Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  Few pandits were willing to teach a caste outsider, fearing ritual pollution and, perhaps not incidentally, a loss of their monopoly on the language. Instead, Jones found a scholar named Ramlochan, whom he hired for the then-princely sum of one hundred rupees a month. Ramlochan was a vaidya, from the caste of medical practitioners, and though not a Brahmin, he still feared that proximity to the eccentric white man would lead to loss of his caste status. So, in accordance with ritual strictures, a “pure” room was constructed for their lessons, and its white marble flooring was cleansed every day with Ganga water.

  Within months, Jones was industriously translating Sanskrit hymns to Hindu gods, then moving on to study the great epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana (all while preparing to work on a digest of Hindu and Muslim laws, the fulcrum of his day job). He soon gained access to a wealth of literary creativity that had remained unknown in the West. As the writer and historian William Dalrymple puts it:

  Jones quickly discovers that he’s stepped into an intellectual gold mine. He discovers that Sanskrit is a language which is not only as old as Latin and Greek, he discovers what no European has realized to this point—that there is still surviving a vast body of Indian classical literature which we know today is about one thousand times as large as the surviving classical literature of Greek and Latin combined. And he discovers that there are these great plays which are the equals of Shakespeare, that there are these epics which are the equal of Homer, and he can’t believe his luck. He also can’t believe that no one else has taken any interest in this stuff.

  Jones’s passion for Persian was now eclipsed by the majesty and depth of this new language. From his study of Sanskrit epics and plays, he began to glean historical clues about the opaque chronology of the Indian past. He found that he could match figures from Indian history to those mentioned in ancient Greek texts, whose dates were known. The Greek texts about Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign, for instance, mentioned the name of an Indian king, Sandracottos, who ruled from the city of Palibothra. Jones, in his Sanskrit reading, had stumbled across the name of Chandragupta, and he realized this was the king whom the Greeks had been talking about. He managed to identify the Mauryan emperor, Ashoka’s grandfather, whose capital had been Pataliputra—and was now able to date Chandragupta’s reign to the fourth century BCE (see 5, Ashoka). Amid the quicksand of Indian historical dates, Jones had broken through to chronological bedrock.

  There would be other breakthroughs, too. Jones’s biggest realization emerged during his early months of Sanskrit study. He made an argument, one still embraced by modern philologists, that utterly startled the reading public of the West:

  The Sanscrit 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 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 some common source.

  This insight—that Sanskrit and the European classical languages were all branches of a single, lost linguistic river—helped to challenge prejudice and reconnect the world. Jones was arguing that Sanskrit was a “beautiful sister” of Greek and Latin. “Imagine the effect of that upon Britain, upon people some of whom looked down on Indians’ idolatrous practices and thought they were fit only to be servants,” Jones’s biographer, Professor Michael Franklin of Swansea University, says. “It was a disconcerting idea that Sanskrit is a more beautiful, a more refined language. To use the epithet ‘refined’ of Indians—this was revolutionary.”

  * * *

  On January 15, 1784, Jones gathered thirty British residents of Calcutta in the grand jury room of the Supreme Court. As he put it, they were men of business, but he formed them into an amateurs’ club aiming at the highest level of academic study of the East.

  The Asiatic Society of Bengal would be modeled on London’s Royal Society. Jones’s optimism and ambition rang out clearly in his first presentation to the society, entitled “A Discourse on the Institution of a Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia.” In it, he declared, “If now it be asked, what are the intended objects of our inquiries within these spacious limits, we answer, MAN and NATURE; whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other.” The post of president of the society was offered to Warren Hastings, India’s first governor-general and a great promoter and patron of scholarship on India. Hastings declined, citing a want of leisure, so Jones was elected in his place.

  Despite the practical moneymaking interests of its members, it’s striking how fixed the focus of Jones’s band of amateur scholars was on studies of the ancient and courtly languages, Sanskrit and Persian. The languages and life of the streets around them were not of interest. Jones had also wanted to induct learned Indians as members, to participate and aid in the society’s explorations of ancient history, epigraphy, linguistics, astronomy, music, physiology, and archaeology—but he was overruled. (Indians weren’t allowed to enter for another half century.) The members, Jones not excepted, tended to be more appreciative of India’s textual past than its human present.

  The discoveries born of this interest would nevertheless have a lasting impact on India and the West. Many of the members of the society produced works that contributed significantly to Western knowledge about the subcontinent. “Jones is a catalyst,” William Dalrymple says. “He uses his authority, his charisma to set all these other characters alight.” Yet no one’s contribution outshone Jones’s. Opening his “First Discourse” he had said, “Gentlemen, when I was at sea last August on my voyage to this country which I had long and ardently desired to visit, I found one evening on inspecting the observations of the day that India lay before us and Persia on our left. Whilst a breeze from Arabia blew nearly on our stern…” It was this sense of being in the midst of currents of different civilizations—Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic—that led him to the research to which he devoted the remaining years of his life.

