COLEBROOKE TRANSFERS MANUSCRIPTS FROM INDIA

First Essays on Jainism

For thirty years in India at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) was an administrator and a scholar with the East India Company. He is considered the founder of modern Indology and "the first great Sanskrit scholar in Europe". (1) He translated the two Sanskrit legal treatises, the Mitakshara of Vijnaneshwara and the Dayabhaga of Jimutavahana.

Colebrooke embodies the passage from the crude designs attendant to eighteenth-century British expansion, to the transnational ethos of nineteenth-century scholarly enquiry. He joined the Company as a young writer (junior clerk) rising to the position of a member of the supreme council and theorist of the British Bengal government. His unprecedented familiarity with a broad range of literature established him as the leading scholar of Sanskrit and President of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He set standards for western Indology. 

Colebrooke's interests in India spanned a wide range of fields and disciplines, and he sought, in one way or another, to pursue them all. Consequently, he wore many hats. 

Even though like many scholars of the period, he was not really aware that Jainism is distinct from both Hinduism and Buddhism, he was one of the first Western scholars to point to the existence of a Jain tradition. While living in India, Colebrooke began publishing his wide-ranging research via the Asiatic Society of Bengal and was a founding member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland on his return to England in 1814. He dedicated the rest of his life to scholarly research, working from the large collection of original manuscripts and copies he had brought back from the subcontinent.

Colebrooke, pencil sketch

Born in London,  Colebrooke was the third and youngest son of Sir George Colebrooke, financier, MP from Arundale and Chairman of the East India Company from 1769. He was educated at home, proving a gifted pupil in mathematics and classics. (2) His mother Mary Gaynor, was the daughter and heir of Patrick Gaynor of Antigua. 

In 1782 Colebrooke was appointed through his father's influence to a writership with the East India Company in Calcutta, and worked in India for 33 years. Unlike many British people in India at this period, Colebrooke became very interested in South Asian culture and languages. He became a renowned Sanskrit scholar and an eminent expert on many aspects of Indian culture, including law, languages, literature, natural sciences and mathematics. In 1786 he was appointed assistant collector in the revenue department at Tirhut. He wrote Remarks on the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal, which was privately published in 1795, by which time he had transferred to Purnia. He opposed the East India Company's monopoly on Indian trade through this article, advocating instead for free trade between Britain and India, which caused offence to the East India Company's governors. (3)

He was appointed to the magistracy of Mirzapur in 1795 and was sent to Nagpur in 1799 to negotiate an allowance with the Raja of Berar. He was unsuccessful in this, due to events elsewhere, and returned in 1801. On his return, was made a judge of the new court of appeal in Calcutta, of which he became president of the bench in 1805. Also in 1805, Lord Wellesley appointed him an honorary professor of Hindu law and Sanskrit at the College of Fort William. In 1807 he became a member of the supreme council, serving for five years, and was elected President of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta.

Typically of many British men working in India at that period, Colebrooke had three children with an Indian woman. Only one survived, who was sent to England for education (4). In 1810 he married Elizabeth Wilkinson. The marriage was short-lived and she died in 1814, shortly before they were due to sail back to England. He had three sons with Elisabeth Wilkinson but only Thomas Edward survived his father. He wrote a biography of his father, Life of H. T. Colebrooke (1873), with a bibliography listing his publications, as part of a reprinting of Miscellaneous Essays.

Colebrooke returned to England in 1814. He no longer had any official position but devoted himself to research, promoting knowledge of India and supplying materials to colleagues.

In 1816 he was elected to the fellowship of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1820 he was a founder of the Royal Astronomical Society. He often chaired the society's meetings in the absence of the first president, William Herschel, and was elected as its second president on Herschel's death, serving 1823–1825. In 1823 he was also a founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, chairing its first meeting although he declined to become its president. (5) But he was the leading force for the foundation, contributing numerous articles to its Transactions.

The Collections of the Royal Asiatic Society contain correspondence and papers concerned with the founding of the Society and Colebrooke's tenure as the first Director; a number of books donated by Colebrooke; and some drawings of Indian agricultural implements, fishing nets, drinking vessels, containers, and musical instruments, also donated by him. The society also holds some of Colebrooke’s personal papers. Among them is a red calf-bound autograph book compiled by an unknown individual, but belonging to Swedish agriculturist Frederick Hendricks in 1893.

It contains printed and handwritten material including biographical information on Colebrooke, obituary notices for Indologist Horace Hayman Wilson, and correspondence from Colebrooke to Nathaniel Wallich, Superintendent of the Botanical Gardens, Calcutta. The correspondence concerns the sending of seeds, plants and geological specimens to both England and South Africa, and the sending of books and journals to India. 

The personal papers also contain photocopies of correspondence between Colebrooke and his niece, Belinda Sutherland Colebrooke, the elder daughter of George Colebrooke, Henry’s brother. After George’s death, Belinda’s mother took them to Scotland where she became involved in a series of affairs. Belinda, and her sister Harriet, were eventually made wards of court and placed with a foster mother, Mrs Lee. This series of 40 letters dates from 1816, when Belinda was 16 years old, until 1824. Belinda died in 1825 but not before she married Charles Joshua Smith, 2nd Baronet, in 1823. Henry Colebrooke took a keen interest in the girls’ lives and encouraged Belinda in her studies, suggesting books for her to read and a suitable language tutor. The letters reveal some of the complexities of the time concerning fostering and also the holding of political seats; alongside living in Scotland, Brighton, Worthing (atrocious!) and London.

His Pursuit of Knowledge

Colebrooke lived in India from 1783 to 1815, working for the British East India Company in various posts. Although he attained high rank in the legal, diplomatic, administrative and even academic spheres, his rise was not as straightforward as it may seem. His actions sometimes diverged from elements of company policy or the approach of the British government in London. His career came to an end after disagreements with the directors of the East India Company and he returned to England in 1814.

He worked differently from most other Europeans studying the culture and languages of India, in that he read the original sources in Sanskrit and discussed them with Indian pandits and scribes. 

