obituary of Roberto Calasso in New York Times

Renaissance Man of Letters, Dies at 80. A Florentine by birth, he was a polymath as an author and publisher (Kafka, Vedic philosophy, Greek mythology) who reached a wide international readership.

nyti.ms/3j9qDku
I first met  Calasso in Milan through Bruce Chatwin, who he had championed in Italy, and turned into a bestseller; and in due course he did the same for me. If he liked a book, he could be the most powerful ally and would put his full authority and reputation behind it.
Suddenly you found your book being reviewed and taken incredibly seriously across Italy, and sent straight into top of the bestseller list.
Read 8 tweets
13 Jul
So grateful to Shailen Bhandare for showing me my great gt uncle James Prinsep's notebooks & scrapbooks & his correspondence with Charles Masson which led him to use the new discovered bi-lingual Greek/Kharosthi inscriptions on Bactrian Greek coins to translate Brahmi & Kharosthi
James Prinseps notebooks contain all his thoughts as he worked away at the mint in Benares, drawing and copying the inscriptions on Indo Greek & Bactrian coins, trying to crack the two languages that obsessed him, Ashoka Brahmi and Kharosthi.
I was amused to see how Prinsep was especially obsessed with the coin of Demetrios I with his elephant headress that I posted last week
Read 8 tweets
13 Jul
Fascinating day at Repton with Mark Horton and @CatJarman yesterday. I first came here to dig with Mark & Martin Biddle aged 17 in 1982- and was present at the discovery of the mass burial of the Viking Great Army, recently made famous by Cat's fabulous book River Kings ImageImage
I rave reviewed Cat Jarman's River Kings in the FT in February- and can't recommemd it highly enough. Not only is it the best account of the archaeology of the Vikings, it also emphasizes the Vikings links to the East through a Gujerati carnelian bead that we found in the charnel Image
Here is the review:

River Kings — were the Vikings really violent?
ft.com/content/309f52…
Read 8 tweets
27 Jun
The Sons of Tipu handed over as hostages to Lord Cornwallis, 1791
Arthur Devis
Private Collection

A measure of how tastes and sensibilities change: British contemporaries somehow saw this as benign. To us, taking a five year old hostage feels profoundly cruel, even a war crime
"Cornwallis accepted Tipu's terms, but his terms were severe: Tipu must surrender half his kingdom, and pay an indemnity of 30 million rupees, release all his prisoners of war, and give his two eldest sons as hostages to guarantee full payment.
The borderlands next to the Marathas were to be handed over to the Peshwa; those next to Hyderabad to the Nizam; and the Company was to receive his territories in the Eastern Ghats as well as those in Coorg and spice-rich Malabar.
Read 7 tweets

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