Sir William Jones

Sir William Jones (1746-1794), English jurist and linguist, considered the father of Asian studies in Britain. Born in London, Jones early demonstrated an aptitude for learning languages. He quickly outstripped his teachers at Harrow School and then at the University of Oxford in Latin, Greek, and French, writing each language in fluent and graceful verse as well as prose. Jones learned to speak Arabic from a native speaker; by himself he acquired an excellent command of Persian and Italian, plus a good reading knowledge of Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and other languages. He translated odes of the Persian poet Hafiz into French verse and published several treatises in French, English, and Latin on Middle Eastern poetry, chiefly Arabic and Persian. In 1772 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and in 1773 became a member of Samuel Johnson's Literary Club, whose members included the best thinkers of the day. At age 27 Jones was England's leading Asian scholar.

The need for a salaried profession led Jones to study law; in 1774 he became a member of the bar at the Inns of Court in London. His most famous legal publication is An Essay on the Law of Bailments (1781), which has often been reprinted and is still considered a minor legal classic.

In 1778 Jones became a candidate for a vacant judgeship in the British high court in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. For several years his application for the judgeship was unsuccessful because of his outspoken opposition to the war being waged against the American colonies (the American War of Independence). Jones also spoke against slavery and other social ills; he was regarded as an advanced and liberal thinker for his time. In March 1783 a new, more liberal ministry gave him the judgeship, along with a knighthood, and in April Jones and his wife set sail for India.

In January 1784 Jones founded the Bengal Asiatic Society, of which he was president until his death. He initiated its research journal, Asiatic Researches, in 1788 and wrote a large part of the contents of the first four volumes himself.

In 1785 Jones began to study Sanskrit. In a presidential address to the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1786, he declared that Sanskrit showed to Greek and Latin “a stronger affinity, both in the roots ... and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer (linguist) could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” Jones also suggested, correctly, that Gothic, Celtic, and Persian languages belonged to the same linguistic family, which linguists now call Indo-European. Earlier writers had noted resemblances between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, but Jones was the first to see the true nature of the relationships and the necessity for assuming descent from a lost common language; this is the basic hypothesis of modern comparative linguistics. See also Linguistics.

Jones was the first to translate in 1789 the great Indian drama Shakuntala, which was written by Kalidasa, a 5th-century Indian dramatist and court poet. His English version quickly became popular in Europe and was retranslated into several European languages, including German. Jones also translated other Sanskrit works. The most ambitious and successful translation was his Ordinances of Manu (1794); it remained the standard European version of this important Sanskrit law book for almost 100 years.

Jones pioneered in many fields of Indic learning, publishing studies on Indian music, chess, botany, and chronology (with astronomy and the calendar). His many interests led him into still other aspects of Indian culture, including philosophy and religion, but his publications on these topics were less successful and are now forgotten. Jones is remembered, however, for the large volume of Indic scholarship that he accomplished in the less than nine years between his first acquaintance with Sanskrit and his death in Calcutta in 1794.