EVENTS

On 22 February 1790, in his Seventh Anniversary Discourse as President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Sir William Jones advanced what would later be termed his “Brahmin theory” of Chinese origins. It was arguably the earliest sustained British attempt to theorize China within an Asian rather than a European intellectual framework. At a time when European knowledge of China remained limited and filtered largely through Jesuit Sinophilia, Jones proposed an alternative account grounded not in Chinese historiography but in Sanskrit textual authority. Reading the term Cina in the Manusmṛiti, he transformed a caste-classificatory category in a dharmasastra into an ethnographic marker for a historical people. From this interpretive move emerged a larger civilizational claim: that the Chinese descended from Hindu Kṣatriyas, and that their culture was derivative and chronologically secondary to India’s. This construction would continue to shape nineteenth-century British Sinology. Jones’s formulation matters less for what it reports about China than for what it reveals about the conditions under which China became thinkable in late eighteenth-century Orientalist scholarship. By analysing his discourse and the underlying assumptions that made it possible, this Wednesday Seminar presentation traces how Jones’s argument gained authority and how it resulted in a new mode of conceptualising China – one produced through Sanskritic antiquity and institutionalised through the intellectual apparatus of the Asiatic Society.

Speaker

Diki Sherpa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at Ashoka University. She completed her PhD in History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests broadly encompass British imperialism, colonialism, and global history. She has previously been affiliated with the Department of Sinology at the University of Vienna and the Hong Kong History Centre, University of Bristol, UK.

Chair

Sreemati Chakrabarti, Chairperson of the Institute of Chinese Studies, is former Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi. She has also been Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi; Head of the Department of East Asian Studies for three terms and Director of the Institute of Chinese Studies (2009-2012). She was a Visiting Faculty at Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China in 2018. She holds a Doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University. She has authored three books: China and the Naxalites, Mao, China’s Intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution and a National Book Trust volume, China. She has also edited Higher Education in China: Select Perspectives and co-edited Taiwan Today. In 2010 she was conferred the “China-India Friendship Award” by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

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