Sir Lepel Henry Griffin KCSI (1838 – 1908)

[KALKI]

Sir Lepel Henry Griffin KCSI (20 July 1838 – 9 March 1908) was a British administrator and diplomat during the British Raj period in India. He was also a writer



Early life[edit]

Lepel Henry Griffin was born in Watford, England on 20 July 1838. His father, Henry, was a clergyman in the Church of England and his mother was Frances Sophia. His mother had been married previously and thus Griffin had ten half-siblings as well as two full sisters.

Griffin was educated briefly at Harrow School, having also attended Malden's Preparatory School, Brighton. He did not go to university but was privately tutored for the competitive examination for entry to the Indian Civil Service. He sat and passed those examinations during 1859 and 1860, being ranked tenth among the 32 successful candidates.

Career

He reached India in November 1860 and was posted to Lahore.[1] The mannerisms of Griffin had attracted attention in India from the time of his arrival there, and in 1875 Sir Henry Cunningham satirised him in the novel, Chronicles of Dustypore,[1] in which he was depicted as the character Desvoeux. Katherine Prior, the author of his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, describes that, "He was a dandyish, Byronic figure, articulate, argumentative, and witty. Anglo-Indian society was at once both dazzled by and scornful of his languid foppishness and irreverent tongue".

In 1880 he became Chief Secretary of the Punjab.[4] He was sent as a diplomatic representative to Kabul, at the end of the Second Afghan War. He was then Governor-General's Agent in Central India and Resident in Indore; and Resident in Hyderabad.

He collaborated with the pioneer Indian photographer Lala Deen Dayal.
He was a proponent of an Anglo-American union, he addressed a meeting on 15 October, 1898 in Luton, on the subject of the suggested Anglo-American union, Col. John Hay, the former United States Ambassador at London attended the meeting

[KALKI]

Bibliography

The Panjab Chiefs. Lahore: T. C. McCartney-Chronicle Press. 1865. The Panjab Chiefs 1. Updated by Charles Francis Massy (New revised ed.). Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press. 1890.
The Panjab Chiefs 2. Updated by Charles Francis Massy (New revised ed.). Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press. 1890. Revised as Chiefs and Families of note in the Punjab (1909)


The Law of Inheritance to Chiefships. Lahore: Punjab Printing Company. 1869.
The Rajas of the Punjab (1873)
Famous monuments of Central India (1886)
The Great Republic (Second ed.). London: Chapman and Hall. 1884.
Ranjit Singh. Rulers of India series. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1892.

[KALKI]

Sir Lepel Henry Griffin (1840-1908) Knight Indian Civil Servant. President, East India Association and the diplomatic representative at Kabul of the Indian government. Author of several books including The Rajas of the Punjab; being the history of the principal states in the Punjab and their political relations with the British government and The Great Republic. At a a meeting of the East India Association held at the Westminister Palace Hotel, London in December, 1901, he reported as paying the following tribute to Indian morality:

"The Hindu creed is monotheistic and of very high ethical value; and when I look back on my life in India and the thousands of good friends I have left there among all classes of the native community, when I remember those honorable, industrious, orderly, law-abiding, sober, manly men, I look over England and wonder whether there is anything in Christianity which can give a higher ethical creed than that which is now professed by the large majority of the people of India. I do not see it in London society, I do not see it in the slums of the East End, I do not see it on the London Stock Exchange. I think that the morality of India will compare very favorably with the morality of any country in Western Europe."

(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 329 - 330).