George Hadley (orientalist)
# George Hadley (orientalist)

George Hadley (died 1798) was an English army officer of the East India Company, now known as an orientalist for his early work on Hindustani.

## Life

Hadley was appointed a cadet in the East India Company's service in 1763, and gained his first commission in the Bengal Presidency on 19 June of that year. He became lieutenant on 5 February 1764, and captain on 26 July 1760.

Hadley retired from the service on 4 December 1771. He returned to England, though it is not known exactly when. He was of assistance to the self-taught orientalist William Price, whom he introduced to William Ouseley.

Hadley died on 10 September 1798 in Gloucester Street, Queen Square, London.

## Works

As an army commander, Hadley was in charge of a company of sepoys, but initially had no knowledge of their language, Hindustani, which was then colloquially known in English as "Moors". For his own use, Hadley wrote a grammar of it, in 1765. A copy of his manuscript was published in London in 1770. Hadley then worked on a corrected edition, which appeared as Grammatical Remarks (1772). He published also Introductory Grammatical Remarks on the Persian Language. With a Vocabulary, English and Persian, Bath, 1776.

Hadley's grammar was aimed at the current British needs in Bengal, to get Indians to work for them, without the mediation of a munshi. Its content, as a phrase book, reflected the economy and social climate of the time, and ignored the Urdu language. Hadley correctly identified Hindustani as a language in its own right, rather than a dialect of Persian. His theory of a Tartar origin was rejected, and his work came in for criticism from John Borthwick Gilchrist, who objected to the version of Hindustani it reported.

In 1788 Thomas Briggs, a printer in Hull, persuaded Hadley to put his name to a compilation, A New and Complete History of the Town and County of the Town of Kingston-upon-Hull.

