RBSI - A laudable project: Literature of India, enshrined in a series NYT - January 3, 2015 When the Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911, it was hailed as a much-needed effort to make the glories of

Posted on: 22 January 2015

A laudable project:
Literature of India, enshrined in a series
NYT - January 3, 2015

When the Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911, it was hailed as a much-needed effort to make the glories of the Greek and Roman classics available to general readers.

Virginia Woolf praised the series, which featured reader-friendly English translations and the original text on facing pages, as “a gift of freedom.” Over time, the pocket-size books, now totaling 522 volumes and counting, became both scholarly mainstays and design-geek fetish objects, their elegant green (Greek) and red (Latin) covers spotted everywhere from the pages of Martha Stewart Living to Mr. Burns’s study on The Simpsons.

Now, Harvard University Press, the publisher of the Loebs, wants to do the same for the far more vast and dizzyingly diverse classical literature of India, in what some are calling one of the most complex scholarly publishing projects ever undertaken.

The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.

The Murty will offer “something the world had never seen before, and something that India had never seen before: a series of reliable, accessible, accurate and beautiful books that really open up India’s precolonial past,” said Sheldon Pollock, a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University and the library’s general editor.

That literary heritage can seem daunting in size. While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged.

The Murty Library, Mr. Pollock said, aims to take in the broadest swath of them. “We are a big tent,” he said. “As long as it’s good and interesting and important, it’s going to be in the Murty Classical Library.”

The editions, which come wrapped in elegant rose-colored covers, are intended, like the Loebs, “to be around for 100 years,” Mr. Pollock said.

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Stunning! <3

Aparna Rawal

Fantastic

For surdas .. have they included originial hindi poetry inside the book?

Yes.

thanks ..

Fabulous! Thanks for sharing this.

This would be excellent, just so long as they don't let the swayamsevaks and their foreign running-dogs run the show.

Admirable project. But words like "classical" ought to be used carefully. There are only two classical languages in India - Sanskrit and Tamil. It's very nice to translate a whole lot of medieval literature authored in numerous other vernaculars like Hindi, Bengali, Kannada. But please don't call the same as "classical". And to engage in chest-beating by saying that Indian literature over a period of 2000 years in all languages is much much bigger in size than Greek/Latin classics from a much briefer period is pointless. It's not comparing apples and apples.

And I sense a great deal of political correctness here when Sanskrit/Tamil get underplayed and mentioned as just 2 of the many many Indian literatures in numerous languages. That's just insane political correctness. Sorry. Hindi, Kannada, Marathi are NOT classical in any sense. These other vernaculars are largely medieval evolutions (though some like Kannada may have pre-medieval origins). And their literatures are essentially inspired by Sanskrit originals. Eg : Tulsidas' Ramcharitamanas being inspired by Valmiki's Ramayan. It is not an original work. But an inspired retelling. Whereas the truly classical works in Sanskrit and Tamil are original works which have evoked interest of other cultures. Eg : Ramayan, Mahabharat, Upanishads etc in Sanskrit or works like Silappadikaram, Manimekalai, Nalayiram in Tamil. These are not inspired, but inspiring.

nice......

I am looking forward to buy them soon.

A very commendable project. My hope is that the effort will zero in on to real classic literature, worth preserving & propagating. The titles of the 4 volumes to be published indicate a tendency to spread the effort too wide, & the selections somewhat trivial.

TKG Namboodhiri - thats spot on. Its interesting that the four volumes are neither Sanskrit works nor Tamil works. So it is strange that a classical library should commence its project with 4 titles that aren't authored in the 2 classical languages of India. Very very strange indeed. I do sense a lot of political correctness in this. It is sad that Sanskrit is despised in this country by a LOT of Indians. People fear embracing this language though it is the primary classical tongue. For some reason, it is still viewed as the language of the priest, the pot-bellied chappie in the nearby temple who needs to be despised at all cost. As Periyar said - "I'd rather trust a snake than a Brahmin". And this very aversion extends to Sanskrit-hate.

The silliest sectarian attitude is to say there are only two classical..I don't even want to enter debate here..Tamil is one of the Dravidian languages..Dravidian languages other than Tamil have grown up with their open interaction with other classicals of India and ..There are many a sources for Indian classical....that apart ...the editors should be wary of sectarian, colonial , political so on influences undermining objective considerations..American and British scholorship have generally survived their own political influences...Dravidian University of Kuppam should be interested in joining this effort in some way.

Mr Parthasarathy - Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own versions of the facts. It is a fact that Sanskrit and Tamil are the two oldest classical literatures in this country. This isn't an opinion of mine. But the unvarnished truth.