Not having any knowledge of Indian languages beforehand, Colebrooke became interested in learning Sanskrit around 1790, when he was in Purnia, in north-eastern Bihar. This interest arose largely out of his curiosity about astronomy, algebra and other sciences that Indian thinkers had developed. His study of Sanskrit grew intense and finally became a central part of his public life, so much so that Colebrooke became widely acknowledged as a leading Sanskritist. His intellectual interests were very broad, demonstrated in publications on castes, ceremonies, languages, literature and philosophy, but also in mathematics, geography, geology, botany and crafts.

Colebrooke ‘developed into the leading expert of Hindu law and Sanskrit studies, concerns that were intertwined in colonial practice’ (6). Studying and codifying Hindu law and understanding its various schools were closely linked to its application in the courts in which Colebrooke worked as a judge. Practical matters connected to colonial work functioned as starting points for several areas of study, but Colebrooke’s intellectual achievements go far beyond this. Their scope and quality have led to comparisons with Indologist Sir William Jones (7).

From the start, Colebrooke surrounded himself with Indian traditional scholars –pandits – who provided him with original manuscripts or purpose-made copies of Sanskrit texts, whether grammars, lexica, law treatises and so on. Among them was the Bihari pandit Chitrapati, whom Colebrooke came to know in Purnia. He also employed two copyists whom he met in Mirzapur, called Ātmarāma and Bābūrāma (Rocher 2007). The three of them followed him to Calcutta. Colebrooke encouraged Bābūrāma to found a Sanskrit press in Calcutta but did not consult him on scholarly matters. He also recruited some pandits in Benares and later a Bengali pandit in Calcutta. In contrast with most Europeans of the period, Colebrooke valued the work of the ‘natives’ and believed that British servants of the East India Company should learn Indian languages, especially Sanskrit (8).

He collected plants in the Sylhet Division and sent plants and drawings to William Jackson Hooker and Aylmer Bourke Lambert. Colebrooke's botanical specimens are stored at Kew Gardens. (9)

Having become a member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1792, Colebrooke became its very energetic president in 1807 and occupied this position until his resignation in 1814. He wrote 20 essays in its journal, the Asiatic Researches, including his first ever article, On the Duties of a Faithful Hindu Widow in 1795.* Further, he initiated large-scale Asiatic Society projects of publications and translations of texts.

It was after eleven years' residence in India, Colebrooke began the study of Sanskrit; and to him was entrusted the translation of the major Digest of Hindu Laws, a monumental study of Hindu law which had been left unfinished by Sir William Jones. He translated the two treatises, the Mitakshara of Vijnaneshwar and the Dayabhaga of Jimutavahana, under the title Law of Inheritance. During his residence at Calcutta, he wrote Sanskrit Grammar (1805), some papers on the religious ceremonies of the Hindus, and his Essay on the Vedas (1805), for a long time the standard work in English on the subject.

Vijnaneshwara was a prominent jurist of twelfth-century India. His treatise, the Mitakshara, dealt with inheritance and is one of the most influential legal treatises in Hindu law. Mitakshara is the treatise on Yājñavalkya Smṛti, named after a sage of the same name. Vijnaneshwara was born in the village of Masimadu, near Basavakalyan in Karnataka. He lived in the court of king Vikramaditya VI (1076-1126), the Western Chalukya Empire monarch.

The Dāyabhāga is a Hindu law treatise written by Jīmūtavāhana which primarily focuses on the inheritance procedure. The Dāyabhāga was the strongest authority in Modern British Indian courts in the Bengal region of India, although this has changed due to the passage of the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 and subsequent revisions to the act. (10) Based on Jīmūtavāhana's criticisms of the Mitākṣarā, it is thought that his work is precluded by the Mitākṣarā. This has led many scholars to conclude that the Mitākṣarā represents the orthodox doctrine of Hindu law, while the Dāyabhāga represents the reformed version. (11)

The Dāyabhāga does not give the sons a right to their father's ancestral property until after his death, unlike Mitākṣarā, which gives the sons the right to the ancestral property upon their birth. 

Colebrooke broke the text of Dayabhaga into chapters and verses which were not in the original text and is often criticized for numerous errors in translation. Rocher believes the mistakes were due to three factors: (12)

1. The format of the Sanskrit texts
2. The texts were deeply involved with an ancient civilization, which the translators were not familiar with
3. The misconception is that the text was written by lawyers, for lawyers

Colebrooke created the division of two schools of thought in India, separating the majority of India, thought to follow the Mitākṣarā and the Bengal region, which followed the Dāyabhāga system.

Bust of Colebrooke

Instrumental in Colebrooke’s exploration of the culture and history of South Asia was his use of original texts, in the form of manuscripts. This is seen in his major intellectual contribution to the origins of Jain studies, Observations on the Sect of the Jains’, published in volume nine of the Asiatic Researches in 1807. Although some of his conclusions about Jainism were overturned by later scholarship, Colebrooke’s work was vital in bringing knowledge of the Jain tradition to a wider audience.

On 15 April 1819 Colebrooke officially presented his collection of Indian manuscripts to the India Office Library of the British government via the East India Company (13). The gift amounted to 2,479 items and Colebrooke continued to borrow them for his research. The famous sculpture of Colebrooke by Francis Chantrey was executed at the proposal of the East India Company directors as a gesture of gratitude and was to be placed in the library.

The holdings of the India Office Library were absorbed into the British Library in 1982. Chantrey’s bust of Colebrooke can be seen at the entrance of the reading room of the Asia and Pacific Collections, as they are known today. The presence of this vast manuscript collection ‘brought about a shift in venues for western Indological research’ (14), prompting scholars to visit London instead of the French National Library, as they had used to do till then.

The Colebrooke Collection forms a substantial element of the British Library’s holdings of Indian manuscripts and artefacts and continues to play a major role in the study of South Asia. Even though the Jain manuscripts were not identified as Jain at the time of donation, they comprise a large part of the Colebrooke Collection.

