Literature Compass 3/6 (2006): 1235–1252, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00388.

‘[A] Place Among the Hindu Poets’: Orientalism

and the Poetry of Sir William Jones
(1746–1794)
Nandini Das*
University of Liverpool

Abstract
As a scholar, linguist and legal authority, Sir William Jones played a major role in
shaping Europe’s understanding of India and the Middle East, not only through his
involvement in tasks such as the establishment of the Asiatic Society or the
codification of Indian laws, but also through his own literary work. His writings
on Persian and Indian literature have inspired a significant body of postcolonial
critique, while their impact on poets such as Southey, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge
has attracted the attention of scholars of Romantic literature. More importantly,
however, scholars are now increasingly beginning to recognise the importance of
Jones’s work in illuminating a crucial stage of British colonial history, when the
eighteenth-century scholarly pursuit of ‘Oriental’ studies became increasingly
embroiled in problematic negotiations with European imperialism. This article
examines the role played by Jones’s scholarship and poetry, particularly that produced
during his tenure in India, in his efforts to mediate between two changing societies
– India under British rule on the one hand, and the increasing professionalisation
of knowledge in eighteenth-century England on the other.

The many epithets with which his admiring contemporaries dubbed William
Jones provide his later readers with a useful litany of his abiding interests –
Persian Jones, Oriental Jones, Asiatic Jones. A precocious linguist whose
knowledge of the classical and modern European languages surpassed that
of his teachers,William Jones became a fellow of University College, Oxford,
at the age of nineteen. By the age of twenty-two, his knowledge of Arabic
and Persian had established his international reputation as an Orientalist,
attracting a personal commission from Christian VII, King of Denmark, to
translate a manuscript history of the conqueror Nader Shah from Persian
into French. By 1783, he had been knighted and appointed a judge of the
Bengal Supreme Court in India. There, his work on Indian laws and
languages and translations from classical Sanskrit literature became an intrinsic
part of what Raymond Schwab’s seminal study of this period has called the
‘Oriental Renaissance’.1
Recent studies have challenged Jones’s contribution to Indian law and
his status as the founder of comparative philology.2 In comparison, however,
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1236 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones

the influence of his literary works on Romantic poetry has attracted

increasing attention. In 1993, for instance, Jerome McGann significantly
chose to begin the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse with Jones’s
‘Hymn to Narayana’ (1785), justifying his decision in the Introduction by
asserting that:
Jones’s translations . . . locate romanticism’s roots in the late eighteenth century’s
many philological and anthropological projects, and they help to explain the
radical connections that hold together such otherwise disparate texts as Blake’s
The [First] book of Urizen, Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’,
Byron’s The Giaour, and Keat’s ‘Hyperion’. (xxi)
McGann’s professed admiration does not prevent him from alluding to
Jones’s original poetry mistakenly as ‘translations from the Vedic hymns’,
but his assertion about the impact of Jones’s ‘Indian’ texts on later Romantics
is certainly valid. These connections, including the influence of Jones on
the one Romantic poet whom McGann does not name here – Percy Bysshe
Shelley – have been explored in detail by Nigel Leask, while Javed Majeed
has analysed the ideological resonances between Wordsworth’s Preface to
the Lyrical Ballads and Jones’s ‘Essay On The Arts, Commonly Called
Imitative’.3
Given his intimate involvement in late eighteenth-century British
administration in India, it is perhaps only to be expected that critical responses
to Jones tend to be highly divided. Among his contemporaries, Jones was
often celebrated as the ideal colonial administrator, imbued with the tradition
of eighteenth-century scholarship and devoid of any signs of corrupt colonial
insouciance. His very first translations from Persian poems were highly
commended by Gilbert Stuart of the Monthly Review in 1772. Stuart’s report
specifically hailed the ‘ingenious Mr. Jones’ as a champion of both the English
public and of Asiatic cultures, protecting the former from being ‘imposed
upon’ by self-interested European translators and their counterfeit translations
from Asiatic languages, while defending the latter from the same attackers
whose deceptions ‘contributed to give unfavourable impressions of eastern
genius’ (508–9). Reviewing Jones’s achievements from a much later historical
vantage point, Garland Cannon, the most dedicated of Jones scholars, echoes
Stuart in asserting that Jones ‘always resisted any political aspects of
scholarship’ (xv) and showed ‘a way toward world humanism and universal
tolerance’ (361). While the responses of Stuart and Cannon celebrate Jones’s
disinterested, intellectual participation in colonial negotiations, Edward Said’s
seminal study of Western encounters with the Oriental Other takes a diame-
trically opposite view. In Orientalism, Said places Jones’s work definitively
within the context of the practical necessities of British colonial rule:
To rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident, these were Jones’s
goals, which, with an irresistible impulse always to codify, to subdue the infinite
variety of the Orient to ‘a complete digest’ of laws, figures, customs and works,
he is believed to have achieved. (78)

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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1237

