DEEP ERUDITION INGENIOUSLY APPLIED

"DEEP ERUDITION INGENIOUSLY APPLIED"

REVOLUTIONS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It is no wonder that James Harris interested himself in idiosyncrasies of various languages. By his day there were a lot of new tongues to pay attention to, especially if you were British; for in the later eighteenth century the British Empire reached a high-water mark. British soldiers and administrators roamed North America and the Indian subcontinent, and the Royal Navy roved the watery world. In January seventeen seventy-one, H M Bark Endeavour was sailing homeward from its voyage of discovery in the South Pacific (where it had run across Australia). On board the young natural historian Joseph Banks puzzled over resemblances among Tahitian, Javanese and Malay vocabularies. And he wondered about their odd overlap with words he had just picked up in Batavia from a Madagascar-born slave.

Such musings pointed toward one of several seismic shifts within philology to be discussed in this chapter-new ways of understanding languages, new methods of studying them, new approaches to history, new conceptions of the Bible and of classical antiquity, new modes of treating the literature and language of England itself. The age-old Christian framework of learning became, as one result, too narrow to contain all new erudition; non-Christian cultures and post-Christian methods became the topic not of a book here and there but of systematic exploration by generations of scholars. Sources of change were many and varied. But three stand out. One was fallout from Britain's development: its political integration, its colonizing, its imperial ventures. Another was cross-fertilization between sundry innovations within philology, none of which arose in isolation from all others. The third was a renaissance in Germany-a renaissance at first not closely watched by English-speaking philologists but which demands coverage here because its longer-term impact was transformative.

ORIENTALIST ERUDITION AND ITS RAMIFICATIONS

In seventeen sixty-seven Benjamin Kennicott took time off from Hebrew research to promote a professorship of Persian language in Oxford. His first sentence pointed out that knowledge of Persian had become "an object of national concern" owing to "the interests which this country has lately acquired in the political, as well as the commercial affairs" of India. (Persian supplied the language of diplomacy and commerce there.) Without facility in Persian, how could "the servants of the East India company" properly do their jobs as "magistrates and legislators" over their subject peoples?

Less hard-boiled motives stirred Kennicott, too. "Every nation has," he added, "besides the mere difference of Language, an Idiom, and even a mode of Sentiment peculiar to itself." Study of language opened the road to understanding national character and to uncovering "the traces" of a people's "primitive manners and original forms of government." The human mind being everywhere essentially the same and yet differently cultivated in various regions of the globe, "every branch of knowledge" would benefit "from an acquaintance with the manners, customs, and practice of the most remote nations." From "the Asiaticks," though degenerated today, "we derive the first seeds of all the knowledge which we have carried to so much higher a degree of perfection." This lineage alone would "justify our search after the remains of that Wisdom" that "once reigned amongst them." Further, the comparative method familiar to Kennicott from biblical philology, if applied to ancient records of sundry nations, could clear up "many doubtful facts" that "length of time, and the want of collateral evidence, have contributed to render obscure." In his boldest claim for comparison, Kennicott argued that exploring parallel customs, analogous religious practices, and "even the similitude of words" among "distinct and remote people" might lead scholars back "to the first source from which the whole race of mankind derive their origin."

The changes Kennicott rang on the promise of linguistic study were unoriginal: his tract repeated themes becoming common in his generation. If the unique historical development of each people, nation, or race-terms then interchangeable-shaped its language, then language became key to unlocking mysteries of cultural evolution and national character.

Yet when Kennicott issued his plea, the only nonbiblical Asian languages really accessible in Europe were three used in commerce, diplomacy, and Christian missions: Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. This would soon change.

