Biography

Sir Edward Clive Bayley (1821-84), knight, Indian administrator and antiquary, was born in St Petersburg on 17 October 1821. Bayley arrived in India in 1842 and until 1849 served principally at Meerut. In April 1849 he was appointed deputy commissioner of Gujarat in the newly annexed state of the Punjab. The following November he became under-secretary to the government of India in the foreign department, where he served under Sir Henry Elliot, the orientalist and archaeologist, who warmly encouraged his antiquarian pursuits. Two years later he returned to the Punjab as deputy commissioner of Kangra, but in 1854 he was compelled by ill health to take furlough. In England he studied law and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1857. He returned to India on the outbreak of the uprising and in September 1857 was ordered to Allahabad to assist John Peter Grant in his provisional government of the Central Provinces. Thereafter he served in a judicial capacity in Benares, Azamgarh, Allahabad, and Agra. In 1862, after a short stint as foreign secretary, he became home secretary, an office he held for the next ten years. From 1873 until his retirement in 1878 he was a member of the supreme council. He was made CSI in 1875, KCSI in 1877, and CIE in 1878; he was vice-chancellor of Calcutta University for five years from 1870. In retirement he edited the ninth volume, on the local Muslim dynasties of Gujarat, of Elliot's History of India as Told by its Own Historians (1886), and served for three years as vice-president of the Royal Asiatic Society. He died at Wilmington Lodge, Keymer, Sussex, on 30 April 1884.

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