The establishment of the Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784 by Sir William Jones fits into the ethos of the age. This was the period when societies of various kinds were being established and consolidated in Britain. The prospect of British ascendancy in India had also become clear by then, and consequently, from the administrative and economic points of view, there was a great need to know systematically about the country they were to rule. There was a further need to relate India to the contemporary framework of European knowledge of human history.

William Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society, came to India as a judge of the East India Company court in Calcutta after a career as an oriental scholar and poet in England. The founding of this Society did not initiate archaeological research in India, as is the common belief, but it acted as a kind of catalyst in that the study of antiquities found an institutional focus among the Europeans in India. Jones was interested in Indian products including plants and timber, the traditional system of Indian legal philosophy and the study of Sanskrit literature. The Society`s journal, Asiatick Researches was edited by Jones, where his `discourses`, before the Society were published between 1788 and 1793. There were ten such `discourses` which constitute the basic source of his ideas about ancient India.

Jones is credited with the first clear statement about the linguistic affinity between such languages as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. In this sense he has been credited with the foundation of what later came to be known as the discipline of comparative philology. In the late eighteenth century, the Biblical theory of creation was the accepted belief, and if, according to this, various human groups or families descended from Noah`s progeny, they had to be mutually related. All that remained for scholars to do was to trace or discover the evidence of such relationships. The main concern of Jones was to relate Indian history to Univer-sal History as it was then understood. It was left to Jones to relate the In-dian past to the progenies of one of the sons of Noah, `the just and virtuous man, whose lineage is preserved from the general inundation`. The original centre of dispersal of `the whole race of man` was thought to be Iran. In his `discourses`, Jones traced the ramifications of this idea in various fields like language and literature, sculpture and architecture, religion and philosophy, etc. His idea that Sanskrit-was related to Latin and Greek was formulated in his third `discourse` delivered on 2 February, 1786, but what is ignored is that in the same sentence he brought in the Peruvians and the Japanese as well. The speakers of Sanskrit were supposed to have `had an immemorial affinity` with them too. These basic historical and linguistic ideas of Jones were shared by many of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries.

The proposal for the construction of a Museum of the Asiatic Society was forwarded in 1796. And the structure got its final shape during the initial phase of 1814. Dr.N. Wallich was appointed as the supervisor of this Museum of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata. The Museum of the Asiatic Society, flaunts a massive as well as remarkable repertory of Paintings, Manuscripts, Bronzes, Numismatic articles, i.e., coins, and Inscriptions. In 1849, the Museum launched the publication of its first catalogue, along with the informative catalogues, detailing regarding the other segments.

The Asiatic Society authorities were the masterminds behind the construction of a public museum in Kolkata, so as to create awareness about the value of antiquity and heritage in India. Inevitably their proposal made to the Indian Government in 1839, received its appropriate response with the inauguration of the Indian Museum in 1866. The Asiatic Society, Kolkata had donated many of the precious items of its repository to the Indian Museum.

In the field of archaeology the contribution of Asiatic Society in Kolkata is undeniable. The library of the Asiatic Society is the pride of the institution and storehouse of rich and unique contents. The huge collection of the library of this institution has been developed mainly with gifts given by the members. The books, coins, drawings, manuscripts, antiquarian and things of historical significance were demonstrated during the meetings of the society and the Secretary was in charge to keep them in his custody. This had been the decree of the Asiatic society since the foundation of the institution. The collection of the books was categorized into three major sections namely Printed Books and Periodicals, Museum Objects and Manuscripts and Archives. Further, the Printed Books Department has four categories like European Languages, Perso-Arabic and Urdu, Sino-Tibetan and South-Asian Languages and Sanskrit and other Modern Indian Languages.

Although archaeological discoveries were scanty till the 1830s, certain major publications date from the early part of the century, the most important of them being Francis Buchanan`s three-volume report on his Mysore survey in 1807 and his survey of Bengal Presidency, submitted in 1816. A three-volume summary of the latter was published in 1838. These were mainly statistical surveys but contain a fair amount of archaeological information. Another set of report of this period was not published, but its author, Colin Mackenzie, made a beginning of the study of antiquities in south India through his collection of inscriptions and manuscripts.

Later, by the early 1830s, James Prinsep, Assay-master of the East India Com-pany mint in Calcutta, became the Secretary of the Asiatic Society and played a major role in the initiation of field research. His own contribution to Indian studies makes him a legendary character. He was primarily responsible for the decipherment of the two most important historical scripts of India namely Brahmi script and Kharosthi script. First, the ninth-century eastern Indian inscriptions were read by Charles Wilkins in the late eighteenth century on the basis of his knowledge of medieval manuscripts of the region, and then it became a case of proceeding from the known to the unknown. The process culminated in James Prinsep`s reading of the inscriptions of King Ashoka of the third cen-tury BC between 1834 and 1838. The breakthrough in the decipherment of the Kharosthi script came in the wake of reading two royal names in Kharosthi on the coins of two Indo-Greek kings, Agathocles and Pantaleon, whose names in Greek also figured in them.

With the decipherment of these two ancient scripts rapid progress was made in the fields of epigraphical and numismatic studies. This, in turn, led to a proper understanding of the chronology of historical sites. This was also the time when attempts were made to understand Buddhist leg-ends on the basis of the two Sri Lankan chronicles, the Dipaxamsa and the Mahavcunsa. An important result was the discovery of the name Piyadasi or Ashoka in these Buddhist chronicles.

Besides these a wide array of paintings, treasures marvelous specimens such as the painting imaging Cupid asleep on Cloud, painted by the magic strokes of the painting-brush and colourful imagination of the famous Artist Joshua Reynolds. Moreover, Guido`s Cleopatra, A Ghat at Varanasi by Daniell, and other instances, glorify the gallery of paintings. Asiatic Society encompasses the wide and interesting spectrum of manuscripts including a plethora of Indian languages and scripts. Some of these are of Asian origin. These are Bengali, Assamese, Gurumukhi, Gujrati, Kanarese, Urdu, Marathi, Nagari, Newari, Oriya, Rajasthani, Sarada, Sinhalese, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Javanese, Turki, Burmese, Chinese, Siamese, Tibetan and so on.

The Asiatic Society, Kolkata, has gone a long way in escalating the disciplines of Humanities and Science to the high pedestals of research and subsequent improvement. The Asiatic Society has propelled the establishment of the Trigonometrical Survey of India in 1818, the Geological Survey of India in 1851, the Indian Metrological Department in 1875, the Zoological Survey of India in 1911, and the Botanical Survey of India in 1912, etc.