Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society: Colonial Scholarship at the Threshold of Modernity
Most students who encounter Sir William Jones today do so as a character in Edward Said’s Orientalism: the founding Orientalist, codifier of “the Orient” for European power, exemplary of a knowledge–power nexus in which to learn was also to rule. That image is not false, but it is partial. More recent work in global intellectual history and the history of religion has revealed a far more heterodox, syncretic, and internally divided figure: a Rational‑Dissenting Christian and would‑be restorer of an original, universal monotheism, a comparative idealist fascinated by Advaita Vedānta and Sufi mysticism, and an indispensable ancestor of both Indian religious reform and Hindu nationalism. This section reads Jones as a palimpsest: a colonial judge and organizer of knowledge, a religious Enlightenment “ancient theologian,” and a participant in longer Indian intellectual genealogies that his own categories helped to shape and that later generations radically rewrote.
In 1783, William Jones—already known in Britain as a classicist, jurist and polyglot—arrived in Calcutta to serve as a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Bengal. Within months he founded the Asiatick Society (1784), an institutional hinge between Company administration and learned inquiry, and in his Third Anniversary Discourse (1786) he famously argued that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and other languages were related, postulating a common linguistic ancestor that later philologists would call “Proto‑Indo‑European.” He set about learning Sanskrit with pandit teachers in Nadiya and Calcutta, at first to compile a Digest of Hindu Law that would allow British courts to apply “Hindoo” norms without being wholly dependent on oral testimony, and soon out of genuine intellectual fascination. At the same time, he served as a senior judge in a colonial court exercising capital jurisdiction over Indians and Europeans alike, drafted legal opinions that helped consolidate British authority, and wrote anniversary discourses that explicitly tied his historical, philological, and comparative work to the defense of biblical revelation.
The canonical Saidian picture isolates one layer of this life: Jones as the Orientalist whose “irresistible impulse” is always “to codify, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient to ‘a complete digest’ of laws, figures, customs, and works,” and whose knowledge production is inseparable from Company rule. Said’s epigram captures something real about Jones’s institutional position and about the function of the Asiatic Society as an arm of colonial knowledge. Yet when read alongside Jones’s own letters, discourses, translations, and devotional writings, and through the lenses of Jessica Patterson’s work on Religion, Enlightenment and Empire, Urs App’s reconstruction of his “ancient theology,” Christopher Hutton’s analysis of his biblical hermeneutics, and Michael Franklin’s study of his dissenting networks, this one‑dimensional Jones begins to dissolve into a more complex, speckled figure.
Tier‑2 Commitments: Mosaic Chronology, Ancient Theology, and Rational Dissent
Jones’s metaphysical and religious commitments were neither simply “secular Enlightenment” nor straightforward Anglican orthodoxy. They form a dense, internally complex Tier‑2 mosaic.
First, he was a historical biblical literalist about Genesis 1–11, but of a specific, symbolical sort. In one often‑cited passage he insists that “either the first eleven chapters of Genesis, all due allowances being made for a figurative Eastern style, are true, or the whole fabrick of our national religion is false,” and goes on to say that the Mosaic narrative, “in the symbolical mode of writing adopted by the eastern sages,” is “more than human in its origin, and consequently true in every substantial part of it, though possibly expressed in figurative language.” For him, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are an inspired historical preface: the only reliable bridge between the antediluvian world and human history as we know it. That conviction underwrites what Thomas Trautmann called his “Mosaic ethnology”: a picture in which all humanity descends from Noah’s sons, dispersing from an Iranian cradle after a universal flood, with linguistic divergence tracking post‑Babel migrations.
Second, however, the religious content he sought to defend was not narrowly Mosaic or Anglican, but what Renaissance and early modern thinkers called prisca theologia, “ancient theology.” App shows that Jones, like Newton, Bryant, and Ramsay, believed that God had originally taught a pure monotheism to Adam, that this religion was transmitted via Noah, and that traces of it survive in many traditions: in the Hebrew Bible, to be sure, but also in Veda and Upanishads, Sufi treatises, Neoplatonism and Greek myth. Hutton’s close reading of Jones’s later essays supports this: Jones insists that the Hebrew scriptures, as historical documents, have “no higher authority than any other work of equal antiquity,” and that what marks them off is the fulfilled prophetic chain from Isaiah to Christ, not an exclusive monopoly on primal truth. Moses matters above all as inspired historian and guardian of the record, not as sole inventor of true religion.
Third, Patterson situates Jones in the orbit of Richard Price and the London Rational Dissent milieu. In letters he praises Price’s Sermons on the Christian Doctrine and says he feels himself “confirmed in the opinions” he had long formed from reading Scripture; Patterson and Franklin read this as evidence of proto‑Unitarian, anti‑Trinitarian views, closer to Price’s Arian Christianity than to Anglican orthodoxy. Hutton notes that Jones could write, quite casually, that “many pious Christians deny that the doctrine of the Trinity is to be found in the Gospel,” and that he regarded the Hindu doctrine of transmigration as “incomparably more rational” than the idea of eternal punishment in hell. Such remarks mark him as a religious radical by late‑eighteenth‑century English standards.
