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Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794

As indicated on p.333, an earlier version of Chapter 9 was delivered to the Asiatic Society in February 2006 and subsequently published as ‘Pluralism Celebrated and Desecrated: A Mughal and British Imperial ‘Romantic’ Legacy’, The Journal of the Asiatic Society, 48: 2 (2006), 69-90. Updating political incidents were added, together with a hitherto unknown rubā’ī of Omar Khayyām I discovered in the Fales Library, and new materials concerning Hazrat Hujwīrī’s treatise, Aśoka’s Edicts and Buddhism, a letter of Augustus Brooke, a poem of John Horsford, works of Chandra Ghosh, Max Müller, and an Indian Mirror article by ‘a native writer’.

This critical biography involved extensive archival research in 34 Indian, British, European, and N. American libraries, museums, state and legal archives, and includes many unpublished poems and newly-discovered letters, revealing his intellectual investment in Maurya and Mughal pluralism and the syncretic co-existence of Hinduism and Islam. Study of this hyperactive and incredibly productive polymath entailed detailed research into an extensive range of disparate disciplines, empires, cultures, religions, literatures, and languages to encompass the many facets of Jones’s remarkable mind and demonstrate exactly how his work led to an Oriental renaissance in the West and cultural revolution in India.