India Discovered

The Recovery of a Lost Civilization

John Keay

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780007399642
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Two hundred years ago, India was seen as a place with little history and less culture.Today it is revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity. How this extraordinary change in perception came about is the subject of this fascinating book.

The story, here reconstructed for the first time, is one of painstaking scholarship primed by a succession of sensational discoveries. The excitement of unearthing a city twice as old as Rome, the realization that the Buddha was not a god but a historical figure, the glories of a literature as rich as anything known in Europe, the drama of encountering a veritable Sistine chapel deep in the jungle, and the sheer delight of categorizing ‘the most glorious galaxy of monuments in the world’ fell, for the most part, to men who were officials of the British Raj. Their response to the unfamiliar – the explicitly sexual statuary, the incomprehensible scripts, the enigmatic architecture – and the revelations which resulted, revolutionized ideas not just about India but about civilization as a white man’s prerogative.

A companion volume by the author of the highly praised India: A History and The Great Arc.

CHAPTER ONE
This Wonderful Country

On 1 September 1783 the Crocodile, five months out of Portsmouth, struck sail and anchored off Madras. On board Sir William and Lady Jones eyed with concern the wall of spray where the rollers of the Indian Ocean crashed onto the offshore reefs. With the other passengers – the ladies in voluminous, rustling gowns and the men all cocked hats and swords, silk stockings and buckled shoes – they trooped into wooden cages and were lowered over the side. Below, an armada of canoes and catamarans manoeuvred for custom; duckings were commonplace, drownings not unusual.

The first glimpse of India, in the shape of the boatmen, was also less than reassuring. They ‘wear no sort of covering but a small piece of rag, not entirely hiding their members’, wrote William Hickey, ‘a very awkward exhibition this for modest girls on their first arrival.’ The brown bodies glistened with the spray and rippled with each stroke of the paddle. And – an early lesson in the nature of British rule in India—these stalwarts had the fine ladies and gentlemen entirely in their power: safely through the foaming breakers, each passenger had to embrace one of those hard brown torsoes for a piggyback through the shallows.

Arriving in Madras was not a dignified business. But on the beach, a parade of well-dressed gentlemen and handsome carriages awaited the new arrivals. Behind, the city shone in the sunshine, white and neoclassical amidst the waving palms, ‘rather resembling the images that float in the imagination after reading The Arabian Nights’. This at last was India, home for months or years to come, a place where a gentleman could live like a lord and simultaneously amass a fortune.

Sir William Jones was no exception. His first priority was to attain financial independence, or to be precise, a clear £30,000. On the strength of his appointment to the post of Supreme Court judge in Calcutta, he had been knighted and had married. His salary, he calculated, would enable him and Anna Maria to save the £30,000 within six years. Then back to England, to his books and his friends.

But he was already more predisposed towards the East than most new arrivals. His professional qualifications as a jurist were unique. Edward Gibbon, then writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described Jones as ‘the only lawyer equally conversant with the year-books of Westminster, the commentaries of Ulpian, the Attic pleadings of Isaeus, and the sentences of Arabian and Persian cadhis [judges]’. On board the Crocodile, Jones had continued his studies in Persian law. He needed to make a small fortune, but he also expected to administer justice to the people of Bengal according to their own laws, and indeed, to study and clarify these.

Elsewhere Gibbon described Jones as more than a lawyer; he was ‘a genius’. And it was for his other attainments, considerable by any standards, spectacular by those of British India, that he was already best known. The son of an eminent mathematician, he was a keen student of mathematics, astronomy and the sciences – and yet first achieved distinction as a classical scholar. Greek and Latin literature were his passions; he modelled his letters on Cicero, his speeches on Demosthenes, and spattered both with classical allusions. At Oxford he turned to modern languages and then Persian and Arabic. His first published works were typical: a Persian grammar and a translation from Persian into French. He was also a much acclaimed poet, was intensely interested in music, and had the bottomless memory so vital to any polymath; aged eleven, it is said, he amazed his schoolfellows by supplying them with the entire text of The Tempest out of his head.

