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 time 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