Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c8.6

c8.6

The introduction to India of European habits of thought, including the concept of history and of historical research, was brought about by men whose primary interests were not academic, though their education was sufficiently broadly based in the humanities for them to appreciate the value of such studies, and even to undertake them themselves in the intervals of busy professional lives in an exacting climate. The great contributions made to the knowledge of oriental linguistics and comparative philology by such figures as Sir William Jones or Carey of Serampore in the late eighteenth century were in themselves partly practical – the translation of the Bible, or an understanding of Hindu law were the immediate aims – though the purely academic issue was never forgotten. The foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal marks the establishment of antiquarian interests in India, as well as of the other aspects of research which, in the phrase of the time, would be classed as ‘philosophical’, and this antiquarianism would be prepared to concern itself with any period of India’s past, historic or prehistoric, that it encountered.