R. C. Temple

Soldier and administrator

Sir Richard Carnac Temple, 2nd Baronet, was born in Allahabad, India, on 15 October 1850, the eldest son of Sir Richard Temple (1826-1902), later Governor of Bombay, and Charlotte Frances Martindale. Educated at Harrow and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he was commissioned in the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1871 and transferred to the Indian Army in 1877, serving with the 38th Dogras in the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-79, when he was mentioned in despatches. Posted as cantonment magistrate in the Punjab in 1879, he developed the abiding interest in Indian folklore, history and ethnology that would define his second career. He served in the Third Burmese War (1885), took charge of Mandalay in 1887, became president of the Rangoon municipality, and from 1895 to his retirement in 1904 was Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, rising to lieutenant-colonel in 1897.

Folklore work

Temple believed a knowledge of local folklore was useful to ruler and ruled alike. In the Punjab he began collecting the songs and stories of professional bards and narrators, transcribing them in the vernacular with English translations. In 1883 he founded Panjab Notes and Queries, which he edited until 1887, and from 1884 he was editor and proprietor of the Indian Antiquary. With Flora Annie Steel he co-authored Wide-Awake Stories (1884), a collection of Punjab folk tales.

The Legends of the Punjab

His great work, The Legends of the Punjab, appeared in three volumes between 1883 and 1890. It preserves the folk legends of Raja Rasalu, Sakhi Sarwar, Goga Pir, Mirza and Sahiban, Sassi and Punnun and many others, exactly as sung by the Punjab's bards — a vast, still-consulted treasury of Punjabi folklore that was later translated into Urdu. He also wrote The Andaman Language (1887, with E. H. Man) and The Thirty-Seven Nats (1906), a study of Burmese animism, and assembled ethnographic collections for the British Museum and Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum.

Honours and later life

Temple succeeded to his father's baronetcy in 1902. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (1894) and of the Bath (1916), elected a Fellow of the British Academy (1925) and of the Society of Antiquaries, and served as president of the anthropological section of the British Association. He married Agnes Fanny Searle in 1880; they had three children. He died on 3 March 1931 at Territet, Switzerland.