Sir William Jones (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was an Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages.

The British Raj (rāj, meaning "rule" in Hindi) was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947. The British Indian Empire in 1936.

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 439 languages and dialects, according to the 2009 Ethnologue estimate, about half (221) belonging to the Indo-Aryan subbranch.

Sanskrit is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, a philosophical language in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and a scholarly literary language that was in use as a lingua franca in the Indian cultural zone.