Colebrooke’s Jain manuscripts were obviously not identified as such in the preliminary categorisation done when the collection was donated to the India Office Library (15). They probably come under the general heading of ‘MSS. of all kinds’. They include an important selection of canonical and non-canonical Sanskrit and Prakrit works and an interesting set of texts written in Gujarati. Among noteworthy items of the manuscripts are:

• Kalpa-sūtra dated V.S. 1614, with the shelfmark I.O. San. 1638, which served as the basis of Colebrooke’s essay, Observations on the Sect of Jains
• Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna, a famous cosmological treatise in Prakrit, has the shelfmark I.O. San. 1553B.

Colebrooke specifically wrote about both these manuscripts in his 1807 article. He described the Kalpa-sūtra manuscript as "the most ancient copy in my possession and the oldest one which I have seen, [and which] is dated in 1614 Saṃvat: it is nearly 250 years old’'. (16)

It is fortunate that there is a surviving list, albeit incomplete, of Colebrooke’s Jain manuscripts in the form of a folio present in the India Office Library collection. The manuscript I.O. San. 1530 (E) lists 27 titles in the Devanāgarī script, accompanied by the number of pages in 22 cases. They correspond to manuscripts that are available today.

Jains and Colebrooke

He was one of the first Western scholars to write about jains in detail, providing information on Jain beliefs and practices that were largely unknown outside the subcontinent. 

Colebrooke’s writings on the Jains suffer from the beliefs standard among European scholars of the period. At one time he concluded that the Jains were a sect of Hinduism and later on he believed that they constituted a sect of Buddhism. Later scholars, particularly Hermann Jacobi, refuted these views.

He failed to distinguish between the languages favoured by the Jains for their scriptures and those used by the Buddhists for their holy texts. Colebrooke collected and copied large numbers of Jain manuscripts from a Jain individual who had converted to Hinduism. 

Two of the works he quotes in his 1807 essay are essential texts in Śvetāmbara Jain thought – the Kalpa-sūtra and the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi of Hemacandra. Colebrooke also refers to the key cosmological works of the Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna and the Lokanālī-dvātriṃśikā. 

Before Colebrooke, the information collected by Major Mackenzie on Jains came from the most authentic sources; two principal priests of the Jainas themselves. Dr Buchanan also had an authentic source, during his journey in Mysore, in the year following the fall of Tipu and Srirangapatna, in 1799, which ended the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and resulted in the East India Company‘s control of the Kingdom of Mysore. Mackenzie records: "Having the permission of Dr Buchanan to use the extracts, which I had his leave to make from the journal kept by him during that journey, I have inserted […] the information received by him from priests of the Jaina sect. I am enabled to corroborate both statements, from conversations with Jaina priests, and from books in my possession, written by authors of the Jaina persuasion. Some of those volumes were procured for me at Benares; others were obtained from the present Jagat Set, at Murshidābād, who, having changed his religion, to adopt the worship of Vishnu, forwarded to me, at my request, such books of his former faith as were yet within his reach."

But Colebrooke directly consulted fundamental works on the tradition. This method distinguishes his undertaking from those of Mackenzie or Buchanan, who wrote down information communicated by informants and pandits. Colebrooke begins the article on Jains by analysing historical-mythological information connected with Jainism on the basis of two works: The Kalpa-sūtra, the most widely circulated Śvetāmbara work. Written in Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit, it provides data about the 24 Jinas.

The second is the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi of Hemacandra. This 12th-century lexicon is one of the most famous dictionaries of synonyms produced in Sanskrit. Hemacandra’s work broadly follows the same pattern as the Amara-koṣa, its most illustrious predecessor. Both lexicons share a large number of words and definitions, but the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi is clearly the work of a Jain; the Jain stamp is present in many ways. One of the most visible signs is the mythological information and the list of Jinas is found in the first section. (17) 

The result of introducing Hemacandra’s work was significant in that it revealed that Jainism had its own tenets and view of the world, which differed from other Indian religions. A lithographed edition of the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi was prepared under Colebrooke’s supervision and published in Calcutta in 1807 by his copyist Bābūrāma. The first edition was criticised for its numerous flaws. It also contained the homonymic lexicon of Hemacandra, his Anekārtha-saṃgraha.

Colebrooke in his essay, analyses combined information provided by both works about the 24 Jinas of the avasarpiṇī and other Jain mythological categories of their ‘Universal History’. There are 63 great men divided into the different categories of Jinas, Cakravartins, Baladevas, Vāsudevas and Prativāsudevas. He writes: "[Jinas] appear to be the deified saints, who are now worshipped by the Jaina sect. They are all figured in the same contemplative posture, with little variation in their appearance, besides a difference of complexion; but the several Jinas have distinguishing marks or characteristic signs, which are usually engraved on the pedestals of their images, to discriminate them." (18) Ages and periods of time as described in the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi are also dealt with (19).

Colebrooke then turns to an exposition of Jain cosmology, saying: "The Saṃgrahaṇīratna and Lokanāb-sūtra, both in Prakrit, are the authorities here used" (20). The Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna is a standard Jain writing on the universe, known in recensions of different lengths. It is concerned with Jain cosmography as well as with the results of karmas and the way they determine rebirths in the universe. The ‘Lokanāb-sūtra’ is usually known as the Lokanālī-dvātriṃśikā – Thirty-two Verses on the Tube of the World. Both texts are classics used even today in the Śvetāmbara monastic curriculum. Colebrooke also describes the three levels of the Jain universe – upper, middle and lower, various deities and continents of the world.

The essay ends rather abruptly with a discussion of Jain conceptions of the universe compared to those of the Hindus as expressed by Bhāskara.

