The Buddha and the Sahibs
by Charles Allen
322pp, / audiobooks narrator- Sam Dastari
Quote the guardian review: On January 15, 1784, the great orientalist Sir William Jones docked at the port of Calcutta aboard the Crocodile. Less than six weeks after he had landed, Jones had gathered together a group of 30 Indophiles, to institute "a Society for enquiring into the History, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia". The society's patron was the governor-general, Warren Hastings, who predicted that "such studies, independent of utility, will diffuse a generosity of sentiment... [after all, the Indian classics] will survive when British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist".
As Charles Allen shows in his book, under Jones, the Asiatic Society of Bengal soon became the scholarly nerve centre that brought together all the different amateur enthusiasts busily working at uncovering the deepest roots of India's lost pre-Islamic history. In the society's Calcutta premises were collated reports sent in from a huge range of eccentric figures working away at translating Buddhist scrolls or ancient rock inscriptions, Gandharan coins or Tibetan mythologies, far separated from each other in remote outposts between the highest peaks of the Himalayas in Tibet and Nepal, through the arid plains of the Deccan to the thickest jungles of 18th-century Burma and Ceylon.J
James Ah Foo Gardner,
Wife Agnes Taylor
Of the
Gilmandyke, NSW.