Together, these elements yield a Tier‑2 configuration that is neither secular nor conventionally orthodox: Mosaic chronology and Noachic ethnology as the non‑negotiable historical scaffold; an ancient Adamic–Noachic monotheism as the real doctrinal core; a Rational‑Dissenting Christology that treats Jesus as uniquely authoritative fulfiller of prophecy rather than a consubstantial person of a Trinity; and a comparativist appetite for finding convergences between this primal religion and the “sublime” insights of Indian, Persian, and Greek traditions.
Advaita, Sufi Mysticism, and Idealist Metaphysics
Within this framework, Jones’s engagement with Hindu and Sufi metaphysics was not a superficial curiosity but a serious attempt to recognize traces of ancient theology outside the Abrahamic fold. Patterson shows how he encountered Advaita Vedānta primarily through Persianate texts such as the Jūg Bāsisht (a version of the Laghu‑Yoga‑Vāsiṣṭha) and Dara Shikoh’s Oupnek’hat, where non‑dual Vedānta is blended with Sufi mysticism. In essays like “On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus” and “On the Philosophy of the Asiaticks,” and in his poem “Hymn to Náráyena,” Jones dwells on the concept of māyā—the illusoriness of the phenomenal world and the priority of the divine absolute—as a kind of “Platonick metaphysicks” and as a pious antidote to modern materialism.
Hutton’s 2025 chapter crystallizes this idealist strand. Jones can write, in explicitly metaphysical terms, that “nothing has a pure absolute existence but mind or spirit; that material substances, as the ignorant call them, are no more than gay pictures presented continually to our minds by the sempiternal Artist,” and that the spiritual danger lies in “attachment to such phantoms,” rather than exclusive attachment to God “who truly exists in us, as we exist solely in him.” This is remarkably close to Berkeleyan immaterialism and to certain Advaitin formulations, and goes a long way toward explaining his enthusiasm for both Vedānta and Sufi mystical poetry.
Jones was also drawn to bhakti and Vaiṣṇava devotion, which he praised as embodying the “purest devotion” and used as poetic and theological sources in his own work. In this sense, the “ancient theology” he is trying to recover is not a thin philosophical monotheism alone, but a blend of devotional and metaphysical elements he finds distributed across traditions: Old Testament prophecy, Christ’s life, Sufi annihilation in God, Advaita’s non‑dualism, and Vaiṣṇava bhakti all appear as partial survivals of a primal monotheistic wisdom deformed by priestcraft and superstition over time.
Manu, Adam, Noah, and Mosaic Ethnology
Jones’s investment in the Manusmṛti and in Brahminical legal learning is best understood against this backdrop. As a judge, he needed a more predictable and text‑based access to “Hindu law” than live testimony could provide; as an ancient theologian, he saw in Manu a figure who might connect Indian legal and cosmogonic myths to the Adamic and Noachic genealogy of Genesis.
In his preface to The Ordinances of Menu (1794), Jones describes the text as a venerable digest of Hindu law and speculates that the first Manu “could be no other person than the progenitor of mankind, to whom Jews, Christians, and Muselmáns unite in giving the name of Adam.” Elsewhere he raises, in Hutton’s paraphrase, whether “the word Adam be derived from ádim, which in Sanscrit means the first, or menu from nuh, the true name of the Patriarch [Noah],” and asks whether “the two Menu’s can mean any other person than the great progenitor, and the restorer, of our species.” He connects Indian mythology not just to biblical figures but also to Greek exemplars like Minos and Saturn, suggesting that the Indian legislator may be the same primal lawgiver honored under different names in other cultures.
For Jones, then, Manusmṛti is not just a convenient colonial code. It is evidence that an “immemorial connection” has subsisted among “the several nations” who adopted similar cosmogonies and legal myths, and thus a witness to the “general union or affinity between the most distinguished inhabitants of the primitive world, at the time when they deviated … from the rational adoration of the true god.” The prestige he accords Manu stems from this dual function: practical legal utility in Bengal’s courts and perceived doctrinal–genealogical significance within an Adam–Noah ancient‑theology schema.
Patterson is right, therefore, to resist readings that make Jones’s embrace of Manu simply a cynical act of divide‑and‑rule. He almost certainly took Manu’s authority as historical and religiously serious, saw himself as recovering a “lost” law from corrupt priestly accretions, and believed that aligning British judicial practice with these ancient ordinances would both please Hindu elites and stabilize Company rule. At the same time, the longer‑term effects of his choices were quite different from his intentions: canonizing a brahminical, text‑centric “Hindu law” that centered varṇa, marginalizing localized and customary practices, and providing later reformers, nationalists and Hindutva ideologues with a Manu‑centric image of Sanātan Dharma that Ambedkar would famously repudiate by burning the Manusmṛti.
