Light from eastern windows

If the popular idea of the men who founded the British Raj as a lot of brutish pig-stickers and greedy nabobs who despised the Indians they exploited and thought their civilisation of no account still persists, this fascinating, well-researched book should be enough to dispel it. At the end of the 18th century, when the East India Company was consolidating its power and extending its possessions, a number of its officials, civil and military, struck by the splendours and mysteries about them, impressive even in their day, began to seek for knowledge of India’s past.

One of the first and most notable of these ‘Orientalists’ (the word had not acquired its present modish disrepute) was Sir William Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court in Bengal, whose ambition it was to ‘know India better than any European ever knew it’. An Arabic and Persian scholar, he was one of the first to break through the Brahmin ban on outsiders learning the sacred language, Sanskrit.