Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal

John Beames

John William Beames was a civil servant and author in British India. He served in the Punjab from March 1859 to late 1861, and in Bengal from December 1861 until the conclusion of his service in 1893. He was also a scholar of Indian history, literature and linguistics. His great work was a comparative grammar of Indo-Aryan languages, published in three volumes in 1872–1879. When he retired from the Indian Civil Service in March 1893, he had gained extensive knowledge of Indian life, and in 1896 wrote an account of his career, first published in 1961 as Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian.