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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
The purpose of this Note is to make available to scholars the text of a new letter by Sir William Jones (1746–94) to Richard Johnson (1753–1807), recently discovered in an antiquarian book and manuscript catalogue issued in 1924 by Maggs Brothers, the London dealers, and otherwise unpublished and unrecorded.
Johnson, an important though neglected figure in the history of the British ‘discovery’ of Hinduism, held a number of influential posts within the East India Company's administration during his sojourn in India from 1770 to 1790. But it is for his investigations into Indian literature and music, including his substantial and important collection of Indian miniatures and Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts, that he deserves to be better known.
1 Maggs, Bros.Bibliotheca Asiatica, Catalogue 452 (London, 1924), Item 665. p. 235Google Scholar
2 Johnson's biographical details are given in Falk, T. and Archer, M., Indian miniatures in the India Office Library (London, 1981), 14–29Google Scholar.
3 The role of such network research in the field of colonial science has been examined by Andrew, Grout, ‘Geology and India, 1775–1805: An episode in colonial science’, South Asia Research, 10, 1, 1990, 118Google Scholar.
4 Garland, Cannon, The life and mind of Oriental Jones (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar.
5 Cannon, Life and Mind, 366
6 Cannon, (ed.), The letters of Sir William Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1970), no. 373, p. 624Google Scholar.
7 ibid., 625–26.
8 Dīpaka, a word which remains untraced as a name of Kāma or as a substantive ‘the inflamer’.
9 Jones did, however, use it in his ‘Hymn to Sereswaty’. William, Jones. Works, 13 vols. (London, 1807), XIII, 316–19Google Scholar.