Tracing a middle point between these two views, a third variant of the
evaluation of Jones’s contribution may be perceived in Nigel Leask’s work
on the Romantic discourse of the ‘Orient’. Leask’s study suggests that the
fascination of the Romantics with Asia and the Ottoman Middle East was
shaped not only by a sense of European superiority to their non-European
colonial possessions, but significantly, also through the recognition that
aspects of these cultures challenged and undermined such claims. His
emphasis, therefore, is on the need to uncover the ‘anxieties and instabilities’
rather than the ‘positivities and totalities’ in the Romantic response to
Oriental cultures (2).
William Jones’s importance within any such enquiry into the ‘anxieties
and instabilities’ of his Romantic successors derives from the very nature of
the position which he occupied in the early 1780s. Culturally, his career
took shape at a time when the intellectual tradition of the gentleman amateur
in mid-eighteenth-century English society was beginning to be threatened
by an increasing specialization of knowledge and emphasis on professional
learning. Jones’s own poetry and translations, as we shall see, are implicitly
shaped by this tension between high-minded scholarship on the one hand,
and pragmatic self-presentation as an expert on Indian languages and culture
on the other. Politically, too, he occupies a liminal position. Known as a
Whig radical with strong anti-monarchist views in Britain, an eloquent
defendant of the movement for Parliamentary Reform and the American
and French Revolutions, Jones was at the same time a representative of
British hegemony in India, asserting that the ‘Hindus . . . are incapable of
civil liberty . . . they must be ruled by an absolute power’ (Letters 2:712).4
Yet despite such apparently incontrovertible proof of his belief in colonial
supremacy, Jones’s tenure in India itself, as S. N. Mukherjee and others have
shown, is an illustration of the dichotomy inherent in the attitudes of the
British in India in the eighteenth century.5 While it was argued that India
needed to be placed under strict, authoritarian British control, it was also
acknowledged that this was a despotism which nevertheless had to recognise
and preserve the traditional laws and customs of the country. For some, this
recognition of age-old Indian traditions went hand in hand with a growing
fascination and engagement with Indian culture. Warren Hastings, who was
still the Governor-General of Bengal when Jones arrived in September 1783,
was himself proficient in Persian, Urdu and Bengali, and encouraged the
production of works such as Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s Code of Gentoo Laws
(1776) and A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778), and Charles Wilkins’s
translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta (1785). Halhed’s preface to his compilation
of indigenous laws reflected Hastings’s beliefs in asserting that ‘an Adoption
of such original Institutes of the Country, as do not immediately clash with
the Laws or Interests of the Conquerors’ was essential for the stability of
British rule in India, and this same belief would later inform Jones’s own
monumental effort to compile a Digest of Indian Laws (ix). Cornwallis, who
took over from Hastings in 1786 with radically different views on the exercise
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1238 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones

of British rule in India, would nevertheless continue to support Jones’s

Digest. The fundamental convictions on which the latter was based are
perhaps best expressed in Jones’s own words in his Preface to the Institutes
of Hindu Law (1794):
It is a maxim in the science of legislation and government, that Laws are of no
avail without manners, or, to explain the sentence more fully, that the best intended
legislative provisions would have no beneficial effect even at first, and none at
all in a short course of time, unless they were congenial to the disposition and
habits, to the religious prejudices, and approved immemorial usages, of the people,
for whom they were enacted. (iii)6
It was in the course of his attempt to uncover the ‘immemorial usages’ of
the Indian people, that Jones made his acquaintance with Sanskrit, which
he would describe to the newly established Asiatic Society as being ‘more
perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely
refined than either’ (Works 1:26).7 His own poetry on Indian themes was
shaped intrinsically by an effort to emulate the traditional tropes and motifs
that he continued to discover in this body of classical literature, often leading
to frustrated outbursts in letters to fellow Orientalists such as Wilkins:
The subject [of the ‘Hymn to Narayena’] is the sublimest that the human mind
can conceive; but my feeble Muse cannot do justice to it. How I lament my
inability to read the two Pur-ns of the Egg and the Lotos! (Letters 2:669–70)8
To attend to William Jones’s literary representations of the ‘Orient’ and
especially India, therefore, is to explore a particularly complex moment of
cultural mediation. As this essay hopes to show, Jones’s literary productions
repeatedly draw the reader’s attention to the presence of an essential yet
often overlooked player in the confrontation between the ruling and the
colonised societies – the individual whom the colonising project places in
the intriguing position of being the subject of one society and the
ruler-in-proxy of another. Especially in the light of the current understanding
of the multivalent nature of eighteenth-century ‘Orientalism’, it is important
to recognise that Jones’s writing provides us with illuminating glimpses into
the complexity of the negotiations that attend an individual subject’s attempts
to adopt a mediating position between two cultures and two societies.
Jones’s ‘Oriental’ poetry begins, as indeed does his career as an
international authority on the Middle East and India, with an unlikely
publication – his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771). The Grammar was
expressly designed for East India Company employees in India, where Persian
was the diplomatic language till 1835. It became the main textbook on the
Persian language for British officials in the subcontinent. In March 1773, a
copy was sent to Warren Hastings, who had recently taken up his post as
the Governor General, by none other than Dr. Samuel Johnson (qtd. in
Boswell 464).9 Jones’s Grammar contained not only an eloquent Preface
justifying ‘Orientalist’ scholarship, but also rather more unusually included
excerpts from Persian literature. The most striking addition, however,
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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1239