Though Colebrooke’s accounts of various Jain texts are reliable, the conclusions about Jainism in his body of work cannot be accepted any longer. Colebrooke observes that the "Jainas constitute a sect of Hindus, differing, indeed from the rest in some very important tenets; but following, in other respects, a similar practice, and maintaining like opinions and observations." (21)

Colebrooke to Wallich

Twenty years later, in 1827, he gave a correct reading and translation of an inscription found on a stone slab showing the feet of Gautama-svāmī, in On Inscriptions at Temples of the Jaina Sect in South Bihar. Colebrooke noted that the slab was installed in 1686 of the Vikrama era (1629 CE) by a Jain family, at the instigation of the Śvetāmbara monk Jinarāja-sūri from the sect of the Kharatara-gaccha. While correctly observing that Gautama and Indrabhūti are the same person and refer to the first disciple of Mahāvīra he makes a mistake by assessing, "It is certainly probable as remarked by Dr Hamilton and Major Delamaine, that the Gautama of the Jainas and of the Buddhas is the same personage; and this leads to the further surmise, that both these sects are branches of one stock." (22)

In an article published the same year in the same journal, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, dealing with ‘Indian Sectaries’, Colebrooke writes: "The Jainas and Bauddhas I consider to have been originally Hindus, and the first-mentioned to be so still, because they recognised, as they [the Hindus] yet do, the distinction of the four castes." (23) This wrong notion does not prevent him from giving in the subsequent nine pages a fairly complete description of the main features of Jain doctrine, such as the nine principles (tattva), six substances (dravya), and eight main varieties of karma (karma-prakr̥ti). Colebrooke also indicates some of the differences between the two main Jain sects of the Śvetāmbaras and Digambaras.

Colebrooke was aware of the existence of the Prakrit languages, in which the Jain scriptures are mostly written. However, his assessment of the texts is hindered by his view that Jainism was an offshoot of Buddhism, a view generally shared by European scholarship. Colebrooke focused on the Prakrit languages in two articles published at a seven-year interval in the journal Asiatic Researches. In his essay in volume seven, published in 1801, Colebrooke mentions Māgadhī and Apabhraṃśa but does not take note of any relation of Prakrit languages with the Jains.

In the second article, however, which was published in volume ten in 1808, he makes use of the 12th-century grammar by Hemacandra, which describes Prakrit in its eighth book. He correctly observes that ‘specimens of it [i.e. Prakrit, are] in the Indian dramas, as well as in the books of the Jains’ (24). The essay, Observations on the Sect of Jains (1807) is largely based on Jain texts in Prakrit, but they are described as ‘'composed in the Prakrit called Māgadhī’' (25), which is incorrect. Canonical works such as the Kalpa-sūtra are predominantly in Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit while texts such as the Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna or the Lokanālī are in Māhārāṣṭrī Prakrit. 

The holy texts of Buddhism are principally written in Pali. The ignorance in accepting the Buddhist and Jain traditions as different from each other also led to the inability to recognise the languages of their scriptures as distinct. Thus Colebrooke could write the absurdity, ‘'I believe [the Prakrit called Māgadhī] to be the same language with the Pali of Ceylon’' (26). This belief was probably further encouraged by the fact that Buddhists use the term ‘Māgadhī’ to refer to the original language of their scriptures. Unfortunately, even twenty years later, Colebrooke held the same position: "Both religions have preserved for their sacred language the same dialect, the Pali or Prakrit, closely resembling the Māgadhī or vernacular tongue of Magadha [in modern-day South Bihar]. Between those dialects [Pali and Prakrit] there is but a shade of difference, and they are often confounded under a single name". (27)

Such statements are no longer tenable. The correct position is: 1. Pali and the Prakrits are two different linguistic stages of Middle India. 2. Pali is the language of Theravāda Buddhist scriptures as they have survived. 3. Prakrits the Jains use are three: Ardhamāgadhī for the Śvetāmbara canonical scriptures, Jaina Māhārāṣṭrī for non-canonical scriptures and Jaina Śaurasenī for the Digambara authoritative scriptures.

The initial passage in the Observations on the Sect of Jains quoted gives valuable information on where Colebrooke obtained his Jain manuscripts. They were acquired in Benares and Murshidabad, and point to Colebrooke’s personal connections with prominent personalities, easily explainable through the high administrative positions he held and his scholarly reputation.

Murshidabad, a town in the north of Calcutta, was the home of several Jain families from Rajasthan who had emigrated for economic reasons in the 18th century. They form the Marwari community. The Jagatseths, whom Colebrooke has mentioned, are one of those families, described as ‘the Rothschilds of India’ (28). Colebrooke mentions the Jagatseth member who converted to Hinduism and thus did not need his Jain books any longer. He describes the convert as "The representative of the great family of Jagat-śeṭh, who with many of his kindred was converted some years ago from the Jaina to the orthodox faith’ (29). This individual is Harakh Chand, who died in 1814. He was the first of the family who abandoned the Jain religion and joined the [Hindu] sect of the Vaishnavs. He was childless and extremely anxious to have a son. He faithfully followed all the ceremonies enjoined by the Jain religion in such a case but with no result. At length, a member of the Vaishnav sect advised him to propitiate Vishnu. He did so and obtained his desire. […] He and his successors have been respected as much as before by the members, of their old religion. In fact, it is doubtful whether the members of this family ever renounced entirely their Jain religion (30).

Few of the manuscripts Harakh Chand gave to Colebrooke have colophons indicating where they could have been copied. It is likely that some of them were copied in Rajasthan and carried by the family to eastern India, with the Jagatseths probably commissioning others after they settled near Calcutta. 

______________________________________

1. Former Fellows of The Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783 – 2002, Royal Society of Edinburgh. p. 194.
2. Lane-Poole, Stanley (1887). "Colebrooke, Henry Thomas (DNB00)." In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 11. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
3. Ibid
4. Rocher Rosane and Rocher Ludo, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. Routledge, 2012. p 117

5. Herbert Hall Turner. "The Decade 1820–1830". History of the Royal Astronomical Society 1820–1920. pp. 11, 18–19.

6. Rocher and Rocher, 33

7. Gobrich, Richard, Theravåda Buddhism: a social history from ancient Benares to Modern Colombo. Routledge, 2004, p 5

8. Rocher and Rocher,198

9. Desmond, Ray, ed. (2002). "Colebrooke, Henry Thomas". Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists Including plant collectors, flower painters and garden designers. CRC Press. p. 702.

10. Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra, (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1975), Volume I, Part II, 703.

