Edward Hamilton Aitken (16 August 1851 – 11 April 1909) was a British civil servant in India, better known for his humorist writings on natural history in India and as a founding member of the Bombay Natural History Society. He was well known to Anglo-Indians by the pen-name of Eha.
Contents
Early life
Eha was born at Satara in the Bombay Presidency on 16 August 1851. His father was the Rev. James Aitken, missionary of the Free Church of Scotland. His mother was a sister of the Rev. Daniel Edward, a missionary to the Jews at Breslau for some fifty years. He was educated by his father in India. His higher education was obtained at Bombay and Pune. He passed M.A. and B.A. of Bombay University, first on the list, and won the Homejee Cursetjee prize with a poem in 1880. From 1870 to 1876, he taught Latin at the Deccan College in Pune. He also knew Greek and was known to be able to read the Greek Testament without the aid of a dictionary. He grew up in India, and it was only later in life that he visited England for the first time, and he found the weather of Edinburgh severe.
Career
He entered the Customs and Salt Department of the Government of Bombay in April 1876, and served in Kharaghoda (referred to as Dustypore in The Tribes on my Frontier), Uran, Uttara Kannada and Goa Frontier, Ratnagiri, and Bombay itself. In May 1903, he was appointed Chief Collector of Customs and Salt Revenue at Karachi, and in November 1905, was made Superintendent in charge of the District Gazetteer of Sind. He retired from the service in August 1906.
He married Isabella Mary, the third daughter of the Rev. J. Chalmers Blake of the Free Church of Scotland on 22 December 1883 in Bombay and they had two sons and three daughters. Their daughter - Jesse Helen, married James Hood Wilson Lownie (1887-1961), and their son Ralph became a colonial judge and author of Auld Reekie. Their grandson is the author Andrew James Hamilton Lownie.
Natural history
He explored the jungles on the hills near Vihar around Bombay and wrote a book called The Naturalist on the Prowl. His writing style was accurate and at the same time amusing to his readers. He studied most of his subjects in life and was very restricted in his collecting.
In response to an appeal for information on rats due to plague in Bombay, he wrote an article for The Times of India (19 July 1899), in which he threw a flood of light on the subject of the habits and characteristics of the Indian rat as found in town and country. He wrote that Mus rattus, the old English black rat, which is the common house rat of India outside the large seaports, has become, through centuries of contact with the Indian people, a domestic animal like the cat in Britain.
In 1902 he was deputed to investigate the prevalence of malaria at the Customs stations along the frontier of Goa, and to devise means for removing the position of the Salt Peons who were affected by malaria in these places. During this expedition he discovered a new species of anopheline mosquito, which after identification by Major James, I.M.S., was named after him as Anopheles aitkeni. During his service he took to writing the Annual Reports of the Customs Department and was frequently thanked for the same. Reviewers have commented that these reports are enlivened by his witty literary touch. In the last two years of his service he was put in charge of The Sind Gazetteer. On completion of this work he retired to Edinburgh. He died after a short illness on 25 April 1909, in Edinburgh.
He refused to be depressed by life in India. "I am only an exile," he remarks, "endeavouring to work a successful existence in Dustypore, and not to let my environment shape me as a pudding takes the shape of its mould, but to make it tributary to my own happiness." He therefore urged his readers to cultivate a hobby.
He wrote:
It is strange that Europeans in India know so little, see so little, care so little, about all the intense life that surrounds them. The boy who was the most ardent of bug-hunters, or the most enthusiastic of bird-nesters in England, where one shilling will buy nearly all that is known, or can be known, about birds or butterflies, maintains in this country, aided by Messrs. B. &. S., an unequal strife with the insupportableness of an ennui-smitten life. Why, if he would stir up for one day the embers of the old flame, he could not quench it again with such a prairie of fuel around him. I am not speaking of Bombay people, with their clubs and gymkhanas and other devices for oiling the wheels of existence, but of the dreary up-country exile, whose life is a blank, a moral Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist creed. What such a one needs is a hobby. Every hobby is good—a sign of good and an influence for good. Any hobby will draw out the mind, but the one I plead for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human kindness from souring, puts a gentle poetry into the prosiest life. That all my own finer feelings have not long since withered in this land of separation from 'old familiar faces,' I attribute partly to a pair of rabbits. All rabbits are idiotic things, but these come in and sit up meekly and beg a crust of bread, and even a perennial fare of village moorgee cannot induce me to issue the order for their execution and conversion into pie. But if such considerations cannot lead, the struggle for existence should drive a man in this country to learn the ways of his border tribes. For no one, I take it, who reflects for an instant will deny that a small mosquito, with black rings upon a white ground, or a sparrow that has finally made up its mind to rear a family in your ceiling, exercises an influence on your personal happiness far beyond the Czar of the Russias. It is not a question of scientific frontiers—the enemy invades us on all, sides. We are plundered, insulted, phlebotomised under our own vine and fig-tree. We might make head against the foe if we laid to heart the lesson our national history in India teaches—namely, that the way to fight uncivilised enemies is to encourage them to cut one another's throats, and then step in and inherit the spoil. But we murder our friends, exterminate our allies, and then groan under the oppression of the enemy. I might illustrate this by the case of the meek and long-suffering musk-rat, by spiders or ants, but these must wait another day....
Writings
His books include
An Indian Naturalist's Foreign Policy (1883)
Behind the Bungalow (1889)
The Naturalist on the Prowl (1894)
The Five Windows of the Soul (1898)
The Common Birds of Bombay (1900)
The Tribes on my Frontier (1904)
Gazetteer Of The Province Of Sindh (1907)
After returning to Edinburgh, he wrote a series of articles on birdlife in the Strand Magazine.