William Wilson Hunter (1840 – 1900)

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Sir William Wilson Hunter KCSI CIE (15 July 1840 – 6 February 1900)[1] was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service.

He is most known for The Imperial Gazetteer of India on which he started working in 1869, and which was eventually published in nine volumes in 1881 and later as a twenty-six volume set after his death.


William Wilson Hunter was born on 15 July 1840 in Glasgow, Scotland, to Andrew Galloway Hunter, a Glasgow manufacturer. He was the second son, among his fathers three sons. He started his education in 1854 at the 'Quaker Seminary' at Queenswood, Hampshire, after a year he joined, the Glasgow Academy.

He was educated at Glasgow University (BA 1860), Paris and Bonn, acquiring a knowledge of Sanskrit, LL.D., before passing first in the final examination for the Indian Civil Service in 1862.

He reached Bengal Presidency in November 1862 and was appointed assistant magistrate and collector of Birbhum, in the lower provinces of Bengal, where he began collecting local traditions and records, which formed the materials for his publication, entitled The Annals of Rural Bengal, which influenced among others the historical romance Durgeshnandini of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

He also compiled A Comparative Dictionary of the Non-Aryan Languages of India, a glossary of dialects based mainly upon the collections of Brian Houghton Hodgson, which according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica "testifies to the industry of the writer but contains much immature philological speculation".

In 1869 Lord Mayo, the then governor-general, asked Hunter to submit a scheme for a comprehensive statistical survey of India. The work involved the compilation of a number of local gazetteers, in various stages of progress, and their consolidation in a condensed form upon a single and uniform plan. There was unhappiness with the scope and completeness of the earlier surveys conducted by administrators such as Buchanan, and Hunter determined to model his efforts on the Ain-i-Akbari and Description de l'Égypte. Hunter said that "It was my hope to make a memorial of England's work in India, more lasting, because truer and more complete, than these monuments of Mughal Empire and of French ambition."

In response to Mayo's question on 30 May 1871 of whether the Indian Muslims are "bound by their religion to rebel against the Queen" Hunter completed his influential work The Indian Musalmans in mid-June 1871 and later published it as a book in mid-August of the same year.

In 1872 Hunter published his history of Orissa. The third International Sanitary Conference held at Constantinople in 1866 declared Hindu and Muslim pilgrimages to be 'the most powerful of all the causes which conduce to the development and propagation of Cholera epidemics'. Hunter echoing the view described the 'squalid pilgrim army of Jagannath' as


with its rags and hair and skin freighted with vermin and impregnated with infection, may any year slay thousands of the most talented and beautiful of our age in Vienna, London, or Washington.


The Imperial Gazetteer of India, William Wilson Hunter's most known work, on which he started working in 1869.
He embarked on a series of tours throughout the country, and he supervised the A Statistical Account of Bengal (20 volumes, 1875-1877) and a similar work for Assam (2 volumes, 1879).

Hunter wrote that


Under this system, the materials for the whole of British India have now been collected, in several Provinces the work of compilation has rapidly advanced, and everywhere it is well in hand. During the same period the first Census of India has been taken, and furnished a vast accession to our knowledge of the people. The materials now amassed form a Statistical Survey of a continent with a population exceeding that of all Europe, Russia excepted."

The statistical accounts, covering the 240 administrative districts, comprised 128 volumes and these were condensed into the nine volumes of The Imperial Gazetteer of India, which was published in 1881. The Gazetteer was revised in later series, the second edition comprising 14 volumes published between 1885 and 1887, while the third comprised 26 volumes, including an atlas, and was published in 1908 under the editorship of Herbert Hope Risley, William Stevenson Meyer, Richard Burn and James Sutherland Cotton.

According to the 1911 Britannica, Hunter "adopted a transliteration of vernacular place-names, by which means the correct pronunciation is ordinarily indicated; but hardly sufficient allowance was made for old spellings consecrated by history and long usage." Hunter's own article on India was published in 1880 as A Brief History of the Indian Peoples, and has been widely translated and utilized in Indian schools. A revised form was issued in 1895, under the title of The Indian Empire: its People, History and Products.

Hunter later said that

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• A Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia: With a Dissertation. Based on the Hodgson Lists, Official Records, and Mss. Trübner and Company. 1868.
• Annals of Rural Bengal. Smith, Elder & Co. 1868.
• The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen?. Trübner and Company. 1871.
• Orissa, Or, The Vicissitudes of an Indian Province Under Native and British Rule. Smith, Elder and Company. 1872.
• A Statistical Account of Bengal. London: Trübner & Co. 1875–1879. (20 volumes)
• A Statistical Account of Assam. 1879. (2 volumes)
• A Brief history of the Indian peoples. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1880.
• The Imperial Gazetteer of India. 1881. (26 volumes)
• The Indian Empire: Its People, History, and Products London (Second ed.). Trübner & Co. 1886.
• Bombay, 1885-1890: A Study in Indian Administration. Frowde. 1892.
• The Marquess of Dalhousie. 1894.
• State Education for the People in America, Europe, India, and Australia: With Papers on the Education of Women, Technical Instruction, and Payment by Results. C. W. Bardeen. 1895.
• The Thackerays in India and Some Calcutta Graves. London: Henry Frowde. 1897.
• Williams Jackson, A. V., ed. (1906). History of India: From the first European settlements to the founding of the English East India Company. History of India. 6. London: Grolier Society.
• Williams Jackson, A. V., ed. (1907). History of India: The European struggle for Indian supremacy in the seventeenth century. History of India. 7. London: Grolier Society.