11. Rocher, Jimutavahana's Dāyabhāga: The Hindu Law of Inheritance in Bengal, (Oxford University Press, 2002), 23.

12. Rocher, Jimutavahana's Dāyabhāga: The Hindu Law of Inheritance in Bengal, (Oxford University Press, 2002), 35.

13. Rocher and Rocher, 139

14. Ibid, 139, 140

15. Rocher and Rocher, 145

16. 1807 essay in Asiatic Researches, p 313

17. I, 24

18. 1807 Essay, Asiatic Researches, p 304

19. Ibid, 313

20. Ibid, 318 n. 2

21. Ibid 288

22. 1827 article, Asiatic researches, p 520

23. Ibid, 549

24. 1808 article, p 393

25. 1807 article, p 310

26. Ibid, 310 note

27. 1827 article, p 521

28. Ibid, 549–550

29. Little, J H, House of Jagatseth, 1920, Calcutta Historical Society, part 2: 104–105

30. Ibid

Note: I am indebted to Nalini Balbir's article, Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the Jain Tradition, in Jainpedia. 

* Max Muller has said that this essay is not original, but a literal translation from Gagannatha's Vivadabhangarnava. (Chips from a German Workshop, vol 2, p 34, footnote). But this article is in fact the third chapter of A Digest of Hindu Law.

© Ramachandran 

A DOCTOR RENDERS RIG VEDA INTO ENGLISH

The Story of H H Wilson

It was a British doctor, who translated the Rig Veda, first into English. Born in London, Horace Hayman Wilson (1786 – 1860) studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital in London and reached Calcutta in 1808 as an assistant surgeon on the Bengal establishment of the British East India Company. His knowledge of metallurgy caused him to be attached to the mint there, where he was for a time associated with John Caspar Leyden, Scottish Indologist. 

Leyden (1775-1881) was born at Denholm on the River Teviot, not far from Hawick, in the Scottish Borders. His father, a shepherd, sent him to Edinburgh University to study for the ministry. In his first Greek class, the professor asked him to translate a passage but when he stood to read he was mocked. His broad Borders accent, rough manners and unfashionable dress made him a laughing stock. However, as he spoke, his tormentors were silenced, the class was captivated by his eloquence and when he finished, they applauded. The professor knew immediately that there was something special about his young student.

Leyden was a haphazard student, apparently reading everything except theology. Though he completed his divinity course, and in 1798 was licensed to preach from the presbytery of St Andrews, the pulpit was not his vocation.

H H Wilson

In 1794, Leyden was acquainted with Dr Robert Anderson, editor of The British Poets, and of The Literary Magazine. Anderson later introduced him to Dr Alexander Murray, and Murray, probably, led him to the study of Eastern languages. Through Anderson also he came to know Richard Heber, by whom he came to the notice of novelist and Leyden's Borders neighbour, Walter Scott, who was then collecting materials for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Leyden was fitted for this kind of work, for he was a borderer himself, and an enthusiastic lover of old ballads and folklore. Scott tells how, on one occasion, Leyden walked 40 miles to get the last two verses of a ballad, and returned at midnight, singing it all the way with his loud, harsh voice, to the consternation of the poet and his household.

With Scott’s help, Leyden found a job as an assistant surgeon in India although he needed a degree in medicine before he could take up his post. Building on the foundations of the previous study Leyden returned to university, this time to the University of St Andrews, to complete his training. With the immense application, he passed the necessary exams. Before departing for India John Leyden published The Scenes of Infancy, the poem he is best remembered for. Scot said of Leyden, “Perhaps he was the first British traveller that ever sought India, moved neither by the love of wealth nor of power…”

In 1803, he sailed for Madras and worked in a local hospital there. He was promoted to be a naturalist to the commissioners going to survey Mysore, and in 1807, his knowledge of the languages of India procured him an appointment as professor of Hindustani at Calcutta; this he soon after resigned for a judgeship, and that again to be a commissioner in the court of requests in 1805, a post which required familiarity with several Eastern languages. He translated some Punjabi works into English.

At the end of 1805, he left India and sailed for Malaysia where he befriended (Sir) Stamford Raffles a young Englishman who secured his place in history some year later when he became the founder of the British colony of Singapore. Leyden spent three months with Raffles and his wife Olivia, and he found himself falling in love. He later expressed his feelings for Olivia in a poem, The Dirge of the Departed Year.

Returning to Calcutta in 1811, Leyden joined fellow Borderer, Governor General Lord Minto in the expedition to Java. Having entered a library which was said to contain many Eastern manuscripts, without having the place aired, he was seized with Batavian fever (possibly malaria or dengue) and died, after three days' illness, on 28 August 1811. He was buried on the island, underneath a small firefly colony.

With Leyden beside him in Calcutta, Wilson became deeply interested in the ancient language and literature of India and was the first person to translate the Rig Veda into English. It was published in six volumes during 1850-1888.

He acted for many years as secretary to the committee of public instruction and supervised the studies of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta. He was one of the staunchest opponents of the proposal that English should be made the sole medium of instruction in native schools and became for a time the object of bitter attacks. On the recommendation of Indologist Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Wilson was appointed secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in 1811. He was a member of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta and was an original member of the Royal Asiatic Society, of which he was director from 1837 up to the time of his death. He was interested in Ayurveda and traditional Indian medical and surgical practices. He compiled the local practices observed for cholera and leprosy in his publications in the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta. (1)

Back in London, in 1832 Oxford University selected Dr Wilson to be the first occupant of the newly founded Boden chair of Sanskrit: he had placed a column-length advertisement in The Times on 6 March 1832, giving a list of his achievements and intended activities, along with testimonials, including one from a rival candidate, as to his suitability for the post. In 1836 he was appointed librarian to the East India Company. He also taught at the East India Company College. (2) In April 1834, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. (3)

He married Frances Siddons, a granddaughter of the famous actress Sarah Siddons (4) through her son George. Wilson died on 8 May 1860. (5)

It is through his vast journeys in Indian classics and scriptures that he made an indelible mark in history. In 1813 he published the Sanskrit text with a free translation in English rhymed verse of Kalidasa's lyrical poem, the Meghadūta, or Cloud-Messenger. (6) He prepared the first Sanskrit–English Dictionary (1819) from materials compiled by native scholars, supplemented by his own research. This work was only superseded by the Sanskritwörterbuch (1853–1876) of German Indologist Rudolf Roth (1821-1895) and Russian German Indologist Otto von Böhtlingk (1815-1904), who expressed their obligations to Wilson in the preface to their great works.

