Thus, to within a decade, one event in India’s ancient history had been given a date. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this discovery. Fortuitously Alexander, Seleucus and Megasthenes had blundered into Indian history at a crucial moment. Chandragupta would soon be revealed as a sort of Indian Julius Caesar, the creator of an empire and the founder of a dynasty unique in Indian history. The date of his ascent to the throne was thus a crucial one. Working backwards from it to the birth of Buddha, and forwards using the Sanskrit king lists, the whole chronology of Indian history could be, and was, based upon it.
Six months after announcing his discovery, Jones wrote to a close friend in England. ‘This day ten years ago … we landed at Calcutta; and if it had not been for the incessant ill-health of my beloved Anna, they would have been the happiest years of a life always happy &’ But now Anna Maria must go home; to stay longer would endanger her life. Jones himself would follow ‘as soon as I can, consistent with my own plans … but having nothing to fear from India, and much to enjoy in it, I shall make a great sacrifice whenever I leave it’.
In fact I shall leave a country where we have no Royal Court, no House of Lords, no clergy with wealth or power, no taxes, no fear of robbers or fire, no snow and hard frosts followed by comfortless thaws, and no ice except what is made by art to supply our deserts; add to this, that I have twice as much money as I want, and am conscious of doing very great and extensive good to many millions of native Indians, who look to me, not as their judge, but as their legislator. Nevertheless a man who has nearly closed the forty-seventh year of his age, and who sees younger men dying around him constantly, has a right to think of retirement in this life, and ought to think chiefly of preparing himself for another…
Already his eyesight was deteriorating, and in November he collapsed with a fever. He recovered, but rheumatism and a tumour continued to give him great pain. Anna Maria sailed for home. Jones immersed himself ever deeper in his studies. Seven volumes of the digest of Hindu law were now complete. A year more of intensive study, and the remaining two volumes should be ready. He officially requested permission to resign his judgeship and return to England in 1795. A month after making the request he collapsed. Doctors linked the tumour to an inflammation of the liver. Again he seemed to recover. On 26 April 1794, the doctors thought him well enough to face an immediate voyage to England. The next day, as if shattered by the thought of such an abrupt departure, ‘the father of oriental studies’ died.
Jones’s discoveries – of the Indo-European family of languages, of the riches of Sanskrit literature, and of the first date in ancient Indian history – were all milestones. But in retrospect, his most important achievement was the founding of the Asiatic Society. Had he left no such institution, his death might well have created an unbridgeable void in the ranks of the orientalists; the reconstruction of India’s ancient history might have been delayed by decades. As it was, there was no hiatus. Henry Thomas Colebrooke, another brilliant scholar, who had read his first paper to the society just before Jones’s death, completed the digest of Hindu laws. He also assumed the mantle of Jones as the champion of Hindu civilization and the exponent of Sanskrit literature; indeed, Professor Max Muller, the great German orientalist, considered Colebrooke the finer scholar.
Many other notable figures assisted in the exploration of Sanskrit and in the study of how India’s vernacular languages had developed from it. Indirectly, they also contributed to the reconstruction of Indian history and the appreciation of Indian art and architecture. But the more sensational discoveries would be made elsewhere. Sanskrit literature proved too unreliable on facts and dates, too hard to authenticate and too diffuse to assimilate; sometimes it was positively misleading.
But if Jones had concentrated on literature, he had also provided for and encouraged the widest possible use of research: ‘Man and Nature – whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other.’ Every branch of Indian studies owed something to his inspiration and, without this, no true picture of India would ever have emerged.
He had also succeeded in making Indian studies respectable. In England, Calcutta was now compared to Florence; there was talk of an Indian-based renaissance; and Jones and his successors were compared to the great Italian humanists. The ‘Exotic East’ had taken on a new meaning. It was no longer possible to view India as an extravagant and titillating circus. For scholars it was a challenge, for administrators a responsibility. Various reforms were making India less attractive to the adventurer and speculator. Jones’s fame ensured that their place would be taken by the soldier-scholars and collector-scientists who became the true glory of the raj.
CHAPTER THREE Thus Spake Ashoka
The trappings of government set up in Calcutta to cope with the sudden acquisition of Bengal included not only a judiciary but also a mint. It was as Assistant Assay-Master at this mint that James Prinsep arrived in India in 1819. The post was an undistinguished one; Prinsep, far from being a celebrity like Jones, could expect nothing better. He was barely twenty and, according to his obituarist, ‘wanting, perhaps, in the finish of classical scholarship which is conferred at the public schools and universities of England’. As a child, the last in a family of seven sons, his passion had been constructing highly intricate working models; ‘habits of exactness and minute attention to detail’ would remain his outstanding traits. He studied architecture under Pugin, transferred to the Royal Mint when his eyesight became strained, and thence to Calcutta. ‘Well grounded in chemistry, mechanics and the useful sciences’, he was not an obvious candidate for the mantle of Jones and the distinction of being India’s most successful scholar.
In the quarter century between Jones’s death and Prinsep’s arrival the British position in India had changed radically. The defeats of Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, of the Marathas, and of the Gurkhas had left the British undisputed masters of as much of India as they cared to digest. Indeed the British raj had begun. The sovereignty of the East India Company was almost as much a political fiction as that of their nominal but now helpless overlord, the Moghul emperor. Both, though they lingered on for another thirty years, had become anachronisms.
From Calcutta a long arm of British territory now reached up the Ganges and the Jumna to Agra, Delhi and beyond. A thumb prodded the Himalayas between Nepal and Kashmir, while several stubby fingers probed into Punjab, Rajasthan and central India. In the west, Bombay had been expanding into the Maratha homeland; Broach and Baroda were under British control, and Poona, a centre of Hindu orthodoxy and the Maratha capital, was being transformed into the legendary watering place for Anglo-Indian bores. In the south, all that was not British territory was held by friendly feudatories; the French had been obliterated, Mysore settled, and the limits of territorial expansion already reached.
Visitors in search of the real India no longer had to hop around the coastline; they could now march boldly, and safely, across the middle. Bishop Heber of Calcutta (the appointment itself was a sign of the times; in Jones’s day there had not been even a church in Calcutta) toured his diocese in the 1820s. The diocese was a big one – the whole of India – and ‘Reginald Calcutta’, as he signed himself, travelled the length of the Ganges to Dehra Dun in the Himalayas, then down through Delhi and Agra into Rajasthan, still largely independent, and came out at Poona and thence down to Bombay.
The acquisition of all this new territory brought the British into contact with the country’s architectural heritage. Two centuries earlier Elizabethan envoys had marvelled at the cities of Moghul India ‘of which the like is not to be found in all Christendom’. The famous buildings of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Delhi, ‘either of them much greater than London and more populous’, they had described in detail. When, therefore, the first generation of British administrators arrived in upper India they showed genuine reverence for the architectural