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. He soon realised that it was cognate with Greek and Latin, which gave him the first intimation of what came to be known as the Indo-European family of languages. A man of his time as well as a scholar, he could not resist ‘plausible conjectures’ about the links between ancient India and prehistoric Britain. Was Stonehenge an Indian temple?
However that might be, a vista of Indian history was now opening up, stretching back to remote antiquity. It soon appeared, from inscriptions on pillars and rocks in India, as well as from evidence in Burma, Ceylon and Tibet, where Buddhism still prevailed, that a religion quite distinct from Hinduism had flourished in India for centuries until it was virtually extirpated by Muslim invaders and orthodox Hindus.
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