[BITList] Thought you might like to see -- Oriental Jones in India

[John Feltham]

 From one of the Listers.....

Its a long read.



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Quoted From:


Reconsiderations

March 2009

Oriental Jones in India

by Jeremy Bernstein

On the life, letters & linguistic genius of William Jones (1746–94).


In the fall of 1988, I found myself in Calcutta for a few days. Put  
that way, it sounds as if I just wandered there, but in fact I was  
meeting a group that was going trekking in Bhutan and our flight left  
from Calcutta. I took advantage of the stopover to visit various  
monuments to the British Raj of which Calcutta had been the capital.  
One of the places I especially wanted to visit was the South Park  
Street Cemetery, whose memorial tombs are practically an encapsulated  
history of the Raj, although it is somewhat off the usual tourist  
route. It was opened in 1767. People like Charles Dickens’s second  
son, Walter Landor Dickens and William Thackeray’s father, Richmond,  
are buried there. Most of the people who are buried there died young,  
and if I had to list the cause of death I would write “India”—India  
was too much for many of them.

My immediate problem was how to find it. I decided that the only thing  
to do was to hire a taxi. There was one in front of the hotel and a  
brief conversation with the driver convinced me that he was an  
intelligent man with an excellent command of English. When I mentioned  
the South Park Cemetery, he had no idea what I was talking about; he  
thought that I wanted to visit Mother Teresa. It finally dawned on me  
that Hindus do not have cemeteries. The bodies are cremated and the  
remains deposited in the nearest river. I explained that I wanted to  
go to the place where English people go to worship their ancestors,  
and we headed at once for the cemetery. It was a lovely, tranquil  
place in which the chowkidar—the watchman—lived. It was raining—the  
monsoon—but he and the taxi driver guided me around. I had come to see  
the tomb of an extraordinary linguist and man of letters, William Jones.

The death of Jones, in 1794, was considered a communal tragedy and he  
is commemorated by a veritable monument. Jones’s father, another  
William, was a Welsh mathematics tutor. One of his jobs was to teach  
the mathematics of navigation on board a British man-of-war. He wrote  
a text on the subject and later a sort of general mathematics primer.  
In it he introduced the notation ¹—“pie”—for the ratio of the  
circumference to the diameter of a circle. It has been with us ever  
since. When Jones père died, Jones was three; he left enough of an  
estate so that Jones, his mother, and his sister were reasonably  
settled. Indeed, Jones was able to matriculate to Harrow. His athletic  
activities there were limited because of some childhood accidents, one  
of which seriously affected his vision, but he threw himself into  
academics. It was at Harrow where he first demonstrated the eidetic  
memory which helped him to become one of the greatest, if not the  
greatest, linguist of his age. The boys at Harrow decided that they  
wanted to do a performance of The Tempest but they could not find a  
copy of the play. Jones obligingly wrote the whole thing down for them  
from memory. Much later in his life Jones, who was always making lists  
of things he had done or needed to do, wrote out a list of his  
languages. It reads:

Eight languages studied critically: English, Latin, French, Italian,  
Greek, Arabic, Persian, Sanscrit [sic]. Eight studied less perfectly,  
but all intelligible with a dictionary. Spanish, Portuguese, German,  
Runick [This may refer to Old Norse, one of the Runic languages],  
Hebrew, Bengali, Hindi, Turkish. Twelve studied least perfectly, but  
all attainable: Tibetian [sic], Pali [an early Indian dialect in which  
the Buddhist canon is preserved], Phalavi [usually called Phelavi or  
Middle Persian], Deri [a Persian dialect spoken in Afghanistan],  
Russian, Syriac [Aramaic], Ethiopic, Coptic, Welsh, Swedish, Dutch,  
Chinese.[1]
In 1764, Jones joined University College in Oxford. A year later he  
accepted a position that changed his life. The Spencers of Althorp  
were a very wealthy aristocratic British family. The title “Earl  
Spencer” had just been created in 1765 and the eldest son of the earl  
had the courtesy title of Viscount Althorp. In 1765, the title was  
held by the seven-year-old George John Spencer. The Spencers were  
looking for a tutor for George John and a man named Jonathan Shipley  
(who would much later become Jones’s father-in-law) recommended him.  
Even though Jones had never met the Spencers, he was hired for the  
job. In addition to George John, there was his sister Georgiana—many  
children of both sexes were named after the king—who was a year  
younger. Jones taught Georgiana her “letters.” She grew into a very  
beautiful and accomplished woman whose unhappy, disordered marriage to  
the Duke of Devonshire dominated the gossip of the day. She gambled  
and lost fortunes and took part in politics. Her affair with Charles  
Grey, a future prime minister, produced a daughter. This ménage  
apparently inspired Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal.

