William Jones was IMO was one of the most influential of the English. Some people answered John Woodroffe (to the question of who composed the English verses to Hindu Gods shown), not a bad choice if you guessed without cheating because his career closely parallels’ Jones. I also wanted to do a segment on Jones but had to dig up some hard to find information that I finally did.
Both Jones and Woodroffe were judges who became sympathetic to the H tradition.Both their wives also became interested in H tradition. In the case of Woodroffe his wife made a Malhotra u-turn & dragged him along back to the preta-mata.+++(5)+++ I wanted to trace the case of Jones’s wife. All evidence suggests she did not waver unlike Woodroffe’s. One author has even suggested that they might have been crypto-H. Plausible - given lines in Her poem “Adieu to India”.
Adieu to India’s fertile Plains,
Where Brahma’s holy Doctrine reigns;
Whose virt’ous Principles still bind
The Hindoo’s meek untainted Mind;
While modern H might be ambivalent to being called meek – perhaps that was the state to which the va~NgIya-s had descended then.The poem has other heathen elements like another poem of her’s - calling in Classical heathen elements.
Jones was a expansive polymath of English gentleman type on account of whom they were able to conquer the H in their declining years.+++(5)+++ His studies spanned botany, zoology – he realized that the loris must be a sister group of the lemur (also unintendedly the roots of Dravidian lemurianism); the nature of filariasis; concordance between Sanskrit and western nomenclature of plants; comparative law; H astronomy; comparative history, following Newton’s study (his father was Newton’s friend & an early student of calculus) & finally the Indo-European theory for which Jones is most widely remembered. The remarkable thing about him was his capacity of both study H tradition in an academic way & as a participant in the religion – something which modern H struggle with as we see with some of the mobs on this medium.+++(5)+++ Jones expressed this to his compatriot Wilkins who was trying to study Skt: “I am in love with the Gopia, charmed with Crishnen, an enthusiastic admirer of Ram, and a devout adorer of Brihma.” Finally we may note his deployment of the parsimony principle attributed to Newton in reasoning the monophyly of IE languages and theory of linguisitic divergence.