Orientalist translations of Hindu law justified British colonial property restructuring

Evidence

The point of [Jones’s] translation was … to provide the 1793 Permanent Settlement with its legal architecture. Jones considered the legal codes on which he labored … to be his most valuable contributions to history, not his many other Orientalist works nor the Indo-Aryan thesis, for which he is much more famous: he aspired to be ‘the Justinian … of the East.’ Jones wanted orientalism, in other words, to serve the demands of colonial property.… Jones’s Orientalism gave the East India company’s revolutionary rule of property the appearance of an ancient origin, folding it into the ‘sakuntala Era,’ at least as far as his European reading public was concerned. The Laws of Manu simultaneously authorized the Permanent Settlement and drew attention away from its material context and consequences. Its logic seemed to be dictated by immemorial traditions. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 795

Categorization

• QUESTION: Would be worth tracing how Jones’s Sanskrit scholarship connects to the later codification movement across other colonies.
• SEED: An essay could explore how legal scholarship launders radical institutional change as timeless tradition — Jones as the archetype.
• CANDY: The man famous for discovering the Indo-Aryan language family considered his legal codes his greatest work, not his linguistic achievements.