In 1805, a young scholar-official of the East India Company was invalided home to Suffolk at the age of only 35. Edward Moor had first gone out to India at the age of 11, soon learnt to speak several Indian languages, and became passionately interested in the cosmology and beliefs of the Hindus.
Now, back in England with time on his hands and in an unfamiliar country he hardly remembered, Moor filled his time by gathering together and organising the artistic, anthropological and textual materials he had been collecting for many years on the deities and images of Hinduism. Five years later, in 1810, he finally published his masterwork, The Hindu Pantheon.
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