The Journey of William Jones in India
When a financially constrained William Jones landed in Calcutta On 25 September 1783, to secure his life and family, a tremendous treasure was waiting for him there, in the form of Indian ancient wisdom.
William Jones (1746- 1794) could read two dozen languages by 1783, the year he was appointed judge in the Bengal Supreme Court, for a lucrative 6,000 pounds a year. He had composed Latin poems, translated pre-Islamic Arabic odes into English and a biography of Iran ruler Nader Shah from Persian into French. Jones initially supported the American war of independence but received the judgeship because his accomplishments deflected attention from his sympathy for the American side.
A linguistic prodigy, Jones was born in London in 1746 to Maria Jones, the daughter of a cabinetmaker and a 71-year-old mathematician, also named William Jones (1675-1749), whose peers included Isaac Newton. William Jones Sr was known for introducing the letter π. His father died when Jones was just three, but his mother Maria gave him a good education, at Harrow and Oxford. By 17, Jones had written his first poem, Caissa in English, based on a 658-line poem called Scacchia, Ludus published in 1527 by Marco Girolamo Vida, giving a mythical origin of chess that has become well known in the chess world.
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| William Jones |
To support his mother, he took a position tutoring the seven-year-old Lord Althorp, son of Earl Spencer. For the next six years, he worked as a tutor and translator. During this time he published Histoire de Nader Chah (1770), a French translation of a work originally written in Persian by Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi. This was done at the request of King Christian VII of Denmark: he had visited Jones, who by the age of 23 had already acquired a reputation as an orientalist, and in appreciation of his work he was granted membership in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. (2)
By his mid-20s, Jones had authored several books. While a knighthood arrived, the want of a steady income brought huge pressures. “I was surrounded by friends, acquaintances and relatives who encouraged me to expel from my way of life…poetry and Asian literature." They wanted him to “become a barrister and be devoted to ambition".
In 1770, Jones joined the Middle Temple and studied law for three years, a preliminary to his life work in India. He spent some time as a circuit judge in Wales, and then became involved in politics: he made a fruitless attempt to resolve the American Revolution in concert with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, (3) and ran for the post of Member of Parliament from Oxford in the general election of 1780, but failed. (4)
But he managed to orient his legal interests also towards the East, producing the forbiddingly named Mahomedan Law Of Succession To The Property Of Intestates. Naturally, his political ambitions floundered. As a supporter of American independence, his work, The Principles of Government; in a Dialogue Between a Scholar and a Peasant (1783), was the subject of a trial for seditious libel (known as the Case of the Dean of St Asaph) after it was reprinted by his brother-in-law William Davies Shipley. (5)
Once his Judge appointment was confirmed, the 38-year-old Jones married his longtime betrothed, Anna Shipley, the eldest daughter of Dr Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of Llandaff and Bishop of St Asaph. Anna Maria used her artistic skills to help Jones document life in India.
He planned to spend five or six years in India before retiring and returning to England. As things turned out, he continued to live in Bengal till his death in 1794, and it is for the Indian enquiries that he is chiefly remembered. Within four months of stepping on Indian shores, he founded the Asiatic Society, which was devoted to studying the culture of the largest continent. Apart from being white and male, prospective members needed to express a love of knowledge to be admitted to the club, whose initial meetings were held in a jury room of the Calcutta court. He nudged his fellow Britons to welcome Indian members but only got them to accept the inclusion of native contributions in the society’s journal.
Around this time Jones began to study Indian languages in earnest, employing a group of Indian scholars to collect and translate Sanskrit and Persian manuscripts. In the weeks he was free from court duties, he would move upriver to a thatch-roof bungalow in Krishnagar, a centre of Sanskrit learning, discarding his judge’s robes for loose kurtas and spending more time conversing with pandits than with fellow countrymen. Only a handful of Europeans before him had acquired a working knowledge of Sanskrit.
He connected his pursuit of money with a pursuit of intellectual stimulation. This quest for financial stability was something Jones shared with another great Indologist Max Mueller who contested the elections for the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1860. The chair had just been vacated by the English Orientalist Horace Hayman Wilson. Horace Wilson had done the first translation of the Rig Veda as well as Kalidasa's Meghadoota while working as a surgeon in India.
