compendia, the Puranas (Antiquities). In addition to Sanskrit, knowledge of the
classics as a reference point was also judged essential by the colonizers, their
study being compulsory and highly valued in the examinations for the India
Civil Service from the 1850s (Majeed 1999).
From theWrst decades of the British presence in India Sanskrit was seen as
the equivalent of Greek and Latin for Europeans, and therefore a language
whose code the learned world should break and harness (Majeed 1999; Raj
2001: 122–3). This was the setting in which the earliest scholarly production
on philology and on the origins of India took place. However, the key
discovery made in theWeld by Sir William Jones (1746–94) also has to be
contextualized in Mosaic ethnology—i.e. ‘an ethnology whose frame is sup-
plied by the story of the descent of Noah in the book of Genesis, attributed to
Moses, in the Bible’ (Trautmann 1997: 41), also called biblical anthropology
(Stocking 1987: 41–5). He used his research on languages as a means to
identify the descendants of Noah and their dispersal throughout the world
(ibid. ch. 2). In the 1780s, Jones made a discovery that would open a
linguistic—and soon a racial—understanding of the Asian subcontinent:
the existence of an ancient language, Indo-European, from which many
modern languages had emerged. This breakthrough would reshape the per-
ception of the cultural distance between India and Europe. His comparative
method made clear the common origin of languages like Sanskrit, Greek and
Latin; aWnding he employed to claim, after highlighting other more ancient
possible links of Sanskrit with Chinese, a common origin for both language
and humanity (Ballantyne 2002: 28). Antiquities formed a part—albeit small
at this time—of this early search for origins. In 1784, Jones’ interest in India
led him to found the Asiatic Society for the purpose of ‘inquiry into the
history and antiquities, the arts, sciences and literature of Asia’ (chapter 2). 5
This society, with its ups and downs, saw the development of diVerent strands
of scientiWc enquiry into ancient India: from Sanskrit to Hinduism, to (later
in the century) Buddhism (Singh 2004: 8–15).
The study of Sanskrit would become more complex when two concepts
were added to the scholars’ interests: those of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Indo-European’.
The Aryan people wasWrst described as Indo-European in 1813, and both
concepts began to be understood mainly in racial terms in the following
decade. The acceptance of this would be linked to European romanticism
and its concern with Oriental philology. This resulted in the creation of
societies such as the 1829 Orient Society of Prussia, and the emergence of
specialists in Oriental studies (Marchand 1996b: 304). Scholars such as
5 The Ceylon Branch of the Asiatic Society was formed in 1845. In 1874 an Archaeological
Commissioner was appointed (Allchin 1986: 3).
South and South East Asia 223