Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794. Michael J. Franklin.

Abstract

Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794 (Oxford University Press, 2011) xii + 396 35 [pounds sterling] In Orientalist Jones. Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794, Michael Franklin has written an engaging, sympathetic, and definitive new scholarly biography of the first great British orientalist, Sir William Jones. Following burst of scholarly interest begun by Raymond Schwab, sustained by the polemical postcolonial theories of Edward Said and his admirers and critics, the achievements of Jones are now well-known with many literary scholars and cultural critics engaged in further researches. Consequently, thorough, up to date, reappraisal of the life and work of all-encompassing Jones is most welcome and greatly needed. William Jones was genuine polymath whose researches into Persian and Sanskrit transformed the intellectual and cultural climate of Europe. Famously, he posited an Indo-European language, related to Sanskrit, as primary language which must have existed in Europe, the near East and northern India, before the existence of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic, thus revolutionizing contemporary understandings of the European language families. Jones produced his highly influential translations of Persian poetry, the Hindu law statutes, Indian poetry, and, most famously, of the Sanskrit masterpiece, Uakuntala of the dramatist Kalidasain 1789. Sanskrit was actually Jones's twenty-eighth language and his extensive linguistic knowledge allowed, as few others could, him to make serious and scientific comparisons among them, thus establishing the new field of comparative linguistics. Beyond language, however, Jones's translations transformed the literary and cultural life of Europe, introducing oriental stories, themes, and imagery that inspired whole generation of writers from Coleridge and Southey, to Shelley and Goethe. The status of this orientalist scholarship and the literature it inspired has been subject to tremendous critical scrutiny variously assessed as an epistemological form of colonialism or deeply empathetic pluralist engagement with the culture of other peoples. Franklin's biography is deeply committed to its subject, and to what it argues is the genuine cultural pluralism that Jones dedicated his life to establishing, from his early work as circuit judge in Wales, to his term as High Court judge in British Calcutta. Although on occasion, Franklin can chide Jones for his infrequent lapses from his high ideals, generally Franklin presents his subject as an eminently decent, rational, and humane man who fought for his cherished beliefs. His faults are few and those he possesses mainly determined by his position as powerful, upwardly mobile intellectual seeking patronage and advancement. Franklin's biography is also distant from those Saidian-inspired denunciations of all forms of orientalist scholarship as covert form of colonialism. This case is made throughout the biography, but especially in the final chapter, 'Indo-Persian' Jones and Indian Pluralism. In this chapter, the methodological heart of the work, Franklin situates the cultural tolerance and pluralist thought that he believes Jones established and espoused and which Indian writers, both Muslim and Hindu, have historically propagated and practiced against contemporary examples of distressing religious violence and intolerance, such as the setting fire to the Sabarmati Express at Godhra by angry Muslims, leading to the deaths of some fifty-eight people. This atrocity sparked reprisals that led to the further deaths of two thousand people, mainly Muslims. Franklin painfully describes how such 21st century developments cast long and deep shadow over both the past and future of the peaceful, plural, and often syncretic co-existence of the great religions of India (334). In response he instances the long history of a sympathetic and productive mingling of Muslim and Hindu traditions (334). …