Charles Philip Brown had a penchant for learning languages. A polyglot, he was fluent in English (his mother tongue), Greek, Latin, Persian, Hindustani, Sanskrit, and Telugu. He fell in love with Telugu–a language which the Italian traveller Nicolo Di Conti called “the Italian of the East”– and spent a lifetime learning the language and reviving its literature.
His fascination with languages started very early on. The son of a Sanskrit scholar and missionary, Charles was born in Calcutta on 10 November 1798. As a young boy, he learnt classical languages–Sanskrit, Hindustani, and Persian–from his father, Reverend David Brown, who managed an orphanage in Calcutta. Being in India helped; he could get hold of classical Sanskrit and Persian texts. But sadly, at the age of fourteen, his father passed away, and, in 1812, he had to move back to England. But he longed to come back to India.
A good way to come back to the country he loved, he realised, would be to join the civil services. So he trained for a civil service position at the East India College–founded in Hertford, England, in 1806 to train “writers, clerks and administrators of the East India Company”–and returned to Madras on 4 August 1817.
In 1820, Thomas Munro, the Governor of Madras, having recognised the need for British administrators to learn local languages, passed an order that every British official should learn a local language. Charles chose Telugu. He learnt the basics of the language and passed the examination.
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