India Discovered

by John Keay

  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.

  Sanskrit proved an extremely difficult language even for a polyglot. But ‘I am learning it more grammatically and accurately than the indolence of childhood and the impatience of youth allowed me to learn any other.’ Perhaps it was this highly systematic approach which enabled him to make his first major discovery. For, within six months, he was experiencing a sense of déjà vu; the grammar, the vocabulary even, seemed to bear some resemblance to Greek and Latin. The Sanskrit for mother was matr, mouse mus and so on. For someone with no Sanskrit-English dictionary, groping to catch the phrases and inflections of a glib pandit, it was not as obvious as it seems now. Nor were the implications clear. It could just be that there were a few borrowed words, either from Sanskrit to Greek or vice versa. Jones, though, guessed that he was on to something more important and in February 1786 he presented his theory to the Asiatic Society.

  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 the forms of grammar, than can possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is similar reason though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [i.e. Germanic] and Celtick, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.

  It was the genius of Sir William Jones that in the chance discovery of what would look to most like a minor coincidence, he could recognize and interpret a cardinal concept. He had not only discovered what later became known as the Indo-European family of languages and indicated that they had a common lost origin; he had in fact laid down the principles of comparative philology. If the study of languages could reveal something as shattering as the common Aryan origin of the ancient peoples of Europe and north India it could clearly be used as a method of historical research. Languages evidently evolved in much the same way as, say, architectural styles. The state of a language at any given period could be used as an indicator of the degree of civilization reached by those who used it. Equally, it could be a way of giving an approximate date to literary compositions of unknown antiquity. Philological studies have since helped to prise open the secrets of many ancient civilizations. India, with its wealth of ancient literature and inscriptions, has benefited more than most, and the dates now ascribed to its earliest literary compositions depend entirely on the evidence of philology.

  More immediately, Jones’s discovery clearly showed that the people of northern India, far from being savages, were actually of the same ethnic origin as their British rulers. Also, if Sanskrit was ‘more perfect’ etc. than Greek or Latin, then the record of civilization in India might be longer than in Europe. However sobering for the sahibs, it was a tremendous boost for oriental studies. The translation of Sanskrit literature suddenly became a matter of much wider interest. What might it not tell of the civilization of this ancient people, and perhaps of the common origins of all the Aryan peoples? And what about the chronology? Just how old were the various Sanskrit writings?

  In what leisure was left after a strenuous life in the courts, Jones forged ahead with his studies. ‘I hold every day lost in which I acquire no new knowledge of man or nature,’ he wrote in 1787. ‘It is my ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it. I rise an hour before the sun and walk from my garden to the fort, about three miles; & by seven I am ready for my pandit with whom I read Sanskrit; at eight come a Persian or Arab alternately with whom I read till nine; at nine come the attorneys with affidavits; I am then robed and ready for court.’ Dinner was at 3 p.m. ‘When the sun is sunk in the Ganges we drive back to the Gardens either in our post-chaise or Anna’s phaeton drawn by a pair of beautiful Nepal horses. After tea time we read; and never sit up, if we can avoid it, after ten.’ He was teaching Anna Maria algebra, and together they were reading Dante, Ariosto and Tasso in the original. Life in Garden Reach had become as idyllic as at their bungalow in Krishnagar. Together they studied botany: Anna Maria drew and painted the plants; Sir William classified them according to the system of Linnaeus and wrote a Latin description of each.

  He drew the line at actually picking the flowers. Much as he loved the natural sciences, he had a very Buddhist aversion to destroying life in any form. His studies encouraged botany in India but temporarily stalled zoology. ‘I cannot reconcile to my notions of humanity the idea of making innocent beasts miserable and mangling harmless birds.’ The livestock that thronged their garden responded to this humane outlook. From the Joneses’ dairy came ‘the best butter in India’. Their sheep and goats, safe from the butcher’s knife, would feed from Anna Maria’s hand. It was all ‘like what the poets tell us of the golden ages; & you might see a kid and a tiger playing at Anna’s feet. The tiger is not as large as a full grown cat, though he will be as large as an ox: he is suckled by a she-goat and has all the gentleness of his foster-mother.’ Jones always insisted that even in England he had never been unhappy; ‘but I was never happy till I settled in India’.