But oriental literature was now his leading interest. Whilst in India he intended to collect manuscripts; he was even prepared to invest some of the £30,000 in them. As the Crocodile had sped across the Arabian Sea, with India ahead and Persia to port, he had been overcome with a flush of intense excitement. Culturally speaking, what a vast and unexplored field lay about him; what untold riches were hidden there; and what a glorious achievement if he could lead men in their systematic discovery.

After a couple of days in Madras, the Joneses were back on board ‘the sweet little Crocodile’ and heading for Calcutta. Madras, once the pride of the British settlements in India, had already been eclipsed. Calcutta, founded less than 100 years before, was now the great attraction. Through Clive’s treaty with the Moghul emperor in 1765, the whole of Bengal, stretching from Benares to Burma, had been ceded to the East India Company. Commercial priorities were giving way to administrative and fiscal necessities. Casually, precariously, but inexorably, British dominion in India was being created. Jones himself described Bengal as ‘this wonderful country which fortune has thrown into Britain’s lap while she was asleep’. Administrative responsibility meant collecting revenue, developing communications, regulating trade and administering justice; hence the judiciary and the Supreme Court, not to mention the network of civil and military officials. From being a trading settlement for seventy years, Calcutta had suddenly become a colonial metropolis.

It is hard now to imagine the city as the gay and elegant capital of the East. Few places can have gained quite such an opposite reputation in the space of a couple of centuries – like Regency Bath turning into the Bronx. Contemporary paintings by the likes of Thomas Daniell show spacious Palladian mansions, wide thoroughfares and stately gardens bordered by the blue waters of the Hughli river – no crowds, no dust; it even looks cooler. As the Crocodile sailed upriver the Joneses passed their future home on Garden Reach – a nine-mile stretch of ‘elegant mansions’. ‘They are all white, their roofs invariably flat and surrounded by colonnades, and their fronts relieved by lofty columns supporting deep verandahs.’ Each, according to a gossipy contemporary, ‘surrounded by groves and lawns, which descend to the water’s edge, and present a constant succession of whatever can delight the eye or bespeak wealth and elegance in the owners’. Then came the fort, also on the eastern bank and ‘so well kept and everything in such excellent order that it is quite a curiosity to see it – all the slopes, banks and ramparts are covered with the richest verdure, which completes the enchantment of the scene’. Finally, the city itself, flanking the fort with government offices and the homes of the military. ‘As you come up past Fort William and the Esplanade, it has a beautiful appearance. Esplanade Row, as it is called, seems to be composed of palaces.’ Indeed, Calcutta was known as ‘the City of Palaces’.

It was also, in Clive’s view, ‘one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond concepcion [sic]’. Fortunes, so easily made, were as easily lost at the whist table. The day was dominated by dinner at about 2 p.m. – ‘a soup, roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread and excellent Madeira’, and that was assuming there were no guests. After dinner the gentleman of the house downed his three bottles of claret and retired to bed until it was time for the evening promenade, supper and a ball, or another round of drinking. Pert little Emma Wrangham and the ravishing Madame Grand provided the scandals; for those too sozzled or syphilitic to stand their pace, there were also legions of ‘sooty bibis’ (prostitutes). Factional quarrels were a way of life at every level. It was only three years since Warren Hastings, the Governor-General, had fought his famous duel with Sir Philip Francis, a senior member of the Governing Council. Yet it was all intensely exciting, like a combination of Paris in the naughty nineties and the Klondike.

The other surprising thing about this city that was to be Jones’s home for the next eleven years was its insularity. Although it was the headquarters of a sizeable chunk of India, Calcutta was less Indian even than Madras or the struggling little colony at Bombay. Clive had foreseen the possibilities of an Indian empire and Warren Hastings was aware that with government there came profound responsibilities for the Indian people. Yet there was no general awareness of such things. More typical was the attitude of Sir Philip Francis who never stirred more than a mile or two outside the city. The only British empire known to most was the one in North America that had just been lost. In India the settlement mentality prevailed. What went on in the Mofussil outside Calcutta was a mystery; what went on amongst the country powers beyond was an irrelevance. Strictly speaking, the East India Company’s administration of Bengal was just another favour granted by the Moghul emperor in Delhi and not so very different from the commercial concessions won in the previous century. ‘Up-country disturbances’ were deplorable if they upset the flow of trade; but not for another twenty years would the British feel constrained to do anything about them.

