Critical Biography of Sir William Jones

琼斯在各个层面上都是一位出色的沟通者[从学术论文到私人信件和由宪法信息协会免费分发的诗歌]，我的目标是在AHRC研究休假期间，对学者和受过教育的普通读者进行广泛的修订传记研究。借鉴sankristists（如Rosane Rocher和Wendy O’flaherty）、波斯主义者和乌尔都语学者（如Muzaffar Alam和S. R. Faruqi）以及历史学家（如C. a . Bayly和P. J. Marshall）的作品，它将使用跨学科的方法将文学批评传记和文化历史研究的元素结合起来。琼斯给英迪亚带来了既善于接受又善于实践的头脑；启蒙主义的宽容和浪漫主义的思索。他的成功很大程度上是因为他有想象力的勇气去建立被认为是不可能的联系。琼斯对明显不同的事物之间的相互联系有着深刻的理解，这在许多方面都是他智慧的标志，并产生了深远的政治影响。他在加尔各答的发现引入了殖民者和他们的“黑人”臣民之间的语言、文化和家庭关系的惊人概念。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：“我渴望看到设拉子”，详细描述了他回家的计划，“波斯，最令人愉快的，最紧凑的，最令人向往的国家”，去见它有才华的诗人，参观它的文化宝藏，并破译波斯波利斯柱子上的“runic字母”。我将追溯使“波斯人”琼斯忠于他的初恋——伊朗——的连续性，伊朗一直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主义和宗教融合的深刻承诺。他对当代印度斯坦诗人，如米尔·塔奇·米尔、苏达和米尔·穆罕默德·侯赛因，或印度女诗人冈娜·贝甘的热情，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为欧洲和亚洲知识分子之间的文化接触提供了一种模式，但一些现代东方主义学者却忽视了这一点，他们强调这种会面的不平等。爱德华·赛义德（Edward Said）断言，琼斯殖民话语的目标是“征服东方的无限多样性”，一些后殖民评论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人民的印度文明的授权版本中构建“印度性格、印度精神、印度生活方式”。通过深入研究琼斯对十八世纪晚期印度语言、文化和宗教传统之间复杂的权力关系的理解，我希望最终证明，这既是一种扭曲，也是一种过度简化。赛义德在介绍2003年版的《东方主义》时，在西方“恐怖、先发制人的战争和单方面的政权更迭”的阴影下，以人文主义的理由呼吁对差异进行更大的容忍，真正欣赏所有文化的相互联系。这本革命性的传记将表明，“印度-波斯”琼斯在他的一生中试图摧毁狭隘的以欧洲为中心的刻板印象，正是提供了这一点。琼斯对印度-波斯语言和民族关系的深入研究，他对多元主义的智力投入，以及他对东西方融合的开明承诺，在一个“智力”被浪费在导弹上的世界里，仍然是一座灯塔。

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.