Jones drew up a list of 16 subjects, ranging from the Mughal and Maratha political systems to the “Music of the Eastern Nations" and “Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery and Anatomy of the Indians", to investigate. And it took him only a year-long glance at India’s cultural exuberance, to constitute the Asiatic Society—the body that reminded Indians of a forgotten figure: emperor Ashoka.
He was entranced by Indian culture, and on 15 January 1784 he founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. (6) What struck Jones most was language. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote about Jones: “Sanskrit fascinated him…. It was through his writings and translations that Europe first had a glimpse of some of the treasures of Sanskrit literature." Jones could interpret Islamic law without translators, but Hindu codes evaded him. He hired a pandit on a princely retainer to give him lessons, and soon Jones built up a vocabulary of 10,000 words. When Brahmins in Benares refused to translate the Manusmriti for him, he produced his own: The Ordinances Of Manu.
He studied the Vedas with Rāmalocana, a pandit teaching at the Nadiya Hindu university, becoming a proficient Sanskritist. (7) Jones kept up a ten-year correspondence on the topic of Jyotisha or Hindu astronomy with fellow orientalist Samuel Davis. (8) He learnt the ancient concept of Hindu Laws from Pandit Jagannath Tarka Panchanan (9), who had a free school for students.
The Aryan Language
Mulling over the structure of the language that had opened the doors of classical Indian learning to him, he came to a path-breaking conclusion, made public in his third annual address to the Asiatic Society, delivered on 2 February 1786:
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from a common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family." (10)
He accurately included Gothic, Celtic and Persian in the list of languages which had sprung from the same root as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Thus he inaugurated the field of comparative linguistics and the idea of the Indo-European family of languages. Other philologists had previously produced analogous hypotheses, but this was the definitive statement. (11) But in many ways his work was less accurate than his predecessors, as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages while omitting Hindustani (12) and Slavic. (13)
Jones was the first to propose the concept of an "Aryan invasion" into the Indian subcontinent, which according to him, led to a lasting ethnic division in India between the descents of indigenous Indians and those of the Aryans. This idea fell into obscurity due to a lack of evidence but was later taken up by amateur Indologists such as the colonial administrator Herbert Hope Risley. (14) Jones also propounded theories that might appear peculiar today but were less so in his time. For example, he believed that Egyptian priests had migrated and settled down in India in prehistoric times. He also posited that the Chinese were originally Hindus belonging to the Kshatriya caste. (15)
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| Sakuntala and Dushyantha, by Raja Ravivarma |
While translations from Sanskrit had a beneficial impact on the West, the same could not be said of the discovery of the Indo-European language group. The first speakers of Sanskrit, the Vedic people, referred to themselves as aryas. The family of languages discovered by Jones came to be called the Aryan family. The idea of an Aryan language family mutated into belief in an Aryan race.
The prolific 19th French writer Arthur de Gobineau popularised the idea of a master race of Aryans, superior in form and intellect to all other ethnic groups. He claimed that all great civilisations had been formed by Aryans, but that these noble invaders had sullied themselves in nations like Iran and India by mixing with other races. The closest thing to living inheritors of the pure Aryan strain was, in Gobineau’s view, modern Germans. His ideas were well received in Germany, notably within the influential circle of the composer Richard Wagner. Members of the Wagner circle adopted the theory of a Germanic master race and gave it a specifically anti-semitic emphasis. The rest is history.
Sakuntalam in English
Apart from the language, Jones felt a deeper affection for Sanskrit poetry. “By rising before the sun," wrote Jones, “I allot an hour every day…and am charmed with knowing so beautiful a sister of Latin and Greek." It was the first time a familial bond was established between Sanskrit and the classical languages of European antiquity.