In seventeen fifty-five a French student of Middle Eastern languages sailed to India. He bore the fragrant name of Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and wandered from Pondicherry in the southeast to Surat in the northwest. In Surat he studied with Parsi (Zoroastrian) priests. By the time he returned to Europe in seventeen sixty-one, he had picked up a working knowledge of Sanskrit, modern Persian, and its ancient ancestors Avestan and Middle Persian-plus scores of manuscripts in all these tongues. In seventeen seventy-one Anquetil-Duperron published three volumes of selections from Zoroastrian writings, under the title Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zorastre (Zend-Avesta, Book of Zoroaster). This translation introduced Europe to sacred Parsi texts. Anquetil-Duperron became the first European to decipher an ancient language of Asia no longer in use, to decode its alien alphabet-cracking open a window that would vastly widen Europe's view of the past. His sometimes shaky rendering also gave Europe its first look at an early Asian text neither biblical nor classical in its associations. Yet it had little immediate resonance.

Twelve years later, on September twenty-five, seventeen eighty-three, the British frigate Crocodile anchored at Calcutta, delivering one of those imperial "magistrates" whose training Kennicott fretted over. He would not have worried about this one. Sir William Jones commanded eleven foreign languages, ancient and modern. He knew something of about fifteen others. He had won acclaim for a Persian grammar ( seventeen seventy-one) and for translations from Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Lowth's lectures on Hebrew poetry inspired him to write a similar Latin commentary on Asian poetry; this book ( seventeen seventy-four) treated Chinese as well as Persian, Turkish, and Arabic verse. "Persian" Jones and "Oriental" Jones became his universal nicknames. But fame did not bring cash, especially fame in a field with almost no paying jobs. So even before his Persian grammar hit the bookstalls, Oriental Jones turned to a career in law.

In that role Jones arrived in Calcutta in seventeen eighty-three, as a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court. Nor did he come to India with an eye on mainly philology but, like the other Britons there, with an eye on the main chance. He wanted to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, then retire to a life of repose back home. Only two motives set Jones apart: he wanted to make his fortune honestly and to use his later leisure for learning. Before leaving England, Jones mentioned to Edward Gibbon his hope that the judgeship would leave time to keep pegging away at orientalist studies, and on shipboard he drew up a longish list of potential inquiries.

He sailed toward well-prepared ground. Bengal's governor-general, Warren Hastings, promoted scholarship as both tool of empire and contribution to knowledge-two projects not easily separated. Among the several young East India Company servants who responded to Hastings's encouragement, Charles Wilkins already knew Persian and Bengali and became the first Briton really to command Sanskrit, the language of the ancient sacred and learned texts of India. In seventeen eighty-five the company published in London Wilkins's translation of the Bhagavad Gita. It circulated throughout Europe.

Jones brought new focus and fame to scholarship on India. Not long after stepping ashore in Calcutta, Jones lobbied company employees who shared his philological bent to join in an association to foster Asian studies. Ill health-the nemesis of Europeans in India-forced Wilkins to Benares (and within a couple years back home). So he was absent on January fifteenth, seventeen eighty-four, when the Asiatick Society of Bengal met in Calcutta to begin its inquiries "into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia." Twenty-nine European males attended. Jones timidly broached admitting "learned natives," unthinkable to most Britishers on the imperial periphery, however erudite. The Asiatick Society was the first organization in the world devoted to Asian studies. It continues today, under "learned native" leadership.

The first obstacle to overcome was ignorance of Indian languages, which hobbled President Jones and most of the members. At first, Jones was reduced to presenting such secondhand materials as a speculative comparison of "the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India" and his rendering of an Italian translation of lines from an Indian legend. The August court recess of seventeen eighty-five gave Jones-inspired by Wilkins-a chance to begin Sanskrit, near the ancient Hindu university in Nadia, under an Indian tutor, Rāmalocana. Jones continued lessons back in Calcutta when the new court term opened in the fall, rising at four a.m. to study.

He was falling under the spell of ancient Indian culture, but its charms did not primarily prompt him to learn Sanskrit. Rather, mistrusting the competence of the Indian scholars (pandits) who advised British courts on Hindu law, he wished to make Indian laws available in English. Once he had Sanskrit reasonably in hand, Jones began a digest of Hindu law governing contract and inheritance, completed after his death by Henry Colebrooke; Jones also supervised a parallel collection of Islamic law, for India's largest religious minority. But the ancient Brahman rules governing personal behavior, attributed to the sage Manu and recorded in the oldest major Hindu law code, the Manava-Dharmasastra, specially fascinated him. Jones finished translating this book, as Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of Menu (his spelling of Manu), only weeks before his death in seventeen ninety-four. This volume launched the word Aryan on its fraught European career. More to the immediate point, it gave European readers their first nuanced insight into some Hindu practices.

