A Vishnu-Come-Lately: John Bacon’s Monument to William Jones (1799)

Abstract

This article considers John Bacon’s marble monument to one of eighteenth-century British colonialism’s most important protagonists, William Jones (1746–1794). A prodigious scholar of Indian languages, religions, and laws, as well as a Supreme Court judge in Bengal, Jones epitomized early orientalism, promoting the study of Indian cultures as a means of facilitating the East India Company’s ‘governmental’ regulation of colonial subjects in its own interests. However, by the time this monument was erected, that vision of British India was becoming a thing of the past, gradually replaced by a more self-consciously imperializing, Anglicizing approach. Reading the monument both with and against the grain, this article argues that the tensions inherent in the orientalist attitude towards India are registered within the monument itself, especially in the relationship between its statue of Jones and the Hindu imagery on its pedestal. For while that imagery pays tribute to Jones, especially through its iconographical depiction of Vishnu, the Hindu god of justice and protection, it is dominated by the undemonstrative yet emphatically present figure of an Indian woman, seemingly the monument’s sole visual reference to a colonized human subject. Existing somewhere between human and sculpture, and between human and divine, she resists meaning and knowledge, troubling the monument’s semantic clarity and commemorative purpose.