Fort William College at Calcutta was established in
1800 CE to train civil servants in Indian languages
It was founded in 1800 to train Company civil servants in Indian languages — option 4.
Why it was set up. Lord Wellesley founded the college on 10 July 1800 — dating it to the anniversary of the battle of Plassey. Young Englishmen were arriving to govern districts whose people they could not understand, and the Company had come to see that an administrator who cannot read a petition or hear a witness cannot govern. The college taught Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Hindustani, Urdu, Marathi and Telugu, along with Indian law, history and revenue administration.
| Detail | Fact |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1800, by Lord Wellesley |
| Purpose | Training Company civil servants in Indian languages and customs |
| Location | Calcutta, within Fort William |
| Notable scholars | William Carey, Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Lallu Lal, Sadal Mishra, Ramram Basu |
Both halves of the option matter. Option 3 has the right year but says only “to train Indian civil servants” — wrong in two ways: the trainees were British, not Indian, and the distinctive purpose was language training. Options 1 and 2 give the wrong year; 1802 is not the founding date.
Its unintended importance. To teach the languages the college had to have books in them, and there were few in prose. It therefore commissioned and printed them — and in doing so gave modern Bengali and Hindi prose their first substantial body of work. Lallu Lal’s Prem Sagar and Sadal Mishra’s Nasiketopakhyan are landmarks of early Khari Boli Hindi, and the Bengali textbooks written there shaped that language’s prose style. The college also compiled grammars and dictionaries and gathered manuscripts, so an institution created for administrative convenience became a major agency of modern Indian literary history.
It closed in 1854, once the Company’s recruits were being trained at Haileybury in England instead.
Hence, the answer is 1800 CE to train civil servants in Indian languages.
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