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An institutional focus of inquiry into the history and antiquities, the arts, sciences and literature of Asia was provided by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, established on 15 January 1784 in the contemporary British Indian capital of Calcutta with the Governor General Warren Hastings as its patron and William Jones, a senior judge, as the president. The ascending British supremacy in India, the trend of forming “societies” for scientific and other investigations in contemporary Britain, and a concern with “how far the products of India could be turned to account” explain the establishment of this institution. A major focus of interest was to understand Indian civilization in light of the contemporary notions of Universal History, which, because of its implicit acceptance of the biblical theory of creation, found no difficulty in believing that all human families were related and that one of the major tasks of historical investigation in India was to seek out proof of such relations. Having argued that the race he called Indian was descended from Ham, one of the three sons of Noah, Jones traced the ramifications of this concept in various fields of Indian endeavor, including Sanskrit, the speakers of which were supposed to have “had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians and Egyptians, the Phoenicians, Greeks and Tuscans; the Scythians or Goths, and celts; the Chinese, Japanese and Peruvians…” (Jones 1788). Interests in India both as the original center of civilization and for the identification of its ancient sites continued during this period. Among other things, Indian priests were supposed to have moved out of a climatically more equable central Asia, spreading civilization wherever they went (Chakrabarti 1976). In the field of historical geography there were some significant publications, notably those by James Rennell, whose Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, which combined both modern and ancient data, “one illustrating and explaining the other,” underwent three editions between 1783 and 1793 (Chakrabarti 1988a, 14, 16–18).
Field archaeology gained no momentum until the 1830s, although some major archaeological sites were noticed by then in a few regional surveys (Roy 1953). The man who inspired field-archaeological studies was James Prinsep, Assay Master of the British mint in Calcutta, Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the principal decipherer, in collaboration with Indian traditional language scholars, of the ancient Indian scripts of Brahmi and Kharoshti. His attitude toward field research is clear from his statement, “What the learned world demands of us in India is to be quite certain of our data, to place the monumental record before them exactly as now exists, and to interpret it faithfully and literally” (Prinsep 1838).
One of the major developments of the period was the enumeration and excavation of Buddhist funerary remains, called stupas, in the northwestern part of the subcontinent. Leadership in this matter was given by some European army officers in the employ of the contemporary Sikh ruler of the region, Ranjit Singh, but nobody expressed it better than Alexander Burnes of the Bombay Army, who in his quest for the stupas and “Grecian remains” found himself referred from place to place “like one in search of the philosopher’s stone” (Burnes 1833). None, however, was more extensive in his observations and collections in this region than Charles Masson (Possehl 1990), an alias for James Loews, who deserted from Bengal Horse
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