Throughout his life, Jones exchanged letters with George John, who  
became one of his closest friends. They are some of the most beautiful  
and fascinating letters in the English language, one commentator going  
so far as to remark that they are the letters that Chesterfield should  
have sent to his son. After functioning as a tutor for a couple of  
years, Jones decided that he should continue to act in loco parentis  
and direct George John’s entire life. The Spencers vehemently  
objected, and it took some years before his relationship with them was  
restored. In the meanwhile he began to build a career as a linguist.

He started with a commission from the King of Denmark to translate  
from Persian. This led, in 1771, to his publication of A Grammar of  
the Persian Language which was modeled after Samuel Johnson’s  
dictionary. Persian was the official language of the East India Company 
—its contracts and treaties were written in it—so Jones thought he  
might get a commission from them. He sent a copy to Warren Hastings,  
the first Governor-General of India, but nothing came of if. In 1773,  
however, Jones was elected to Johnson’s Club, which met at the Turk’s  
Head Inn, as the youngest member. Boswell was elected four weeks  
later. A few years later Jones proposed George John as a member. In a  
letter he described the membership. Here is a partial accounting:

Burke, the pleasantest companion in the world, his eloquence all the  
kingdom knows. Fox, of great talents both natural and acquired.Gibbon,  
an elegant writer, not without wit in conversation. Garrick, whom all  
Europe knows. Sheridan, a sprightly young fellow with a fine comick  
genius, very little older than yourself. Johnson, the best scholar of  
his age. Reynolds: a great artist and fine writer on his art. Boswell  
of Corsica, a good natured odd fellow.
Each of the members had a sobriquet. Johnson was of course “Dictionary  
Johnson.” Jones was either “Oriental Jones” or “Persian  
Jones.” (George John joined the Club.)

Jones might have become an Oxford don, which would have suited his  
intellectual propensities, but, instead, he opted for law. For several  
years, he practiced by traveling the circuit—several hundred miles—on  
horseback. At one point, he made an unsuccessful run as the Whig  
representative from Oxford. Georgiana helped in his campaign. By this  
time Jones was already trying to get an appointment as a puisne judge  
in the Bengal Supreme Court of Judicature. This was a court whose  
judges were appointed by parliament with the approval of the king to  
preside over legal matters in British India. The pay was a staggering  
6,000 pounds a year. Jones figured he could live on 2,000 and, in a  
few years, save enough to return to Britain and retire in comfort, if  
not luxury. But the prospects of the judgeship kept waxing and waning  
with various changes of government.

At one point Jones even thought of emigrating to America. But, in  
1782, with a new change of government his chances improved, and on the  
basis of his prospects he proposed to Anna Maria Shipley. The proposal  
was accepted with the understanding that the marriage would have to  
wait until Jones actually became a judge. He felt that he could not  
support her properly on his lawyer’s earnings and would not take money  
from her family. Anna Maria wrote to her good friend Georgiana:

How can I describe to you half the Joy & happiness my heart feels in  
the idea of the affection & friendship you express for my Mr. J — but  
how should it be otherwise you who have known his merits so long & who  
have a heart that is form’d to love everything that is good and wise.  
He absolutely Idolizes [you].
One wonders if either she or Jones had any real idea of the disorder  
of Georgiana’s life.

