Simon Digby (oriental scholar)

Digby was born in 1932 at Jabalpur in the Central Provinces, now Madhya Pradesh. Simon Digby's father was Kenelm George Digby, a judge of the Indian High Court, and his mother was Violet M. Kidd, an accomplished painter. As his father was a friend of J. F. Roxburgh, the first headmaster of Stowe School, Digby was sent to that school (1946–1951) after attending a preparatory school in North Wales. In 1951 he went with his mother on a painting expedition to Delhi, Rajasthan and Kashmir. On his return to Britain he attended Trinity College, Cambridge (Major and Senior Scholar, Earl of Derby Student), 1951–1956; History Tripos, University of Cambridge (BA Cantab., 1st Class Honours with Distinction) 1956; proceeded MA 1962.^[8]

Digby knew how to read Urdu and Hindi, and while at the University of Cambridge he attended classes in Persian and began to publish his own translations of Persian poems. He lived in Whewell's Court and it was here that he welcomed Amartya Sen when he arrived in Cambridge in the summer of 1954. In 1957 he returned to India for two years sponsored by a grant from the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. During this time he learned about Indian art history and museology, having spent time at what was then known as the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India.^[9] In 1959 he travelled to Pakistan, where he visited Lahore, Rawalpindi, Balakot, the Kaghan Valley and Peshawar, among other places. On his return to London Digby lived in a tiny house in Camberwell while he studied for a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he focused on the Sultanate period.^[8]

In 1962 he returned to India where he spent almost a year in Hyderabad and another year in Delhi during which period he wrote on Indian history and contributed an article on the Emperor Humayun to the Encyclopaedia of Islam. This was his first article for this work. He also contributed to the first volume of The Cambridge Economic History of India. His first major article was 'Dreams and Reminiscences of Dattu Sarvani, a Sixteenth Century Indo-Afghan Soldier' for the Indian Economic and Social History Review, which sprang from Digby's interest in medieval Indian warfare and Indian Sufism.^[9] On his return to London he became a regular reviewer in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies and The Times Literary Supplement. From 1968 to 1984 he was the Honorary Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society, which involved him in ordering and cataloguing the Society's collections.^[8] In 1969, he was elected a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.^[9] In 1970, he delivered a paper at the Seminar on Aspects of Religion in South Asia at SOAS entitled 'Encounters with Jogīs in Indian Sūfī Hagiography', which David Gordon White later described as "what may be the most widely circulated unpublished manuscript in the field of South Asian studies."^[10]

In 1971 Digby hitch-hiked to Venice with a friend, who was later the BBC World Service's regional manager in Delhi. The two left Venice and travelled by sea to Rhodes and Anatolia, and then on public transport through Turkey to Tehran, Kerman, Zahidan and Quetta. Digby was in Karachi when war broke out between India and Pakistan, and here he privately published his book War-Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate. In 1972 he was appointed to a post in the Department of Eastern Art of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which had been created for David McCutchion, who had died before he could take it up. This was to be Simon's only full-time paid position, he having benefitted from a number of legacies from deceased relatives. At the Ashmolean, and on a tight budget, he made a series of purchases of Indian decorative arts that were exceptional for their quality.^[8] Around this time, he was the inspiration for two oil-on-wood abstract paintings by the Turner Prize-winning British artist Howard Hodgkin: "Small Simon Digby",^[11] and "Simon Digby Talking".^[12]

As an ex-officio member of the Oriental Faculty of the University of Oxford (1972–2000), Digby was responsible for supervising postgraduate students, and gave instruction in Hindi, Urdu and Persian. In addition, he examined postgraduate theses including that of Michael Nazir-Ali. Digby also served as visiting professor in Paris and Naples, where he lectured on Sufism and architecture. In 1999 Digby was awarded the Burton Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society^[13] and delivered a paper later published privately as Richard Burton: the Indian Making of an Arabist. In his latter years Digby lived in a cottage in Jersey which had been left to him by a relative. From here he made annual visits to India.^[8] In January 2003, he was conferred the degree of D.Litt. honoris causa from Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi.^[14]

Simon Digby died of pancreatic cancer in Delhi on 10 January 2010, having been diagnosed with the disease only on 28 December 2009. He had been due to deliver a talk at the India International Centre entitled "A Runaway Mughal Prince" at the invitation of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage.^[1] He was cremated in India on 14 January 2010 and his ashes immersed in flowing water. Digby was unmarried and left no close relatives.

The trustees of his will, in the absence of clear instructions about what to do with his estate, sold his most valuable artefacts (many at auction in 2011^[15][16]) and established the Simon Digby Memorial Charity to promote the study of subjects in which Simon Digby was interested. The Charity funded a post doctoral fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A conference held in Digby's honour in June 2014 resulted in the publication of a volume on his historical method, edited by Francesca Orsini and published by Oxford University Press in 2022.^[3] The fellowship has also funded the completion of Simon Digby's unpublished academic work, which is being published in the 11-volume series The Life and Works of Simon Digby.^{[7][17][18][19][20]} The trustees also donated Digby's collection of chiefly Indo-Persian manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.^[21]

Simon Digby's scholarly interests spanned a wide range of areas and fields. He is primarily known as an historian of Sultanate-era north India, in its social, economic, political, military and religious aspects.^[22] His keen interest in Sufism – extending into the Mughal period – informed much of his work in that field, as he (following the work of Mohammad Habib, K. A. Nizami, and Syed Hasan Askari) investigated "the important sidelights on Indo-Muslim history [that] are to be found in Sufi literature."^[23] His early interest in the art of the Indian subcontinent is evidenced in some of his earliest publications, and was sustained throughout his career; this was supplemented by ventures into architecture and numismatics.^[24] Significant other interests included sub-continental travel writing from the pre-modern period through to the era of European colonialism, "Wonder-Tales" and comparative folklore, and a subset of his work developing from interests in the works and trajectories of both Richard Burton and Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries.

Digby's first major piece of Sultanate-era history was his 1971 monograph War-horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies. This was self-published under the imprint 'Orient Monographs', and printed in Karachi. In his review of the book, the historian Derek Latham laid out the major historiographical intervention made by Digby:

In the present century various theories have been advanced to explain the initial military success and the subsequent long survival of the sultanate. Indian modernists have argued that, because of the caste system, the indigenous population lacked a sense of national unity and cohesion. Indian Muslims, on the other hand, have contended that the lower castes were quick to see in Islam their salvation and delivery from the tyranny of the higher castes and accordingly welcomed their Muslim invaders. On the military side others have held that mounted combat, in which the Muslims excelled, was unfamiliar to their Hindu opponents. Dismissing the two political theses as tendentious (which undoubtedly they are, though I myself would not say that they are devoid of all truth), Simon Digby concentrates on the military aspect of the matter and cites evidence, first, against the notion that the Hindus had no experience of mounted combat and, secondly, against the idea that the Muslim conquest and ascendancy were based on superior weapons of close combat such as the sword.^[25]

Digby contributed three pieces to The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1: c.1200–c.1750, edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib and published in 1982, on ‘Economic Conditions before 1200’, ‘The Currency System’ and ‘The Maritime Trade of India’ in the period. Later in his career he produced other macro-level studies of the period: on Indo-Persian historiography (2001b); and what he termed the 'provincialisation' of the Delhi Sultanate in the course of the fourteenth century (2004a).

Digby also concentrated on what Irfan Habib described as 'the curiosities and minutiae of history': examples include his investigation of the correct location of the tomb of Buhlul Lodi (1975a) and the correct name of Sultan Iltutmish (1970b).