Sir William "Oriental" Jones: Ahead of His Time, and Ours

Not just an egghead

However, readers would be wrong to pigeonhole Jones as a wonder-nerd. He was also one of history's most gifted humanists. At a time when racism was taken for granted, he praised the cultures of the East, to the point of preferring them on many levels. He had a passion for Muslim and Hindu law, and at his death, was compiling a body of translations and commentary, with an eye to integrating them into British law in India. In 1784 he founded the Royal Asiatick Society, the first Western organisation dedicated to studying and disseminating information on foreign cultures. His copious writing, running to 13 volumes, remains authoritative two centuries after his death.

All of these activities seriously undermined Europe's studied ethnocentrism, solidly establishing the common parentage of European and Asian cultures, and ultimately of humanity. Like all great scholars, he raised more questions than he answered, and those questions have kept his successors smashing idols ever since. Indeed, his tabula raza approach is still controversial, as I have noted in my own work on First Nations history.

Jones himself said, "I hold every day lost, when I do not acquire some new knowledge of man and nature." Indian archaeologist K. Paddayya calls Jones "one of the most influential minds of the modern age," and notes that interest in Jones peaks when sensitivity is "in," and recedes as arrogance comes back in fashion. (I suspect that the Jones revival of the 1990s is already history.)

Jones has naturally suffered the slings and arrows of political correctness in recent years, but none of his critics have been able to make the dirt stick. That's because the classic injustice of holding figures to moral standards developed after their time simply isn't relevant to Sir William. It's not just that he was ahead of his time. (His clinical perspective, for example, wouldn't become procedure among anthropologists until a century after his death). He was ahead of our time as well. In his openness and rejection of bigotry, this product of the 18th century was superior to the norm in the 21st. It is much the measure of Sir William's soul that scholars in modern India continue to revere this dead white male imperialist.

Paging Sir William...

Today, when it has suddenly become fashionable to reduce complex truths to simple lies, and the fundamental

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