Dr. Bharat Gupt's open letter is a must read for all Bharatam Janam.
I wonder if Murty & Murthy's, the whiz-kids of Indian MNCs will respond in the public domain -- Kalyan
I hope Murty will revise his munificence in $ in the context of NaMo's appeal for Make in Bharat.
Namaskaram.
Kalyanaraman
See: http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2015/01/murty-classical-library-catalogs-indian.html
At the outset, best wishes to Sheldon Pollock and Rohan Murty, Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murty for publishing the first 5 volumes of a Library named after Murty using the Murty’s $5.2 million grant for Harvard’s Indian classics series announced in 2010. May this initiative be a resounding success.
Having delivered the customary shubh kaamanaayen, we as the reading public have questions to ask which Murty, Murthy and Co. should answer either directly or through Sheldon Pollock and Girish Karnad when they visit Jaipur before Obama's visit on 26 January 2015. Who knows? Obama may also show up at Jaipur :)--
The questions:
1. Why couldn't Murty, Murthy and Sheldon Pollock find a publisher in India and editors, translators from India?
2. Why was it necessary to have the Harvard University imprint for the publications on Indian themes by Indian writers?
3. Even if Murty, Murthy look upon the grant as a business decision with social responsibility, (given the Hindu tradition and legacy of s'renidharma श्रेणिधर्म of a corporate) given their corporate presence as an IT corporation in USA (and also traded in Nasdaq), was it not their responsibility to nurture the literary talents in India, given their larger presence in India? Have they heard the recent, impassioned plea by Hon'ble PM Narendra Modi (NaMo) calling upon every Bharatiya to promote Make in India?
And now, for two additional comments (with implicit questions):
4. I take strong exception to the insulting references made in the promotional material put out through the media articles etc. by Sheldon Pollock's team insinuating the present NaMo regime with name-calling, using loaded phrases with insulting political overtones such as: "...the project also comes as a timely if implicit rebuke to the Hindu nationalists of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with its promotion of a unitary Indian identity based on selected Sanskrit religious classics."
5. It is unfortunate that Murthy and Murthy become unwitting partners in such political anti-Hindu phobia. Shame on you, Harvard for nurturing such bigotry. Next time Harvard U. folks happen to be in Bharat, I would strongly suggest that they should listen to a public lecture by NaMo as he converses with his audience living in a hope that Bharatam will get back to the due share of the world GDP which the nation had in 1 CE (pace Angus Maddison). I would request prospective Indian corporate donors of grants to foreign institutions to pause and just glance at this bar-chart and use their corporate wisdom to help the nation's cause (sure, I understand you are all global citizens). We have to get there because Bharatiyas are over 1.25 billion people in over 625000 villages.
Good luck, Murty and Murthy and of course, Sheldon Pollock who is a product of the academe governed by the dictum: 'Publish or perish'. Live on Sheldon, you have miles to go to understand the depths of Hindu tradition, far removed your imagined biases against select Samskritam classics in a myriad subjects including yoga and aadhyaatmika आध्यात्मिका knowledge systems. Have you heard the phrase, 'ज्ञानम्' in Hindu tradition, Sheldon. It happens to be a Samskritam word, also with cognates in almost all languages in which your Murty Library is set to excel.
Good luck.
Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
January 4, 2015
An Open Letter to Sri Rohan Murty JANUARY 19, 2015
Published by IndiaFacts
Dear Sri Rohan Murty,
I read with interest your article on DailyO explaining why you funded Harvard to start and run the Murty Classical Library. I shall be honest and blunt to a fault without meaning any disrespect. I am sure you agree that a frank discourse and exchange helps all of us. If it helps, I’ve been a senior academic for over three decades in various spheres related to Indology and Sanskrit among other related disciplines. In that spirit, let me state at the outset that you have been taken for a ride by Prof. Sheldon Pollock or to be more truthful, by an Anglophonic attachment. Just because Harvard has experience in bringing out a classical series is no reason for your giving them the largesse. You could have easily done the job in India by getting Indian Universities involved in the project and thus assisted the development of classical studies in India.
You have paid for promoting the American academics and indirectly, put things under their control. To be fair, I know that several Indians will be involved in the project and do the translations, but this is not the same as a series coming out of India. You have basically entrusted your money into a non-indigenous centre of power that will translate and over time, order and repackage classical texts of India to suit the Western vision of India. I have admiration for the scholarship of Prof. Sheldon Pollock but the fact that such an endowment should have been made to a foreign university smacks of total mistrust in the abilities of Indian scholars, their institutions and their ability to execute the task. I do not blame Prof. Pollock, as he is working well in the interest of his language and his culture.
Shri Murty, if your father could build an IT firm that counts as a solid achievement by an Indian, why didn’t you think it fit to place trust in Indians scholars to do the same with done the translation series? That some of them will be employed by Pollock is not the point. Sri Rohan Murty, you have also erred on another major count. You have empowered English and not “modern Indian languages”—I refer to the classics that Prof Pollock professes to get translated. What is needed is the translation of the classics of Sanskrit and of each modern Indian language into other 25 or so modern languages.
That is the task which would have instilled greater intellectual awareness, and led to a literary renaissance in India. It would have given creative work to thousands of scholars in India and made Indian medieval heritage an available reality. Several major translations done in the mid-20th century are lost or are out of print. Translations into English from the so called regional languages are currently being done by American university departments as parts of their doctoral and higher research programs while there’s no comparable effort in our own academia.
My dear Rohan Murty, you have provided financial help to all those employed abroad—to be candid, you have breathed fresh life into these universities which are increasingly starved for funds and shutting down Indology and/or Sanskrit departments. You could have helped the Indian language departments immensely if such translations between the languages of India had been done by an Indian general editor located in India. It would have helped the literary studies at our universities.
My dear Rohan Murty, you have provided financial help to all those employed abroad—to be candid, you have breathed fresh life into these universities which are increasingly starved for funds and shutting down Indology and/or Sanskrit departments. You could have helped the Indian language departments immensely if such translations between the languages of India had been done by an Indian general editor located in India. It would have helped the literary studies at our universities.
More generically, there seems to be a fundamental error in the minds of globalized Indians—that packaging Indian things into English empowers Indian things. This is a grievous fallacy. The Salman Rushdies of the world have brought some fame to India but how abiding the fame is, only time will tell. However, the Tulsidases and Tagores have constructed the spiritual, philosophical and literary consciousness of India. Let their languages be promoted with each other, for each other and by each other. With due respect, you seem to resemble another version of Chandrabhan Prasad who has recently consecrated a temple for the “English Goddess for Dalits” near Shahjahanpur.
In the end, Sri Rohan Murty, I would say, yes, it is your money and your prerogative to donate to whoever you deem it. I don’t grudge the fact that you have chosen to serve Harvard. Perhaps, some other Indian corporate can still take the challenge and serve Indian languages, keeping both the control of the discourse as well as the funding rooted within India.
With best wishes,
With best wishes,
Dr. Bharat Gupt
Associate Professor (Retd), Delhi University
Associate Professor (Retd), Delhi University
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