Yet, if law mandated Sanskrit for Jones, literature and science also profited. Even before he had a solid grip on Sanskrit, Jones was writing poems retelling Hindu tales and extolling Hindu gods. After he did get a hold of the language, he learned from the pandit Rādhākānta Sarman about the great poet Kālidāsa (around four hundred C.E.) and about his greatest play, Sakuntalā. In the summer recess of seventeen eighty-seven, with Ramalocana's aid, Jones began to translate it into Latin. (He believed Latin's similarity to Sanskrit made it fitter for a literal version than English.)

The Latin translation he then turned into English, publishing it anonymously in Calcutta in seventeen eighty-nine as Sacontalá, or the Fatal Ring. The next year it appeared in London. The 'Indian Shakespeare' swept Europe. "Do you want heaven and earth comprehended in a single name?" asked Goethe in seventeen ninety-one, "I name you, Sakontala, and thus all is said." Schubert turned the play into an opera. Lamartine burbled that Kālidāsa combined the genius of Homer, Theocritus, and Tasso.

Jones and his colleagues in the Asiatick Society recovered other artifacts of ancient Indian civilization for Europeans, including smaller-scale Sanskrit works-in effect, reprocessing Indian culture, in more or less inventive ways, as Europeans had long done with Greece and Rome. Jones himself, under the tutelage of Rādhakānta and other pandits (including his Sanskrit teacher Rāmalocana), began the mammoth effort of working out from Sanskrit documents a chronology of Indian history-in effect, trying to add another column to those old comparative, Scaligerian chronologies that started with Adam. (He utterly failed.) This project, in turn, led Jones to bully his friend Samuel Davis into investigating ancient Indian astronomical calculations. Jones himself dabbled in astronomy and became the first European scholar to study Indian music. All this information, along with reports on Asian culture and natural history, appeared in the Asiatick Society's irregularly published journal, Asiatick Researches. Although printed in Calcutta, hundreds of copies sailed to Europe. Reprints soon appeared in London. The Massachusetts Historical Society elected Jones a member; Harvard College begged him to send Indian manuscripts for its library. Abandoned by her lover in eighteen oh six, the Romantic poet Karoline von Günderode left a suicide note in Sanskrit. By eighteen twelve, the breathlessness over Sanskrit had spread so widely that E.T.A. Hoffmann could use it in satire.

This sudden rage for ancient Indian culture had long-term consequences. Asiatick Researches, Wilkins's Bhagavad Gita, Jones's Ordinances of Menu and Sacontalá, and a few other publications from his Calcutta circle created, over the span of little more than a decade, a new field of philologically oriented European scholarship-now called Indology. The Calcutta scholars' achievement paralleled in form that of the Anglo-Saxonists around the beginning of the century-and had much stronger impact. Missionary reports had provided blurry glimpses of nonbiblical civilizations, notably in China; Anquetil-Duperron had opened a small window onto Zoroastrianism. But Indology offered the first wide-ranging, systematic studies by Europeans of an ancient literate culture outside the orbit of the three familiar 'religions of the book.' It set the stage for-not yet produced-a post-Christian frame of erudition. For just this reason anti-Christian deists valued it, but Jones himself still thought

Fatal Ring because the plot turns on a ring that allows King Dushyanta to recognize the heroine Sakuntalā. Kālidāsa's play is based on an episode in the Mahābhārata.

within biblical categories.) For the moment, the new field remained stunted by the fact that only in India could Europeans learn Sanskrit. This barrier fell at the beginning of the next century. In eighteen oh four, eighteen oh five, and eighteen oh eight, three different Sanskrit grammars appeared in English. The last was by Jones's early guide in Sanskrit, Charles Wilkins, for students in a college started by the East India Company to prepare Britons for its service. Ironically, Wilkins's and Jones's fellow countrymen did little to advance the field these two had largely invented. A younger East India Company employee, the hyperactive Sanskrit scholar Henry T. Colebrooke, on retiring to Britain rallied other ex-Company hands to found, in eighteen twenty-three, the Royal Asiatic Society. But it and Colebrooke were soon eclipsed by continental Europeans, French and German, who came to dominate Indology. Until after eighteen hundred, though, Calcutta remained the center of European Indic studies.

