by John Keay
It is hard now to imagine the city as the gay and elegant capital of the East. Few places can have gained quite such an opposite reputation in the space of a couple of centuries – like Regency Bath turning into the Bronx. Contemporary paintings by the likes of Thomas Daniell show spacious Palladian mansions, wide thoroughfares and stately gardens bordered by the blue waters of the Hughli river – no crowds, no dust; it even looks cooler. As the Crocodile sailed upriver the Joneses passed their future home on Garden Reach – a nine-mile stretch of ‘elegant mansions’. ‘They are all white, their roofs invariably flat and surrounded by colonnades, and their fronts relieved by lofty columns supporting deep verandahs.’ Each, according to a gossipy contemporary, ‘surrounded by groves and lawns, which descend to the water’s edge, and present a constant succession of whatever can delight the eye or bespeak wealth and elegance in the owners’. Then came the fort, also on the eastern bank and ‘so well kept and everything in such excellent order that it is quite a curiosity to see it – all the slopes, banks and ramparts are covered with the richest verdure, which completes the enchantment of the scene’. Finally, the city itself, flanking the fort with government offices and the homes of the military. ‘As you come up past Fort William and the Esplanade, it has a beautiful appearance. Esplanade Row, as it is called, seems to be composed of palaces.’ Indeed, Calcutta was known as ‘the City of Palaces’.
It was also, in Clive’s view, ‘one of the most wicked places in the Universe & Rapacious and Luxurious beyond concepcion [sic]’. Fortunes, so easily made, were as easily lost at the whist table. The day was dominated by dinner at about 2 p.m. – ‘a soup, roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread and excellent Madeira’, and that was assuming there were no guests. After dinner the gentleman of the house downed his three bottles of claret and retired to bed until it was time for the evening promenade, supper and a ball, or another round of drinking. Pert little Emma Wrangham and the ravishing Madame Grand provided the scandals; for those too sozzled or syphilitic to stand their pace, there were also legions of ‘sooty bibis’ (prostitutes). Factional quarrels were a way of life at every level. It was only three years since Warren Hastings, the Governor-General, had fought his famous duel with Sir Philip Francis, a senior member of the Governing Council. Yet it was all intensely exciting, like a combination of Paris in the naughty nineties and the Klondike.
The other surprising thing about this city that was to be Jones’s home for the next eleven years was its insularity. Although it was the headquarters of a sizeable chunk of India, Calcutta was less Indian even than Madras or the struggling little colony at Bombay. Clive had foreseen the possibilities of an Indian empire and Warren Hastings was aware that with government there came profound responsibilities for the Indian people. Yet there was no general awareness of such things. More typical was the attitude of Sir Philip Francis who never stirred more than a mile or two outside the city. The only British empire known to most was the one in North America that had just been lost. In India the settlement mentality prevailed. What went on in the Mofussil outside Calcutta was a mystery; what went on amongst the country powers beyond was an irrelevance. Strictly speaking, the East India Company’s administration of Bengal was just another favour granted by the Moghul emperor in Delhi and not so very different from the commercial concessions won in the previous century. ‘Up-country disturbances’ were deplorable if they upset the flow of trade; but not for another twenty years would the British feel constrained to do anything about them.
William Hodges, the artist, who was touring India when Jones arrived, thought it ‘a matter of surprise that of a country so closely allied to us so little should be known. Of the face of the country, of its arts and crafts, little has yet been said.’ After several unsuccessful attempts, Hodges managed to get as far inland as Agra and Gwalior, reminding his contemporaries of the glories of the Taj Majal and of Gwalior’s massive hill fortress, ‘the Gibraltar of the East’. They made little impression on the socialites of Calcutta. The price of indigo, Miss Wrangham’s engagement, and the shocking case of William Hunter and the three mutilated maidens were more to their taste.
In this philistine and grasping society Sir William Jones could hardly be other than a conspicuous exception. In London he had been accused of showing an ill-tempered reticence in company, and though he quite reasonably objected, it was to the ill-temper rather than the reticence. As befitted a man of letters, he was reserved in the company of others unless they were his intellectual equals – and there would be precious few of these in Calcutta. Nor had he any time for factions and politics. An unhappy experience as prospective MP for Oxford, plus the drudgery of having had to promote his career by seeking favours, had embittered him. Finally, he was now married and very happily so. Anna Maria, beautiful, accomplished and devoted, was his great delight. Her health would be his only real anxiety in India, and her companionship was one of the major factors in the confidence with which he set about his work. In a society so rife with scandal, it was no small achievement to remain forever untouched by it. Only one other relationship in India could rival theirs – that between another Anna Maria and her husband, Warren Hastings.
Whatever had been achieved in the way of Indian studies before Jones was due to Hastings. The first Governor-General of India (Clive had been Governor of Bengal only), he was also the greatest. Faced with the challenge of governing several million Indians, he conceived the novel and momentous idea of trying to do so with their approbation. Little was yet understood of their customs, whether Muslim or Hindu, and few thought much of their character. ‘As degenerate, crafty, wicked and superstitious a people as any race in the known world,’ thought a contemporary, adding ‘if not more so.’ Hastings differed. He spoke Urdu, Bengali and some Persian; he could understand them and in turn respected them. If British rule in India was to prosper and to last, British administrators must themselves become partly Indianized. They must learn the languages, study the customs. The government must work within existing institutions, not try to impose a whole new set of Western ones. There must be an intellectual exchange, not a walkover; and if there were flagrant abuses in Indian society they must be reformed from within, not proscribed from without. Hastings, according to an eminent historian, ‘loved the people of India and respected them to a degree no other British ruler has ever equalled’.
If this ambitious scheme was to be realized, the first essential was that all would-be administrators should be able to speak the language. Persian was the language of diplomacy and was already widely used in government circles. Bengali, the local vernacular, was less known; but by the time Jones arrived, the first Bengali grammar, written by Nathaniel Halhed, an old Oxford friend of Jones, and printed by Charles Wilkins, was already in circulation. Bengali was thus the first of the Indian languages to be made available to scholars; and Wilkins, who cast the type with his own hand, was the first to print in the vernacular in India. The repercussions of this achievement would be enormous, not only for the British for whom the work was intended, but for Indian letters.
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 Brahm
in 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 c
an 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’.
