Benares Illustrated Hardcover – 1 December 2009

If ever there has been an unsung genius, it is James Prinsep. Born in 1799, he had a short life of only forty years, dying in 1840. And yet, considering his wide variety of interests and his seminal contributions in many of these areas, it can, with some confidence, be stated that he was one of the greatest geniuses born in human history. Thus, he was at the same time a physicist, a chemist, an anthropologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, a numismatist, an epigraphist, a town-planner, a cartographer and an architect – and one may not have exhausted the list. Actually, his one achievement, that of deciphering the Brahmi script, through which India and the world came to know of that unique figure in world history – Emperor Asoka – would have entitled him to a place alongside those of Champollion and Rawlinson, among the greats of intellectual history. And when one considers that James deciphered not one but two ancient scripts – Brahmi and Kharoshthi – through which was revealed the existence of a whole line of Indo-Scythian kings, one stands in awe of the man.