John Prinsep

John Prinsep (also spelled John Princep) (1748–1830) was born the son of a vicar in rural Oxfordshire, England, with limited horizons for advancement. He joined the East India Company as a cadet, travelling to Bombay, and was soon engaged in mercantile pursuits, eventually becoming the earliest British merchant to plant indigo, and becoming extremely wealthy in the process. Prinsep subsequently returned to England, where he became a London alderman and a member of parliament, but he eventually lost both large fortunes he created. He was the progenitor of an Anglo-Indian family of merchants, all of whom were artistically gifted.

John Prinsep was born on 23 April 1746, the son of Rev. John Prinsep, BA graduate of Balliol College, Oxford and vicar of Bicester, Oxfordshire. The young Prinsep arrived in Bombay in 1771 as a cadet, shortly after the arrival of Warren Hastings as the first Governor-General of Bengal.

The vicar's son and former London cloth merchant arrived in Calcutta with almost nothing to his name. "I landed with my baggage at the Custom House," Prinsep recalled in an unpublished memoir, "and proceeded to the 'Punch House' in the Bazaar with ten guineas that I had borrowed from my friend to bear my expenses till I should have presented myself to the Fort Major." It was an inauspicious beginning, but like so many other English arrivals in India, it was fraught with the frisson of Empire and ambition.

In spite of being nearly penniless, Prinsep arrived with a valuable commodity: letters of introduction. Soon, he discovered, Calcutta was not London. "I could not help being surprised at the hospitality offered me," Prinsep later wrote, "for, once respectably introduced, I found myself at home everywhere. No formality, no stiffness or reserve, everybody happy to receive the stranger." The point of view would be echoed by the English ever since, down to E. M. Forster.

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