ABSTRACT
‘Koi Hai’—or ‘Is anyone there?’, the call used by the British in Bengal to summon a servant—was the pseudonym of Thomas Seymour Burt, an army officer and expert on the ancient stone inscriptions of India. Burt, the son of a Somerset vicar, went to India as a cadet in 1821, and joined the Bengal Engineers. Burt was court-martialled and dismissed, having apparently committed fraud three years before, in the course of his duties as executive engineer of the department of public works in Allahabad. He returned to England in 1865. Burt wrote on a variety of subjects, including a travel narrative, Account of a Voyage to India, via the Mediterranean, and Account of an Excursion in Search of Ancient Inscriptions and Other Relics in India. His poetry, written at various times, is collected in the volume Poems: Consisting of Tales from the Classics, The Exile’s Return, The Delights of India and Miscellaneous Pieces, from which the extract is taken.
