A Vishnu-Come-Lately: John Bacon's Monument to William Jones (1799).

This article analyzes John Bacon's 1799 marble monument to William Jones (1746–1794), a British colonial judge and scholar of Indian languages, religions, and laws, located in St Paul's Cathedral, London. Jones, a key figure in early orientalism and a Supreme Court judge in Bengal, promoted the study of Indian cultures to aid the East India Company's colonial governance, embodying a complex blend of admiration for Indian traditions and colonial administration. The monument's design reveals tensions in orientalist attitudes through its juxtaposition of Jones's statue with Hindu iconography, notably a prominent Indian female figure symbolizing both resistance and the limits of colonial knowledge. This figure, associated with the Hindu goddess Mohini and the concept of shakti (female spiritual power), complicates the monument's commemorative purpose by embodying ambiguity between life and death, human and divine, reflecting the fading era of Jones's vision of British India as it gave way to a more overtly imperial and Anglicizing regime.