There Jones put flabby flesh on Kennicott's speculation that parallels among religions might lead scholars back to a common source of the human race. The first volume of Asiatick Researches included a revision of Jones's paper to the Asiatick Society on likenesses between Greek, Roman, and Hindu gods. These similarities extended, he now suggested, to gods of Egypt, China, Persia, Syria, and other lands, including old northern Europe and "some of the southern kingdoms, and even islands, of America." Such affinities, he argued, pointed to a common origin of all these religions in a single primitive people. He detailed parallel attributes of gods and made much of superficial verbal congruencies.

I leave etymologists, who decide everything, to decide whether the word MENU, or, in the nominative case, MENUS, has any connection with MINOS, the lawgiver, and supposed son of JOVE. The Cretans, according to DIODORUS of Sicily, used to feign, that most of the great men, who had been deified in return for the benefits which they had conferred on mankind, were born in their island; and hence a doubt may be raised, whether MINOS was really a Cretan. The Indian legislator was the first, not the seventh, MENU, or SATYAVRATA, whom I suppose to be the SATURN of Italy: part of SATURN's character, indeed, was that of a great lawgiver; . . .

This fantastic essay got much attention in Europe. It may also have set Jones to thinking along lines that led to a more consequential comparison.

Comparative speculation was not new to Jones. He knew Adam Ferguson and had read and reread that conjectural historian's Essay on the History of Civil Society, which claimed to unify the experiences of all peoples in a common pattern of social evolution. Jones's boss Warren Hastings had argued that collating "the cultures and languages of different nations will uncover analogies and similarities," which "in turn will lead us to the origin of humanity." 'Culture' was coming into use about this time to mean the whole of a people's arts, sciences, religion, mores, and so forth. The coinage suggested a new way of thinking needing a new word or, in this case, redefining an old one. Usage like Hastings's would evolve into the modern anthropological sense of 'culture'; but at this point stress fell on articulated ideas, and English speakers were more likely to say 'civilization.' German speakers imported Kultur around seventeen eighty to meet the same need. Jones himself, wearing his lawyer hat, had written a book comparing Roman, Greek, Hindu, Mosaic, Islamic, and Visigothic laws. He had puzzled, with a Polish correspondent, over why Persian and European languages had a lot of similar words. He gave a paper to the Asiatick Society proposing a link between Hebrew and Devanagarī, modern Sanskrit, alphabets. When he sat down to master Sanskrit, he almost automatically compared this latest tongue to languages he already knew.

After studying Sanskrit for six months, he made a striking observation; and what he observed changed fundamentally the study of language. On February second, seventeen eighty-six, the Asiatick Society met to hear its president deliver his third "anniversary discourse." Jones devoted this lecture to a survey of Indian culture- inevitably a superficial one. In bouncing from philosophy to physiognomy, chess to chronology, Jones paused to comment on the ancient sacred language. Here is the paragraph in full:

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: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.

This passage is arresting-and not only for ranking a language of a darker-skinned, colonized people above the revered classical languages of European palefaces. It offered a new view of the relationships among languages, implying a new program for studying them.

Jones's contribution to philology needs specification. He himself took less interest in purely linguistic affinities than in genealogical relations among peoples that he believed these links showed. He wanted to place India on the biblical family tree, where all peoples descended from Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Jones neither began nor, unfortunately, ended projects of tracing race through language. Equating movement of languages with migrations of human beings haunted philology for generations, climaxing tragically in the Nazis' 'Aryan race.') Nor was Jones first to notice similarities between Sanskrit and European languages; missionaries and merchants had observed them as early as the sixteen eighties; one or two scholars even teetered on the edge of something like a family, including some of the languages Jones mentioned. Charles Wilkins's friend and mentor, Nathaniel Halhed, dabbled in Sanskrit and published a comparison with Greek; Jones's acquaintance and correspondent Lord Monboddo noted the same connection.

