West Edward William 1824-1905 Orientalist, engineer

Edward William West was the eldest of twelve siblings born in 1824 to William West, owner of West's Patent Press Company Ltd, and Margaret Anderson. In May 1844 at the age of 20, he travelled to Mumbai as a superintendent of the machinery and buildings of the family-owned cotton packing company. Following a short visit to England, he returned to India in 1851 as an executive engineer of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company (GIPR), where the following year he became Chief Engineer.

The railway projects in British India fall within the vast colonial surveying project which saw territories mapped and documented in vast detail. Included in such surveys were the documentation of architectural and archaeological sites. Before the formation of the Archaeological Survey of India, which codified and centralised this practice within the government, the work of engineers such as the West brothers, for whom work facilitated and necessitated travel and armed them with the technical expertise, forms a meticulous bank of knowledge of historical sites across British India.

Edward was one of five brothers who took part in this documentation project of rock-cut caves and temples in the Maharashtra region of India. Arthur Anderson West joined his brother in November 1849 as a railway surveyor for the GIPR. Henry Anderson travelled to India in 1851 with Edward William to work as a surveyor with the GIPR. Following the completion of the line between Mumbai to Janna, in 1853, Henry spent a total of almost seven months (between April and October 1853) systematically documenting the Kanheri Caves. Walter West joined the project later, in 1870, travelling to the Kanheri Caves to clarify information left unresolved from Edward and Arthur's last visit in 1866 prior to their return to England.

The material was gifted to the Royal Asiatic Society in December 1917 by Mrs. Burgess, the wife of the then late James Burgess, architectural historian and once General-Director of the Archaeological Survey of India. The material came into Burgess' possession following the death of Edward in 1905, sent to him in 1906 by his surviving brother Arthur under the guise of exploring the prospect of publishing the portfolios of drawings, plans, and notes. Nothing however appears to have come of this project and the material remained in Burgess's possession until his death in October 1916.