William Hodges, the artist, who was touring India when Jones arrived, thought it ‘a matter of surprise that of a country so closely allied to us so little should be known. Of the face of the country, of its arts and crafts, little has yet been said.’ After several unsuccessful attempts, Hodges managed to get as far inland as Agra and Gwalior, reminding his contemporaries of the glories of the Taj Majal and of Gwalior’s massive hill fortress, ‘the Gibraltar of the East’. They made little impression on the socialites of Calcutta. The price of indigo, Miss Wrangham’s engagement, and the shocking case of William Hunter and the three mutilated maidens were more to their taste.

In this philistine and grasping society Sir William Jones could hardly be other than a conspicuous exception. In London he had been accused of showing an ill-tempered reticence in company, and though he quite reasonably objected, it was to the ill-temper rather than the reticence. As befitted a man of letters, he was reserved in the company of others unless they were his intellectual equals – and there would be precious few of these in Calcutta. Nor had he any time for factions and politics. An unhappy experience as prospective MP for Oxford, plus the drudgery of having had to promote his career by seeking favours, had embittered him. Finally, he was now married and very happily so. Anna Maria, beautiful, accomplished and devoted, was his great delight. Her health would be his only real anxiety in India, and her companionship was one of the major factors in the confidence with which he set about his work. In a society so rife with scandal, it was no small achievement to remain forever untouched by it. Only one other relationship in India could rival theirs – that between another Anna Maria and her husband, Warren Hastings.

Whatever had been achieved in the way of Indian studies before Jones was due to Hastings. The first Governor-General of India (Clive had been Governor of Bengal only), he was also the greatest. Faced with the challenge of governing several million Indians, he conceived the novel and momentous idea of trying to do so with their approbation. Little was yet understood of their customs, whether Muslim or Hindu, and few thought much of their character. ‘As degenerate, crafty, wicked and superstitious a people as any race in the known world,’ thought a contemporary, adding ‘if not more so.’ Hastings differed. He spoke Urdu, Bengali and some Persian; he could understand them and in turn respected them. If British rule in India was to prosper and to last, British administrators must themselves become partly Indianized. They must learn the languages, study the customs. The government must work within existing institutions, not try to impose a whole new set of Western ones. There must be an intellectual exchange, not a walkover; and if there were flagrant abuses in Indian society they must be reformed from within, not proscribed from without. Hastings, according to an eminent historian, ‘loved the people of India and respected them to a degree no other British ruler has ever equalled’.

If this ambitious scheme was to be realized, the first essential was that all would-be administrators should be able to speak the language. Persian was the language of diplomacy and was already widely used in government circles. Bengali, the local vernacular, was less known; but by the time Jones arrived, the first Bengali grammar, written by Nathaniel Halhed, an old Oxford friend of Jones, and printed by Charles Wilkins, was already in circulation. Bengali was thus the first of the Indian languages to be made available to scholars; and Wilkins, who cast the type with his own hand, was the first to print in the vernacular in India. The repercussions of this achievement would be enormous, not only for the British for whom the work was intended, but for Indian letters.

One other work of importance had been completed and another was already in manuscript. To enable lawyers to conduct their cases in the native courts, Halhed had followed his grammar with a Code of Gentoo [i.e. Hindu] Laws. This was a digest assembled by Brahmins working under his supervision. Jones would find it inadequate as a legal code, but it was a step in the direction Hastings wanted the whole administration to take. The other work was potentially much more exciting. Wilkins, having established his Bengali press, won the confidence of the local Brahmins and, with their help, started to learn Sanskrit.

Sanskrit is the sacred language of the Hindus. Its origins were then unknown and, as a spoken language, it was as dead as ancient Greek. But it was the medium in which the earliest religious compositions of the Aryan settlers in India had been expressed; and in the jealous possession of the priestly Brahmin caste, it had been preserved and augmented for centuries. It thus seemed to be the key to the discovery of ancient India: whatever there might be of literary, historical and scientific merit in the pre-Islamic culture of India was composed in Sanskrit or one of its later derivations.