In the beginning of March of 1783, Jones’s nomination for the  
judgeship was sent to the king, who approved it. Jones was knighted,  
and he could, at last, marry Anna Maria. The wedding was in April.  
Soon after, he and his bride began the six-month passage to India on  
the frigateCrocodile. Almost immediately, he began the practice of  
writing full accounts of his activities to George John. Since it took  
something like a full year to receive a response they served almost as  
annual reports. George John was now looking after Jones’s financial  
interests in Britain. It is interesting to note that, the long history  
of their friendship notwithstanding, Jones always addressed George  
John as “my lord.” One wonders if Jones ever called him by his first  
name.The first of the letters is from aboard ship. It reads, in part:

Lat. 43°. 37’. Long. 12°. 50’. I seize the first paper that I can  
find, my dear lord, to write my first letter from the Atlantick, and  
to promise you longer letters from remoter seas. We are at this  
instant sailing between cape Ortegal and a black spot marked on the  
charts as a rock, of which however we have seen nothing and may justly  
doubt the existence. The breeze is fresh and fair, but the sea  
unusually high; and the rolling of the ship impedes the swiftness of  
our sailing… . All circumstances considered, we have no reason to  
complain of our accommodations. The Crocodile is almost new, and,  
though small, an excellent sea boat: the captain intelligent and  
experienced, eager to oblige, desirous and capable of entertaining;  
the officers, men of agreeable manners and good sense. My daily  
studies are now, what they will be for six years to come, Persian and  
Law, and whatever relates to India; my recreation, chess; my exercise,  
walking on deck an hour before dinner; but my great delight is the  
sweet society and conversation of Anna Maria, whose health and spirits  
are really wonderful in a situation so new to her and by no means  
pleasing in itself. The motion of the ship obliges me to lay down my  
pen. Farewell, my dear lord … Adieu!
Shortly after arriving in Calcutta he writes:

14 Oct. 1783. My dear friend, I write a few lines this morning, merely  
because I have resolved to lose no opportunity of writing to you, and  
a packet, I hear, will sail hence to morrow. A detail of our voyage …  
must be the [subject] of letters written a few weeks hence, when I am  
a little settled in a house of my own, and a little master (as I am  
not at all now) of my own time. This only I may say in general: that  
we have gathered roses mixed with thorns, have had pleasures and  
pains, hours of amusement and hours of dullness, some few of sickness,  
and some minutes even of alarm. The situation of the house, where we  
now are, is beautiful: I am sitting near the bank of a fine river, on  
the opposite side of which are some elegant houses and gardens with  
trees of a fine verdure: ships of any size may come up to the town:  
numbers are now at anchor before me, and the sweet little Crocodile is  
riding almost under my window. The town is large and well peopled, yet  
airy and commodious; the houses are in general well built and some of  
them equal to palaces.
On their arrival in Calcutta, the Joneses first made the acquaintance  
of Warren Hastings, who had taken up his position as the first  
Governor-General of Bengal in 1773. Hastings had been forced, for  
financial reasons, to drop out of his public school, Westminster,  
where he had been a brilliant student. But he became a ferocious  
autodidact. India, for him, was not only a commercial opportunity but  
a vast terrain for study. The first British expedition to Tibet, on  
which he sent his young aide George Bogle, was typical. He saw a new  
avenue for trade and also a completely unknown field of study. Now  
here on his doorstep was dropped, in the person of Jones, one of the  
foremost intellects of his age. The two became friends. Here is a  
letter from Anna Maria to Georgiana:

