David Thomas Richardson

David Thomas Richardson (died 1808) was an officer of the Bengal Army or the East India Company and a Hindu scholar who established the Company's staff training college at Barasat, but who died with his family when, returning to England from India, their ship, the Lord Nelson was lost in a hurricane in 1808.

David Thomas Richardson was born to a Scottish borders family in Langholm, Dumfriesshire, one of eleven children. In 1779 he became an East India Company cadet, later serving under Colonel (later General) Thomas Wyndham Goddard in the 5th battalion of Sepoys, during the First Anglo-Maratha War; thereafter he transferred to the 3rd Bengal European Regiment. He was one of a number of his family to serve in the east; his brother Gilbert was captain of an East Indiaman and married Catherine Eliza Richardson; his brother William served in the Second Anglo-Mysore War, but was captured and murdered by poison on the orders of Tipu Sultan. Two of his sisters married fellow officers.

Richardson appears to have been transferred to military intelligence work, arising out of his knowledge of Persian and Hindustani; he is noted, later in his career, as a language examiner for the Company's staff training college. In this context, he is notable as the apparent instigator of, and companion on, a trip to Europe made between 1799 and 1802 by Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, a tax-colletor and Persian scholar associated with Oudh State during a period in which the Company was increasing its control of that territory. It appears that Abu Taleb, who had had to exile himself from Oudh after being too closely identified with British interests, may have been sponsored by the Company to make his trip, presumably with a view to retaining his utility for later company uses in Oudh. Certainly, it appears somewhat singular that an officer of the Company would invite a local to accompany him to England, but that, nevertheless, happened. Singular too was that Abu Taleb published a travel-book recounting his journey, in ciraca 1805, Masir Talib fi Bilad Afranji (The Travels of Taleb in the Regions of Europe), which was translated and reprinted - including by the East Inda Company - as Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe.

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