The Great Big Indian Library

Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women; Sufi Lyrics; The History of Akbar: Volume 1; The Story of Manu; and Sur’s Ocean. Ranging from translations of Bulhe Shah’s Gurmukhi lyrics to the work of third century BCE Buddhist nuns, these five books launched The Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) in New Delhi at two events today. Special guests in the evening release at The Leela Palace, Chanakyapuri included former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Amartya Sen, who released the books this evening, as well as Rohan Murty, Narayana and Sudha Murthy and Sheldon Pollock, the General Editor of the series.

This collaboration between Infosys founder Narayan Murthy’s son Rohan Murty and the Harvard University Press began with a previous endowment from Murty in 2010, and seeks to make India’s multilingual literary heritage available to all; either as an affordable paperback (Rs 495) or more expensive hardback (Rs 1,495). This unprecedented collection, prettily bound in pink and bearing the motif of an elephant, may one day make up a collection of as many as 500 Indian classics.

General Editor Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University, says, “The languages that make up Indian literature are found in an area vaster than Europe. Taken all together, they give India the single most complex and continuous multilingual tradition of literature in the world. That is the complexity and multiplicity MCLI seeks to present to readers.” He spoke about the misconception that classics can be effortlessly contemporary; “They are effortlessly un-contemporary,” he says. Pollock envisions a day when technology, the special province of MCLI’s backers, will make these works available on the internet, even on “smart and dumb phones”, he joked in an aside. More seriously, he spoke of looking for translators in all languages; Malayalam, for example, where it is more difficult to source quality works. Pollock previously worked on the Clay Sanskrit Library series, which closed several years ago; in this new series, he will get to bring valuable classics to us again, and this time from many languages.

“This series should make it possible for the next generation of Indians to have access to the best of our classical literatures,” said Murty, who was asked by one of the 300 odd people in the audience about Shakespeare, Dickens and the rest of the Western classics, and how MCLI fits into the canon. He replied, “I don’t see any sort of dissonance here. This is another option. Why don’t we read poetry by women in this part of the land, for example? That leap is not that hard to make.”

Written in Indian languages including Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, MCLI’s works include literary commentary and facing page translations. Newly commissioned fonts for languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, and Telugu, will also be made available, free of charge, for non-commercial use upon publication, MCLI informs us.

The series will publish new classics every year, and looks to expand in all directions. “This is Rohan’s enterprise, and we leave the selection up to Sheldon,” Narayana Murthy told Open, whose 31-year-old son has shone at his alma mater, Harvard University, as well as at Infosys, in the past. The classics are an area of interest for the young man, who holds a Ph. D. in computer science and is a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. A programming enthusiast with interests in computing, he has also sustained a great interest in the classics. This marks his first big solo venture, as philanthropist and supporter of literature.

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Rajni George

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