Brahmins, Priestcraft, and Colonial Guardianship
Jones’s relationship to Brahmins and to contemporary Indian religious life was marked by simultaneous dependence, admiration and deep suspicion. He needed pandit expertise to access Sanskrit texts and legal traditions, and he was willing to pay and publicly praise learned Indian collaborators like Rāmalocana, who taught him Sanskrit and helped him navigate dharmaśāstra. He insisted that the Asiatic Society employ Indian scholars, thanked them by name in his proceedings, and stressed that European ignorance could be remedied only through patient study with those who knew the languages and traditions firsthand.
Yet, as Patterson and Hutton emphasize, his Rational‑Dissenting suspicion of priestcraft made him hostile to what he saw as Brahmin attempts to inflate antiquity and mystify the laity. He accused Brahmins of having “designedly raised their antiquity beyond the truth” by manipulating astronomical cycles and yuga calculations, and argued that Hindu chronologies of millions of years were allegorical devices “to embellish and dignify the historical truth,” not literal time‑spans. He believed that Halhed and others had been duped by such allegories into accepting an impossibly old age of the world, and he treated much of Hindu cosmology and ritual as “labyrinths of error” overlaying an original monotheism that only careful philological and historical work could tease out.
In this frame, modern Indians appeared to him as “deluded” and “besotted,” in Hutton’s phrase, and unready for self‑rule: unlike American colonists, the Indians among whom he lived “would receive Liberty as a curse instead of a blessing.” He saw eighteenth‑century Hindu practice as a degenerate distortion of ancient Indian wisdom and took British rule to be, for the foreseeable future, a necessary guardianship: a way to stabilize society, purify law, and, perhaps, ultimately re‑orient Indians toward the rational adoration of the true God their ancestors had once known. That conviction aligns with his untroubled performance of judicial office, his immense labor on codification, and his lack of any recorded advocacy for Indian political autonomy.
Here Said’s insight about the entanglement of knowledge and power retains some bite. Jones’s Digest of Hindu Law, his translation of Manu, and his chronologies and histories all fed directly into the machinery of colonial rule, enabling British judges to claim that they were administering justice “according to native law” while in fact enforcing a newly text‑fixed, Brahmin‑filtered, and biblically framed version of “Hindu tradition.” The Asiatic Society, for all its genuine erudition and collaborative practice, was also a node in what later scholars call the “politics of knowledge” of the East India Company.
At the same time, the word–deed record complicates any easy picture of Jones as a simple civilizational chauvinist. He could describe contemporary Indians as degraded and yet declare that Hindu transmigration is “incomparably more rational” than the Christian hell he had grown up with. He could regard modern Hindu ritual as corrupt priestcraft and yet be moved by Vaiṣṇava devotional poetry and Sufi–Vedāntic reflections on the unreality of the sensible world, and he could find more metaphysical kinship with Dara Shikoh’s Banaras pandits than with Anglican defenders of eternal torment. These tensions are not superficial: they expose how his Tier‑1 capacities (curiosity, philological rigor, imaginative sympathy) and his Tier‑2 commitments (Mosaic chronology, ancient theology, Rational Dissent piety, imperial confidence) intersected in ways that were both productive and constraining.
Power Asymmetry, “Biblical Leakage,” and Translation
The collaborative philological work of the Asiatic Society unfolded within structural power asymmetry. Jones was a Supreme Court judge and a high‑status European in a colony where traditional patronage networks were collapsing; pandits who worked with him and his colleagues depended on British support in a context of shifting sovereignties. Refusing to cooperate with such a figure could carry social and economic costs. On the epistemic side, disagreements over textual interpretation or doctrinal meaning were invariably resolved in published work in Jones’s favor, because it was his English that mediated what would count as “Hindu law” or “Hindu philosophy” for metropolitan and later Indian readers.
As Raymond Schwab, Franklin, and others have noted, Jones’s translations exhibit what might be called “biblical leakage”: Christian and biblical connotations seep into the rendering of brahman, dharma, karma, mokṣa and other key terms. Brahman appears as “Supreme Being” or “God”; dharma as “duty” or “law” in a quasi‑Christian moral sense; karma as “fate” or “destiny” glossed through Providence; mokṣa as “salvation.” Such choices are not neutral. They assimilate Hindu metaphysics to a Christian–Deist idiom in ways that foreground continuities with ancient theology and obscure genuine ontological divergences. Even as he insists that Hindu texts should be read “on their own terms,” Jones cannot entirely escape the gravitational pull of his own conceptual repertoire.
