The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; Or, How William Jones Discovered India

Celebrated as greatest of the Orientalists' and undisputed founder2 of Orientalism, William Jones is best remembered for his discovery of an Indo-European family of languages. Although he was not the first to notice that Sanskrit resembled Greek and Latin, he was the first to be credited with the comparative method that gave birth to a modern science of philology. Jones's so-called discovery, and the science to which it gave birth, signals the emergence of a discourse sanctioning a colonial expansion into Asia. British colonizers were now able to trace their own heritage back to an ancient civilization of the Indian subcontinent they happened to occupy. The translation of Sanskrit manuscripts prompted the Oriental renaissance of Romantic thought and a European fascination with everything Indian.3