  Perhaps nothing excited the West more about the potential riches of Indian civilization than Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, one of the masterpieces of ancient Sanskrit literature, which he published in 1789. The original was “so much like Shakespeare,” Jones wrote, “that I should have thought our great dramatick poet had studied Kalidasa.” In one scene, the emperor of India first catches sight of the heroine, Shakuntala, “so lovely a girl, who ravishes his soul,” and gazes on her from behind a tree. In his translation, Jones tried to maintain a balance between the sensuous and the restrained, but he was not always comfortable with the easy eroticism of Kalidasa’s verse:

  Her charms cannot be hidden, even though a robe of intertwisted fibres be thrown over her shoulders and conceal a part of her bosom, like a veil of yellow leaves enfolding a radiant flower. The water lily, though dark moss may settle on its head, is nevertheless beautiful; and the moon with dewy beams is rendered yet brighter by its black spots. The bark itself acquires elegance from the features of a girl with antelope’s eyes and rather augments, than diminishes, my ardour. Many are the rough stalks which support the water lily; but many and exquisite are the blossoms which hang on them.

  Jones’s Shakuntala became a European sensation, setting off a bout of Indomania among tight-laced academicians. The German poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel, for one, was enraptured. He wrote of the translated work, “All is animated with a deep and lovely tenderness of feeling; an air of sweetness and beauty is diffused over the whole.”

  * * *

  From his letters home, it is gloriously clear that Jones’s studies in India brought him joy. “I never was unhappy in England; it was not in my nature to be so; but I never was so happy till I settled in India,” he wrote. Yet he was also frequently ill; a friend visiting from London once described h
im as a “perfect skeleton.”

  Still, he carried on with his work, allowing no concessions in his schedule. When he was not in court, his day looked like this:

  Morning

  One letter.

  Ten chapters of the Bible.

  Sanscrit Grammar.

  Hindu Law, &c.

  Afternoon

  Indian Geography.

  Evening

  Roman History.

  Chess. Ariosto.

  In 1794 he finally published his translation of a Sanskrit compilation of Hindu law, Institutes of Hindu Law: Or the Ordinances of Manu, which he had first come across in 1785. This body of legal thought (which legend dates to roughly ten thousand years ago, but that most scholars believe was formalized within a few hundred years before or after the start of the Common Era) was held in high esteem by many Hindus, but it also served to enshrine the Brahminic conception of Hindu society, and ignored the vast diversity of local legal customs. Jones used it to develop principles of jurisprudence for all Hindus, while Muslims and other communities received their own laws.

  For better or worse, Jones’s translation would become the foundation for much of subsequent Indian jurisprudence. But the project, and India, had left him spent. His wife, finally finding the climate too much, had sailed back to England in 1793. The following April, as he was preparing to join her, Jones died from inflammation of the liver. After a decade in Calcutta, he left behind a huge list of future works to translate, plus an unfinished geography and history of India. His wife, the daughter of a radical bishop, proved herself far from the customary scholar’s wife, the kind thanked in acknowledgments for her patient suffering. It was Anna Maria Jones who, within less than two years of receiving the shipment of her dead husband’s papers and manuscripts, turned them into a six-volume edition of his works.

  Despite the scale of Jones’s achievement, the wonder of Sanskrit and ancient Indian literature wore off pretty quickly in the West. By the early nineteenth century, the shield of Burkean conservatism, which offered to protect cultures and traditions, had been replaced by the reformist stick of Benthamite utilitarianism, intent on correcting cultural habits in the light of reason and utility. India, with its irrational laws and customs—sati, or widow immolation, being a prime example—was a perfect schooling ground. The British in India came to see plays such as Shakuntala as examples of “the greatest immorality and impurity,” and in 1835, Lord Macaulay, decreeing the educational curriculum for Indians, removed Sanskrit and Persian literature in favor of the moral uplift of Milton and Pope. As he put it then, in a line that has since become infamous, “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

  Yet in some respects Jones’s impact persists. Scholarship and power often go together; though Jones was devoted to literature and language, his labors also helped lay the groundwork for British rule in India, and helped, too, to give that dominion a legitimacy that sustained it for the next century and a half. Even as ruling ideologies changed, the British broadly maintained solicitude for Indian customs and laws. That legacy continues, not without controversy, in India today. The country still has multiple codes of civil law, specific to different religious communities—which some see as an anomaly in a polity that claims to be a secular liberal republic.

  In his search to understand India, Jones had also turned to the Brahmins. The pandits were often his interpreters and guides, and he saw Brahminism as the “true” Hinduism. In this way, the studies of Jones and his fellow scholars seeded the ground for the later cultivation of a golden-hued nostalgia about the ancient Vedic past—which became in turn a source for the Hindu revivalism that nourishes the modern-day ideology of Hindutva.

  You can’t blame an industrious eighteenth-century scholar-judge for this—just as you can hardly blame him for those who would later take his idea of a common Indo-European language and pervert it into a genocidal origin myth about an ancient Aryan race. It’s only slightly more plausible to write off Jones as an Orientalist in Edward Said’s negative meaning: a man who celebrated the exoticism of the East as a way to deny it political legitimacy. Said was right—this did indeed happen on a huge scale. But there is also a long history of intellectual amateurs who labored more for enthusiasm than profit. (Many of these amateurs were invisible to the East India Company, not shills for it.) William Jones was an Orientalist in this more positive sense: a man who arrived in India and studied its culture with humility, and then sought to awaken the West to its riches. The irony is that he also awakened the East.