Octr. 27 Yesterday we pass’d at Alipoor. Mrs. Hastings desir’d us to  
come to breakfast at 7 o’clock but I did not feel stout enough for  
that… . Mr. Hastings has two garden houses within a hundred yards of  
each other in a very pleasant lawn, as pretty as an entire flat can be  
— we found Zophani [Zoffany] drawing one of the elephants pictures &  
Mr. Hastings standing by him;— a magnificent palankeen was waiting to  
carry me to the other house, where Mrs. Hastings was sitting in her  
bed chamber in a very elegant eastern dress & a turban, she had been  
very ill, & is in so bad a state of health that she goes to England in  
Decr. as the last resource — we look’d over some drawings of views in  
India till dinner; we sat down 20 in one room which was so large &  
airy that tho’ we had a great dinner, I have not din’d so cool since I  
came here. Sr. Thoms. Mills sat next to me, & from his knowing every  
lady in England I had a very pleasant chat with him… . I like Mr.  
Hastings better & better every time I see him; he has great natural  
politeness & attention with much agreable knowledge & a thousand  
little anecdotes & stories which he relates vastly well — after dinner  
the whole party broke up, & I was shewn into an elegant apartment — a  
little dressing room with every possible convenience for washing &c.  
&c, a bed chamber with a silver bedstead & very fine muslin furniture  
where I slept for an hour — when we made our appearance again we saw  
three large elephants richly caparison’d, Mr. Hastings desir’d I would  
go with him upon one, Sr. Wm. & Captn. Williamson on another, Mr.  
Smolt & Zophani on the 3d.; thus mounted & escorted by a troop of  
horse & a little thousand of foot with chasse mouches set out & took  
an airing of 4 or 5 miles & found Mrs. Hastings & tea ready for us in  
the other house, where there was tea, chess, chat, & cards till supper  
at nine, soon after ten, we return’d home lighted by our six  
masaulgies, four carrying flambeaux & two large branches with night  
lights in each.
Jones, as was typical of him, had made a long list of things he  
intended to learn about. This included the history of chess. At age  
seventeen, Jones had written a poem, in Latin, about chess—“Caissa or  
the Game of Chess”—which one can find in most anthologies of chess  
literature. Curiously, one of the things he does not mention is the  
study of Sanskrit. He had, it seems, no intention of studying the  
language until his professional obligations more or less forced him  
into it. The supreme court heard cases not only involving British  
colonials but also Indians, who were governed by different laws. In  
particular, Hindus were governed by what was called “Gentoo law,”  
which was codified in Sanskrit. To deal with this the court employed  
pandits as interpreters.

What troubled Jones was that he could not be sure that the pandits  
were adding their own version of the laws, thereby skewing some of the  
cases. He decided that he needed to learn Sanskrit to make sure that  
this was not happening. After considerable difficulty, he managed to  
hire his own pandit to teach him at least an hour a day. And, being  
Jones, he acquired a mastery over the language that no foreigner had  
ever managed. By 1787, he could write to George John:

To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek  
literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the  
hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still  
worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo: suppose Greece to have been  
conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by  
the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by  
the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be  
one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his  
countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other  
Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country; substituting  
Sanscrit for Greek, the Brahmans, for the priests of Jupiter, and  
Valid, Vaasa, Caldas, for Homer, Plato, Pindar. Need I say what  
exquisite pleasure I receive from conversing easily with that class of  
men, who conversed with Pythagoras, Thales and Solon, but with this  
advantage over the Grecian travellers, that I have no need of an  
interpreter? Farewell!
There are two reasons for the fame Jones’s mastery of Sanskrit enjoys  
today. The first is his translations of some of the masterpieces of  
Sanskrit literature which had been entirely unknown in Europe—above  
all, The Recognition of Sakuntula, a seven-act play written by the  
fourth- or fifth-century Sanskrit poet and playwright Kalidasa. The  
play is a kind of fairy-tale based on the Sanskrit epic the  
Mahabharata. It was originally written in both high-caste Sanskrit and  
Prakrit—a vernacular spoken by common people. Jones translated from  
both. The translated play made a very considerable impact on  
Europeans, including Goethe. The second source of Jones’s fame comes  
from a single paragraph in his Third Annual Discourse to the Asiatic  
Society in Calcutta which he delivered on February 2, 1786. In this  
single paragraph, Jones founded the entire subject of modern  
historical linguistics.

