Colin Mackenzie

Colonel Colin Mackenzie (1754–8 May 1821) was Scottish army officer in the British East India Company who later became the first Surveyor General of India. He was a collector of antiquities and an orientalist. He surveyed southern India, making use of local interpreters and scholars to study religion, oral histories, inscriptions and other evidence initially out of personal interest and later as a surveyor. He was ordered to survey the Mysore region shortly after the British victory over Tipu Sultan in 1799 and produced the first maps of the region along with illustrations of the landscape and notes on archaeological landmarks. His collections consisting of thousands of manuscripts, inscriptions, translations, coins and paintings, which were acquired after his death by the India Office Library and are an important source for the study of Indian history.

Mackenzie (also first postmaster of the town) was born in Stornoway on the Island of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, the second son of merchant Murdoch Mackenzie and Barbara around 1753 or 1754. Little is known of his early life but he is thought to have started his work as a Comptroller of the Customs at Stornoway from 1778 to 1783, possibly through his the influence of his father's association with the Mackenzie Earls of Seaforth. In his youth he had an interest in mathematics possibly fostered by his schoolmaster, a freemason, Alexander Anderson. Lord Kenneth Mackenzie (last Earl of Seaforth) and Francis (fifth Lord Napier) sought his help in preparing a biography of John Napier and his work on logarithms. When Lord Napier died in 1773, Kenneth Mackenzie helped Colin to obtain commission with the British East India Company to join the Madras Army. When he arrived in Madras on 2 September 1783 he was thirty and was never to return home again. He joined as a Cadet in the Infantry division but was transferred in 1786 as a Cadet of Engineers.

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