appeared at the very end of the text. Here Jones introduces his readers to
his own poetic adaptation of perhaps the greatest example of the Persian
lyric form called the ghazal or gazel, a poem by the major fourteenth-century
Persian poet,‘Hafiz’, which begins:
agar An Turk-i ShirAzi bi-dast Arad dil-i mArA
bi-khAl-i Hinduwash baksham Samarqand u BukhArA
As scholars have frequently pointed out, Jones takes many liberties to adapt
the original verses to the tastes of eighteenth-century English society.10
Hafiz’s plea to his unnamed ‘Shirazi Turk’ in the introductory couplet of
the ghazal, for instance, becomes a much-elaborated blazon:
Sweet maid, if thou wouldst charm my sight;
And, bid these arms thy neck infold;
That rosy cheek, that lily hand,
Would give thy poet more delight
Than all Bocara’s vaunted gold,
Than all the gems of Samarcand. (Grammar 131)11
Jones, however, is not alone among European translators of Hafiz to assume
the subject to be a female lover. More significant is the change he introduces
at the very end of his adaptation. In Jones’s prose translation, which
immediately follows the original text, the poet’s valediction reads as follows:
O Hafiz! when thou composest verses, thou seemest to make a string of pearls:
come, sing them sweetly: for heaven seems to have shed on thy poetry the
clearness and beauty of the Pleïads. (130)
The verse translation, on the other hand, reads:
Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung:
Thy notes are sweet, the damsels say;
But O! far sweeter, if they please
The nymph for whom these notes are sung. (134)
Hafiz’s name is erased from the poem. Instead of his self-congratulatory
poetic signature, we now have Jones’s ‘simple lay’ that implicitly records its
own qualities and reputation. At the same time, the text artfully denies its
own artistry, choosing rather to concentrate on wooing the ‘beloved’, the
projected audience, to whom the poem is directed and whose favour the
poet seeks to earn.
If the Grammar as a whole established Jones as the leading scholar of the
language in Europe, the ‘Persian Song’ established his reputation as an
‘Orientalist’ poet. Its reception by an enthusiastic readership led to the
demand for further translations, as well as to the translator’s own popularity
as ‘Persian’ Jones in fashionable social circles. As the first English translation
of Persian poetry, it also set a literary example that would be followed by a
number of better known English poets, from Southey and Byron to Edward
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1240 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones

Fitzgerald.12 Taken together, however, the book and the poem are invaluable
in establishing Jones’s own approach to the role he envisages for the
Orientalist scholar within his society.
In the Preface to the Grammar, Jones speaks the familiar language of
colonial appropriation when he suggests that ‘the man of taste will
undoubtedly be pleased to unlock the stores of native genius, and to gather
the flowers of unrestrained fancy’ (xix). Yet the appropriative venture does
not seem to be coupled with any sense of colonial superiority; the Grammar
repeatedly asserts the value and precedence of Persian culture, emphasising
the antiquity of the language and literature it seeks to introduce to its
European readership. ‘Whilst all the nations of Europe were covered
with the deepest shade of ignorance, the Califs in Asia encouraged the
Mahomedans to improve their talents, and cultivate the fine arts’ (vi), Jones
writes, later supplementing the excerpts of Persian verses with assertions
such as this:‘I may confidently affirm that few odes of the Greeks or Romans
upon similar subjects are more finely polished than the songs of these Persian
poets’ (127). In the process, Jones’s own professed intellectual curiosity is
crucially distinguished from the materialistic concerns of other representatives
of ‘the Nations of Europe’:
[T]hey would perhaps, have persisted in despising it, if they had not been
animated by the most powerful incentive that can influence the mind of man:
interest was the magic wand which brought them all within one circle, interest
was the charm which gave the languages of the East a real and solid importance.
(viii–ix)
By repeatedly setting up such painstaking distinctions between the
self-interested practice of other Europeans engaged in colonial ventures, and
the disinterested scholarly enquiry that Jones claims to represent, Jones’s
texts undeniably complicate any convenient formulation of a simple binary
relationship between a single, unified European ‘self ’ and an Oriental
‘Other’. In fact, Jones’s wry allusion to the ‘magic’ of self-interest affecting
the scholarship of European nations may be traced back to his very public
conflict with the French scholar, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron
(1731 –1805), which unfolded in the same year as the Persian Grammar. As
the defender of British Orientalist studies at Oxford against
Anquetil-Duperron’s attacks, Jones denounced the latter’s Zend-Avesta,
ouvrage de Zoroastre (Paris, 1771) as a forgery in his scathing Lettre à Monsieur
A*** du P***, dans laquelle est compris l’examen de sa traduction des livres attribués
à Zoroastre.13 It is this incident which helped to establish his reputation as an
exemplary Orientalist, so highly commended in Gilbert Stuart’s 1772 report
in the Monthly Review, cited earlier in this essay. Given this context, the
poet’s emphatic wooing of his readers in the ‘Persian Song’, and Jones’s
scholarly self-positioning within the Grammar, become far more complicated
entities than merely minor figurations of British imperialist interests in the
Middle East or in India. They are both grounded firmly within the social
context shared also by Jones’s projected readers – the ‘men of taste’ of
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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1241

eighteenth-century London – and the same social context would shape

Jones’s later engagements with Sanskrit literature and culture in India.
By the 1730s, as John Barrell has suggested, the primary representative
of the ‘public virtue of disinterestedness’ in English society was the
gentleman-intellectual (17–50). Apparently unattached to any determinate
business, this increasingly important figure was the sort of man who would
be elected as a member of Johnson’s Turk’s Head Club – the most influential
club of the eighteenth century whose members were deliberately a
‘miscellaneous collection of conspicuous men’, where the wealthy and
aristocratic members ostensibly had to earn their entry by virtue of intellectual
recognition rather than social esteem (qtd. in Brewer 46).14 Attempting to
define the true ‘Fine gentleman’ of the period, Richard Steele presented
him as one who cannot merely depend on his social status or ‘natural
Endowments’. Steele suggests that ‘a long series of Education’ needed to be
adopted for the gentleman to develop his comprehensive view; ‘he must
Travel to open his Mind, to enlarge his Views . . . as well as to fashion and
polish himself, and to get clear of National Prejudices; of which every
Country has its share’ (143). John Brewer has shown how the members of
the Turk’s Head Club not only similarly explored astonishingly diverse fields
of knowledge from aesthetics to botany, but also directed their efforts towards
emphasising the necessity of an ordering intellectual presence within society.
‘The effect of these works’, he suggests, ‘was not to narrow this inheritance
into a single strand but to establish their authors as sympathetic custodians
and interpreters of many rich and diverse traditions’ (46–7).
Johnson applied the same credo in creating his own representation of the
ideal intellectual and artist, the Oriental Rasselas. Johnson’s hero is a
disinterested and objective explorer in the best geographical and intellectual
senses of the term, one who has ‘read all the poets of Persia and Arabia and
was able to repeat by memory the volumes that are suspended in the mosque
of Mecca’; one who recognises that ‘[the true poet] must divest himself of
the prejudices of his age and country . . . His labour is not yet at an end; he
must know many languages and many sciences’ (Rasselas 41–5). The shadow
of this scholar-explorer falls across the advice that Johnson had given to his
personal friend, Warren Hastings, regarding the role of the British
administrator in India. In the letter accompanying his gift of the Persian
Grammar, Johnson significantly charts a course of intellectual exploration
for Hastings to accompany the political administration of the new dominion:
I shall hope, that he who once intended to increase the learning of his country
by the introduction of the Persian language, will examine nicely the traditions
and histories of the East; that he will survey the wonders of its ancient edifices,
and trace the vestiges of its ruined cities; and that, at his return, we shall know
the arts and opinions of a race of men, from whom little has been hitherto derived.
(Boswell 464)
In 1773, young William Jones was elected to Johnson’s Turk’s Head Club
for exemplifying this very ideal, as ‘perhaps the only lawyer equally
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1242 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones

