‘Sir William Jones’, a book review
dating to 1968 and therefore 45 years old, is in 2013 exactly half the age of
its author, Ranajit Guha, the Bengali writer and thinker who is also the most
influential living historian of South Asia. Guha and his wife Mechthild live
close to the Viennese woods on the outskirts of Vienna. From their house you
can see straight to the sanatorium in which Subhas Chandra Bose was briefly
housed. The other figure from nationalist times who once lived not so far away
was Mirabehn. She spent her last years in the proximity of the regions where
her first idol, Beethoven, had composed his music. At one time Mechthild had
thought of writing a book about Mirabehn, but many years back, after some
meetings with her prospective protagonist, she decided against pursuing the
idea. (Unlike Annie Besant, C.F. Andrews, and Verrier Elwin, who have
biographers, Madeleine Slade seems to have made a getaway.)
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| Mechthild and Ranajit Guha in 2008 (photo courtesy Nonica Datta) |
But to return to the author of 'Sir William
Jones', who turns 90 in May. His piece on Jones, consistent with his work as a
whole, shows an idiomatic hold over the English language which is seldom found
among people writing Indian history now. The precision and elegance of his
phrasings are nearly antique: you could look at his review as a kind of Grecian
urn, an artefact that isn't made any more. The internalization among history
practitioners of what might as shorthand be termed Spivakese or Bhabhanese, the
universal urge to sms, email, and update facebook pages, and newer forms of
writing in a vast and democratized marketplace have taken historiographical
prose in very different directions since Guha’s heyday from the 1960s to the
1990s. The older forms of crafting history via a thorough immersion in the
English and European literary canons are either seriously weakened or lost or,
worst of all, condescended to. The straitjackets that pass under the name of
disciplinary specializations have, specially in India, made history’s divorce
from literature pretty nearly complete. Speak to any of the professors teaching
history in an Indian university and the first complaint they voice is that
their students can’t write history because they need to be taught English,
never mind the literary canon. Yet this isn’t something that anyone is going to
rectify institutionally, for example by making every history student take
compulsory courses in the classics of English prose.
Which makes it all the more important
to read Guha’s work, and recognize the value of this short book review. This
little essay is an unputdownable putdowner. It tears into William Jones in
prose of an Orwellian precision and ferocity. The book being bayoneted is S.N.
Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in
Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1968). Guha's piece was first published in South Asian Review, vol. 1, no. 4, July
1968, pp. 314–15, and may now be found in the author's collected essays, The Small Voice of History, edited by
Partha Chatterjee (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009).
The review is reproduced in full to
felicitate Guha as that rarest kind of Indian historian who has written English
prose worth reading half a century after he wrote it. There’s also of course
the added excitement that by the time Guha’s done with him there’s very little
left of Sir William Jones. Guha shrivels Sir William into a rather little heap;
in fact, the Burra Sahib, seen through the review, seems rather lucky in not having been alive to read Guha’s views or he’d
have shrivelled into an even littler heap. There’s nothing as lip-smackingly
satisfying as a hatchet job which buries its subject so deep that you begin to
wonder if he ever existed. On the other hand, in this case it does seem legitimate to ask if Jones merits such annihilation, and to wonder if the severity of Guha's castigation isn't tied up with his demonization of all Sahibs and valorization of Subaltern resistance to everything imperial.
To honour Ranajit Guha, some
weeks back Permanent Black, in consultation with Mechthild Guha, asked a few
scholars to send in short tributes of 300-600 words. These have begun coming in
and will in the course of time be blogged. The deadline for submission remains
end January 2013, extendable by a few days if necessary.
Then, we heard out of the blue from a
couple of scholars we had not invited—they asked if they too could send in
their tributes. We agreed, of course. In view of this, it seems a nice idea to
open the field even wider: there are bound to be plenty of scholars and
historians wanting to pay some form of personal homage to Ranajit Guha. So
Permanent Black hereby invites all readers of this blog: if your professional
or personal life has been changed or improved or influenced in some way by Ranajit
Guha’s life or work, and you would like to send in an appreciation or critique,
please do. We cannot promise to publish all the tributes that we receive, but they
will all be conveyed to Ranajit Guha. And we will blog as many of them as we
can. The tributes should be 300-600 words and emailed to perblack@gmail.com as
Word attachments.
