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Sir William Jones — soon to be appointed a judge of the supreme court in Bengal, but also a linguist, poet, orientalist and politician — was among the defenders. Afterwards he composed a pamphlet demanding that ‘every man in the City and in the country will carry his firelock and will know how to use it.’ His scheme for universal armament played to fears of the baying rabble, but its real target was the despotic government that he saw as the greater threat.
Dr Johnson called Jones ‘the most enlightened of the sons of men’. In his best-known poem he posed the question, ‘What constitutes a state?’ and, in words quoted by American Presidents and Senators down the century that followed, answered: ‘Men…[who] know their rights, and knowing dare maintain.’ The same theme was pressed in his Principles of Government, written in 1782 at the house of his friend Benjamin Franklin, which advocated universal manhood suffrage and popular education. Even as Jones was securing recommendation to the Crown for appointment to the Indian judicial bench, the King’s ministers were prosecuting the printer of his ‘seditious, treasonable, and diabolical’ tract — a feat of political dexterity that few judges can have matched before or since.
Michael Franklin has written the definitive biography of this most polymathic of men, moving with ease between the many facets of his remarkable mind. In rescuing Jones from the more extravagant slurs of postcolonialist critics, he restores him as a major figure in the shaping of Western relations with India.Yet he also acknowledges the insoluble conundrum of Jones the imperialist.
Had he not gone to Bengal at the age of 36, Jones would have been remembered as one of the most sparkling of Georgian savants and radical champions of the rights of men. Born in Wales mid-century, his father, who rubbed shoulders with Isaac Newton, died suddenly when he was three. The boy had slender means, but prodigious talents. Three decades later, he was master of over 20 languages, a pioneering orientalist who had introduced swathes of Persian literature to English readerships. He had written an important treatise on commercial law, the Essay on the Law of Bailments. A member of Johnson’s Club, his friends and correspondents numbered Burke, Gibbon and Reynolds, even if the energetic patronage of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire had brought him no closer to Parliament.
Jones’s achievements in India, where he arrived in 1783, were at once his most portentous and controversial. He exported the clubbable intellectual life of the Georgian metropolis to Calcutta, founding the Asiatic Society of Bengal as a stimulus to scientific learning about the orient. A present of a book in Sanskrit in 1785 prompted him to learn the language and, in a revolutionary moment, to posit its common roots with Greek and Latin. As a jurist he busied himself with the preparation of a ‘complete digest’ of Hindu and Muslim law, to be enforced in the East India Company’s courts.
Jones inhabited a world in which India’s English overlords could view the country with wonderment and a sincere curiosity. He sought, as Franklin puts it, ‘similitude rather than difference in Asiatic literature’. As a judge he embodied the attempt to govern Indians through their own laws. Within a year of taking up the study of Sanscrit, he was able to choose between the divergent opinions of pandits on questions of ancient Hindu law. In time all this world would be usurped by anglicising tendencies that arrogantly proclaimed European superiority.
Yet Jones was also part of the apparatus of British rule, his high-minded enquiries tainted with the machinations of an empire. As Franklin deftly traces, his cherished rights of Englishmen were diluted when it came to the rights of mankind. ‘I shall certainly not preach democracy to the Indians,’ he wrote, ‘who must and will be governed by absolute power.’ For Jones, their rights were stuck in an ancient past and certainly not to be maintained with firelocks. Abroad, the fervent radical had himself become a despot, however enlightened a one this fine biography reveals him to be.
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