Francis Wilford
He also claimed to have discovered a Sanskrit version of Noah (Satyavrata) and attempted to confirm the historicity of revelation and of the ethnology of Genesis from external sources, particularly Hindu or other pagan religions.According to Bayly, the preferred method of Wilford was to sit in the company of Pandits and other Hindus, recite together with them stories from puranic and western mythology, scripture and history, finding matches and points of similarity.[3] According to Leask, by proceeding in this manner, Wilford was simply following the methodology of William Jones and other Orientalists of the 18th century in syncretising Sanskrit with Classical and Biblical narratives, establishing transcultural correspondences by means of often crude conjectural etymologies.Albeit, Wilford's reputation did not win the scientific respectability for his proposed theories, his work[s] did exert a lasting influence in early 18th century antiquarians and Romanic poets like S.T.Wilford claimed to had found proof of this based on the fact that "the very ancient statues of Gods in India have crisp hair, and the features of Negroes," in contrast to modern denizens.[2] During the 1790s, for some years, rumours circulated about Wilford's discoveries evincing the relationship among Hindu traditions, Bible, and the ancient British antiquities in Orientalist and antiquarian circles in Bengal.Second, the inheritance of common store of sacred lore- underlying unities in human mythology, Biblical, and Classical – Wiford thought, he saw a link between the stories of Bacchus, Osiris, and the Hindu Purusha.The origin of Indian religion and culture is claimed to be located in the remote northern islands of the Britain [that colonised India before] itself rather than in the Abyssinia or Hindu Kush," according to Nigel Leask.Wilford claimed the existence of a Sanskrit Belt, 40 degrees broad and across the Old Continent, in a SE and NW direction, from the eastern shores of the Malay Peninsula to the western extremity of the British isles.For this, he asserted that the Brahmins proclaim that "every man after death must go to 'Tri-Cuta' and Sweta...there to stand trial before the king of justice, the Dharma-raja" – signifying, the British Isles are "the beginning and the end of the worldly pilgrimage.".[7]Wilford later admitted his guilt; according to Indira Ghose, that the Hindu expert who had been providing him manuscripts and who had been assisting him in his studies of sacred texts had corroborated the veracity of his religious theories.Wilford smartly blamed the fraud on someone else, and said:[7] In order to avoid the trouble of consulting books, he conceived the idea of framing legends from what he recollected from the Puranas, and from what he had picked up in conversation with me.At the end of his life, he was comparing geographical texts in Sanskrit with the corpus of classical Greek and Latin literature, which was finally published as the Geography of ancient India, posthumously.Joseph Schwartzberg, a professor of geography and an author, denounced Wilford's "gullibility" – as he was looking for classical, Biblical, and Egyptian place names in Puranas as those texts were not scientific -, but recognised his importance in the history of Indian Cartography.