Sir
William Jones
a book review by Ranajit Guha
'The Father of Indology' emerges from this study as a
pretty poor mouse. Dr Mukherjee takes a close look at Jones’s record as a linguist,
historian, and translator from Indian languages. His ‘discoveries’ about the affinity
of Indo-European languages had already been largely anticipated by other European
scholars. His chronology of Indian history made confusion worse confounded, if
only because of his uncritical adherence to the current practice of fitting oriental
traditions to Judaeo-Christian creation myths. The identification of
Sandrocottas as Chandragupta had already been arrived at by Joseph de Guignes
years before Jones came up with it. As an epigraphist, Jones’s achievement
falls far below that of Wilkins, Prinsep, and Radhakanta Sharman. Wilkins was a
better Sanskritist, too, and Jones’s own translations are the result of his
collaboration with Indian scholars. And, finally, the Digest of Hindu and
Mohammedan Law which he wanted to bequeath as ‘a noble legacy from me to three
and twenty million black British subjects’ turned out to be ‘a disorderly compilation’,
according to James Mill, and a work of ‘very little practical value’ according
to Dr Mukherjee. Yet this was the man who, almost before he had learnt the
elementary rules of Sanskrit grammar, came out with a weighty pronouncement on
the structure of that language; who, equipped with the ragbag of
biblical legend as the basis of his historiography, casually set about writing
a comprehensive history of the ancient world; and who, even before he reached
Calcutta, had made up a sixteen-point plan of investigation ranging from ‘proofs
and illustrations of scripture’ to ‘the Music of the Eastern Nations’.
The curious fact is that Jones himself seems
never to have been bothered by doubts about his intellectual ambition being far
out of proportion to his ability. If this was something that had to do with his
personality, the present monograph at least is no guide to our understanding on
that particular point. Dr Mukherjee talks of Jones’s ‘complex personality’
without telling us exactly what he means. Far from being complex, Jones comes out
in these pages as being very ordinary indeed. He seems to have had an excessive
attachment to his mother, but we have no way of knowing what it actually means
in terms of behaviour except that from time to time he would quote the old lady in justification of any of his attitudes, and
that he used to dote on his wife. Dr Mukherjee speaks of his aversion to power.
Yet such aversion, if there was any, did not prevent Jones from seeking
patronage in the manner characteristic of his times. He was as conformist as
any of his brand of Radical Whigs, and it is not quite clear why Dr Mukherjee, against
his own evidence, describes Jones as having been to some extent alienated from
Oxford: at every crunch Jones seems to have jumped up in defence of the Oxford
system of education and scholarship.
What emerges is in fact the portrait of a man of
large ambitions and little talent—and less humour. This latter characteristic
was noted by Horace Walpole, that shrewd contemporary, who found Jones’s
election address ‘absurd and pedantic’, and subsequently by Bentham, for whom
Jones was ‘an industrious man with no sort of genius’. One is not surprised
that as a young man Jones used to prefer swimming to
dancing; that as an aspiring scholar he found
Voltaire’s wit unbearable, apparently because ‘he cannot give an abstract of
the Newtonian philosophy without interspersing it with strokes of humour’; and
that, in translating Kalidasa’s famous play, he omitted all that in the
original referred to the heroine’s bosom. Dr Mukherjee is quite right in concluding
that Jones’s legacy boils down to one solid achievement—the foundation of the
Asiatic Society. Yet the legend dies hard that he was the founder of Indology.
The legend continues to hurt and
to falsify to the extent that even in this, the most recent work on the
subject, there is no mention at all of Max Muller (except in the bibliography)
and that even in a work of this kind the tradition of pedantry has left its stain:
why indulge in the archaic distinction between romanticism and classicism when
it is so obviously futile to try and draw a line? Why, for that matter, use
diacritical marks for Sanskrit words, particularly if one
has not quite mastered the rules which govern them?
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