Sir William Jones (1746–94), poet, philologist, polymath, polyglot, and acknowledged legislator was the foremost Orientalist of his generation and one of the greatest intellectual navigators of all time. He re–drew the map of European thought. ‘Orientalist’ Jones was an extraordinary man and an intensely colourful figure. At the age of twenty–six, Jones was elected to Dr Johnson’s Literary Club, on terms of intimacy with the metropolitan luminaries of the day. The names of his friends in Britain and India presents a roll–call of late eighteenth–century glitterati: Johnson, Hester Thrale, Eliza ... More

Sir William Jones (1746–94), poet, philologist, polymath, polyglot, and acknowledged legislator was the foremost Orientalist of his generation and one of the greatest intellectual navigators of all time. He re–drew the map of European thought. ‘Orientalist’ Jones was an extraordinary man and an intensely colourful figure. At the age of twenty–six, Jones was elected to Dr Johnson’s Literary Club, on terms of intimacy with the metropolitan luminaries of the day. The names of his friends in Britain and India presents a roll–call of late eighteenth–century glitterati: Johnson, Hester Thrale, Elizabeth Craven, Boswell, Reynolds, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, Elizabeth Vesey, Elizabeth Montagu, Franklin, Price, Priestley, Burke, Hastings, Zoffany, Gibbon, Goldsmith, Percy, Sheridan, Fox, Pitt, Wilkes, Warton, Garrick, etc.. In Bengal his Sanskrit researches marked the beginning of Indo–European comparative grammar, and modern comparative–historical linguistics, of Indology, and the disciplines of comparative literature, philology, mythology, and law. He did more than any other writer to destroy Eurocentric prejudice, reshaping Western perceptions of India and the Orient. Jones’s remarkable career embodies a reverse transculturation in suggesting that enlightened tolerance was Asia’s gift to Europe. His commitment to the translation of culture, a multiculturalism fascinated as much by similitude as difference, profoundly influenced European and British Romanticism, offering the West disconcerting new relationships and disorienting orientations. Jones’s translation of Śakuntalā (1789) accomplished Oriental renaissance in the West and cultural revolution in India. William Jones is remembered with great affection throughout the subcontinent as a man who facilitated India’s cultural assimilation into the modern world, helping to build India’s future on the immensity, sophistication, and pluralism of its past.