Brian Hodgson carried out early natural history investigations in British India and Nepal, where he served as British Resident from 1833-1844. He was especially interested in Himalayan birds and mammals, but also made botanical collections and authored ethnographic works.
Hodgson joined the East India Company in 1817. Arriving in Calcutta the following year, he served as assistant commissioner in Kumaon before being posted to Kathmandu in 1820, as Assistant Resident. He was subsequently made Resident, in 1833.
In Kathmandu, Hodgson retained a group of local research assistants at his own expense, whom he trained in natural history, especially ornithology. He made prodigious collections and published a total of 127 zoological papers, describing nearly 200 birds and mammals from Nepal.
Hodgson's reputation as a scholar of Himalayan natural history and ethnography led to his appointment to the Royal Asiatic Society (1828) and the Linnean Society (1835) and earned him the Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur (1838) in this period.
After stepping down from his position in 1844, Hodgson spent a period in England before taking up as an independent researcher, based in Darjeeling, northern India. He now devoted himself to studying the peoples and languages of the region, though he also continued work on zoology and geography.
The botanist Joseph Hooker stayed with Hodgson in 1848-1850, and later named the genus Hodgsonia Hook.f. & Thomson, a fruit-bearing vine in the Cucurbitaceae family, in his honour.
Hodgson retired to Gloucestershire, England, in 1858, where he died in 1894. In 1864 he gifted to the India Office a large collection of materials in several languages which he had amassed in Kathmandu and Darjeeling. He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1877 and was awarded an honorary degree, DCL, from Oxford University in 1889.
Hodgson was married twice, to Anne Scott (d. 1868) and Susan Townshend. He also fathered two children with a Kashmiri woman who lived with him in India. He sent the children to live with his sister in Holland to avoid discrimination in India, but they did not survive to maturity.
Sources:
M. Cocker and C. Inskipp, 1988, A Himalayan Ornithologist: the life and work of Brian Houghton Hodgson
W.W. Hunter, 1896, The Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson
D.M. Waterhouse (ed), 2004, The Origins of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Nepal and Darjeeling, 1820-1858
J. Whelpton, 2004, "Hodgson, Brian Houghton (1801?-1894)&x#22;, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13433, accessed 23 August 2012.
