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THE BOOKS OF CIVILISATION | OPEN Magazine

16 January 2015
O P E N E S S AY

Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is
working on a book on the political legacy of the Shah Bano case, The Divorce That Rocked India. He is a regular contributor
to Open

THE BOOKS OF CIVILISATION

The Murty Classical Library of India is a love marriage of delicious elegance between new money and old glory

Hindu | Indian literature | NR Narayana Murthy

Clas s ical Library of India | Manucaritram u | Surs agar
T AGGED U N D ER |

Murty

If the Bharat Ratna has not been utterly debased by political whimsy and point-scoringwhether from the
secular left or the Hindu right Id want that honour to be conferred, 25 y ears from today , on Sheldon
Pollock and Rohan Naray ana Murty .
The former, professor of Sanskrit at Columbia, is the general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India, a
series of translated v olumes of classical Indian literature that has been funded by the latter, a computer
scientist from Harv ard and the son (notwithstanding the missing h in his surname) of NR Naray ana Murthy ,
the billionaire co- founder of Infosy s. With an endowment from Murty of $5.2 million, the series has enough
capital in its v aults to keep going for 1 00 y ears, at the rate of fiv e new v olumes of translation per y eara
lov e-marriage of delicious elegance between new money and old glory .
Published by the Harv ard Univ ersity Press, the first fiv e v olumes of the series are now av ailable for purchase.
The handsome hardbacks are steep, at between Rs 1 ,495 and Rs 1 ,695 per v olume. But the paperbacks are a
dazzling bargain: Who could resist Surs Ocean (Sursagar) at Rs 495? That gets y ou 1 ,000 pages of the poems
of Surdas, the original Brajbhasha tex t (in Dev anagari) on the left-hand pages and a superb English translation
on the right. Sarad samai hu Syam na aaye
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The time is autumnstill, the Dark One has not come.