Leyden

In 1827 Wilson published Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, which contained a full survey of the Indian drama, translations of six complete plays and short accounts of twenty-three others. His Mackenzie Collection (1828) is a descriptive catalogue of the extensive collection of Oriental, especially South Indian, manuscripts and antiquities made by Colonel Colin Mackenzie, then deposited partly in the India Office, London (now part of the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library) and partly at Chennai. He also wrote a Historical Sketch of the First Burmese War, with Documents, Political and Geographical (1827), a Review of the External Commerce of Bengal from 1813 to 1828 (1830), a translation of Vishnu Purana (1840), and a History of British India from 1805 to 1835, (1844–1848) in continuation of James Mill's 1818 The History of British India.

Rig Veda in English

Wilson's translation of Rig Veda follows the interpretation of Sayana, a renowned Indian Vedic scholar. Wilson followed the Sanskrit text printed by Muller, from a collation of manuscripts. Sayana was the brother of Madhava Acharya, the prime minister of Vira Bukka Raya, who was the king of Vijaya Nagara, in the 14th century. Both brothers were scholars.

It was the best way to do it then. It is a prose translation, not a metrical one. It is not exhaustive in notes. The first edition of the first volume of Wilson's translation of Rig Veda Sanhita, published by Allen and Co in London in 1850, was reprinted by H R Bhagavat of Pune, in 1925, with slight changes-Bhagavat followed the system of dividing the Rig Veda into Mandalas, Anuvakas and Suktas, a system generally adopted. Another edition was published by The Bangalore Printing and Publishing Company in 1946, of which C Ramanuja Aiyangar was secretary. 

A German translation of Rig Veda by Max Muller was published in 1856, the birth year of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and two copies of this rare book came to Bhandarkar Institute, Pune in 2014. Max Muller was instructed by the British to conduct a study on the Vedas, as they wanted to rule India. So, Muller began his research and then translated the Vedas into English. Max Muller has written more than 64 books on the Vedas in his lifetime. 

In the introduction to his English translation, Wilson records: "When the liberal patronage of the Court of Directors of the East India Company enabled Dr Max Muller to undertake his invaluable edition of the Rig Veda a wish was expressed that its appearance should be accompanied or followed by, with all convenient despatch, by an English translation. As I had long contemplated such a work and had made some progress in its execution, even before leaving India, I readily undertook to complete my labours and publish the translation." (7)

So, such translation projects were not very innocent and they were funded by the Company. Wilson also mentions in his introduction that an edition of the Vajasaneyi portion of the Yajur Veda was done by Dr Albrecht Weber in Berlin, liberally aided by the Company. The text of the Sanhita of the Sama Veda and a translation by Rev John Stevenson were published by the Oriental Translation Fund and a German translation of the same by Professor Benfey of Gottingen was also published. M Langlois produced a translation of Rig Veda in French, and Dr Friedrich August Rosen in Latin. T H Griffith published a translation of the Rig Veda in 1896.

The early 1800s saw several competing projects of opening the hitherto guarded textuality of the Veda to a wider public, both in Europe and in India. Apart from those animated by the spirit of imperial control or allegedly pure academic interest, others situated themselves within the broader goals of the new wave of missionary work in India. Among the Protestant missionaries to take an active part in projects of that sort, the figure of Rev. John Stevenson of the Church of Scotland stands out. Stevenson did pioneering work in editing and translating of the Veda, especially his work titled The Threefold Science which appeared in 1833 in Bombay.

Before Wilson's venture, the first ashtaka of Rig Veda, Ogdoad or Eighth Book of the Rig Veda had been already translated partly into English by Rev John Stevenson and Dr Roer, and fully into Latin by Dr Rosen. A translation in French by Par M Langlois (1850) extending through four ashtakas, or half the Veda, had been published in Paris. But Wilson was not aware of its existence. (8) He felt that their existence of them does not preclude the use of an English version. The work of Stevenson extends only to the first three hymns of the third section, out of the eight, which the first book, or ashtaka, consists of. Dr Roer's translation is equally limited, stopping with two sections, or 32 hymns. Both translations were printed in India.

Friedrich August Rosen (1805-1837) was a German Orientalist, brother of German Orientalist Georg Rosen and a close friend of German pianist Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. He studied in Leipzig, and from 1824 in Berlin under linguist Franz Bopp. He was briefly a professor of oriental literature at the University of London and became secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1831.

His Rigvedae Specimen, excerpts from the Rig Veda based on manuscripts brought back from India by Colebrooke, were enthusiastically received by European academia as the first authentic evidence of the archaic Vedic Sanskrit language. His most important work was an edition of the entire Rig Veda, left incomplete at his premature death shortly after his 32nd birthday. His translation of the first book of the Rig Veda appeared posthumously in 1838. The remaining books remained unedited for another five decades, until the Editio Princeps of Max Müller in 1890-1892.

Dr Rosen's translation of the first book is complete in the text, but his premature death interrupted his annotations. Although executed with profound scholarship and scrupulous exactitude, Sanskrit is converted into Latin with such literal fidelity that the work is scarcely useful for the layman and could be used as a reference. The translation, according to Wilson, is subordinate to the Sanskrit text on the same page. (9)

The principle followed by M Langlois is the converse of that adopted by Dr Rosen and he avowedly sought to give to the mysterious passages of the original, a simple interpretation. He succeeded in it. At the same time, he has not been cautious in his rendering of the text sometimes and has diverged from the original phraseology. The Sanskrit Rig Veda is more than a literary composition; it supplies the most ancient Hindu value system of religious worship and social organization. If its language is not preserved erroneous views of primitive Hinduism may be produced. Langlois has made his translation from manuscript copies of the Veda and its commentary, which would be less accurate than a final edition.

