The Bhagalpur district is tucked away in the eastern corner of Bihar, India. It was once a place of major appeal to the British officials of colonial India. Major James Rennell, the first surveyor general of India, had carried out a conscientious appraisal of the Bengal state (1764-67) and published his report which became the groundwork for many a path-breaking paper on the topography of Bengal. Rennell’s work was followed by a diligent survey of Bhagalpur which was accomplished by Dr. Francis Buchanan in 1810-11. In 1838, Robert Montgomery Martin published his meticulous study of Bhagalpur.

It was in Bhagalpur that Lt Col Alexander Dow (d July 31, 1779), the first English historian of the Indian subcontinent, was buried in an old cemetery. The city also treasures the mortal remains of the second wife (Anne Elizabeth, b 1808 at Bombay, d June 7th, 1879, aged 70 years) of Teignmouth Sandys (born August 8, 1808 at St Keverne, Cornwall) – who was an officer of the Bengal Civil Service. Sandys and Elizabeth got married in Purneah (Bihar) on November 28, 1843. She was the daughter of Capt Richard Finnis Cauty of the “country service”. Teignmouth was earlier married to Caroline who died in Calcutta on May 2, 1840 at the age of 28 years.

The extension of the said cemetery in 1897 was supported by the richest Muslim landlord of Bhagalpur, Syed Irtaza Hossain who was the grandfather of Syed Safdar Hussain Khan, and Syed Ali Raza Khan, of Doolighat, Patna.

Sandys joined the East India Company as a writer on April 30, 1827. The covenant was executed on May 17. On April 25, 1827, a notification of appointment was issued from the Court of Directors.

He arrived in India on October 29, 1827. On December 30, 1828 he was appointed assistant to the magistrate of Nuddea. Working his way up, eventually, he was appointed as civil and sessions judge of Bhagalpur in 1856. His career with the Bengal Civil Service came to an end in 1863.

Nagendranath Gupta says in his autobiography that “one Mr Sandys, a retired civilian who at one time had been district and sessions judge of Bhagalpur, had chosen to settle down in the town instead of returning to England. He owned a fine large house with the largest compound in the town. He had bought some zamindaris and conformed to the usages of zamindars. He used to send dallies to the district officers, European as well as Indian. He was highly respected and was the leader of the European society of Bhagalpur. He was very friendly with Indians. I remember having seen him – then an old man – spade in hand, digging in his grounds in a shirt and an old pair of trousers”.

Being a man of high taste, Sandys owned another large house near his residence which remained vacant for a long time, where a large leopard was shot dead by some European officers.

The Bhagalpur district is tucked away in the eastern corner of Bihar, India. It was once a place of major appeal to the British officials of colonial India.

Sir Hastings D’Oyly recounts in Tales Retailed of Celebrities and Others that “when I first arrived at Bhaugulpore, Mr Teignmouth Sandys was living in a large house situated in a very large compound in that station. He had been for years the judge of Bhaugulpore, but had retired from the service and elected to stay and enjoy his pension, at least for a time, in the country that he so much liked. He was a tall, big, powerful man, a typical Cornishman, a simple-minded, honest, straightforward gentleman and a real good fellow. He was a bit queer. He used to sleep on a bamboo platform which he had put up on some high branches of a very fine Banyan tree; he had made a succession of ladders leading up to this platform. He had many fads; one of which was experimenting on machines for extracting and dressing the fibre of the rheea plant. He was not at all secretive, so of course someone got hold of his invention and forestalled him by taking out a patent for an improved machine very much on the lines of the one which old Sandys had invented. He thought he would invent a method of building a house without wooden beams, which are so often destroyed by the white ants. His idea was to make huge broad blocks of artificial stone, each big enough to form a ceiling to a room. He had an assistant to help him. When one small bungalow had been erected, Sandys asked his assistant to live in it, but the assistant ‘wasn’t having any’, and this was just as well for the roof did not stand long. M. Sandys had several daughters: Eliza Sandys married Maj Reymond Hervey de Montmorency; Alice Claudine became Lady Sir Henry Wylie Norman; Ella Sandys married Sir Mortimer Durand. Still another was Mrs Edward Braddon, her husband being a brother of the celebrated novelist, Miss Braddon. Edward Braddon was in the uncovenanted civil service, but retired and settled in Tasmania where he became, I believe, the president of the council”.

Other sources suggest that he had at least four more grown-up daughters: Annie Louisa (eldest daughter of Anne from her previous marriage with George Palmer) was married on March 7, 1855 at Gaya to Gen Sir George Chesney (d 1895); Amy Harriett Augusta Sandys (b September 17, 1849 at Gaya, d December 11, 1887 in London, and buried in Hillingdon and Uxbridge Cemetery) was the widow of Harry Wallis Alexander of the Bengal Civil Service; Florence Sandys was married, at Christ’s Church Bhagalpur, on January 10, 1865, to Lt RJ Walker, of Bengal Staff Corps, 17^th Regiment Native Infantry; and Mary Dent Sandys was married to Maynard Brodhurst – judge of Benares and later Allahabad. Their son Maj Bernard Maynard Lucas Brodhurst played at least one First-Class cricket match for Hampshire.

Being a multifaceted genius, Sandys dabbled into designing agricultural machines also which were cheap, simple and able to save labour. One of the machines was called Bi-Lever Balance Crane or Jack and Jill. It was meant to draw water from reservoirs and wells. In this regard, JF Sandys had sent a detailed report to the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India which appraised the designs and gave encouraging feedback. His inventions involving the easy extraction, by separation of the wood from the bark, of all fibrous plants; and extraction of fibres of all fibrous plants other than those of a woody character, gained much appreciation in his lifetime.

Durand (Sandys’ son-in-law) has dedicated a segment of his diary titled A typical Bengal district to Bhagalpur, wherein he has written at length about Sandys and his family.

Durand disembarked as an assistant magistrate of Bhagalpur in September 1873. He writes: “Finally there was a large house in the centre of the station occupied by some pleasant people of the name of Sandys. The head of the household, Teignmouth Sandys, had been a civilian and judge, but had retired. He belonged to an old Northumberland family which had been settled for centuries on the Cornish coast near St Keverne, but he preferred life in India to the rather solitary home of his people. He had with him his wife and two unmarried daughters.”

In 1881, en route to Calcutta, Durand visited Bhagalpur where his father-in-law lived after the death of his wife (1879). He records in his diary: “the old house is heartbreaking now, half-dismantled and full of ghosts to me. There is something horrible about the permanence of everything material when our lives change so fast. All round this house is the same; wherever I look I know every tree and every foot of ground, and expect to see the old faces; and yet all is so utterly different. Seven years has done it all. I suppose I shall hardly ever see this place again, and I feel as if I could go round and kiss every inch of its wood and stone. I shall never love any house as I have loved this”.

Sandys was forlorn after the demise of his wife and the spatial distance from the daughters heightened the dejection. These reasons probably made him ponder his decision of staying back in Bhagalpur. It must not have been easy for Sandys to leave his beloved place and return to England but eventually, with a heavy heart, he left the city and settled in his native country where he died at Hillingdon on August 29, 1885 and was buried in the Uxbridge cemetery. His death must have cast a pall of gloom over Bhagalpur.

Pleasantly, Sandys remains etched in the memories of citizens and the up-market quarter of the city bears his name.

The author, based in Jaipur, is an IT professional with a postgraduate degree in physics and history. He writes about art, history, literature and travel