The first Europeans to gain any knowledge of the language were probably Portuguese priests in the sixteenth century. To strengthen their hand in religious disputations with the Brahmins, at least two of the fathers had penetrated its secrets, though without showing any appreciation of its literary wealth. The first Englishmen to show any interest in such matters were equally blind. ‘There is little learning among them [the Hindus],’ wrote a eighteenth-century traveller, ‘a reason whereof may be their penury of books which are but few and they manuscripts.’ He was right about the books. There were only manuscripts and they too were carefully guarded. But he overlooked the oral tradition. As every Sanskrit scholar would discover, finding the right pandit (teacher) to interpret them was every bit as important as possessing the manuscripts.

All we know about Wilkins’s pioneering efforts in Sanskrit is that by the time Jones arrived on the scene he had almost completed the first translation of a Sanskrit work into English. He had chosen the Bhagavad Gita, a long extract from that longest of epics, the Mahabharata. The Gita was the best loved devotional work in India and its publication was to cause a sensation. But first Wilkins sent the work to his patron, Warren Hastings. Would the Governor-General recommend that the East India Company finance its publication?

I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality [wrote Hastings], of a sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental Doctrines… I should not fear to place, in opposition to the best French versions of the most admired passages of the Iliad or Odyssey, or of the first and sixth books of our own Milton … the English translation of the Mahabharata.

Hastings was overwhelmed. ‘Not very long since, the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life.’ Now their civilization was being revealed in this masterpiece from an age ‘preceding even the first efforts of civilization in our own quarter of the globe’. For the benefit of the Company’s hard-headed directors, he pointed out that the publication could produce only gratitude from their Indian subjects and greater understanding from their officers. And he ended with a prophetic and resounding pronouncement on the whole body of Indian writings. ‘These will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.’

It was as if he was already aware that, however great and lasting the British raj, the discoveries of the orientalists would transcend it. Buried in antiquity there lay the structure of a remarkable civilization; unearthed and reconstructed, it could become the noblest of all monuments to the British period in India.

For this task no man was better qualified than the new Supreme Court judge. Jones combined the broad, bold vision of Hastings with the incisive intellect of Wilkins. In addition, his personality and his enthusiasm for the task had a magnetic quality. Coming straight from England, he was above the pettiness and hedonism of Anglo-Indian life. His stature lent a new respectability to those who took Indian culture seriously. Hastings could encourage others, but Jones had the rare gift of inspiring them.

Before he had even found a Calcutta home, he got in touch with Hastings’s protégés. Wilkins and the rest had been working each in his own vacuum. They were flattered. On 15 January 1784, less than sixteen weeks after his arrival, Jones invited thirty kindred and influential spirits to the High Court jury room.

The proceedings were opened by Sir William Jones who delivered a learned and very suggestive discourse on the Institution of a Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia. The address was enthusiastically received, and a resolution was come to establishing the Society under the name of the Asiatic Society.

Supposedly modelled on the Royal Society, the Asiatic Society owed everything to Jones and was really closer to Dr Johnson’s celebrated club, of which Jones had been a member. It was highly informal; there were no rules and the only qualification for membership was a voluntarily-expressed ‘love of knowledge’. After Jones, much of this informality would be changed; but his other stipulation remained. The field of enquiry was to be all-embracing. ‘You will investigate whatever is rare in the stupendous fabric of nature, will correct the geography of Asia, … will trace the annals and traditions of those nations who have peopled or desolated it; you will examine their methods in arithmetic and geometry, in trigonometry, mensuration, mechanics, optics, astronomy, and general physics; … in morality, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; in medicine … anatomy and chemistry. To this you will add researches into their agriculture, manufacture and trade … music, architecture and poetry...If now it be asked what are the intended objects of our enquiries within these spacious limits, we answer Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other.’

To draw up such a comprehensive scheme was an achievement in itself. But Jones was also the only man of his generation who could himself make a distinguished contribution in all these fields. During his ten years as president he stamped the Society with his own unique brand of universality. His contributions included papers on Indian music, on a cure for elephantiasis, on Chinese literature, on the scaly anteater, on the course of the Nile, on Indian chronology, on the Indian zodiac, on the Indian origin of chess, on a new species of haw-finch, on Indian botany, on spikenard, on mystical poetry and on the slow-paced lemur – and all this in addition to his more seminal studies of Hinduism, Indian history and the language and literature of Sanskrit which were emb...