  He was also in a state of intense excitement. ‘Sanskrit literature is indeed a new world; the language (which I begin to speak with ease) is the Latin of India and a sister of Latin and Greek. In Sanskrit are written half a million of stanzas on sacred history and literature, epic and lyric poems innumerable, and (what is wonderful) tragedies and comedies not to be counted, about 2000 years old, besides works on law (my great object), on medicine, on theology, on arithmetic, on ethics and so on to infinity.’ He felt like a man who had stumbled unawares on the whole corpus of classical literature. How could he convey this excitement?

  Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose
them to be still worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo; suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals and Tartars, and lastly by the British; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other European had ever heard of. Such am I in this country; substituting Sanskrit for Greek, the Brahmins for the priests of Jupiter, and Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa for Homer, Plato and Pindar.

  Jones had no doubts that Sanskrit literature, like the language itself, was in every way the equal of Greek or Latin literature. He was now, in 1787, translating a drama by Kalidasa, ‘the Indian Shakespeare’. Completed in 1788 and published the following year, Sakuntala fully justified his expectations. It was the first Sanskrit work to be translated purely for its literary merit. Despite the omission of some passages too bold for contemporary tastes – like the one detailing the heroine’s swelling breasts – the comparison of Kalidasa with Shakespeare was not excessively partisan. Sakuntala was strongly reminiscent of The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was an instant success. The Calcutta edition was followed by two London editions within the space of three years.

  Jones was, however, wrong about one thing. Kalidasa was known to have lived in the age of a king called Vikramaditya, but Jones’s dating of ‘above 2000 years old’ was a few centuries out. Vikramaditya was the tide of several Indian sovereigns, and Kalidasa’s patron reigned about AD 400. He was thus a contemporary of St Augustine, not Homer.

  As the literary evidence of a great classical age in Indian history accumulated, the question of dates became more and more vexed. Sanskrit literature included some long lists of kings, but no chronicles – and nothing that could be regarded as historical writing. This was a bitter disappointment. Where was the Indian Tacitus? And, without him, how could this civilization be fitted into any kind of historical context? Jones heard tell of the Rajatarangini, a Kashmiri work of the twelfth century which we now know to be the only historical work relating to pre-Islamic India. But in time and place it is far removed from the classical age, and anyway, Jones was not able to get a copy.

  Failing that, there was just one date in the whole of ancient Indian history – 326 BC which, as every schoolboy was expected to know, was the year that Alexander the Great had invaded the Punjab. Strangely, this event, so significant to western historians, seemed to have entirely escaped the attention of Sanskrit authors. Nowhere did Jones find any mention of Greeks or any sign of Greek influence.

  Through the early 1790s he continued to broaden the scope of his Sanskrit reading. He had already discovered that chess and algebra were of Indian origin; to these, after studying a Sanskrit treatise on music, he added the heptatonic scale. He was also making progress with his legal code and creating something of a reputation in the courts. ‘I can now read both Sanskrit and Arabic with so much ease that the native lawyers can never impose upon the courts in which I sit.’ To the acclaim of scholars all over the world (Dr Johnson called him ‘one of the most enlightened of the sons of men’) was added the sincere regard and affection of Bengalis, whether petitioners or pandits.

  India was exercising its spell on him. His planned stay of six years was up; but he no longer yearned to return to England. He might make a visit to Europe, but he planned to be still in India at the turn of the century. Hinduism he found increasingly attractive and the doctrine of reincarnation seemed ‘incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by Christians of punishment without end’. But he was not tempted to forsake Christianity. Indeed there was no need; the Thirty-nine Articles, if written in Sanskrit, would pass for the work of a Brahmin and be quite acceptable to Hindus.

  By now the Joneses had become something of an institution. Young Thomas Twining, only seventeen and just arrived in India, was so honoured by an invitation to dine with them that he filled a whole page of his journal with an account of the visit.

  The party consisted of Sir William and Lady Jones, another gentleman and myself. Sir William was very cheerful and agreeable. He made some observations on the mysterious word om of the Hindoos, and other Indian subjects. While sitting after dinner he suddenly called out with a loud voice ‘Othello, Othello’. Waiting for a minute or two and Othello not coming, he repeated his summons, ‘Othello, Othello’. His particularly fine voice, his white Indian dress, surmounted by a small black wig, his cheerfulness and great celebrity, rendered this scene extremely interesting. I was surprised that no one, Muslim or Hindoo, answered his summons. At last I saw a black turtle of very large size, crawling slowly towards us from an adjoining room. It made its way to the side of Sir William’s chair, where it remained, he giving it something it seemed to like. Sir William observed that he was fond of birds, but had little pleasure seeing them or hearing them unless they were at liberty; and he no doubt would have liberated Othello if he had not considered that he was safer by the side of his table than he would be in the Ganges.

