ABSTRACT
In 1786 William Jones, a Justice of the High Court of Bengal and student of Sanskrit, gave an address to the Bengal Asiatic Society in
which he made a statement that was to change the face of European intellectual life:
Jones’s pronouncement initiated a kind of ‘Indomania’ throughout Europe as scholars looked to Sanskrit for an origin to European languages that went even deeper than Latin and Greek. What remained in the aftermath of Indomania was the entrenchment of Orientalism and the vast expansion of language study. For the next century European ethnologists, philologers and historians were to be obsessed with the Orient and the Indo-European group of languages because these seemed to offer an explanation of the roots of European civilisation itself.
