Jones, Sir William

(1746–1794) Founder of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal and one of the fathers
of modern Indology. Jones came to
Calcutta from England in 1783 as a
Supreme Court judge during the governorship of Warren Hastings, considered
one of the founders of the British
Empire in India. He was employed by
the East India Company, who, in its pursuit of trade and profit, acquired political power over regions of India. Jones
immediately applied himself to the
study of Sanskrit, in part to discover the
particulars of traditional Hindu law,
since the East India Company’s general
policy was to allow different religious
communities to be governed by their
own traditional laws. Jones was a linguistic genius who had mastered the
current and classical European languages, as well as Persian. He immediately recognized Sanskrit as a distant
relative of Greek and Latin, and through
his influence the serious study of
Sanskrit texts began. From a legal perspective, his most important work was a
translation of the laws of Manu (Manu
Smrti). This was one of the most important texts in the dharma literature and
prescribed ideal rules and regulations
for all sorts of human conduct. This
322
Jnaneshvari
translation was intended to give the
British some idea of classical Hindu
law, but they failed to realize that
this text was composed not as a legal
manual but as a guide to religious
life. Jones died at age forty-eight from
an inflammation of the liver. His translation was published posthumously.