ABSTRACT
In his seminal essay “On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India,” written soon after his arrival in India in 1784, Jones renders the Other in categories familiar to the West. He draws classical analogies between the mythologies and religious practices of the Greco-Roman and the Hindu world. What Jones is trying to demonstrate is that Europeans are not encountering a strange culture but their own culture in its primitive form. In other words, Europeans are rather rediscovering their own pagan past in Hinduism.
