None of these explanations seems satisfactory. For one reason, by this time the Islamic world no longer equated to the Middle East – there were many Muslims in India and further east, and in Africa. As was mentioned earlier, Islam had been immensely successful in its spread around the world – judged in purely spiritual (rather than in material) terms, the faith that had originally been Arab had been exceedingly successful, second to none as an export. And so the wider answer, about the ‘asymmetry’, if there is one, surely lies in the great opening-up of the world, in the age of exploration, which provided Europeans with access to vast tracts of fresh land, in Africa, Australia and the Americas, with their associated flora, fauna and natural resources and, above all, their huge markets which allowed for trade, innovation and capital formation on an unprecedented scale. This is the simplest explanation, and the most convincing.
In France in the seventeenth century the king, Louis XIV, was told that the Portuguese settlements in India were not as secure as they might be and saw his chance. Without fuss, he added six young Jesuits – all scientists as well as prelates – to a mission he was sending to Siam.55 The men were put ashore in the south of India, the first of the French (as opposed to Portuguese) ‘Indian missions’ which were to gain both fame and notoriety for the ordeals they endured and for their collection of Lettres édifiantes et curieuses which gave detailed accounts of their experiences. These Jesuits were far more sympathetic and accommodating to the Indians than their previous colleagues. This was shown expressly in the so-called ‘concessions’ which they allowed regarding Catholic worship – these became known as the rites malabars or cérémonies chinoises, a hybrid form of worship, which was denounced in Rome and eventually condemned in 1744. But if this tolerant approach didn’t satisfy the Vatican, it appealed to the abbé Bignon, the French king’s librarian and the man who reorganised the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris. He requested the missionaries to be alert for Indic manuscripts, which he was keen to obtain to form the backbone of an Oriental library. In 1733, in the Lettres édifiantes, the Jesuits announced their response: the discovery of one of the ‘big game’ of the hunt, a complete Veda, long thought to have been lost.56 (It was in fact a complete Rig Veda in Grantha characters.17) Had the French Jesuits not taken the tolerant, accommodating approach that they did, it is unlikely they would have got close enough to local clerics and intellectuals to have been shown the Hindu scriptures in the first place, nor might they have realised what they had. Some years later, owing to Vatican intolerance, Jesuit relations with literate Indians deteriorated and shipments from the subcontinent were discontinued. By then, however, Europe had been exposed to Sanskrit and this turned into a major intellectual event.
‘Only after 1771 does the world become truly round; half the intellectual map is no longer blank.’ These are the words of Raymond Schwab, the French scholar, in his book The Oriental Renaissance, a title he took from Edgar Quinet who, in 1841, described the arrival of many Sanskrit manuscripts in Europe in the eighteenth century and compared them with the impact of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.57 I have adopted Quinet and Schwab’s title for this chapter, and in what follows have relied heavily on their work. What Schwab meant was that the arrival of the Hindu manuscripts, together with the deciphering, at much the same time, of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was an event more or less comparable with the arrival of the ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts, many in Arabic translation, that had transformed European life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see above, Chapter 17). Schwab himself felt that the discovery of the Sanskrit language and its literature was ‘one of the great events of the mind’.58
This transformation began almost certainly in 1771 when Abraham Anquetil-Duperron, ‘an obscure luminary’, published his translation of the Zend Avesta in France. This, says Schwab, was ‘the first time anyone had succeeded in breaking into one of the walled languages of Asia’.59 Anquetil was described by Edward Said as a French scholar and ‘ecumenist of beliefs (Jansenist, Catholic, and Brahmin)’. He transcribed and translated the Zend Avesta while in Surat, ‘freeing,’ in Schwab’s words, ‘the old humanism from the Mediterranean basin.’60 He was the first Western scholar to visit India expressly for the purpose of studying their scriptures. At first he called Sanskrit Sahanscrit, Samcretam or Samscroutam.18
The real start of the Oriental renaissance, however, properly began with the arrival in Calcutta of William Jones and the establishment of the Bengal Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784. This society was established by a group of highly talented English civil servants, employed by the East India Company, who, besides their official day-to-day duties helping to administer the subcontinent, also pursued broader interests, which included language studies, the recovery and translation of the Indian classics, astronomy and the natural sciences. Four men stood out. These were, first, Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the governor of Bengal, and a highly controversial politician, who was later impeached for corruption (and, after a trial that lasted, on and off, for seven years, acquitted), but throughout it all energetically encouraged the activities of the society.61 It was Hastings who ensured that learned Brahmans gathered at Fort William to supply the most authentic texts, which illustrated Indic law, literature and language. The others in the group were William Jones, a judge, Henry Colebrooke (the ‘Master of Sanskrit’) and Charles Wilkins. Between them, these men accomplished three things. They located, recovered, and translated the main Indian Hindu and Buddhist classics, they kick-started the investigation of Indian history, and Jones, in a brilliant flash of insight, uncovered the great similarities between Sanskrit on the one hand and Greek and Latin on the other, in the process reshaping history in a manner we shall explore throughout the rest of this chapter.
These men were all brilliant linguists, Jones especially. The son of a professor of mathematics, he was, on top of everything else, an accomplished poet. He published poems in Greek at the age of fifteen, while at sixteen – having learned Persian from ‘a Syrian living in London’ – he translated Hafiz into English.62 He later said that he had studied twenty-eight languages and had a thorough knowledge of thirteen.
Apart from Jones’ breakthrough, the next most eye-catching was Jean François Champollion’s, in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. In 1822 Champollion wrote his famous Letter to M. Dacier, which provided the key to the hieroglyphic script, making use of the trilingual Rosetta Stone, brought back from Egypt, as its key. ‘On the morning of September 14, 1822, Champollion ran across the rue Mazarine on which he lived, into the library of the Institut des Inscriptions, where he knew he would find his brother, [Jean Jacques] Champollion-Figeac, at work. He cried out to him, “I’ve got it”, went home, and fell unconscious. Coming out of a five-day coma, he immediately picked up the sequence of a waking dream that was almost as old as he was, and asked for his notes. On the 21st he dictated a letter to his brother, dated the next day, which he read to the Académie des Inscriptions on the 27th.’63