In 1788, Jones translated into English, Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntalam, giving it the title, Sacontala, or The Fatal Ring. His preface mentioned that Kalidasa lived “at a time when the Britons were as unlettered and unpolished as the army of Hanuman”, and described the play as “a most pleasing and authentic picture of old Hindu manners, and one of the greatest curiosities that the literature of Asia has yet brought to light”. The published translation was faithful to the original apart from a deleted description of Shakuntala’s breasts, considered too steamy for the conservative British public.*
It was censorship, given the pseudo-moral predispositions of the West. Where Kalidasa spoke of Shakuntala's "young breasts seem to lie hidden as a flower amid the autumn leaves," Jones omitted the breasts completely. In a way, Jones modelled a new Shakuntala—a prototype of so-called European virtue, as opposed to the sensuous Shakuntala a free Kalidasa described; an Indian woman born of Victorian idealism.
The action of Abhijnanasakuntalam commences with king Dushyanta on a hunt. Pursuing a deer, Dushyanta chances upon the hermitage of sage Kanva and is captivated by his foster-daughter Shakuntala. He courts Shakuntala, weds her, gets her pregnant, and leaves for his kingdom, promising an early reunion. Lost in dreamy memories, Shakuntala fails to notice the arrival of sage Durvasa. He tells Shakuntala that she will be completely forgotten by the man whose thoughts kept her from doing her duty. Shakuntala loses the ring while bathing in a river, and is rejected by Dushyanta when she appears in his court. The ring she has lost has been swallowed by a fish and it is restored by fishermen. Dushyanta recognises the king’s seal and thus remembers Shakuntala.
But the story of Shakuntala presented in the epic Mahabharata is a little different from Kalidasa’s version. In the Mahabharata, Dushyanta recognises Shakuntala immediately but refuses to acknowledge their connection fearing public censure. It takes a voice from the heavens confirming Shakuntala’s story. There’s no lost ring, no fish and no recognition scene. There are, however, two other places in the epic where a fish plays an intermediary function.
Near the beginning of the Mahabharata, we find a king Uparichara hunting, as was Dushyanta. Uparichara fells asleep and had a wet dream. Upset, he summons a hawk, gives it a leaf on which some of his semen has spilt, and instructs the bird to take it to his wife in the palace. However, another hawk attacks Uparichara’s carrier bird, mistaking the semen-spotted leaf for juicy prey. The leaf falls into the river Yamuna, where it is swallowed by a fish.
The king of fisher folk finds a baby girl inside the fish and adopts her. It is Satyavati, who carries a strong odour of fish in her. Enamoured of the girl, Sage Parashara offers to replace the smell of fish with a pleasant fragrance if she sleeps with him. She gives birth to Parashara’s son Krishna Dvaipana, the Dark Islander, who is the author of Mahabharatha himself.
A while later, Satyavati, her hymen restored by Parashara, marries king Shantanu and has two sons with him. The first die while single, and the second, Vichitravirya, succumbs to tuberculosis soon after his wedding. Seeing Shantanu worried about leaving behind no successor, Satyavati tells him about her natural son. They summon Krishna Dvaipayana, requesting him to impregnate Vichitravirya’s two wives. The young women, who expect to share a bed with a handsome king, are faced instead by a fearsome-looking mendicant. One blanches at the sight of Dvaipayana, while the other shuts her eyes in fear during sex. He informs them that their reactions have determined the fate of their progeny. One son will be a pale weakling, and the other will be blind from birth.
These two sons, Pandu and Dhritarashtra, fathers of the Pandavas and Kauravas respectively, fight the Mahabharata war. Dvaipayana retires to the mountains, where he divides Brahma’s singular Veda into four.
Near the conclusion of the Mahabharata, a group of sages come visiting, among them Kanva, in whose hermitage Shakuntala lived all those generations ago. A few Yadus disguise their companion Samba as a pregnant woman, with a mace providing a bulging belly. They take Samba to the visiting sages and ask whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. The sage curses that Samba will give birth to an iron mace which will destroy the entire clan. The panicked Yadus grind the mace to a powder which they throw into the sea. However, the particles are washed ashore and absorbed by reeds that grow at the water’s edge. One chunk of iron, which has been left intact, is swallowed by a fish. Years later, past hatreds resurface, leading to armed combat. The sharp, iron-stiffened reeds prove handy weapons. The fish which swallowed the unground bit of iron has, meanwhile, been caught. The hunter Jara fashions an arrowhead out of the metal, and kills Krishna with it, having mistaken him for a deer.
