The relationship among languages raised an enticing possibility for Francis Wilford (1761–1822). Sanskrit books might preserve the names, places, and events known from biblical history in forms that European readers had not yet recognized. Working in Benares through learned Indian assistants, he commissioned searches for those connections. Publication in Asiatic Researches brought the findings to readers already interested in the antiquity of India.
The discoveries could be remarkably convenient. A name resembled a biblical ancestor, a geographical description seemed to place an event, and a passage supplied circumstances familiar from Genesis. Wilford compared these findings with accounts from other regions, allowing one proposed relationship to support another. The inquiry increasingly depended on the people selecting and explaining the Sanskrit material for him.
In 1805 he reported that an assistant had fabricated passages. The admission exposed a failure within the way the research had been conducted. Wilford had made his desired connections known, and producing those connections had become a way to satisfy the person commissioning the work. The resulting deception did not make genuine Indian flood traditions false. It required separating those traditions from passages manufactured for this particular search.
That sorting became more difficult once the claims had travelled beyond their first publication. Another author might repeat a discovery without encountering the later confession, or use an apparently secure comparison that depended on compromised material. Wilford’s correction and his original findings consequently acquired different histories. A reader working from those later books might still encounter the supposed Sanskrit evidence as confirmation, long after Wilford had withdrawn the passages on which the claim depended.