I cannot imagine w hat love spells w ere exerted
by some female foe to bar his w ay.
The v olume has a dauntingly erudite introduction by John Stratton Hawley , professor of Religion at Barnard
College, that few lay readers will be equipped to comprehend fully . But Hawley s translation of Surdas
demotic poetry has a lightness of touch that makes reading a breeze: The sari flutters, rev ealing great beauty
/ a spray of nail marks on the breast How v iv id the language of longing, how timelessly erotic.
And how easily marred might the poetry hav e been by a clunky translation. But as Hawley and his editor,
Kenneth E Bry ant, tell us in the acknowledgments, the book has been four decades in the making. This v olume,
as well as the others in the first flush of the Murty series, is nothing less than a monumental labour of lov e; and
it is a lov e, in the main, of Western scholars in Western univ ersities for classical Indian literature. As Indians
squabble ov er whether the Gita should be Indias national book, and whether Py thagoras did nothing more
than rip off Indian mathematicians more ancient than he, scholars in the West go about their quiet business as
guardians of Indian culture, and of tex ts that are scarcely studied any longer in the land of their composition.
How else do we ex plain the fact the Murty Library v olume of The Story of Manu (Manucaritramu)the finest
poem in classical Telugu, composed around 1 620 by Allasani Peddana, the self-sty led Creator of Telugu
Poetry (Andhrakav itapitamaha)has nev er before been translated into another language? Not into Tamil, or
Hindi, or Bengali, or Malay alam. And y et here, V elcheru Naray ana Rao of Emory Univ ersity and Dav id
Shulman of the Hebrew Univ ersity of Jerusalem giv e us a limpid translation into English of Peddanas highly
amicable poetry .
If a w oman doesnt have the good luck
of having a lover w ho is young and handsome
and w ho makes love to her w henever she w ants,
w ho really loves her, w hat good is her beauty
and her youth? Why be alive?
There are ov er 500 pages of such liv ely observ ations, of candid homilies that remain as fresh as they were
when they first graced palm-leaf manuscripts in the time of Krishnadev aray a, a king lauded ceaselessly (and,
we are told, sincerely ) by Peddana.
The adulation of a monarch is the av owed purpose of another v olume in the Murty series, Abul-Fazls The
History of Akbar, V olume 1 (known to us as Akbarnama). Edited manfully by Wheeler M Thackston, professor
emeritus of Persian at Harv ard, Abul-Fazls tome can best be described as hagio-historiography . The author
is a cross between a Mughal Boswell and Herodotus, as well as a fulsome, full-time praise-singer. The
translator, in his introduction, flags the perv erse difficulty of Abul-Fazls prose, which is in a parabolic sty le
that is far from immediately comprehensible; not only is the sty le difficult but he also coins new words and
uses old ones in nov el way s. Thackston also alerts us to Emperor Akbars translation bureaumaktabkhana
which sponsored translations of works of Hindu learning into Persian, the language of the Mughal court.
(This is not unlike the credo of the Murty Library , taking works from the classical Indian canon and
translating them into English, the language of the worlds intellectual court.)
The most modern of the Murty books is Sufi Lyrics by Bullhe Shah, the 1 8th-century poet. Christopher
Shackle, the editor and translator, is emeritus professor of the Modern Languages of South Asia at Londons
School of Oriental and African Studies, and he makes clear that he prefers to spell the name of Punjabs finest
Sufi poet as Bullhe, and not Bulleh, heretofore the customary English transliteration. Intriguingly , the
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original Punjabi ly rics are printed here in the Gurmukhi script, ev en though, almost uniquely in the modern
world, Panjabi is a biscriptal language. The preference for Gurmukhi ov er Persian-scripted Punjabi could, I
suspect, reflect commercial considerations: Harv ard must believ e that Indian readers of Punjabi, especially
the wealthy Sikh diaspora, are a bigger market for the v olume than their Pakistani counterparts.
Like Surdas easy going Brajbhasha, Bullhe Shahs Punjabi glides unresistingly into English. Shackle refrains
from try ing to make English poetry out of the original Punjabi, setting himself, instead, the task of try ing to
conv ey the sense of the poetry in a consistent sty le of plain English prose that aims to steer a middle path
between off-putting formality and jarring colloquialism. The results are a respectful, handsome, and nev er
joy less rendition of the ly rics into English. Take this fragment:
Bullha, the mullah and the torch bearer both have the
same intent. They spread light to people, but are
alw ays in the dark themselves.
Or this one:
I flee from those w ho have studied a little bit.
If someone discerning judges me, I tell him: I flee from
those w ho have studied a little bit.
Learned scholars are my brothers; those w ho have studied
a little bit drive me mad
I sav e my fav ourite v olume for last. This, the Therigatha sty led in English as Therigatha: Poems of the First
Buddhist Womenis the shortest of the lot, and will be, to the many readers who encounter it for the first
time, the most beguiling of the Murty classics. These poems were composed in Pali ov er two millennia ago.
The translator, Charles Hallisey , senior lecturer on Buddhist Literature at Harv ard, deems them as a
collection to be the first anthology of womens literature in the world. The therisor senior oneswere
ordained Buddhist women of some religious achiev ement, and he urges us to read their poetry not as a
historical document, nor ev en as literary ex otica from a by gone age, but as liv ing literature with its own
clarity , truths and epiphanies. The poignancy of many of the v erses cannot be denied.
The hairs on my head w ere once curly,
black, like the color of bees,
now because of old age
they are like jute.
Some v erses are startling:
We w ere mother and daughter,
but w e shared one husband,
I w as afraid of w hat had to come from that,
it w as perverse and made my hair stand on end.
Sexual urges, let them be cursed,
they are dirty, foul, dangerous,
and they w ere all right there
w here mother and daughter shared one husband.
One is transported by these words: not to another time, for a mnage of this sort, while outlandish, is not
inconceiv able today . Instead, one is taken to the midst of a priv ate lifeliv ed by mother and daughterthat
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must hav e been turbulent, often tox ic. How did these women arrange their liv es? And who was the man they
shared? Was he happy ? Or did he, too, think his situation dirty , foul, dangerous? Somehow, I doubt it. Men,
surely , were av id and omniv orous ev en 2,000 y ears ago, when Pali was the language of lov e and lust.

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