  22

  RAMMOHUN ROY

  “Humanity in General”

  1772–1833

  In Bristol’s wooded Arnos Vale Cemetery there is an unusual memorial. Above neat rows of granite crosses and Victorian marble obelisks towers a pavilion some thirty feet high, built in an Indian style—twelve pillars, made of Bath stone, supporting a canopy topped by a four-sided dome of the sort typical in Bengal. Similar chhatri dot the Indian landscape, commemorating the dead, but one doesn’t often see them in Britain. It’s a fitting monument for a man who stood out not only in India, but also in the larger history of his age. “Beneath this stone,” reads the epitaph,

  rest the remains of Raja Rammohun Roy Bahadoor, a conscientious and steadfast believer in the unity of the Godhead, he consecrated his life with entire devotion to the worship of the Divine Spirit alone, to great natural talents, he united thorough mastery of many languages and early distinguished himself as one of the greatest scholars of his day. His unwearied labors to promote the social, moral and physical condition of the people of India, his earnest endeavours to suppress idolatry, and the rite of suttee[,] and his constant zealous advocacy of whatever tended to advance the glory of God and the welfare of man live in the grateful remembrance of his countrymen.

  By the time of his death in Bristol in 1833, the Bengali scholar Rammohun Roy had become a worldwide intellectual celebrity. An English contemporary called him a “lion of the season,” and he was sufficiently dashing that a lock of his luxuriant hair has been preserved at the Bristol Museum. “He was a man of charisma and he was a man of determination,” Carla Contractor, a historian who has documented the three years Roy spent in Britain, says,

  He was six feet tall, a towering figure, and he made sure he dressed in flowing muslin robes, but with spats and European shoes. He wowed people, and they half-expected to be overwhelmed by this man. Whichever party he was invited to go to, he went. And he made sure that he spoke to the people that he wanted to. He was a networker of the first order.

  Roy was part of an international set of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century radicals and reformers who attacked established religion and ruling despots, including the East India Company. He corresponded with Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man, and with the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wanted him to sit in the Westminster House of Commons. In Spain, liberals dedicated the country’s 1812 Constitution to him. In America, the young Ralph Waldo Emerson read him avidly. Roy celebrated Latin American revolutions and dined with the king of France. “Rammohun was the first Indian to have a significant view of the outside world, not just meaning the Mughal world or the Hindu world, but meaning the European world,” the late Sir Christopher Bayly, a Cambridge professor and a leading historian of India, told me. “He also had some sense that India was part of a world community.”

  What gained Roy renown in the West, above all, was his advocacy to improve the status of women in India, and to abolish the practice of sati (or “suttee,” as it was then known), the Hindu rite in which widows immolated themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres. In his own country, however, Roy’s contribution took on a larger significance. He planted in India a universalist flag, urging his compatriots to judge their society and its customs by international standards, at the very moment when these standards were emerging in the Enlightenment West.

  * * *

  Roy was born in 1772, to a
Brahmin family in up-country Bengal. His early life was both privileged and unsettled. His father, Ramakanta, was a zamindar, one of the rentier landlords who soon benefited from the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, an agreement on landed property, concluded in 1793, which the British devised to create a loyal class of wealthy Indians. Ramakanta had three wives, polygamy being standard practice in his Kulin Brahmin subcaste. Although he and Roy’s elder brother would eventually fail in business and be jailed as debtors, there was money enough for Roy to receive a solid education in Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit.

  Roy’s earliest known manuscript, in Persian, displays an attraction to rationalist arguments and a strong distaste for religious superstition and unquestioning faith. This was perhaps a reaction to the elaborate worship rituals observed by his mother, Tarini Devi—a “peculiar delirium of pieties” that extended to requiring her son to recite sacred verses before even drinking a glass of water. (To say mother and son had difficulties is an understatement: Roy would eventually humiliate her, legally and socially, during a court battle over property, and she ended her years in retreat, sweeping temple floors.)

  In his twenties, Roy went to work for the East India Company, where he started a profitable sideline lending its officers money. He also leveraged property he had inherited to acquire more. By 1814, at the age of forty-two, he finally had the financial wealth to devote himself fully to deeper passions—scholarship and religious and social reform. For this new chapter in his life, Roy acquired a palatial Georgian mansion in Calcutta, where liberal impulses and ideas—about rationalism, reform, and progress—were circulating. The city had publishing houses and major newspapers, and India’s first free public library was soon to open there. Roy’s home became a weekly meeting place for freethinkers seeking to reform press censorship and other illiberal aspects of British rule. They were also looking to reform Hindu ritualism. “I have never ceased,” he wrote of some of the more superstitious and inhumane Hindu customs, such as sati, “to contemplate these practices with the strongest feelings of regret, and to view in them the moral debasement of a race who, I cannot help thinking, are capable of better things; whose susceptibility, patience, and mildness of character render them worthy of a better destiny.”