conversant with the yearbooks of Westminster, the commentaries of Ulpian,

the Attic pleadings of Isaeus, and the sentences of Arabian and Persian cadhis’
(Gibbon 4:296). However, his ‘wide survey’ of this intimidating range of
disciplines was not driven by amateur enthusiasm alone. Jones came from
accomplished but non-aristocratic Welsh stock, and had to support himself
by tutoring the Viscount Althorp, later the second Earl Spencer. He was
keenly aware of the lack of economic security that threatened his intellectual
independence and authority: it was a lack which he intended to redress
through the systematic acquisition and utilisation of his varied specialised
knowledge. In this, again, Jones seems to occupy a familiar liminal position,
at once operating within and outside the developing structures of
professionalism and disciplinarity in the late eighteenth century.15 The
‘haughtiness to my superiors’, which his detractors allege against him is ‘only
a proper dignity of mind and a zeal for independence’, he notes in a letter
in 1778.
True it is, that, except in compliance with the forms of society, I acknowledge
no man as my superior, who is not so in virtue or knowledge . . . I call it only
a sense of that manly 2σονομ2α, which ought to be the basis of every good
government, and which is certainly founded on reason. (Letters 1:263)16
‘[O]ur country gentlemen’, on the other hand, he writes to the Viscount
Althorp in 1779, ‘are in general either so ignorant, so prejudiced, or so
corrupt, that Liberty, manly, rational, intelligible Liberty, will never be much
benefited by them.’The salvation of the nation lies in the establishment of
a working meritocracy:
[I]t is from an union of virtuous men and real patriots that can form any hope
of prosperity to Britain . . . our constitution cannot be preserved (I say it with
confidence) unless all of them consent to form, not a party, founded on selfish
motives and personal connections, but an union, founded on the solid basis of
good sense, liberty, law, and general happiness. (1:318)17
It is no surprise, then, that the impetus behind his prolonged efforts to
acquire the judgeship in Calcutta had more to do with practical, political
considerations than with an interest in exploring Indian culture. In a letter
written before his departure, he describes his plan to spend a few years in
India, and return
with a very handsome fortune, and . . . be in parliament, before the age of forty,
with a perfect knowledge of India, which is now become an object of infinite
importance to every British statesman. (1:352)18
In both his early commentary on Persian poetry and later experimentations
with Indian images and motifs, therefore, Jones’s comprehensive view and
‘perfect knowledge’ is recurrently presented as the stronghold on which the
future, not only of British colonial ventures, but also of the intellectual,
imaginative life of Britain itself depends. Just as he had reminded his readers
of the administrative necessities that justified the learning of an alien language
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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1243

in the Persian Grammar in 1771, his copious notes to the later ‘Indian’ poetry
would point out the implicit links between intellectual and economic
enrichment. In the Argument to the ‘Hymn to Lacshmi’, the Hindu goddess
of wealth and prosperity, for instance, Jones notes:
We may be inclined perhaps to think, that the wild fables of idolaters are not
worth knowing, and that we may be satisfied with mispending our time in
learning the Pagan Theology of old Greece and Rome; but we must consider, that
the allegories contained in the Hymn to LACSHMÍ constitute at this moment the
prevailing religion of a most extensive and celebrated Empire, and are devoutly
believed by many millions, whose industry adds to the revenue of Britain, and
whose manners, which are interwoven with their religious opinions, nearly affect
all Europeans, who reside among them. (Selected Works 154)
Yet this pragmatic interest cannot be easily disentangled from Jones’s genuine
and longstanding attempts as a poet, to combine the traditions of classical
learning and civic humanism with his new, specialised access to Asian
literatures. At the conclusion of the ‘Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern
Nations’ appended to his Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the
Asiatick Languages (1772), for instance, Jones had explained his interest in
Eastern poetry in terms of a Promethean effort to inject new life into
European literary imagination and scholarship:
I cannot but think that our European poetry has subsisted too long on the perpetual
repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables: and it
has been my endeavour for several years to inculcate this truth, That, if the principal
writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our publick libraries, were printed with
the usual advantage of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations
were studied in our places of education, . . . a new and ample field would be opened for
speculation; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind,
we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes, and a number of excellent
compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future
poets might imitate. (336)
The similarity with the ideas of Johnson’s Rasselas is obvious; in both texts,
the images of material acquisition are inextricably conflated with the imagery
of intellectual daring and comprehensiveness. In Jones’s later writing, the
acknowledged attraction of the ‘very handsome fortune’ that he had hoped
to acquire through his position in India, while remaining an undeniable
presence, often quickly gives way to the exhilaration of this intellectual
discovery:
Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be
in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still worshippers
of Jupiter and Apollo: suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by
Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by the English; then suppose a court
of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an
inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there,
which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no
other Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country. (Letters 2:755–6)19
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1244 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones

