A major new biography of Sir William Jones (1746-94), the foremost Orientalist of his generation and one of the greatest intellectual navigators of all time. Jones's Sanskrit researches marked the beginning of Indo-European comparative grammar, and modern comparative-historical linguistics, of Indology, and the disciplines of comparative literature, philology, mythology, and law. He did more than any other writer to destroy Eurocentric prejudice, reshaping Western perceptions of India and the Orient. His commitment to the translation of culture, a multiculturalism fascinated as much by similitude as difference, profoundly influenced European and British Romanticism, offering the West disconcerting new relationships and disorienting orientations. Remembered with great affection throughout the subcontinent as a man who facilitated India's cultural assimilation into the modern world, Jones helped to build India's future on the immensity, sophistication, and pluralism of its past.