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 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.