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have since helped to prise open the secrets of many ancient civilizations. India, with its wealth of ancient literature and inscriptions, has benefited more than most, and the dates now ascribed to its earliest literary compositions depend entirely on the evidence of philology.
    More immediately, Jones’s discoveryclearly showed that the people of northern India, far from being savages, were actually of the same ethnic origin as their British rulers. Also, if Sanskrit was ‘more perfect’ etc. than Greek or Latin, then the record of civilization in India might be longer than in Europe. However sobering for the sahibs, it was a tremendous boost for oriental studies. The translation of Sanskrit literature suddenlybecame a matter of much wider interest. What might it not tell of the civilization of this ancient people, and perhaps of the common origins of all the Aryan peoples? And what about the chronology? Just how old were the various Sanskrit writings?
    In what leisure was left after a strenuous life in the courts, Jones forged ahead with his studies. ‘I hold every day lost in which I acquire no newknowledge of man or nature,’ he wrote in 1787. ‘It is my ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it. I rise an hour before the sun and walk from my garden to the fort, about three miles; & by seven I am ready for my pandit with whom I read Sanskrit; at eight come a Persian or Arab alternately with whom I read till nine; at nine come the attorneys with affidavits; I am thenrobed and ready for court.’ Dinner was at 3 p.m. ‘When the sun is sunk in the Ganges we drive back to the Gardens either in our post-chaise or Anna’s phaeton drawn by a pair of beautiful Nepal horses. After tea time we read; and never sit up, if we can avoid it, after ten.’ He was teaching Anna Maria algebra, and together they were reading Dante, Ariosto and Tasso in the original. Life in GardenReach had become as idyllic as at their bungalow in Krishnagar. Together they studied botany: Anna Maria drew and painted the plants; Sir William classified them according to the system of Linnaeus and wrote a Latin description of each.
    He drew the line at actually picking the flowers. Much as he loved the natural sciences, he had a very Buddhist aversion to destroying life in any form. His studiesencouraged botany in India but temporarily stalled zoology. ‘I cannot reconcile to my notions of humanity the idea of making innocent beasts miserable and mangling harmless birds.’ The livestock that thronged their garden responded to this humane outlook. From the Joneses’ dairy came ‘the best butter in India’. Their sheep and goats, safe from the butcher’s knife, would feed from Anna Maria’shand. It was all ‘like what the poets tell us of the golden ages; & you might see a kid and a tiger playing at Anna’s feet. The tiger is not as large as a full grown cat, though he will be as large as an ox: he is suckled by a she-goat and has all the gentleness of his foster-mother.’ Jones always insisted that even in England he had never been unhappy; ‘but I was never happy till I settled inIndia’.
    He was also in a state of intense excitement. ‘Sanskrit literature is indeed a new world; the language (which I begin to speak with ease) is the Latin of India and a sister of Latin and Greek. In Sanskrit are written half a million of stanzas on sacred history and literature, epic and lyric poems innumerable, and (what is wonderful) tragedies and comedies not to be counted, about 2000years old, besides works on law (my great object), on medicine, on theology, on arithmetic, on ethics and so on to infinity.’ He felt like a man who had stumbled unawares on the whole corpus of classical literature. How could he convey this excitement?
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