As soon as Jones had taken root in Calcutta, he found a few like- 
minded colonials who were also interested in the culture of the Indian  
subcontinent and Asia in general. He created a place where they could  
meet and exchange views which he called the Asiatic Society. His first  
choice as president was Hastings, but Hastings was too busy so Jones  
became president. Some of the meetings had a handful of attendees and  
some nearly thirty. Jones gave a series of lectures which were  
published in a journal for which he edited and did most of the  
writing. In the Third Annual Discourse, the following paragraph  
appears with no commentary:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful  
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than theLatin,  
and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them  
a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of  
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong  
indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without  
believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps,  
no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so  
forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though  
blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the  
Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
Although there was already some discussion here and there in the  
literature about common features of seemingly unrelated languages, no  
one had ever suggested that there was a “family” of languages that had  
sprung from a common source that might no longer exist—a lost proto- 
language. Jones does not spell out his evidence in this paragraph nor  
does he say why he thinks the structure of Sanskrit is more “perfect”  
than that of Greek, and I have not found anything pertaining to these  
matters in his letters—at least the ones that I have read. But here  
are a few things he might have had in mind. In both Sanskrit and Greek  
there is a special form for two of anything as opposed to one or  
three. Speaking of numbers, the Sanskrit for three is “tri” and for  
six is “sas.” The number 100 is an especially interesting case. In  
Sanskrit it is “satam.” Here is what it is in a few of the so-called  
“satam langauges”:

Welsh: cant; Italic: centum; Baltic: simtas; Bulgarian: sto; Avestan:  
(Old Iranian) sata.
The Greek is hekaton which requires some discussion of Sanskrit  
pronunciation, and to get to our “hundred” requires an application of  
the laws of phonetic change. But when we compare this to the south  
Indian language Tamil where the word is nooru, it is clear that we are  
in another linguistic space. If we think of the north Indian languages  
as an advancing tide, it is clear that the tide stopped somewhere in  
the middle of India.

Jones did not give a name or homeland to his ur language. We call it  
“proto-Indo-European”—PIE—and it is fairly recently that the body of  
evidence, archeological and otherwise, seems to fix the homeland at  
the steppes—the grass prairies in the general region of the Black Sea.  
The PIE people who flourished, it seems, in the third and fourth  
millennia BC were herders who rode horses and had chariots and knew  
how to use copper. Why they migrated from their homeland with their  
horses and language we do not know for sure. This is a huge subject  
with a vast literature. A very nice summary is given in The Horse, the  
Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony. I must leave it here.

Hastings left India in February of 1785. He was under a cloud and he  
returned to an impeachment trial at which he was ultimately acquitted.  
Burke was his principle prosecutor, and, when Jones found out, he  
ended his friendship with Burke. The Joneses had a very happy if  
childless marriage. At one point, Anna Maria wrote to Georgiana about  
babies, “You will have just one dozen & a half to make amends for  
starting it so late.—I shall never set about it at all.” They led a  
very tempered life—they went to bed early and avoided much of the  
social whirl of Calcutta. Jones read to her for an hour every evening.  
He tried to walk at least five miles a day in the early morning. But  
she was never entirely well, and he was frequently sick.

Jones was determined to spend ten years in India so that he could  
retire with at least 30,000 pounds and a life of independence. But by  
November of 1783, it was clear that Anna Maria had to go back to  
England for her survival. Jones was to follow as soon as he could. But  
on April 27, 1794, after a brief illness, Jones died at the age of  
forty-seven. The people in the colony regarded this as a disastrous  
loss. Their grief resulted in the large memorial tomb that I found in  
the South Park Cemetery. It must have taken something like six months  
for the news to have gotten back to Anna Maria. What she must have  
felt can only be imagined. Georgiana, who had been taught her  
“letters” by Jones wrote a poem:


Admir’d and valued in a distant land,
His gentle manners all affection won:
The prostrate Hindu own’d his fostering hand,
And Science mark’d him for her fav’rite son.

Regret and praise the general voice bestows,
And public sorrows with domestic blend;
But deeper yet must be the grief of those,
Who, while the sage they honor’d, lov’d the friend.
Notes

Unless otherwise indicated, the Jones quotations, including this one,  
are taken from an unpublished annotated collection of Jones’s letters  
and related matters which I have done in collaboration with the  
linguist Rosane Rocher.

====================


ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.




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