Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social (Series 2)

Eligious and Social by Sir Alfred C Lyall Preface to First Edition 1882. This book contains, in the form of chapters, eleven essays. Ten essays relate to India, being mainly the outcome of personal observation in certain provinces and of intercourse with the people one essay relates to China, with which country the writer has no direct acquaintance and since they are all so far alike in their subjectmatter that they deal with the actual character and complexion of religion and society in these countries at the present time, they may possibly be considered to have some useful bearing on the general study of Asiatic ideas and institutions. For throughout Asia, wherever the state of society has not been distinctly transformed by European. of these eleven essays, one has been omitted in the new edition.

Alfred Comyn Lyall GCIE, KCB, PC, FBA (4 January 1835 - 10 April 1911) was a British civil servant, literary historian and poet. He was born at Coulsdon in Surrey, the second son of Alfred Lyall and Mary Drummond Broadwood, daughter of James Shudi Broadwood. He was educated at Eton College. His elder brother, James Broadwood Lyall, was already serving in India, and this may have influenced him towards a career in that direction. After Eton and Haileybury, Lyall joined the Indian Civil Service in 1856, and served a long career in India. He landed at Calcutta in January 1856. After four months of training he was posted as an Assistant Magistrate at Bulandshahr in Doab, a part of the North-West Provinces. He was there when the Indian Rebellion of 1857 occurred: his house was burned down and he was nearly killed when fleeing as his horse was shot from under him. He joined the Khaki Risala of Volunteers, an irregular European cavalry unit. He helped "pacify" Bulandshahr. In May 1858 he was transferred to Shahjehanpur where he helped "restore order". In April 1861 he returned to England for about eighteen months.

THE single volume of "Asiatic Studies" published in 1882 has been for some years out of print. In preparing a fresh edition, with some necessary revision, I have thought it might be worth while to add a second volume containing a few selected essays and dissertations, chiefly on the subject of Asiatic religions, that have been written by me. at different times in recent years. In order to bring together two essays upon the same subject-the relations of the State with Religion in China I have transferred to this new volume chap. v. of the original Studies.

The first chapter of the second volume contains three letters which were originally published under the signature of Vamadeo Shastri. In these letters I ventured upon the attempt to represent, or at least to throw light upon, certain religious views, feelings, and opinions which I believe to exist, not without considerable among the conservative classes of India, but which are apt to escape the attention of Englishmen, whether at home or in that country. For this purpose the assumption of a pseudonym was convenient, and, I hope, excusable. It has been chosen to denote an orthodox Brahman, versed in the religion and philosophy of his own people, and to some extent in the literature of the West, who is chiefly interested, like all Indians of the old schools, in the religious situation, and who surveys from that standpoint the moral and material changes that the English rule is producing in India.

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