From his arrival in Bengal in 1783 to his death in 1794, Jones’s enquiries
into Indian culture and traditions covered topics as varied as the compilation
of the first written digest of Hindu laws, comparative linguistics, Hindu
chronology,Asian ethnology and detailed descriptive botanical records. The
range of disciplines covered by the enquiries he undertook, and encouraged
within the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he established in 1784, are proof
enough of his own intellectual comprehensiveness.20 His literary productions
in this period include translations from the Sanskrit classics, such as selections
of tales from the Pañcatantra, Jayadeva’s dramatic lyrical poem, Gitagovinda,
and perhaps his greatest contribution, the 1789 translation of K-lid-s-’s
ancient play of loss and recognition, 9acontalá.21 Particularly important for
the insights they offer into Jones’s combination of ‘Orientalism’ and literature,
however, are the small group of original poems he wrote over the same
period, including nine ‘hymns’ to Hindu deities, the mock-heroic ‘Enchanted
Fruit, or, The Hindu Wife’ (1784), and a revised plan for the national epic
he had initially drafted in the 1770s,‘Britain Discovered’.
In one of the most perceptive recent examinations of these texts, Kate
Teltscher suggests that Jones’s approach to his Indian material is characterised
by what she terms as a process of consistent ‘literary annexation’ (211). Indian
culture, in such cases, is organised and contained within the limits of English
and European discourse. It is a process strikingly illustrated by the prints
used by Jones in his essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, in which
Indian deities appear within elaborate frames of eighteenth-century European
scrollwork. Teltscher suggests that the prints represent ‘an iconographic
parallel to this practice of literary annexation’.
Although the prints are fairly accurate copies of late eighteenth-century
East-Indian paintings, they are represented in an entirely neo-classical
manner . . . The decoration contains the Hindu gods within decorous European
bounds. (211)
Jones’s habit of containing the material of his Indian studies within a
complex network of references to the European literary and intellectual
tradition has been noted by a number of other scholars. While Teltscher’s
reading proposes to recover the colonial subtext of Jones’s work, Nigel Leask
suggests that Jones, in this, shares an approach common to other ‘Orientalists’
of his generation, whose efforts were directed towards
codifying the immense corpus of Hindu literature in terms of the interpretative
skills in which they were learned, namely the exegesis of Graeco-Roman
literature, the Bible and English common law. (100)22
Leask does not pursue this further in Jones’s writings: his focus, after all, is
on later Romantic encounters with the East, but his observation is important
nevertheless. By emphasising the shaping influence of the familiar European
interpretative skills on the newfound Indian material tackled by such scholars,
his reading implicitly acknowledges the importance of re-examining the

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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1245

writings of ‘Orientalists’ like Jones in the context of the European

socio-cultural environments within which they were produced.
Along with the developing discourse and practice of colonial hegemony
in British India, it is this context that one needs to consider when attending
to the intricate cross-cultural manoeuvres in Jones’s writings. The sets of
prints used in the essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ (Works
1:229–80) again provide a crucial insight into a process through which both
India and Britain ultimately lend themselves to furthering Jones’s own
reputation as a polymath. They were, after all, illustrations appended to
Jones’s essay, which in spite of all disclaimers against forced conclusions
drawn between the gods of Greece, Italy and India, proceeds to draw
increasingly assertive, breathtaking parallels across the pantheons. Jones thus
translates from the Matsya Purana the story of the universal deluge, comparing
it with the Biblical Flood; draws parallels between the four ‘Yugs’ and the
four classical Ages; and makes such statements as ‘[i]n this picture [of the
Hindu god, Crishna] it is impossible not to discover, at the first glance,
the features of APOLLO, surnamed Nomios, or the Pastoral, in Greece, and
OPIFER in Italy’ (267). Within this erudite framework, the illustrations are
displayed like the specimens that Jones as an amateur naturalist was in the
habit of collecting. Focussed upon, identified and bilingually labelled, they
exemplify the comprehensive knowledge of their presenter. For the
contemporaneous reader they would not only represent an alien space
brought within the confines of a familiar eighteenth-century frame, but
more specifically, would advertise an otherness brought under control
through the writer’s more comprehensive and superior knowledge. As such,
they function as visual reminders of an omniscient intellectual authority,
which, in appearing to be unimpeded by mere political, social and cultural
differences, is also rendered invulnerable to the assaults which such political,
social and cultural concerns may otherwise invite. Similarly, one can see
how the poems too, could at once reaffirm Jones’s authority as an Orientalist
and linguist, as well as reap the profits of his own (and Johnson’s) advice to
rejuvenate the tired imagery of eighteenth-century poetry with the help of
the ‘poetry of the Eastern nations’.
The first of the Indian hymns, the ‘Hymn to Camdeo’, forms a case at
hand. The Argument of the Hymn opens:
The Hindu God, to whom the following poem is addressed, appears evidently
the same with the Grecian EROS and the Roman CUPIDO; but the Indian
description of his person and arms, his family, attendants, and attributes, has new
and peculiar beauties. (Selected Works 99)23
The Indian god, as Teltscher notes, is certainly ‘slotted into the familiar
pantheon’ (207). However, at the same time Jones’s language records a
prolixity of scholarly information about Indian mythology that the general
European reader would almost certainly lack. The scholar-poet’s authority
over the reader is thus established even as he seems to accede to the demands
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1246 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones

