Patronage over Literature, Translation and Print: Some Remarks on 1809 Edition of the Dabestān-e mazāheb Published in Print with the Support of the East India Company

Dabestān-e mazāheb is an interesting example of a 17th century text on various faiths and creeds of the Indian subcontinent. The present case study looks at possible explanations for its popularity claimed for it in the editorial note found in the first printed edition (1809) while simultaneously analysing reasons behind selection of this particular text for a print publication in the light of patronage extended by the East India Company to translation and printing of selected Indian writings. The process in this case is well documented in the correspondence of British officials such as Sir William Jones, but as to the reasons for the printing even more may be deduced from the highly ornate Persian peritext appended at the end of the 1809 edition by the book’s editor, Nazar Ashraf. The note provides an interesting testimony to the evolving fusion of the long tradition of manuscript writing and the advancements in printing which the paper explores.

Le ius commune européen : « hareng rouge » de l’approche comparative des traditions juridiques anglaise et française

Pour saisir l’ancien droit anglais dans une approche comparative, le ius commune constitue une tête de pont inefficace. Au départ, l’historien du droit français est mal préparé, principalement en raison des carences de son historiographie nationale, laquelle, trop exclusivement axée sur les spécificités françaises, ignore largement les caractéristiques européennes de la tradition romaniste et son évolution aux Temps Modernes. Mais même en supposant que cette défaillance puisse être surmontée, la civil law anglaise ne permet d’appréhender ni le génie de la common law, ni même l’esprit dans lequel l’Equity s’est développée à l’époque moderne. L’interface que constitue dans l’orbis exiguus du ius commune la méthode moderne – l’usus modernus systématisant ratione materiae et opérant une fusion substantielle du ius commune et des iura propria d’un territoire – a été trop peu développée par les juristes anglais du xvie au xviiie siècle, qu’ils furent des civil lawyers comme John Cowell ou Thomas Wood, ou, exceptionnellement, un common lawyer comme Sir William Jones.

Sir William Jones (1746–1794) and the Early Orientalist Discourse on Sufism

Many theories have been proposed to discuss Sufism in terms of its linguistic origins and its role in spiritual knowledge, its concepts and ideas, and cultural influences. Both Muslim and orientalist scholars have offered opposing views on the beginnings of Sufism. Unfortunately, Western orientalists were the first to research this topic, and their ideas greatly influenced later scholars. This study examines how early British orientalists, particularly Sir William Jones, approached the study of Sufism. Jones represents the early development of British orientalism, which started in the form of personal travel accounts long before orientalist societies were established to support them. Only the later ‘experts on the Orient’ created scholarly circles that followed a more objective and systematic approach to studying Muslim cultures, yet often persisted in the erroneous claim that Sufism was an external and foreign element in Islamic culture.

Sir William Jones and Oriental Mysticism

Oriental mysticism, religion, and science are all intertwined with literature; while proven to be fantastic for many scholars, this intermixture has made it challenging to extract mystical concepts from poetry. This difficulty has been one of the earliest sources of conflict between Oriental literary scholars, religious figures, and mystics. The situation becomes more complex should one attempt to compare Oriental mysticism with its Occidental counterpart. Arguably, the first Western scholar who conducted such a rigorous comparison was Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a linguist, translator, and poet who was also a Supreme Court Judge in Calcutta. His fascination with Persian mystical poets such as Rumi (1210-1273), Sadi (1210-1292), and Hafez (1315-1390) drove him towards Sufism. Due to his understanding of Persian mysticism and culture, Jones became one of the best interpreters of Indo-Persian literature. His works, founded on his fascination with Persian language and literature, gained him the title of ‘Persian Jones’ and established his international reputation as an Orientalist. Jones’s publications highly impacted Romantic scholars, developing sympathetic representations of the Orient in the period’s literature. Jones’s works, letters, Persian manuscripts, and the annotations he made on them have not been examined for his Persian mystical studies before this thesis. Therefore, this PhD research will investigate his works and library on Sufism and his comparative study of mystical schools. It intends to analyse Jones’s findings in his comparative mystical studies and elaborate on his understanding of Sufism. This thesis investigates his essays, letters, and annotations in various texts; such texts are mainly available in the Royal Asiatic Society archives and the British Library’s India Office Records and Private Papers. Moreover, in some cases, Jones has altered his English translations of Persianate Sufi texts; these alterations will be examined and compared with the original texts to demonstrate Jones’s rationale behind them. This research will pursue the accuracy of Jones’s interpretation of Sufism and Hinduism. In addition, it examines his development of the interpretations of Oriental mysticism, which he presented to eighteenth-century Europe. The findings of this research will contribute to the growing literature on Orientalism and shed a brighter light on the works of Sir William Jones and Indo-Persian literature and mysticism.

Building a Library: The Arabic and Persian Manuscript Collection of Sir William Jones

This article contributes to the established scholarship on Sir William Jones (d.1794) by providing a detailed overview and analysis of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collection that Jones acquired both before arriving in India in 1784, and during his time living in Kolkata. 118 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and 69 Sanskrit manuscripts, as well as nine Chinese manuscripts, were transferred to the Royal Society library by Jones in 1792. These were then transferred to the India Office Library in 1876 and are currently housed in the British Library. As well as an in-depth survey of these manuscripts, this article provides important information on the manuscripts which remained in the Jones's possession after 1792 and which were sold, along with the rest of Lady Jones's (d.1829) library, at auction in 1831 after her death. Within this overview of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collections, there will be a sustained focus on the methods of acquiring manuscripts and Jones's curatorial management of his library.

EMPIRE AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN THREE LETTERS FROM SIR WILLIAM JONES TO GOVERNOR-GENERAL JOHN MACPHERSON

These newly discovered letters help to reconstruct the close association between two seemingly disparate eighteenth-century Britons in India. Moreover, they suggest that a fixation on clashes of ‘cultural attitudes’ has distorted modern assessments of the politics of scholarly patronage in that era. The long-lauded William Jones and the long-dismissed John Macpherson were not so different after all. The views of each ranged from the sublime heights of Enlightened philosophy to the grubby depths of imperial politics.

Orientalism and Hebraism

This chapter begins by showing how Sir William Jones used ‘Eastern’ poetry as a means of regenerating English literary culture and expanding its range, exemplified by his role in mediating Hindu mythology for his readers. While works by Coleridge, Shelley, and others responded to this stimulus, a tradition of allegorical verse romance pioneered by Landor used Eastern settings to reflect on the politics of the revolutionary era. Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer extends the Jonesian project by confronting readers with ‘significant otherness’, while his later poem Roderick, the Last of the Goths dramatizes instead the purging of foreign contamination. The chapter juxtaposes Roderick with Byron’s The Giaour and examines Moore’s Lalla Rookh as a literary pastiche offering readers access to an appealing exotic East. It concludes with Walter Scott’s representation of his heroine Rebecca in Ivanhoe as a retrospect on Orientalism and Hebraism in the Romantic period.

Creative Translation

This chapter addresses the theory and practice of translation in works by Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, Felicia Hemans, Sir William Jones, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite Shelley’s view of its impossibility, translation is shown in the work of Jones, Byron, and Shelley to be one of the most vital and sophisticated literary activities of the Romantic era, at once a means to enlightenment about poetic traditions outside Britain and an arena for bold technical experimentation. For Shelley, translation constitutes a creative habitus through which he escapes his native language and then translates back into English from an assumed ‘foreign’ persona. Keats’s poetry, on the other hand, demonstrates how originality is prompted through engagement with the translations of others. The chapter also situates theories about translation in Britain within the context of wider debates on the Continent.