These three legends – the stories of Shakuntala, Uparichara and Jara – provide varying perspectives on the Orientalist enterprise. In the first instance, Orientalism is like Dushyanta’s ring, a beneficent force returning a precious memory to India and reconnecting the nation with its forgotten history. In the second, it is like Uparichara’s seed, being transmitted to another land with both consequences, good and evil. Finally, British Orientalism is like Jara’s arrowhead, a weapon used consciously or otherwise towards an evil end.
Jones Finds Chandragupta
William Jones made one crucial contribution to the study of Indian history by providing the first accurate dating for the reign of an Indian sovereign who had ruled before the common era. Greek chronicles mentioned that Seleucus Nicator, who succeeded to Alexander the Great’s eastern dominions, had sent his ambassador Megasthenes to the court of an emperor named Sandrocottus at Palibothra. Historians had speculated that Palibothra was the same as Pataliputra, the city known as Patna in modern times.
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| Jones's tomb in Kolkata |
Following Jones’s evidence, the story of the dynasty of Chandragupta, the Mauryas was pieced together. The history is related to Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka was unravelled by James Prinsep, who came to Calcutta in 1819 as Assistant Assay-Master in the Mint and was later posted to Benares. Prinsep studied indecipherable inscriptions in two scripts, Brahmi and Kharoshti. After years of painstaking collation of data from edicts and coins, Prinsep succeeded in the late 1830s in decoding them.
It was revealed that the pillar and rock inscriptions had been commanded by a king referred to as Devanampiya Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods. His kingdom was clearly Buddhist in inspiration. Prinsep was informed by a colleague posted in Ceylon that a great Indian king called Ashoka, also known as Piyadasi, had converted to Buddhism and sent a religious mission to Ceylon. The mystery was thus resolved and Ashoka got his rightful place in Indian history. It was as if Dushyanta’s lost memory had been restored.
Influence on Western Thought
The prologue from Goethe’s Faust, which is influenced by the sutradhar who speaks in the first scene of Abhijnanasakuntalam, is only the first of many examples of the influence of Indian thought on Europe. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “Sanskrit literature will be no less influential for our time than Greek literature was in the fifteenth century for the Renaissance.” His great book, The World as Will and Idea (1819), is profoundly marked by Vedantic and Buddhist thought.
Schopenhauer used Jones's authority to relate the basic principle of his philosophy to what was, according to Jones, the most important underlying proposition of Vedânta. Schopenhauer was trying to support the doctrine that "everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is the only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation." He quoted Jones's original English:
"... How early this basic truth was recognized by the sages of India since it appears as the fundamental tenet of the Vedânta philosophy ascribed to Vyasa, is proved by Sir William Jones in the last of his essays, On the Philosophy of the Asiatics (Asiatic Researches, vol. IV, p. 164): "The fundamental tenet of the Vedânta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms."
At the end of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, clearly echoing Indian notions of cyclical time, demonstrated the continuing hold of India on the German imagination.
Indian idealistic thought penetrated Russia and Romania, it crossed the Atlantic and was taken up by the American transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, most conspicuously his poem Brahma, expounded a Upanishadic conviction in Over-Soul, an essay published by him in 1814. Transcendentalism laid the foundation for the success of Swami Vivekananda in America.
