Critical Biography of Sir William Jones

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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.