The oldest authoritative texts of the Hindus are the four Vedas: Rig, Yajur, Sama and Adharva. Many passages are found in Sanskrit, some in the Vedas themselves, which limit the number to three. (10) The fourth, Atharva, though it borrows from Rig, has little in common with others. Its language is of a later era. So, it is regarded as a supplement to the other three.

The Rig Veda consists of metrical prayers, and hymns termed Suktas, addressed to different divinities, each of which is ascribed to a Rishi, a holy author. The hymns have no methodical arrangement, and there is not much connection in the stanzas. (11) Sometimes, the same hymn is addressed to different divinities. In the Veda, there are no directions for the application of Sutras, no mention of the occasions on which they are to be employed, or the ceremonies at which they are to be recited. For all this, we are indebted to an Anukramanika or index, accompanying each Veda.

Rosen

The Yajur differs from Rig in being more ritual. The invocations, when not borrowed from the Rig, are in prose. Sama and Adharva are recast of the hymns of the Rig Veda. So, Rig Veda has priority over the other three, and its great importance in Hinduism. The Veda consists of two parts, Mantra and Brahmana. (12) The first is the hymns and formulae aggregated in the Sanhita, and the second is a collection of rules for the application of the Mantras.

Of the Brahmana portions of Rig Veda, the most important is the Aitareya Brahmana, in which several remarkable legends are detailed. The Aitareya Aranyaka, another Brahmana of this Veda, is more mystical, of a third, the Kausitaki, little is known. The Brahmana of Yajur Veda, the Shatapatha, partakes more of the character of Aitareya. The Brahmanas of the same and Atharva are few and little known. The supplementary portions of these two Vedas are the metaphysical treatises termed Upanishads. Connected with the Vedas also are the treatises on grammar, astronomy, intonation, prosody, ritual, and the meaning of obsolete words called the Vedangas. Besides these, there are Prathisakhyas, or treatises on the grammar of Vedas, and the Sutras or aphorisms inculcating its practices.

In the Rig Veda, the number of Suktas is above a thousand, containing more than ten thousand stanzas. They are arranged in two methods: one divides them into eight Khandas (portions) or Ashtakas (eighths)., each of which is again subdivided into Adhyayas or chapters. The other plan classifies the Suktas under the Mandalas or circles, subdivided into more than a hundred Anuvakas or sub-sections. A further subdivision of the Suktas into Vargas, or paragraphs of five stanzas each is common to both classifications.

The hymns are composed in a great variety of metres, several of which are peculiar to Vedas, the richness of which evince an extraordinary cultivation of rhythmical contrivance. A large number of hymns are dedicated to Agni and Indra., the deities of fire and the firmament. For instance, of the 121 hymns contained in the first ashtaka of Rig Veda, 37 are addressed to Agni and 45 to Indra. Of the rest, 12 to Maruts or Winds and 11 to Ashwinas or sons of the Sun. Four to the personified dawn, four to the Viswadevas and the rest to inferior divinities.

Translating volume 1 of Rig Veda, Wilson concludes that the Hindus were not nomads, which is evident from the repeated allusions to fixed dwellings, villages and towns. (13) They were never behind their barbarian enemies the overthrow of whose numerous cities is so often spoken of. A pastoral people they might have been to some extent; but they were also an agricultural people to a great degree as is evidenced by their supplications for abundant rain and for the fertility of the earth, and by the mention of agricultural products, particularly, barley. (I.5.6.15). They were manufacturing people; for the art of weaving, the labours of the carpenter, and the fabrication of gold and of iron mail, are alluded to; and what is more remarkable, they were a maritime and mercantile people. (14)

Not only are the Suktas familiar with the ocean and its phenomena, but merchants have been mentioned pressing earnestly to board ship, for the sake of gain. (I.10.6.2); and there is a naval expedition against a foreign island, or continent (dwipa), frustrated by a shipwreck. (I.17.1.3-5). They must have made advances in astronomical computation, such as the adoption of an intercalary month, to adjust the solar and lunar years to each other, is made mention of. (I.6.2.8)

Civilization must have therefore made considerable progress, and the Hindus must have spread to the sea coast, possibly along the Sindhu or Indus into Kutch and Gujarat, before they could have engaged in navigation and commerce. That they had extended themselves from a more northern site, or that they were a northern race, is rendered probable from the peculiar expression used, on more than one occasion, in soliciting long life, when the worshipper asks for a hundred winters (himas), a boon not likely to have been desired by the natives of a warm climate. (I.11.7.14).

They also appear to have been a fair-complexioned people, and foreign invaders of India (I.15.7.18) Indra divided the fields, it is said, among his white-complexioned friends, after destroying the indigenous barbarian races. The expression Dasyu often recurs which is defined to signify one who not only does not perform religious rites but attempts to disturb them and harass their performers. The latter is the Aryas, the respectable, or Hindu, Aryan race. Dasyu signifies a thief, a robber. (15)

Wilson's interpretation may not be correct since the terms are used in the text as contrasted with each other, as expressions of religious and political antagonists. But Wilson infers that no violence or conjecture is required to identify Dasyu as the indigenous tribes of India, refusing to adopt the rituals of the civilized Aryas. He suggests that the political condition of the Hindus is not known except for the names of some princes. The geography of the Hindus remained the same, which it continued to be until the Muslim conquest.

Wilson, fortunately, finds that the distinctions of caste were not there. Whenever collectively alluded to, mankind is said to be distinguished into five sorts, Pancha Kshitaya. There is the term Brahmana, which doesn't have a caste sense. They are the priests. Viswamitra, who is said to be a Kshatriya by birth, exercises the functions of the priesthood, at the sacrifice of Shunashepas. There is one phrase which is in favour of considering the Brahmana as a member of a caste, as distinguished from the military caste: "If you, Indra and Agni, have ever delighted in a Brahmana or a Raja, then come hither." (I.16.3.7). But Wilson asserts that this is not decisive. But Colebrooke has translated a subsequent part, specifying the four castes. He quotes a verse from the eighth Ashtaka in the Purusha Sukta: "His mouth became a Brahmana, his arm was made a Kshatriya, his thigh was transformed into a Vaisya, from his feet sprung the Sudra." (16)

Without subscribing to Colebrooke, Wilson leaves his introduction, recommending further research.

