One other work of importance had been completed and another was already
in manuscript. To enable lawyers to conduct their cases in the native courts, Halhed had followed his grammar with a
Code of Gentoo
[i.e. Hindu]
Laws.
This was a digest assembled by Brahmins working under his supervision. Jones would find it inadequate as a legal code, but it was a step in the direction Hastings wanted the whole administration to take. The other work was potentially much more
exciting. Wilkins, having established his Bengali press, won the confidence of the local Brahmins and, with their help, started to learn Sanskrit.
Sanskrit is the sacred language of the Hindus. Its origins were then unknown and, as a spoken language, it was as dead as ancient Greek. But it was the medium in which the earliest religious compositions of the Aryan settlers in India had been expressed;
and in the jealous possession of the priestly Brahmin caste, it had been preserved and augmented for centuries. It thus seemed to be the key to the discovery of ancient India: whatever there might be of literary, historical and scientific merit in the pre-Islamic culture of India was composed in Sanskrit or one of its later derivations.
The first Europeans to gain any knowledge of the language
were probably Portuguese priests in the sixteenth century. To strengthen their hand in religious disputations with the Brahmins, at least two of the fathers had penetrated its secrets, though without showing any appreciation of its literary wealth. The first Englishmen to show any interest in such matters were equally blind. ‘There is little learning among them [the Hindus],’ wrote a eighteenth-century
traveller, ‘a reason whereof may be their penury of books which are but few and they manuscripts.’ He was right about the books. There were only manuscripts and they too were carefully guarded. But he overlooked the oral tradition. As every Sanskrit scholar would discover, finding the right
pandit
(teacher) to interpret them was every bit as important as possessing the manuscripts.
All we know
about Wilkins’s pioneering efforts in Sanskrit is that by the time Jones arrived on the scene he had almost completed the first translation of a Sanskrit work into English. He had chosen the
Bhagavad Gita,
a long extract from that longest of epics, the
Mahabharata.
The
Gita
was the best loved devotional work in India and its publication was to cause a sensation. But first Wilkins sent the work
to his patron, Warren Hastings. Would the Governor-General recommend that the East India Company finance its publication?
I hesitate not to pronounce the
Gita
a performance of great originality [wrote Hastings], of a sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental Doctrines&. I should not fear to place, in opposition to the best French versions of the most admired passages of the Iliad or Odyssey, or of the first and sixth books of our own Milton & the English translation of the
Mahabharata.
Hastings was overwhelmed. ‘Not very long since, the inhabitants of India were
considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life.’ Now their civilization was being revealed in this masterpiece from an age ‘preceding even the first efforts of civilization in our own quarter of the globe’. For the benefit of the Company’s hard-headed directors, he pointed out that the publication could produce only gratitude from their Indian subjects and greater
understanding from their officers. And he ended with a prophetic and resounding pronouncement on the whole body of Indian writings. ‘These will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.’
It was as if he was already aware that, however great and lasting the British raj, the
discoveries of the orientalists would transcend it. Buried in antiquity there lay the structure of a remarkable civilization; unearthed and reconstructed, it could become the noblest of all monuments to the British period in India.
For this task no man was better qualified than the new Supreme Court judge. Jones combined the broad, bold vision of Hastings with the incisive intellect of Wilkins.
In addition, his personality and his enthusiasm for the task had a magnetic quality. Coming straight from England, he was above the pettiness and hedonism of Anglo-Indian life. His stature lent a new respectability to those who took Indian culture seriously. Hastings could encourage others, but Jones had the rare gift of inspiring them.
Before he had even found a Calcutta home, he got in touch
with Hastings’s protégés. Wilkins and the rest had been working each in his own vacuum. They were flattered. On 15 January 1784, less than sixteen weeks after his arrival, Jones invited thirty kindred and influential spirits to the High Court jury room.
The proceedings were opened by Sir William Jones who delivered a learned and very suggestive discourse on the Institution of a Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia. The address was enthusiastically received, and a resolution was come to establishing the Society under the name of the Asiatic Society.
Supposedly modelled on the Royal Society, the Asiatic Society owed everything to Jones and was really closer to Dr Johnson’s celebrated club, of which Jones had been
a member. It was highly informal; there were no rules and the only qualification for membership was a voluntarily-expressed ‘love of knowledge’. After Jones, much of this informality would be changed; but his other stipulation remained. The field of enquiry was to be all-embracing. ‘You will investigate whatever is rare in the stupendous fabric of nature, will correct the geography of Asia, & will
trace the annals and traditions of those nations who have peopled or desolated it; you will examine their methods in arithmetic and geometry, in trigonometry, mensuration, mechanics, optics, astronomy, and general physics; & in morality, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; in medicine & anatomy and chemistry. To this you will add researches into their agriculture, manufacture and trade & music, architecture
and poetry & If now it be asked what are the intended objects of our enquiries within these spacious limits, we answer Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other.’
To draw up such a comprehensive scheme was an achievement in itself. But Jones was also the only man of his generation who could himself make a distinguished contribution in all these fields. During his
ten years as president he stamped the Society with his own unique brand of universality. His contributions included papers on Indian music, on a cure for elephantiasis, on Chinese literature, on the scaly anteater, on the course of the Nile, on Indian chronology, on the Indian zodiac, on the Indian origin of chess, on a new species of haw-finch, on Indian botany, on spikenard, on mystical poetry
and on the slow-paced lemur – and all this in addition to his more seminal studies of Hinduism, Indian history and the language and literature of Sanskrit which were embodied in his annual discourses to the Society.
