Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Birdwood, George Christopher Molesworth
BIRDWOOD, Sir GEORGE CHRISTOPHER MOLESWORTH (1832-1917), Anglo-Indian official and author, the eldest son of General Christopher Birdwood, Indian army, by his wife, Lydia Juliana, daughter of the Rev. Joseph Taylor, of the London Missionary Society, was born at Belgaum in the Bombay Presidency 8 December 1832. His family had long been connected with the Indian army and public services. He was sent at the age of seven to England to be educated, and went first to the Plymouth new grammar school, then to the Dollar Academy, and finally to the university of Edinburgh where he took his M.D. degree. In 1854 he was appointed to the Bombay establishment of the Indian medical staff, and he took part as a naval surgeon in the Persian expedition of 1856-1857. During the following ten years, whilst practising in Bombay and holding professorships of anatomy and physiology
and of botany and materia medica at the Grant medical college, he laid the foundations of his future work by devoting himself to the study of many unexplored aspects of Indian life, social, economic, and scientific. He was registrar to the newly founded university of Bombay, curator of the government museum, secretary to the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and one of the founders of the Victoria botanical gardens and the Victoria and Albert museum at Bombay. His manifold activities in Bombay, which found recognition in his appointment as sheriff of the city in 1864, were cut short by ill-health, and he returned to England in 1868, as he told his friends, to die, but in fact, only to begin a long career of valuable service as an interpreter to his own countrymen of Indian life, art, and culture, and as a friend to Indians, for whom he aimed at promoting opportunities of social and intellectual intercourse with England. He was special commissioner of the Bombay government for the Paris exhibition of 1867; and, after he had recovered his health at home, he was appointed to assist Dr. John Forbes Watson [q.v.] in the annual exhibitions at South Kensington, of which the first was held in 1871. In 1878 he was posted as special assistant in the statistics and commerce department of the India Office, and he was in charge of the Indian sections of the chief international exhibitions down to that of Chicago in 1898. He retired from official work in 1902.
Birdwood’s literary output both before and after his retirement was enormous, but the bulk of it was in the somewhat scattered form of reports, papers in the transactions of learned societies, contributions to magazines and newspapers, and introductions or appendixes in the books of others. The range of his writings was as wide as his interests. He was an authority on Indian art—more so perhaps than on Indian philology and etymology, in which he sometimes gave free rein to his whimsical imagination and love of paradox, though he was an accomplished Sanskrit scholar. To the study of Indian life and Indian folk-lore he brought a store of recondite information and solid learning. Besides special treatises on Indian botanical subjects, his two most important works were his Report on the Miscellaneous Old Records of the India Office (1879), and The Industrial Arts of India (1880); perhaps his most characteristic work is the volume of essays, entitled Sva (1915), giving to the mystic ‘Svastika’ an interpretation which some authorities dispute. Birdwood had an important share in the foundation of ‘primrose’ day (19 April). The oriental strain in Lord Beaconsfield’s character appealed strongly to him, and it was a letter of his to The Times shortly before the first anniversary of the statesman’s death which led popular sentiment to associate the primrose with his memory [see W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli, vi. 680-1].
Birdwood, who was knighted in 1881, and made K.C.I.E. in 1887, died at Ealing 28 June 1917. He married in 1856 Frances Anne, daughter of Edward Tolcher, R.N., of Plympton St. Mary, and had three sons and two daughters.
[India Office List; Journal of Indian Art and Industry, vol. viii, January 1899; Journal of the Royal Society of Arts; files of The Times; private letters.]