This is a welcome study. Although primarily about the careers, ideas, and influence of two scholar-administrator brothers in India, Sir William and Dr. John Muir, it begins and ends in Scotland and addresses much in between. Among the many subjects it addresses are nineteenth-century Scottish education, the role of patronage and education in the recruitment of Indian Civil Service members, religious views and career patterns in northern British India, intellectual exchanges between British administrators and pandits and ulama, and, of course, the contributions of John and William Muir to scholarship on the Vedas and Islam, respectively. Patient readers will walk away with a nuanced understanding of the intellectual climate in the British Raj during its heyday.

Avril Powell engages and then mostly rejects the notion of a Scottish essence to the careers of the Muir brothers. Acknowledging the broader reach of a popularized Enlightenment that touched even the small towns where the Muirs were raised and educated, she points to the many influences that shaped their lives and attitudes after they left Scotland, including a crucial period of training at Haileybury College that Anglicized them and exposed them to evangelicalism. Although the Muirs followed some recognizably Scottish patterns in their private lives—William married into a Scottish family ensconced in the East India Company’s service—Powell argues for an imperial experience in which the Muirs moved freely between “markers of Scottishness, Englishness and Britishness” (10). She concludes by highlighting differences between the two brothers regarding their Scottish heritage: while William occasionally played up the virtuous qualities of Scots, John mostly disguised his ethnic identity. More important, neither can be identified with any particular strain of Orientalism that can be traced back to the Scottish Enlightenment. Their views of Indian and Islamic civilizations were shaped by ideas whose provenance lay elsewhere.

A book about two Orientalist scholars who contributed to debates regarding the origins of Vedic civilization and of Islam must, of course, investigate those contributions. Powell handles this task with aplomb. The much-analyzed relationship between language and power, she reminds us, did not mean that would-be East India Company officials faced a particularly rigorous course of language studies. The Muir brothers, for instance, began the study of the classical languages in which they made their reputations by taking private tutorials at Haileybury because Sanskrit and Arabic were not compulsory subjects when they attended. Real training began in India, where John polished his skills in Sanskrit and William his in Arabic. Powell adds a twist to this familiar story of linguistic training and cross-cultural dialogue by interweaving it with a narrative of contrasting religious development. The exposure to evangelicalism led the brothers to markedly different appreciations of their respective scholarly subjects.

John Muir was less smitten by religious fervor than his brother and was critical of missionaries for tactical mistakes such as neglecting Indian cultural traditions. Convinced of the Aryan origins of the Vedic peoples, he looked for parallels rather than differences between East and West and found much to admire in Sanskrit literature and Vedic civilization. To the last, he emphasized affinities between ancient Greek and Sanskrit languages, authors, and ideas. As an administrator, John favored the Orientalist educational model of diffusing Western knowledge through the Sanskrit language and with the aid of pandits who had to be convinced of the need for this. William Muir was religiously more zealous and actively supported missionary activities in his private capacity. His publications were informed by a confidence in the superiority of Christianity and sparked considerable controversy with the Muslim scholarly community. Saiyid Ahmad Khan was one of those provoked to outrage by William’s disdainful comments about the deficiencies of Islamic societies when measured by the standards of post-Reformation Christian European civilization.

Powell is at her best when deftly exploring the complex relationship between William Muir and Saiyid Ahmad Khan and their contrasting views of Muhammad, the nature of Islamic civilization, and the factors responsible for social and cultural advance. Although both agreed that the Indian Muslim community was “backward” (220), lagging behind others in taking advantage of modern education, their differing views on educating Indian Muslims is revealing. The issue of female education is a case in point. William held the common Enlightenment view that the status of women was a marker of the progress of civilization, and in his published works he castigated Islam for promoting polygamy and favoring men in matters of divorce. Consequently, he promoted female public education as crucial to all progress in India. For his part, Saiyid Ahmad thought traditional zenana education suitable for Indian Muslim women and argued that public schooling for girls was dependent on a level of civilization that his society had not yet attained.

Also valuable is a chapter on the Muir brothers and the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Delving into their little-used private correspondence and a massive collection of intelligence papers gathered by William Muir during the tumult, Powell offers up unexpected conclusions. Despite his antipathy to Islam and close proximity to events—he was stationed in Agra in 1857—William interpreted the uprising and its causes “in ways very sympathetic to its participants, particularly Muslims” (175). Where others saw a deep-rooted Muslim conspiracy and a wider civilian revolt, he remained convinced that it was a mere mutiny. Evangelicalism provides a clue here. Powell attributes William’s interpretation to his desire to protect missionaries from the charge of provoking unrest. John Muir, already retired to Edinburgh, was moved to support a public campaign for more missionary activity as a response to 1857. But this support was offset by distress at the tone of the local campaigners that recalls his earlier criticism of missionaries in India.