Jones is now largely forgotten in India, except perhaps in a pejorative sense for being the founder of the Orientalist enterprise. But his influence is staggering, even if obscured. His works are no longer investigated despite the fact that his contributions to modern India’s understanding of justice and legalism, compromises and classicism, punditry and publishing, over the past 200 years, are virtually unrivaled.  In more ways than one, William Jones is the phantom that India’s postcolonial mind seeks to fend off.