Sir William Jones (1746-94) was the foremost Orientalist of his
generation and one of the greatest intellectual navigators of all
time. He re-drew the map of European thought. 'Orientalist' Jones
was an extraordinary man and an intensely colourful figure. At the
age of twenty-six, Jones was elected to Dr Johnson's Literary Club,
on terms of intimacy with the metropolitan luminaries of the day.
The names of his friends in Britain and India present a roll-call
of late eighteenth-century glitterati: Samuel Johnson and James
Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley,
Edmund Burke, Warren Hastings, Johannes Zoffany, Edward Gibbon,
Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles James Fox,
William Pitt, and David Garrick.
In Bengal his Sanskrit researches marked the beginning of
Indo-European comparative grammar, and modern
comparative-historical linguistics, of Indology, and the
disciplines of comparative literature, philology, mythology, and
law. He did more than any other writer to destroy Eurocentric
prejudice, reshaping Western perceptions of India and the Orient.
His commitment to the translation of culture, a multiculturalism
fascinated as much by similitude as difference, profoundly
influenced European and British Romanticism, offering the West
disconcerting new relationships and disorienting orientations.
Jones's translation of the Hindu myth of Sakuntala (1789) led to an
Oriental renaissance in the West and cultural revolution in India.
Remembered with great affection throughout the subcontinent as a
man who facilitated India's cultural assimilation into the modern
world, Jones helped to build India's future on the immensity,
sophistication, and pluralism of its past.
Michael J. Franklin's extensive archival research reveals new
insights into this radical intellectual: a figure characterized by
Goethe as 'a far-seeing man, he seeks to connect the unknown to the
known', and described by Dr Johnson as 'the most enlightened of the
sons of men'. Unpublished poems and new letters shed fresh light
upon Jones in rare moments of relaxation, while Franklin's research
of the legal documents in the courts of the King's Bench, the
Carmarthen circuit, and the Supreme Court of Bengal illustrates his
passion for social justice, his legal acumen, and his principled
independence.
General
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