A History of Indian Literature v1.c7.s2.8

v1.c7.s2.8

However, still more important for the opening-up of large departments of Indian literature was the work of the famous English orientalist William Jones¹ (born 1746, died 1794), who went to India in the year 1783 in order to take up the post of Chief Justice at Fort William. Jones had already in his youth occupied himself with oriental poetry, and translated Arabic and Persian poems into English. No wonder that, when he arrived in India, he transferred his enthusiasm to the study of Sanskrit and Indian literature. Already a year after his arrival in India he became the founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which soon displayed an extraordinarily useful activity in the publication of periodicals, and especially in the printing of numerous editions of Indian texts. In the year 1789 he published his English translation of the celebrated drama "Śakuntalā" by Kālidāsa. This English translation was translated into German in the year 1791 by Georg Forster, and awakened in the highest degree the enthusiasm of men like Herder and Goethe. Another work of the same poet Kālidāsa, the lyric poem "Ṛtusaṃhāra," was published in the original text by Jones in Calcutta in the year 1792, and this was the first Sanskrit text which appeared in print. Of still greater importance was the fact that Jones translated into English the most famous and most reputed work of Indian legal literature, the law book of Manu. This translation appeared in Calcutta in 1794 under the title "Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinance of Manu." A German translation of this book appeared in 1797 in Weimar. Finally Jones was also the first who affirmed the certain genealogical connection of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin and its hypothetical connection with German, Celtic and Persian. He had already also pointed out the similarities between the ancient Indian and the Graeco-Roman mythology.