Jones announced in his preface to Sacontala that it would be his last literary translation and that he would henceforth concentrate on his professional studies. Jones was unhappy with the appointed pandits of the court, who were tasked with interpreting the laws of Hinduism and contributing to judgements. After a number of cases in which different pandits came up with different rulings, Jones determined to thoroughly learn Sanskrit so that he could independently interpret the original sources. (16)
The ambitious goal he had set himself was to translate into English the Laws of Manu, from Sanskrit, and create a Digest of Indian and Arabian Laws. Jones' final judicial project was leading the compilation of a Sanskrit "Digest of Hindu Law," with the original plan of translating the work himself. (17) After his death, the translation was completed by Henry Thomas Colebrooke. (18) He believed that Indians under British rule ought to “enjoy their own customs unmolested”, but neither colonial judges nor ordinary Indians had access to the sacred languages of Hindus and Muslims. They depended on the interpretations of pandits and maulvis, most of whom appeared eager to please the highest bidder.
Jones’s codification of religious laws made the process of delivering justice far more transparent, but also removed the need for any input from Indians. All power now rested in the hands of Britons. A similar process played out in the field of Indology. Beyond the first close contacts between British Orientalists and local teachers, the discipline became an almost exclusive European enterprise. Orientalism divested Indians of the remnants of power they had within the colonial system.
In this light, the Palestinian Marxist author Edward Said, who gave a new meaning to the term Orientalism, argued that the aim of William Jones’s studies, and that of Orientalism in general, was “to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning”.
Jones was also not devoid of imperial prejudice. He argued: “I shall certainly not preach democracy to the Indians, who must and will be governed by absolute power." As a British judge, he scoffed at any political conception of Indianness; it was India’s historical accomplishments he thought profoundly admirable. He once wrote, “I never was unhappy in England, but I never was happy till I settled in India."
By 1794, Jones declared the new mission. His incomplete desiderata featured Panini’s grammar, the Vedas, the Puranas, and more. But tragedy struck, and within the year he was dead. The climate never agreed with him—and a grave was built for him in India. He once said, “The best monument that can be erected to a man of literary talents, is a good edition of his works." His widow published a collection, showcasing his legacy as the interpreter of India for the West. The West, sadly dismissed Jones, going down a path of degradation in a few years. And India, they decided, never could be great; For them, what Jones saw was a myth, and soon, the Raj arrived to destroy the legacy. But India fought back and secured its treasures.
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1. Edgerton, Franklin (2002) [1946]. "Sir William Jones, 1746–1794". In Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.). Portrait of Linguists. Vol. 1. Thoemmes Press. pp. 1–17.
2. Shore, John (1815). Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones. Hatchard. p. 52.
3. Cannon, Garland (August 1978). "Sir William Jones and Anglo-American Relations during the American Revolution". Modern Philology. 76 (1): 34.
4. Ibid, 76 (1): 36–37.
5. Ibid, 43–44.
6. Anthony, David W. (2010). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. p. 6
7. Ibid
8. Davis, Samuel; Aris, Michael (1982). Views of Medieval Bhutan: the diary and drawings of Samuel Davis, 1783. Serindia.
9. "Dictionary of Indian Biography" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Dictionary_of_Indian_Biography.djvu/431
10. Jones, Sir William (1824). Discourses delivered before the Asiatic Society: Miscellaneous papers, on the religion, poetry, literature, etc., of the nations of India. Printed for C. S. Arnold. p. 28.
11. Auroux, Sylvain (2000). History of the Language Sciences. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. p. 1156
12. Roger Blench, Archaeology and Language: methods and issues. In: A Companion To Archaeology. J. Bintliff ed. 52–74. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2004.
13. Campbell, Lyle; Poser, William (2008). Language Classification: History and Method. Cambridge University Press. p. 536
14. Bates, Crispin (1995). "Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry". In Robb, Peter (ed.). The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. p. 231.
15. Singh, Upinder (2004). The discovery of ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology. Permanent Black.
16. Rocher, Rosanne (October 1995). Cannon, Garland; Brine, Kevin (eds.). Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones, 1746-1794. NYU Press. p. 54.
17. Ibid, pp. 61–2.
18. Ibid, pp. 61–2.
* The breast description in Arthur W Ryder's translation (Act 1):
Beneath the barken dress
Upon the shoulder tied,
In maiden loveliness
Her young breast seems to hide,
As when a flower amid
The leaves by autumn tossed-
Pale, withered leaves-lies hid,
And half its grace is lost
© Ramachandran