Jones's distinction was to articulate clearly the hypothesis of a common lost ancestral language, to specify a broad range of supposed daughter languages, and to attract widespread attention to the idea. In seventeen seventy-nine he had speculated that an "almost primæval" language ancestral to Persian, Greek, Latin, and the Celtic tongues might explain apparent cognates in all these languages. Now, when he saw how Sanskrit resembled ancient languages of Europe and Persia, he postulated an unknown language ancestral to all. Jones was right. Every tongue he named evolved from a single language that "no longer exists," later named Proto-Indo-European. Of the daughters, Jones omitted most notably the Slavic languages, largely outside his ken and grouped by him with Central Asian tongues. He was also wrong, later, to add Egyptian and Ethiopian to the ancestry, probably influenced by his biblical theory of descent from Noah. Yet this extended family, whose genealogy was to be deduced by comparing languages, supplied what Thomas Trautmann called "the necessary elements for imagining the Indo-European language family and Indo-European speaking peoples." As we have seen, in the sixteenth century scholars already recognized connected groups of languages-and believed, without details, that all European tongues descended from Japhet. But the idea that languages formed families as a result of branching descent from a common ancestor gave a new basis for systematic research into languages. Thanks to Jones, the comparative, historical, and genealogical method central to textual philology had found a remarkable new use.

This bombshell lay buried in one paragraph in a rambling lecture first printed on the far side of the world from Europe. (Jones did develop considerably the notion of language families in his "Eighth Anniversary Discourse" in seventeen ninety-one.) Had someone else uttered these words, they might have eluded notice outside Calcutta. But the speaker was Oriental Jones, known all over Europe: "the incomparable Jones," Goethe called him. Especially amid the craze ignited by his Sacontalá, nothing Jones said about Sanskrit would go unheard. But, as with the Indology he pioneered, the ears that perked up mostly grew on heads in Germany and France.

Out of the marriage of European philology and Indian texts, then, came two new fields of knowledge: Indology and comparative philology (or comparative grammar). The first offered no new methods; earlier scholarship had forged the techniques there applied. Its novelty lay in opening to European eyes a civilization previously obscure. Indology became the first field in which a self-perpetuating cohort of European scholars-not the odd missionary, merchant, or chronologer-worked systematically to uncover the riches of a non-European civilization across a wide front. In a narrow, academic projection, Indology foreshadowed area-studies programs in post-1945 universities. In a broad, cultural view, Indology immensely expanded European perspectives on the history and civilizations of the world.

Comparative philology or comparative grammar, in contrast, hardly transformed how Europeans saw the world; but its procedural originality deeply changed the study of language. Jones in effect invented a new kind of philology. The concept of language families formed by genealogical descent gave students of language a novel way to classify languages and track their development. This fresh approach retained philology's central dogma of historical comparison. But it radically changed what to compare and the kind of conclusions to be drawn from the comparison. Grammarians no longer analyzed only the histories of individual languages or closely related ones, seen in isolation; they now also began to contrast grammatical and lexical change over time in quite diverse languages believed to be related over vast spans of time and space. By doing so, philologists aspired to retrace the history of the languages and even to reconstruct tongues long vanished from the earth. Within a quarter century of Jones's discourse, Friedrich von Schlegel was using the term comparative grammar and sniffing around the regular consonant shifts between Latin and German. Less than a decade after Schlegel's book, Franz Bopp began rigorous comparison of Indo-European languages, starting with verb conjugations. Seventy-five years after Jones introduced the idea of a language family comprehending tongues from India to Ireland, August Schleicher partly reconstructed the mother of them all, Proto-Indo-European. Loose speculation about Adam's language became rigorous science.