The Asiatic Society of Bengal

Address: 1 Park Street 
Timing: Monday-Friday 
Entry: Free
An unglamorous building housing one of the most consequential scholarly institutions in Asian studies. Founded 1784 by Sir William Jones, it was here that Jones proposed, in a 1786 address, the Indo-European language hypothesis: that Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and Persian descend from a common source, among the most important observations in the history of linguistics. Later scholars here deciphered the Brahmi script and produced the first Tibetan-English dictionary. The Society’s holdings run to roughly 150,000 books and over 100,000 manuscripts, including a Shah Jahan-signed Padshahnama and a 1362 Rigveda manuscript that may be the oldest surviving copy in existence. A tradition of scholarship conducted under colonial auspices but never fully reducible to colonial purposes: Jones’s Sanskrit studies were, in a real sense, an intellectual precondition for the Bengal Renaissance.