and expectations of his culture. It is a technique which the poem itself adopts
at the conclusion, when British neoclassical balance and the exotic Indian
god are both requisitioned to the services of the ‘bard’:
O thou for ages born, yet ever young,
For ages may thy Bramin’s lay be sung!
. . . 
Thy mildest influence to thy bard impart,
To warm, but not consume, his heart. (Selected Works 103)
The broad syncretic sweeps through which Jones’s texts advance place him
in a position of authority comparable to that of the omniscient ‘Observation’
that ‘surveys mankind from China to Peru’ in Johnson’s ‘Vanity of Human
Wishes’ (Samuel Johnson 12). If the fruits of Jones’s ‘Orientalist’ research are
codified into manageable parcels exploited and replaced at will, the literary
and ideological possessions of Europe are no less manipulated, albeit as
elements with which one may muffle the notes of cultural dissonance.
Parallels are thus drawn between a Hafiz ode and a Shakespearean sonnet,
between the Védánta and Platonic philosophy, and the scholastic effort itself
is described as a study ‘substituting Sanscrit for Greek, the Brahmans for the
priests of Jupiter, and Valmic,Vyasa, Calidasa, for Homer, Plato, Pindar’.24
In his personal, practical interactions with the Brahmans, the traditional
keepers of the ancient Sanskrit texts, Jones’s approach is similarly reminiscent
of his career in London, when the employment of his scholarship had helped
him to inscribe himself within a privileged ‘union’ of scholars, and where
the intellectual pursuits of the disinterested, propertied gentleman had
functioned as a symbolic capital which he had both desired and denied in
turns. Rosane Rocher has shown that Jones’s decision to learn Sanskrit was
driven not so much by any scholarly interest as by his distrust of Brahman
pandits – a powerful, elite group in Indian society – and his unwillingness
to be dependent on their interpretation of Hindu legal traditions. His
employment of a non-Brahman expert, the Vaidya scholar R-malocana
KaCDhavarCa could be interpreted as the public adoption of an explicitly
anti-Brahmanical stance (Rocher, ‘Weaving Knowledge’ 58). However,
while in a letter to Arthur Pritchard in late September, 1785, Jones could
complain unhesitatingly about the ‘villainy of the Brahman lawyers [which]
makes it necessary for me to learn Sanscrit, which is as difficult as Greek,’
by 1790, his criticism of what he perceives as Brahmanical malpractice is
coupled with equally damning criticism of religious practises in Europe:
I abhor the sordid priestcraft of Durga’s ministers, but such fraud no more affects
the sound religion of the Hindus, than the Lady of Loretto and the Romish
impositions affect our own national faith. (Letters 2:686)25
Throughout this period, Jones’s increasing knowledge of Sanskrit gradually
enabled him to create for himself a place on the margins of the social and
intellectual circle of the Bengali Brahmins. His letters in 1787, for instance,
repeatedly inform correspondents of his satisfaction in acquiring a cottage
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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1247

in Krishnagar, ‘close to an ancient university of Brahmans, with whom I

now converse familiarly in Sanskrit’ (2:777 –8).26 They also reveal a rising
interest in the appreciation that ‘the good Brahmans’ showed for his
scholarship and literary talents:
I had made a Sanskrit stanza . . . This verse has given me a place among the
Hindu poets. The Rájà copied it, his son got it by heart, and his Brahmans
entered it among their records . . . The Rájà, and his Brahmans . . . call me a
Hindu of the Military tribe, which is next in rank to the Brahmanical.27
Jones’s Indian poetry frequently reflects this assiduous self-construction.
Following the precedence set by the ‘Bramin’ bard in the ‘Hymn to Camdeo’,
the prefatory Argument to the ‘Hymn to Ganga’ explains that the text
is feigned to have been the work of a BRA’HMEN, in the early age of HINDU
antiquity, who, by a prophetical spirit, discerns the toleration and equity of the
BRITISH government, and concludes with a prayer for its peaceful duration under
good laws well administered. (Selected Works 124)
This ventriloquized poetic voice tries to obtain the best of both worlds. In
his recognition of the virtues of British rule, he is superior to the rest of the
Indian community, a vates of colonial discourse. At the same time, his
position as a Brahman ‘in an early age of HINDU antiquity’ valorises him
as a part of one of the world’s ancient, venerable civilisations. Moving
constantly between ‘HINDU antiquity’ and ‘BRITISH government’,
prophetical insight and rational administration, the statement reveals the
precarious nature of the balance, which is only heightened by the additional
emphasis of the italicised final clause. Jones’s vision of a legitimate British
imperial administration, exercising a firm but enlightened power over its
colonial possessions, it seems, is dependent ultimately not on inherent cultural
superiority, but on the prophetical voice of the Brahman and the appropriate
exercise of ‘good laws’. There can be little doubt that the laws Jones had in
mind were those being compiled in his Digest of Indian Laws, based, as we
have seen earlier, on a fundamental belief that the laws governing the Indians
should arise from the ‘approved immemorial usages, of the people, for whom
they were enacted’ (Institutes of Hindu Law iii).
In 1770, Jones had drawn up the plan of a projected national epic ‘Britain
Discovered’. While residing in Calcutta in 1787, he revised the plan, adding
the machinery of Hindu gods and goddesses, and the change again accords
with the approach adopted in the ‘Hymn to Ganga’. In the expanded plan
of 1787, Prince Britanus of Tyre journeys to Britain where he marries the
nymph Albion. Their marriage, symbolising the marriage of Royalty and
Liberty, is meant to illustrate ‘the excellence of our Constitution, and the
Character of a perfect king of England’. However, Hindu gods are depicted
as seeking to prevent Britanus from reaching Albion because the goddess
Ganga foresees the potential threat to their existence posed by the future
British rule over India. In an implicit and significant nod to Jones’s own
Welsh ancestry, Ganga’s fears are calmed finally by the prophecy of a druidic
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1248 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones

