A section from the journey
New Eyes on an Old Faith
As the British settled in, a few of them grew curious about the learning of this land. They learned Sanskrit and studied the old texts. We call them the Orientalists. In 1784 they founded the Asiatic Society. Two years later one of them, William Jones, noticed that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were strangely alike, as if sprung from one lost mother-tongue. It opened a whole new science of language and history.
We have seen the British come as traders, then as rulers. But power was not the only thing that crossed the sea. Curiosity came too. A few of the newcomers began to wonder at the deep learning they found in this land.
Some of them set out to study it properly. They learned Sanskrit, the ancient language of the texts. They sat with Indian scholars, the pandits, who had kept this knowledge alive for ages. We call these European students of the East the Orientalists.
To share what they were finding, they founded a learned club in Calcutta in 1784. They called it the . It became a busy workshop where old texts were read, translated, and discussed. For the first time, Indian learning was being studied in a Western way and carried out to a Western world.
The leading mind among them was Sir William Jones. He was an English judge, sent to the courts of Calcutta. But his true love was languages, and he had a rare gift for them. He had learned many already. Now he gave himself to Sanskrit, and what he found astonished him.
As he studied, Jones noticed something strange and wonderful. Sanskrit was deeply like Greek. And it was deeply like Latin. Not here and there, by chance, but in its very bones, in the roots of its words and the shape of its grammar. The likeness was too strong to be an accident.
In 1786, before the Asiatic Society, he said it plainly. These languages, he argued, must have sprung from one older language, a common source that no longer exists. Here are his own words.
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”
Think of what this meant. A judge in Calcutta, listening to the chants of India, heard in them a cousin of the tongues of Europe. The peoples were far apart, but their languages were kin. From this small, careful insight a whole new science grew, the study of a great family of related languages and of the deep past they reveal.
Now you may feel a quiet bell of memory. We touched this very thread long ago, at the start of our journey, when we asked how to trace the deep history of this land. Here it returns, seen now from the European side, in a Calcutta courtroom in 1786.
We should be honest about this new gaze. In part it was a true gift. These scholars saved texts, learned the language, and helped the world see the depth of Indian thought. But a foreign eye also frames what it sees in its own way. The same gaze that lit up so much would also, at times, bend the picture out of shape. We will come to that.
Jones found kinship where others saw only strangeness. Think of a time you looked closely at something foreign to you and suddenly saw how near it was to your own. What does it do to us to discover that what seemed far away is really kin?
Not every newcomer came only for power. A few came, in time, with real wonder at the learning of India. These European scholars learned Sanskrit, sat with pandits, and pored over the ancient texts. We call them the Orientalists, the early Western students of the East. In 1784, in Calcutta, they founded the Asiatic Society to gather and share this knowledge. Their leading light was Sir William Jones, an English judge with a gift for languages. In 1786 he said something that changed how the world saw its own past. Studying Sanskrit, he found it so close to Greek and Latin, in its word-roots and its grammar, that the three must have sprung from a single older language now lost. From that insight grew the study of the Indo-European family of tongues, and a new way of tracing the deep history of peoples. This is a thread you have met before, far back at the very start of our journey. Here it is again, now from the European side. The Orientalists' gaze was a true gift in part, and in part, as we will see, a distorting lens.
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