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’.