spirit who, like Jones, ‘recommends the government of Indians by their

own laws’ (qtd. in Majeed 22).28 Again, India is represented as a ‘Past’,
mediated by Jones to a future which explicitly lies in the hands of Britain.
It is a Britain, however, that depends on the poet and the legal scholar to
voice its destiny and duty as the ruler nation.
The continued effort to mediate between the past and the present,
between the Indian ‘subject’ and the European reader, between amateur
disinterestedness and pragmatic professionalism, mark one of Jones’s most
striking literary productions, the mock-heroic poem ‘The Enchanted Fruit,
or, The Hindu Wife’ (1784). Alluding to an episode from the Indian epic,
Mahabharata, this poem tells the story of how queen Draupadi has to admit
to a ‘sin of the senses’ in order to restore a magic fruit, unwittingly cut down
by her five husbands, the Pandavas, to its parent tree. Jones’s games with
cultural counters are explicit in this text, written in one of the most popular
genres of eighteenth-century poetry, light-hearted in its approach to the
theme of female sexual freedom yet bristling with learned footnotes that
move with studied ease from references to Tasso’s Aminta to the Sanskrit
Bhagavad Gita. The confrontation between European and Indian traditions
is deliberately staged. Draupadi’s fruit is equated with ‘that apple, pluck’d
for Eve’, and the power of contemporary English femininity is questioned
by representing Draupadi as the ideal redeemer of Eve.
Could you, ye Fair, like this black wife,
Restore us to primeval life,
And bid that apple, pluck’d for Eve . . . 
Hang from its parent bough once more
Divine and perfect, as before,
Would you confess your little faults?
(Great ones were never in your thoughts). (Selected Works 95, lines 497–504)
The challenge posed by the Indian epic has intriguing ramifications, as a
disgruntled Britannia is introduced into the narrative, and proceeds to blame
her ‘bard’ for his unjustified aspersion on British women. Jones’s text at this
crucial point appears to abandon its painstakingly created mediating voice
in favour of a more familiar poetic tradition, as the Faerie Queene – that other
national epic written, ironically, during Edmund Spenser’s colonial seclusion
as an Elizabethan agent in ‘wild’ Ireland – imposes itself on the ostensibly
Indian tale. Britannia, who embarks on an epic battle to destroy the monster,
Scandal, is very like Spenser’s Britomart, while her opponent is strongly
reminiscent of the Blatant Beast with whom Sir Calidore fights the last battle
in Spenser’s unfinished poem. Yet in the final, decisive encounter between
the two, Britannia’s Spensarian struggle is suddenly and undeniably shot
through with the idiom of the Hindu goddess Durga’s fight with the giants
of Indian mythology. Just as the poem had earlier presented Draupadi as the
redeemer of Eve’s original sin, now the martial prowess of Britannia is
thoroughly supplanted by an extended epic simile that invokes Durga’s
transcendent energy:
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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1249

Thus, when Asurs with impious rage,

Durst horrid war with Dévtás wage,
And darted many a burning mass
E’en on the brow of gemm’d Cailás,
. . . 
The nymph beheld the fiend advance,
And couch’d the far-extending lance
. . . 
Her spear with many a griding wound
Fast nail’d him to the groaning ground. (96, lines 541–54)29
Estranging the familiar, the conquering image of the mother goddess
celebrated in Bengal allows for the final, triumphant re-entry of Jones’s
mediating, bardic speaker.
The protean twists and turns of cultural referents in this text strikingly
illuminate the closely interlinked roles of the familiar and the exotic in
Jones’s career as an ‘Orientalist’ poet and scholar. Jones adopts and discards
elements of both traditions at will, slipping between them to focus finally,
characteristically, on the fundamental relationship between the writer and
the reader:
Now reign at will, victorious Fair,
In British, or in Indian, air!
. . . 
And, when charm’d circles round you close
Of rhyming bards and smiling beaux,
Whilst all with eager looks contend
Their wit or worth to recommend,
Still let your mild, yet piercing eyes,
Impartially adjudge the prize. (97, lines 559–74)
As in the case of the concluding stanza of ‘A Persian Song’, this final image
is an eloquent one. The figure projected through William Jones’s poetic
text does not seem to care if the ‘victorious Fair / [reign] In British, or in
Indian, air,’ and he is similarly above the pitiable squabbles among lesser
mortals who struggle to assert their own ‘wit or worth’. His language entices
every individual reader to see in him the elevated intellectualism and
impartiality that his poem professes to see in the reader. Emphatically
underscoring his aloofness from the general crowd of bards and beaux, he
remains self-consciously suspended in the glare of reading eyes, with the
rewards of his labour permanently in his sights. In the final count, as Whig
radical, Asiatic Jones or honorary member of the Hindu warrior class, it is
the making of Sir William Jones that constitutes the matter of Jones’s gripping
conversation with the East.