These are the specific sites where Tier‑1 virtues and Tier‑2 frames entangle. His respect for Indian learning leads him to translate and publish materials that would otherwise have remained inaccessible to European and, in some cases, to later Indian reformers; his theological and civilizational commitments lead him to present those materials through a filter that privileges monotheism, rational devotion, and idealist metaphysics over ritual plurality, local cults, and non‑hierarchical cosmologies.
Genealogical Afterlives: From Brahmo Samaj to Hindutva and Ambedkar
Jones’s legacy does not end with his death or with the first wave of Orientalist scholarship. The categories, canons, and translations he helped establish became crucial resources for nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century Indian thinkers across the political and religious spectrum.
Rammohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj drew extensively on Jones’s elevation of Veda and Upanishads to argue that “original” Hinduism was a rational, monotheistic faith corrupted by later superstition, and that social and religious reform was therefore a restoration rather than Westernization. Roy cited Jones as evidence that serious European scholars recognized the philosophical depth and monotheistic core of ancient Hindu texts, using his prestige to answer Christian missionaries and Anglicist critics of “Hindoo idolatry.” Later figures such as Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen, and Vivekananda inherited a Vedānta‑centric, Upanishadic “high Hinduism” whose global visibility owed much to Jones’s translations and celebrations of Sanskrit.
Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that Indians owed a “deep debt of gratitude” to Jones for recovering their classical past and bringing the “treasures of Sanskrit literature” to the attention of Europe and, indirectly, of modern Indians themselves. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan treated him as an early pioneer of comparative philosophy, someone who had helped establish Indian thought as a serious interlocutor for Western metaphysics and theology, and built his own “universal religion of the spirit” in part on the Indo‑European and comparative framework Jones and his successors had elaborated. Even where figures like Aurobindo disagreed with the literalism or historicism of Jones’s readings, they acknowledged that his work had opened a path for psychological and esoteric interpretations of the Vedas and Upanishads to be undertaken within a shared global conversation.
At the same time, the Manu‑centric, brahminical “Hindu law” architecture Jones helped solidify became a target for sharp critique and radical reappropriation. Gandhi, despite indirectly relying on the Orientalist canon for some of the texts he read, explicitly rejected the whole “rediscovery” narrative, insisting that India’s essence was already alive in village life and that she did not need to be unveiled through European philology; his antimodernist, village‑based nationalism sits uneasily with Nehru’s and Radhakrishnan’s gratitude to Jones. B.R. Ambedkar, from a radically different angle, identified the Manusmṛti as a cornerstone of caste oppression and publicly burned it, rejecting the very legal‑religious edifice Jones had helped to monumentalize.
Hindutva ideologues, finally, inherit Jones’s celebration of Sanskrit and his Indo‑European philological link only to invert his migration schema. Where Jones had seen Aryan‑speaking peoples entering India from an Iranian cradle and dispersing from west to east, they now argue for India as the original homeland of the Indo‑Europeans and for an “Out‑of‑India” civilizational expansion that made Vedic culture the fountainhead of world civilization. Contemporary political projects such as the Saraswati river “rejuvenation” or Rakhigarhi archeological claims are framed, in part, as corrections to a “colonial–Marxist” Aryan‑invasion theory that began with Jones’s Mosaic ethnology.
Across these afterlives, the same cluster of Tier‑2 categories—ancient monotheistic Golden Age, Veda/Upanishads/Manu as core scripture, Aryan–Sanskrit prestige, Indo‑European kinship, idealist metaphysics—feeds very different projects: Brahmo universalism, Nehruvian secular nationalism, Radhakrishnan’s comparative spiritualism, Gandhian antimodernism, Ambedkarite anti‑caste struggle, Hindutva ethnonationalism. Jones’s Tier‑1 virtues and Tier‑2 commitments built an infrastructure of concepts, canons and texts that later agents could appropriate, contest or invert, often in directions he neither intended nor would have endorsed.
From the standpoint of this book’s concerns—Tier‑1/Tier‑2 distinctions, weak agency, and navigation under power asymmetry—Jones thus appears as an exemplary speckled figure. He combined genuine curiosity, philological rigor, and imaginative sympathy with a rigid Mosaic chronological frame, a Rational‑Dissenting ancient‑theology project, and a conviction that contemporary Indians were too “deluded” to be left to their own devices. Those Tier‑2 commitments made British guardianship feel both necessary and beneficent, authorized his position as colonial judge and codifier, and channeled his Tier‑1 capacities into structures that reinforced imperial rule. Yet the very same capacities and frameworks also made possible a kind of intercultural learning and conceptual hybridization—between Pricean Christianity and Advaita, between biblical monotheism and bhakti—on which later Indian and European thinkers could draw for both cosmopolitan and chauvinist ends.
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