  I passed a most pleasant day in the company of this distinguished and able man. He was so good as to express some approbation of my Persian studies, and repeated to me two lines of a Persian couplet, and also his translations of them -

  Kill not that ant that steals a little grain;

  It lives with pleasure, and it dies with pain.

  Sitting in the shade on the banks of the Hughli, surrounded by venerable pandits and tame livestock, with Anna Maria sketching quietly in the background, he seemed the archetype of the Indian teacher – scholar and law-giver, patron to man and beast. It was the same at the Asiatic Society. He presided at almost every meeting, and at the beginning of each year delivered a challenging discourse on some different aspect of oriental studies. Right from the start there had been something Socratic in his manner – You will investigate this, enquire into that, etc., etc. – and in his last discourse he referred to the Society as a ‘symposiack assembly’. Revered and loved (though rarely seen) by Calcutta society, he was indeed the Indian Socrates.

  In 1793 he delivered his tenth discourse and celebrated the occasion by casually coming out with the long-awaited breakthrough on Indian chronology. ‘The jurisprudence of the Hindus and Arabs being the field I have chosen for my regular toil, you cannot expect that I should greatly enlarge your collection of historical knowledge; but I may be able to offer you some occasional tribute, and I cannot help mentioning a discovery which accident threw my way.’ He had already laid down the basis of literary and linguistic studies; now, at last, he had unearthed a foundation from which a start could be made with the reconstruction of India’s ancient history. The discovery may have been accidental, but it was his greatest; no one without his immense learning and his genius for spotting a relevant fact could have made it.

  First there was the Greek background. Following the invasion by Alexander the Great, Seleucus Nicator, his successor in Asia, had sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to India. This man’s report had subsequently been raided by numerous classical writers for their descriptions of India and so, though the original was lost, it could be largely reconstructed. It appeared that Megasthenes had found the Indian court at a place named Palibothra, at the junction of the Ganges and the Erranaboas. He had given a long and interesting account of the court and its ruler, Sandracottus; but where Palibothra was, which river the Erranaboas was supposed to be, and who Sandracottus was, all remained mysterious. One geographer had maintained that the Erranaboas must be the Jumna and that therefore Palibothra must be the modern Allahabad at the junction of the Ganges and the Jumna. There were several other claimants including Kanauj and Rajmahal, but the most promising was Patna, the ancient name for which was known to have been Pataliputra. This sounded very close to the Greek; but there was a problem. No river joins the Ganges at Patna. In the 1770s the great geographer James Rennell revealed that once upon a tim
e the Son river might have joined the Ganges at Patna, though it had since taken up a course much further east. But how could the Son river be the Erranaboas, especially when Megasthenes had mentioned the Son as a quite separate river?

  This conundrum must have been on Jones’s mind as he waded through the Sanskrit literature. The first connection came when he stumbled upon a reference to the Son as the Hiratiyabahu, or golden-armed. Immediately he realized that Erranaboas could be a Greek attempt at Hiranyababu; in which case Erranaboas was the Son after all and Megasthenes was wrong when he thought them two separate rivers. And if the Erranaboas was the Son then Palibothra must indeed be Pataliputra, the modern Patna. That left just Sandracottus, the Indian ruler whom Megasthenes had so much admired. He was evidently an adventurer and usurper but a man of considerable ability and the creator of a vast empire. Yet no such name appeared in any of the Sanskrit king lists.

  Jones went on reading. In an obscure political tragedy he found what purported to be the story of Chandragupta; he was described as a usurper who chose Pataliputra as his capital and received foreign ambassadors there. This proved the point; Chandragupta must be Sandracottus. The later discovery of an alternative spelling for Sandracottus as Sandraguptos clinched it. Going back to classical sources, it was also known that, before sending Megasthenes, Seleucus Nicator had himself visited, or rather invaded, India. He had been beaten back but his adversary, even then, had been Sandracottus, whose dominion was already established right across northern India. Seleucus returned west and was known to have reached Babylon in 312 BC. SO Sandracottus must have ascended the throne before this date, but after Alexander’s visit – somewhere between, say, 325 BC and 313 BC.