MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA – THE FIRST FIVE BOOKS

When the Murty Classical Library was announced around two years back (if I am not wrong), I was excited … this is almost the first time that something of this kind was happening … I had heard of Classical Library publications like the Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Library and was sort of aware of what would emerge if the Murty Classical Library of India project took off … the biggest surprise for me was the fact that Dr Rohan Murty, computer scientist, was funding the project … Rohan Murty is the son of N. R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys …

After the initial announcement, this information sort of went somewhere into some unmarked corner of my memory store … and in 16 January 2015 issue of OPEN, I saw this article by Tunku Varadarajan, “The Books of Civilization,” which told me that the first 5 books of the Library were released … the article begins with:

“If the Bharat Ratna has not been utterly debased by political whimsy and point-scoring—whether from the ‘secular’ left or the ‘Hindu’ right— I’d want that honour to be conferred, 25 years from today, on Sheldon Pollock and Rohan Narayana Murty.

The former, professor of Sanskrit at Columbia, is the general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India, a series of translated volumes of classical Indian literature that has been funded by the latter, a computer scientist from Harvard and the son (notwithstanding the missing ‘h’ in his surname) of N R Narayana Murthy, the billionaire co- founder of Infosys. With an endowment from Murty of $5.2 million, the series has enough capital in its vaults to keep going for 100 years, at the rate of five new volumes of translation per year—a ‘love-marriage’ of delicious elegance between new money and old glory.”

(you can read the complete article here ... http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/the-books-of-civilisation )

Rohan Murty and Sheldon Pollock

And the rest of the article goes on to talk about each volume of the series … when I started reading, I thought these books would be beyond my reach, but Varadarajan assures us that though the handsome hardbacks were steep, the paperbacks were a “dazzling bargain” … I checked the prices online on two sites and there was some difference in prices and discounts and also shipping charges … I went back and forth till the evening and by evening amazon.in had made shipping ‘free’ … I bought all 5 in one go (that means I bought these books in January this year and am writing about them in April ... such a long journey, Jai?  ) … These are the first five titles of the Murty Classical Library:

• Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women, translated by Charles Hallisey.
• The Story of Manu, by Allasani Peddana, translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman.
• Sur's Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition, Surdas, edited by Kenneth E. Bryant, translated by John Stratton Hawley.
• Sufi Lyrics, Bullhe Shah, edited and translated by Christopher Shackle.
• The History of Akbar, Volume 1 (the Akbarnama), by Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, edited and translated by Wheeler Thackston.

The first time I read some of the Therigatha Poems was sometime in 1994 when I bought Women Writing in India, Vol. 1, which had English translations of poems of the Buddhist senior nuns or theris, hence Theri-gatha … that gave me a good introduction to the earliest writings by women in India, dating back to 6^th century BC … I don’t remember much of that now … Surdas’s poems are not entirely new, them being part of Hindi textbooks during school and with this huge volume, close to a thousand pages with notes and all, there is immense scope for more illumination … I have heard some sufi songs and qawwalies of Bullhe Shah over the years, but since they were mostly in Punjabi, the meanings were not apparent as one would like them to be, and this English translation might mitigate that, I hope, as and when I get time to read them … the other two books, The Story of Manu and the Akbarnama, I am completely unfamiliar with, except that one has read in school history books that Abul Fazl wrote Akbarnama … 

And by this rather weak round-up of these five volumes, it is evident that I haven’t read even small portions of these wonderful books … except the last two mentioned which are in prose, the first three contain verses, and so it might be easier to tackle them poem by poem, or read verses randomly and take it one at a time …

And these are the pictures of the covers of the books I bought … I know they haven’t come out well … but, well …

Published by the Harvard University Press, each volume is in the dual-language format with the original language and English facing … like this …

I wholeheartedly welcome this initiative and feel that this kind of series or library was long overdue … yes, we have the Clay Sanskrit Library, but that deals with only Sanskrit … look at the language range in the first five volumes of the Murty Classical Library – Pali, Punjabi, Telugu, Brajbasha, Persian – and there are many more to come, they have promised …

Thanks Rohan Murty and Sheldon Pollock …