Critical Biography of Sir William Jones

琼斯是一个高超的沟通者在各种各样的水平[从学术话语到个人信件和诗歌免费分发的社会宪法信息]，我的目标将是生产-在AHRC研究休假所涵盖的期间-一个修正传记研究广泛访问的学者和受过教育的一般读者。借鉴桑克里主义者，如罗珊罗谢尔和温迪奥弗莱厄蒂，波斯学者和乌尔都语学者，如穆扎法尔阿拉姆和S。R. Faruqi和历史学家，如C。A.贝利和P. J.马歇尔，它将使用跨学科的方法，联合收割机文学批评传记和文化历史研究的元素。琼斯给印度带来了一种既能接受又能经验的思想，一种启蒙运动的宽容和一种浪漫主义的思辨。他的成功主要是因为他有想象力的勇气，使连接被认为是不可能的。琼斯对表面上不同的事物之间的相互联系的深刻理解，在许多方面都是他智慧的标志，这将产生深远的政治影响。他在加尔各答的发现引入了令人震惊的概念，即殖民者与他们的“黑人”臣民之间的语言、文化和家庭关系。 2003年3月，当“智能”炸弹在巴格达爆炸时，我发现了一封“新信”，他在信中热情地写道：“我渴望看到Shiraz”，详细说明了他计划通过“波斯，最令人愉快的，最紧凑的，最令人向往的国家”回国，以满足其才华横溢的诗人，查看其文化宝藏，并破译波斯波利斯石柱上的“如尼字母"我将追溯使“波斯人”琼斯忠实于他的初恋-伊朗-的连续性，伊朗仍然是他语言学和民族学研究的焦点。这种对波斯文化的持久尊重有助于解释他对文化多元化和宗教融合的深刻承诺。他对当代印度斯坦诗人的热情，如米尔·塔奇·米尔、绍达和米尔·穆罕默德·侯赛因，或印地语女诗人贡纳·贝加姆，平衡了他对古普塔文化的迷恋。琼斯与印度教学者和穆斯林毛拉维斯的密切合作提供了一个欧洲和亚洲知识分子之间文化接触的模式，而这一模式被一些现代东方主义学者所忽视，他们强调这种接触的不平等。继爱德华·赛义德（Edward Said）的教条主义领导之后，他断言琼斯的殖民话语的目的是“征服东方的无限多样性”，一些后殖民批评家和文化理论家认为琼斯的翻译是在西方文化霸权强加给主体和主体化的人的印度文明的授权版本中构建“印度教性格，印度教心理，印度教生活方式”。通过深入研究琼斯对18世纪后期印度语言与文化和宗教传统之间复杂权力关系的理解，我希望最终证明这既是一种扭曲，也是一种过度简化。在介绍2003年版的《东方主义》时，赛义德在西方“恐怖、先发制人的战争和单方面政权更迭”的阴影下，呼吁以人文主义为基础，对差异给予更大的宽容，真正欣赏所有文化的相互联系。这本复古的传记将表明，“印度-波斯”琼斯，在他一生的努力，以摧毁狭隘的欧洲中心主义的刻板印象，提供了正是这一点。琼斯对印度-波斯语言和民族学的密切关系的深入研究，他对多元主义的智力投资，以及他对东西方融合的开明承诺，仍然是一个世界上的灯塔，在这个世界上，“情报”被浪费在导弹上。

Jones was a superb communicator at a wide variety of levels [ranging from academic discourses to personal letters and poems distributed gratis by the Society for Constitutional Information], and my aim will be to produce - within the period covered by AHRC Research Leave - a revisionary biographical study broadly accessible to the scholar and the educated general reader. Drawing upon the work of Sankritists such as Rosane Rocher and Wendy O'Flaherty, of Persianists and scholars of Urdu, such as Muzaffar Alam and S. R. Faruqi, and historians such as C. A. Bayly and P. J. Marshall, it will use an interdisciplinary methodology to combine elements of literary critical biography and a cultural historical study. Jones brought to India a mind that was both receptive and empirical; an Enlightenment tolerance and a Romantic speculation. He succeeded largely because he had the imaginative courage to make connections assumed to be impossible. Jones's profound apprehension of the interconnectedness of the apparently disparate, in many respects the hall-mark of his intellect, was to have profound political consequences. His Calcutta discoveries introduced startling concepts of linguistic, cultural, and familial relationship between the colonizers and their 'black' subjects. In March 2003 as 'smart' bombs exploded in Baghdad, I discovered a 'new letter' in which he passionately wrote: 'I burn with a desire of seeing Shiraz', detailing his plans to return home by way of 'Persia, the most delightful, the most compact, the most desirable country of them all', to meet its talented poets, to view its cultural treasures, and to decipher the 'runic letters' on the pillars of Persepolis. I shall trace the continuity that made 'Persian' Jones faithful to his first love - Iran - which remained a focal point of his linguistic and ethnological investigations. And this enduring respect for Persian culture helps to explain his profound commitment to cultural pluralism and religious syncretism. His enthusiasm for contemporary Hindustani poets such as Mir Taqi Mir, Sauda, and Mir Muhammad Hussein, or the female Hindi poet Gunna Begam, balanced his antiquarian fascination with Gupta culture. Jones's close co-operation with Hindu pandits and Muslim maulavis provides a model of cultural contact between the European and Asian intelligentsia ignored by some modern scholars of orientalism who stress the inequality of such meetings. Following the doctrinaire lead of Edward Said, who asserted that the object of Jones's colonial discourse was 'to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient', some postcolonial critics and cultural theorists have seen Jones's translations as constructing 'a Hindu character, a Hindu psyche, a Hindu way of life' in an authorized version of Indian civilization imposed by Western cultural hegemony upon a subject and subjectified people. By means of intensive research into Jones's apprehension of the complex power relationships between languages and cultural and religious traditions in late eighteenth-century India, I hope conclusively to demonstrate that this is both a distortion and an over-simplification. Introducing the 2003 edition of Orientalism, under the shadow of Western 'terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regime change', Said appealed on humanistic grounds for greater tolerance of difference, for a genuine appreciation of the interconnectedness of all cultures. This reviosionary biography will show that 'Indo-Persian' Jones, in his life-long attempts to destroy small-minded Eurocentric stereotypes, had provided exactly that. Jones's intensive research into Indo-Persian linguistic and ethnological affinities, his intellectual investment in pluralism, and his enlightened commitment to a syncretic East-West synthesis remain something of a beacon in a world where 'intelligence' is squandered upon missiles.