So, who are the Dasyus in the Rig Veda?

German Indologist Hermann Oldenberg states that no distinction between historical events and mythology existed for the Vedic poets. For them, the conflict between the Aryans and Dasas extended into the realms of gods and demons with the hostile demon being on the same level as the hated and despised savages. (17)

The three words Dasa, Dasyu and Asura (danav) are used interchangeably in almost identical verses that are repeated in different Vedic texts, such as the Rig Veda, the Saunaka recension of Atharva Veda, the Paippalada Samhita of the Atharva Veda and the Brahmanas text in various Vedas. Scholars interpret Dasa and Dasyu may have been synonyms of Asura (demons or evil forces, sometimes simply lords with special knowledge and magical powers) of later Vedic texts. (18)

Kautilya's Arthashastra dedicates the thirteenth chapter on dasas, in his third book on law. This Sanskrit document from the Maurya Empire period (4th century BCE), has been translated by several authors. Shama Sastry's translation in 1915, R P Kangle's translation in the 1960s and Rangarajan's translation in 1987 all map dasa as a slave. However, Kangle suggests that the context and rights granted to dasa by Kautilya, such as the right to the same wage as a free labourer and the right to freedom on payment of an amount, distinguish this form of slavery from that of contemporary Greece. (19)

According to Arthashastra, anyone who had been found guilty of nishpatitah (ruined, bankrupt, a minor crime) may mortgage oneself to become dasa for someone willing to pay his or her bail and employ the dasa for money and privileges. (20)

British Anthropologist Edmund Leach points out that the Dasa was the antithesis of the concept of Arya. As the latter term evolved through successive meanings, so did Dasa: from "indigenous inhabitant" to "serf," "tied servant," and finally "chattel slave." He suggests the term "unfreedom" to cover all these meanings. (21)

According to historian Tony Ballantyne, Rig Veda depicts the cultural differences between the Aryan invaders and non-Aryans of the Indus valley. He states that although the inter-Aryan conflict is prominent in its hymns, a cultural opposition is drawn between Aryans and the indigenous people of North India. According to him, it depicts the indigenous tribes such as the Pani and Dasas as godless, savage and untrustworthy. Panis are cattle thieves who seek to deprive Aryans of them. He states Dasas were savages, whose godless society, darker complexion and different language were culturally different from Aryans. They are called barbarians (rakshasa), those without fire (anagnitra) and flesh-eaters (kravyada). The Aryas were on the other hand presented as noble people protected by their gods Agni and Indra. He adds that their names were extended beyond them to denote savage and barbarian people in general. He concurs that this continued into later Sanskritic tradition where dasa came to mean a slave while Arya meant noble. (22)

________________

1. Wilson, H. H. (1825), "Kushta, or leprosy, as known to the Hindus", Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, 1, 1-44, Wilson, H. H. (1826), "On the native practice in cholera, with remarks", Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, 2, 282-292

2. Men and Events of My Time in India by Sir Richard Temple, John Murray, London, 1882 p. 18

3. The Record of the Royal Society of London for the promotion of Natural Knowledge (Fourth ed.). London: Printed for the Royal Society. 1940.

4. Crawford, D.G. (1930). Roll of the India Medical Service. London: W. Thacker & Co. p. 58.

5. The Record of the Royal Society of London for the promotion of Natural Knowledge (Fourth ed.). London: Printed for the Royal Society. 1940.

6.  Truebner & Co. (1872) publisher's catalogue entry for Megha-Duta 

7. Wilson, The Rig Veda Sanhita, The Bangalore Printing and Publishing Company,1946, Introduction, p iii

8. Ibid, p ii

9. Ibid, p iv

10. Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, On the Vedas, Asiatic Researches, vol viii, p 370

11. Wilson, The Rig Veda Sanhita, The Bangalore Printing and Publishing Company,1946, Introduction, p vi

12. As in the Yanjna paribhasha of the Apasthambha, quoted by Sayana, "the name Veda is that of both Mantra and Brahmana." Sayana Acharya, Introduction, Muller's edition, p 4

13. Wilson, The Rig Veda Sanhita, The Bangalore Printing and Publishing Company, 1946, Introduction, p xxxiv

14. Ibid, p XL

15. Ibid, p XL1

16. Colebrooke, Asiatic Researches, Vol VII, p 251

17.  Hermann Oldenberg (1988). The Religion of the Veda. Motilal Banarsidass. p. 81.

18. Wash Edward Hale (1999), Ásura- in Early Vedic Religion, Motilal Barnarsidass, pages 157–174

19. Kangle, R. P. (1997) [first published 1960], The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra (Part III), Motilal Banarsidass, p. 186

20. Ibid

21. Leach, Edmund (1962), "Slavery in Ancient India by Dev Raj Chanana (Book review)", Science & Society, 26 (3): 335–338

22. Ballantyne, Tony (2016). Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. Springer Publishing. p. 170

© Ramachandran 

WILLIAM JONES FINDS KALIDASA AND PATNA

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.

William Jones

By the time of his death, Jones knew eight languages thoroughly, was fluent in a further eight, with a dictionary at hand, and had a fair competence in another twelve. (1) A desire to read the Bible in the original drew him to Hebrew, and an interest in Confucius led him to Chinese. He thought Greek poetry “sublime" but when he “tasted Arabic and Persian poetry", his enthusiasm for Greek “began to dry up". The only language he ignored was his native Welsh.

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)

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. 

Jones's tomb in Kolkata

However, Megasthenes had described the capital of Sandrocottus as standing at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Erranaboas, but only the first of these flowed through Patna. Jones unearthed the fact that Patna used to be the site of the confluence of the Ganga and the Son before the latter changed its course. He found, that another name for the Son was the Hiranyabahu, which matched the Erranaboas of Megasthenes’ account. Finally, he discovered a play which told of a usurper king called Chandragupta, who had a court at Pataliputra and had welcomed foreign ambassadors to it. Thus, Jones could state that Chandragupta was the same as Sandrocottus, whose reign had to have commenced between 325 BCE and 312 BCE.

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