Rohan Murty: Culture Capitalist

ROHAN MURTY NEARLY became a professor. It had been his dream and his father’s. After a PhD from Harvard where he was also made a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows, he interviewed at a few American universities hoping to live a scholarly life. He had certainly become acclimatised to the company of illustrious academics and still recalls evenings spent in sparkling conversation with Nobel laureates. But marriage (Murty and Lakshmi Venu, daughter of TVS Motors Chairman Venu Srinivasan, have since divorced) and other circumstances tugged him back to India. “When my classmates were applying for internships, I never bothered because I knew I was going to be an academic. To give up that dream was a difficult decision, it took me four months,” he says. Not that he regrets it. Since returning to Bengaluru in 2013, he has assisted his father NR Narayana Murthy at Infosys, guided their private investment firm Catamaran Ventures through an exciting time in India’s startup capital, and been instrumental in the launch of quality translations of classical Indian texts.

Murty, 32, divides his time between Bengaluru, Boston and London. “I am spending much of my time working on some very hard problems in computer science, with a potential to impact the way businesses consume technology,” he says. When I meet him in his office in Jayanagar, south Bengaluru, he is eating breakfast from a picnic basket: a bowl of cut mango followed by rice crisps in milk. He has had little sleep since arriving from London a couple of days ago. His mind, though, is sharp, flitting from innovation in the IT industry to the relevance of ancient Indian texts. That Murty has engineering chops is beyond dispute. He took to coding early in life, inspired by his father, and graduated in computer science from Cornell University. An MIT fellowship followed and he became interested in emerging wireless technology— the subject of his PhD. In short, he conformed to every stereotype of a bright south Indian engineer studying in the US.

But there is also, in him, an unimpeachable passion for the humanities. Nearly every conversation with Murty, I imagine, must run the length and breadth of science, technology, philosophy, history, literature and education, like a railroad branching every which way only to meet at critical civilisational junctions. It was as a doctoral student that he began to read heavy tomes on Byzantine history and took a class in philosophy. “I even considered doing a second PhD in philosophy. My father, supportive as always, joked that I should get business cards printed, identifying me as a professional student,” Murty says.

He believes that the humanities are necessary to inspire engineers to think a little differently. This acquires special importance at a time when technological advances are enabling the automation of several processes in the IT industry, leaving the workforce struggling to upskill to stay relevant. As someone who helped measure productivity and deploy automation at Infosys, Murty should know. In this era of super-specialisation, when many engineers risk ossification in their respective ‘geeky’ silos, there is an urgent need for exposure to ideas from across disciplines—and across time and space.

This is where Murty hopes he can help. His contribution to The Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) goes beyond his $5.2 million endowment to Harvard University Press. He has a vision for the library, which has thus far published nine volumes including remarkably lucid translations of Surdas, Tulsidas and Abu’l Fazl. Four more volumes are forthcoming next January, one of them the first ever translation from Kannada of Hoysala court poet Raghavanka’s work on the life of Harishchandra. “I think reading these books gives you context about India and the history of its ideas,” he says. “The important thing is that each of us should strive for exposure to as many ideas as possible. To employ a reductive example, even someone with a specialised job, such as a nuclear physicist, could benefit from a study of the humanities.”

Murty has taken every opportunity to promote the books and fiercely defended the library’s general editor, the learned Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock, against false propaganda earlier this year by academics who took exception to his ‘utter indifference and disrespect’ for so-called Indian values. Somewhere in Murty’s well-stocked mind dwells a healthy aversion to politicisation. He has refused to be sucked into controversy despite several criticisms of the MCLI’s choice of texts and scholars. The democratisation of classical Indian studies irrespective of religion is in fact a boldly apolitical objective. And for this, the MCLI has been lauded by academics and world media.

Over a century ago, James Loeb, a Harvard alumnus and philanthropist, took it upon himself to bring Greek and Latin classics to the millions. Ever since, green and red Loebs have graced the shelves of libraries, scholars and laymen alike and have become a symbol of higher learning. The Murty Classical Library, which employs a similar parallel text format, with the original Indic text on the left and the English translation on the right, aims to make ancient Indian language works just as accessible. The translations are not fusty and some of the texts published so far, such as Bulleh Shah’s Sufi lyrics, have been a hit with amateur readers. Murty is obviously very proud. For he is, at heart, a student of life, deriving inspiration from history and literature. With one foot in the realm of culture and the other firmly planted in the sciences, he personally backs breakthrough initiatives that could change the way we look at science and technology, such as a robotic astronomy project at The Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. He wants to digitise Indian texts and support Indian students of engineering who deserve to attend international conferences, among other things. On days when he is in Bengaluru, Murty catches up with his parents over dinner—he lives alone, not far from their residence—and meets friends. And then it is back to chasing his own dreams across the world.

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