Notes
* Correspondence address: The School of English, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69
7ZR, UK.
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1250 . Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones
1 Jones himself, incidentally, preferred the term ‘Asiatic’, since ‘Oriental’, he suggested, was ‘a
word merely relative, and, though commonly used in Europe, contain[s] no very distinct idea’.
See ‘A Discourse on the Institution of a Society for Inquiring into the History, Civil and Natural,
the Antiquities,Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia’, in Works of Sir William Jones 1:4.
2 See, for instance, Ray Harris’s Introduction to William Jones, Discourses Delivered at the Asiatick

Society; Robbins, ‘Jones as a General Linguist in the Eighteenth Century Context’, Objects of
Enquiry, eds. Cannon and Brine 83–91.
3 Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East; Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings. Jones’s influence on

Shelley and on Prometheus Unbound in particular has been examined in detail also by Drew 229–
82.
4 Letter from Sir William Jones to Arthur Lee, dated 1 October 1786.
5 Adrienne Ward has reviewed the plurality and dichotomy inherent in eighteenth-century

Orientalism, before Orientalist endeavours became firmly linked to nineteenth century imperialist
ventures, in ‘Eastern Others on Western Pages: Eighteenth-Century Literary Orientalism’. See
also Marshall,‘Empire and Authority’; Porter,‘Orientalism and Its Problems’.
6 While Jones’s admiration for Hastings did not seem to affect his relationship with Hastings’s

successors in India, Cornwallis and John Shore, it incidentally led to his split with a friend and
erstwhile admirer in England, Edmund Burke, Hastings’s chief opponent in the impeachment
process. For an perceptive study of Jones’s position on the role of British rule in India, see Franklin,
‘Accessing India’ 48–66. For a general historical review of this period of British rule in India, see
Eighteenth Century, ed. Marshall, vol. 2 of Oxford History of the British Empire; Marshall, Impeachment
of Warren Hastings.
7 Jones, ‘The Third Anniversary Discourse, On the Hindus, delivered 2nd of February, 1786’,

Works 1:19–30.
8 Letter to Charles Wilkins, dated 14 April 1785.
9 Letter from Samuel Johnson to Warren Hastings, dated 30 March 1774.
10 See, for instance, Jones,‘Sir William Jones as an Arabist’ 77.
11 The ‘Persian Song’ is reprinted in Selected Poetical and Prose Works 185–8.
12 The demand for more translations was supplied by Jones himself with the publication of Poems,

Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (1772). For Jones’s influence on the
Romantics, see Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination and Leask, British Romantic Writers and
the East.
13 Anquetil-Duperron is best known for his three-volume translation of the Zend-Avesta (1771),

which introduced Zoroastrian texts to Europe, and his subsequent translation of the Sanskrit
Upanishads into Latin (1804). He would be later celebrated by Edward Said for exemplifying the
‘triumphant eclecticism’ of early Orientalist research (51; see also 77–8). Michael J. Franklin
discusses the circumstances of the debate in his biography of Jones, Sir William Jones 13–14.
14 Johnson’s letter to Boswell, dated March 1777. Members of the club included the painter Joshua

Reynolds, the politicians Burke and Charles James Fox, the historian Edward Gibbon, the naturalist
Joseph Banks, and actors and playwrights Garrick, Goldsmith and Sheridan.
15 The ambivalence in Jones’s position was shared by many of his contemporaries, including Samuel

Johnson, examined by Nicholas Hudson. For a provocative exploration of the relationship between
disciplinarity, professionalisation and literature in eighteenth-century England, see also Siskin.
Richard Drayton specifically discusses how the early British colonies became the spaces in which
the ‘formal empire of professional knowledge’ began to take shape (see especially 244, 250).
16 Letter from Sir William Jones to the Viscount Althorp, dated 2 May 1778.
17 Letter from Sir William Jones to the Viscount Althorp, dated 16 September 1779.
18 Letter from Sir William Jones to the Viscount Althorp, dated 12 March 1780.
19 Letter to the second Earl Spencer, 4–30 August 1787.
20 For a useful review of Jones’s many fields of research, see Trautmann.
21 For a detailed review of the significance of this translation, see Michael Franklin’s invaluable

introduction to the text in Sacontalá;.

22 This link between ‘Orientalist’ interests and traditional classical scholarship was discussed

exhaustively, of course, by Raymond Schwab in La Renaissance Orientale (The Oriental Renaissance).

23 Among Jones’s Romantic successors who were influenced by his authoritative evocations of

the Indian deities was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who mentions the ‘Indian Camdeo’ in a letter to T.
J. Hogg, dated 20 June 1811. See Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1:112.
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 Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones . 1251
24 Jones compares Shakespeare’s sonnet 99, ‘The forward violet thus did I chide’ with an ode by
Hafiz in his ‘Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations’, Selected Works 331; the comparison
between Greek and Indian philosophy is made in ‘The Third Anniversary Discourse, On the
Hindus’, Works 1:28; letter to the second Earl Spencer, 4–30 August 1787 (Letters 2:755–6).
25 Letter to Jonathan Duncan, 7 February 1790, Letters 2:855–6.
26 Letter to Thomas Caldecott, 22 September 1787, Letters 2:777–8.
27 Letter to the second Earl Spencer, 12 August 1787, Letters 2:747–8.
28 It is worth noting here that in 1784, Jones had sent Edmund Burke his report on the ‘Best

Practicable System of Judicature for India’, which recommended the rule of India by Indian Law.
See Cannon,‘Oriental Jones’, Objects of Enquiry 37.
29 Cf. the concluding stanza of Jones’s ‘Hymn to Durga’ (Selected Works 178):

O Durga, thou hast deign’d to shield

Man’s feeble virtue with celestial might,
Gliding from yon jasper field,
And, on a lion borne, hast brav’d the sight;
For, when the demon Vice thy realms defied,
And arm’d with death each arched horn,
Thy golden lance, O goddess mountain-born,
Touch but the pest – he roar’d and died.

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