To the far-flung official with a cherished interest in crustaceans, meteorology or Arabic, it came as a revelation that here was a Society anxious to hear from him, and a man who
knew enough about the subject to guide his studies and publish his findings. From Benares to Chittagong, and in far away Madras and Bombay, men sat up and took notice of their surroundings. Reports of manuscripts, monuments, inscriptions, old coins, strange customs, forgotten tribes and rare birds began to pour in. Through the Society, Jones was able not only to collate and pass on all this material
but to publicize it. The first volume of
Asiatick Researches,
the Society’s journal, appeared in 1789. Four more followed during Jones’s decade as president and each caused a successively greater sensation in Europe.
Previously the great bar to Indian studies among those who acknowledged that there might be something to study was the idea that they were somehow disreputable. What could one expect
to learn from idolators who worshipped cows and monkeys, and who yet presumed to claim a history that out-distanced that of classical Greece, and a religious tradition that discredited the accepted chronology of Genesis? Why should one bother with sculpture that was invariably suggestive and often obscene, or with a religion that enjoined widows to burn themselves? The Hindus apparently condoned
infanticide and, according to a seventeenth-century writer, considered the most disgusting eccentricities as evidence of sanctity.
Some yogis go stark naked, several of which I have seen in India, and ‘tis reported that the Hindu women will go to them and kiss the yogi’s yard. Others lie something upon it when it stands, which the yogis take to buy victuals with; and several come to stroke it, thinking that there is a good deal of virtue in it, none having gone out of it, as they say, for they lie not with women nor use any other way to vent their seed.
They can hold their breath and lie as if dead for some years, all of which time their bodies are kept warm with oils etc. They can fly and change souls, each with the other or into any beast. They can transform their bodies into what shape they please and make them so pliable that they can draw them through a little hole, and wind and turn them like soft wax. They are mighty temperate in diet, eating nothing but milk and a sort of grain they have.
By the late eighteenth century it was not usual to be quite as candid as John Marshall had been. But reports like this were common knowledge. How could such people, ‘scarce elevated
above the degree of savage life’, be worthy of serious study except by anthropologists?
On the other hand, Hastings’s eulogy on the
Gita
suggested that, for all its modern absurdities, Hinduism was based on the loftiest of religious sentiments. It was also being said that the Hindus really only worshipped one god, though in many guises. This immediately made the subject more respectable. Jones,
though, was more intrigued by the many guises. ‘I am in love with the
gopis,’
he wrote to Wilkins in 1784, ‘charmed with Krishna, an enthusiastic admirer of Rama and a devout adorer of Brahma. Yudhisthir, Arjun, Bhima and other warriors of the
Mahabharata
appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.’ As if to make the whole pantheon of Hindu
gods more acceptable to Western tastes, one of his first papers was on
The Gods of Greece, Italy and India.
Deploying his immense classical learning, he identified many of the Indian gods with their classical counterparts and even suggested that the Greeks might have imported many of their deities from India. Zeus and company might not be entirely respectable, but their exploits had never been
considered reason for ignoring classical studies. Likewise with the Hindu pantheon. Siva’s wife, Parbati, corresponded well with Venus; Jones could not resist reminding his audience that Venus was occasionally portrayed in the form of a ‘conical marble’ for which ‘the reason appears too clearly in the temples and paintings of India’. The lingam or phallus was indeed a formidable hurdle for any good
Christian Englishman who might be mildly intrigued by Hinduism or Indian sculpture. But, as Jones observed, in Hinduism ‘it never seems to have entered the heads of the legislators or peoples that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a singularity that pervades all their writings and conversations, but is no proof of depravity in their morals’.
This is an argument that the British were
never able to swallow. Jones is almost unique in his acceptance of the erotic in Indian art and of its place in the Hindu religion. Having disposed of the obvious stumbling blocks, he was ready to launch into a sympathetic discovery of India’s past.
CHAPTER TWO
An Inquisitive Englishman
In the winter of 1784–5 the Joneses made a tour up the Ganges to Benares and back by way of the ancient cities of Gaya and Gaur. Sir William was getting a feel for ‘this wonderful country’, meeting the men who corresponded with him, and stalking the precious manuscripts. A copy of the legal code of Manu, the ancient law-giver whom he had previously compared
with Moses, was his most prized acquisition. He planned to use it as the basis for a new compendium of Hindu law which would replace Halhed’s. He also considered how to outmanoeuvre the Brahmins on whom the courts had to rely for the interpretation – not always impartial – of Sanskrit laws. But he finally resolved to learn Sanskrit himself only when Wilkins announced his intention to leave India.
Wilkins was still the only Englishman who had mastered the language. Jones would therefore be the second.
In autumn 1785 the Joneses moved to Krishnagar, sixty miles upriver from Calcutta. There, beside the ancient seat of Bengali scholarship at Nadia, they rented a bungalow, built ‘entirely of vegetable materials’, and Jones approached the local Brahmins for instruction in Sanskrit. In spite
of considerable cash inducements, they refused and eventually decamped for a religious festival. In their absence Jones found Ramlochand, a doctor who, though not a Brahmin, knew and had taught Sanskrit. With reservations he accepted the new pupil.
For the next six years the Joneses returned to Krishnagar and Ramlochand every autumn. Nadia became Jones’s ‘third university’. He adopted the Indian
dress of loose white cotton; their thatched bungalow became the scene of a pastoral idyll that was the antithesis of Calcutta life. Even Anna Maria, who though ‘not always ill, is never well’, seemed to revive there. The days passed in a routine of simple pleasures and hard study.