Hope unique classical library project does well
As Indians, we take great pride in saying that we have an incredibly rich and diverse civilisational heritage. Yet, the average Indian has little understanding of what exactly such civilisational wealth entails. For example, we know that there are many literary gems written in Indian languages, but not even a handful of people in the country today has read them in the original. Thankfully, a mammoth initiative is now underway to plug the gaping hole. With a $5.2 million dollar grant from Harvard scholar Rohan Murty, Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy's son, Harvard University Press has launched the Murty Classical library of India, which aims to translate as many Indian literary works into English as possible and make them available to the contemporary scholar and lay reader alike. Though the project refers to ‘classics', it does not mean that the library will only house long and heavy texts. Instead, the MClI will include anything that is “good and interesting and important”, in the words of Mr Sheldon Pollock, a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University and the library's general editor.
HUP plans to publish 500 volumes over the next 100 years, but for now the MClI has got off to a modest start. This month, it launched five volumes: Bullhe Shah's Sufi lyrics edited and translated by Christopher Shackle; Abu'l-Fazl's The History of Akbar (Volume 1) edited and translated by Wheeler M Thackston; Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women translated by Charles Hallisey; Allasani Peddana's The Story of Manu translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman; and finally, Surdas's Sur's Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition edited by Kenneth E Bryant and translated by John Stratton Hawley. Every volume is in two languages, with the original text appearing along with the translation. This initial offering alone allows us a glimpse into the diversity of the MClI project. Geographically, it will cover a wide range of literary traditions with roots in Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east, Nepal in the north to Sri lanka in the south. Thematically, it will include everything from religious texts to scientific works, political treatises to feminist works. No wonder then that the MClI has been dubbed as the world's most complex publishing project ever.
The importance of a project such as the MClI cannot be overstated, but two points underscore its urgency. First, many of the classical texts exist only in their original manuscripts. Unless they are immediately retrieved and saved for posterity, there is a real fear that they may be lost forever. Second, if India (indeed, the sub-continent as a whole) wishes to emerge as a force to reckon with in the future and script its own narrative, it must understand its past. There is, after all, something to being a soft power. A good deal of that power comes from realising and promoting the country’s hoary cultural history and texts.