Murty Classical Library's Ranjit Hoskote: It is not meaningful to complain bitterly that ‘people from elsewhere’ are translating ‘our classics’

A still from the first Indian film ever made: Dadasaheb Phalke’s 'Raja Harishchandra' (1913); and the cover of 'Ten Indian Classics' which contains excerpts from texts like Raghavanka’s 'The Life of Harishchandra' translated by Vanamala Vishwanatha from the original Kannada. (Images via Wikimedia Commons & Murty Classical Library of India)

Rohan Murty was a PhD student at Harvard University when Gurcharan Das introduced him to Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock, who was then in search of funding to carry forward his work of translating Indian classical texts into English. Rohan, son of Infosys cofounder Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murty, was sold on the idea. He put USD 5.2 million into the project around a decade ago, with the first book under the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) x Harvard University Press labels releasing in January 2015. Now, to mark its 10th anniversary, Murty Classical Library of India has released a book containing excerpts from earlier translations of 10 Indian classics - from the Tulsidas Ramayana to Bulle Shah's Sufi poetry and songs of the earliest Buddhist nuns (Therigatha).

Titled 'Ten Indian Classics', the book covers roughly 2,500 years and a vast geographical spread. The book comprises translated excerpts from Pali, Punjabi, Kannada, Sanskrit, Hindi, Telugu, Urdu and Persian, and has a foreword by poet, art curator and MCLI editorial board member Ranjit Hoskote. In an email interview, Hoskote explained why he would not add anything more to 'Ten Indian Classics', who can translate Indian texts in a post-colonial world and how he became associated with the project. Edited excerpts:

You write in your foreword to 'Ten Indian Classics' that South Asian literary classics are “continually caught up in a lively interplay with many other forms of cultural expression available through oral narrative, scribal record, performance, and print, as well as ranging across the classical, folk, and mediatic domains of experience. These would include scripture, recitation or storytelling, dance or theatre, ritual ceremonies, as well as cinema, television, and comics.” Could you expand on this?

My point, here, is to situate South Asia’s literary classics within larger cultural circulations that extend beyond the domain of the printed text. As scholarly productions, as annotated critical editions, as the subjects of commentary, our printed classics are not ends in themselves, but invitations that emerge from a living tradition. This is true of all the works from which extracts appear in 'Ten Indian Classics'.

An excellent example is Raghavanka’s 'The Life of Harishchandra', admirably translated by Vanamala Vishwanatha from the original Kannada. This text, composed early in the 13th century CE, marks the first occasion when the ancient legend of Harishchandra, available as an episode in various texts, was transformed into a full-scale poetic narrative in its own right. Raghavanka takes a relatively minor character from epic lore and turns him into a symbol of dedication to truth, piety and duty. His poem passed into domestic storytelling in Kannada, through the oral tradition. As the translator points out, it later became the basis of major theatre productions and eventually cinema masterpieces, such as the very first Indian film ever made, Dadasaheb Phalke’s 'Raja Harishchandra' (1913). Mahatma Gandhi himself was deeply impressed by the figure of Raghavanka’s Harishchandra, which he encountered in a play ultimately based on Raghavanka’s poem, as a child.

Likewise, Tulsidas’ 'The Epic of Ram', a masterpiece of Awadhi devotional narrative literature composed in the late 16th century CE – translated with great sensitivity for the MCLI by Philip Lutgendorf – is widely available to listeners and readers through diverse media, both in its canonical form and in popular avatars. It continues to exert its fascination through a spectrum of media and platforms including printed texts, live recitations and performances on religious occasions including the celebrated Ram-lila, audio and video retrieval systems of various technological periods, television versions of the Ramayana, and various comic-book series in a range of South Asian languages including English.

There’s often a strong link between religion and the Indian classics that have survived over centuries. In this book, too, at least six out of 10 texts have a spiritual, religious significance. How do you respond to this?

The sharp distinction between a realm of spiritual, religious, theological and cosmological concerns on the one hand and a realm of secular, worldly, rational and material concerns on the other is an outcome of a particular conception of what it means to be modern. In the world from which these classics emerged, no such distinction was either made or thought necessary. Instead, the concerns now separated into these two fairly irreconcilable realms were seen to be entwined, entangled, mapped over each other, presenting themselves sometimes as contiguous and at other times as choices to be exercised.

The songs of the earliest Buddhist women, collected into the Pali Therigatha and translated beautifully by Charles Hallisey here, are deeply moving reflections on the social and familial constraints that these female renunciants have left behind, as well as expressions of their spiritual aspirations. The hymns of Guru Nanak, exquisitely translated here by Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, articulate extraordinary visions of eternity and infinity, a cosmos imagined in the richest possible detail as a habitat for the individual seeker, yet they also explore the path of ethical action, of care and devotion and love in the granular here and now.

You make an interesting point about who can translate in a post-colonial world. Tell us what you would say to someone who challenges Western scholarship and translations of Indian writing today, and why.

As you know, I have written in the Introduction to 'Ten Indian Classics' that “an empathetic yet critical knowledge is the only touchstone of adhikāra, or authoritative competence, here, not a flat nativist claim to cultural authenticity or an insistence on the primacy of dry textual exegesis”. That ‘empathetic yet critical knowledge’ is shaped by long years of dedicated study and visceral engagement with the classical texts themselves, the languages and literary traditions from which they emerge, the cultural and political contexts in which they gained significance, and the lifeworlds that they continue to inhabit. It is true that many translators of the Indian classics happen to have been born in, or live and work in European or North American contexts. This speaks to the simple empirical fact that these regions possess the highly developed academic infrastructures and resources that are necessary to support such scholarly and translation commitments. India, regrettably, has chosen not to invest in such infrastructures and resources.

It is not meaningful to complain bitterly that ‘people from elsewhere’ are translating ‘our classics’. Instead, we must ask why it is that we have produced so few scholars and translators who have the capacity, the skill, the linguistic talent and the intellectual energy to take up such responsibilities. What are the systemic failures that we must address and remedy in a redemptive and transformative spirit?

That said, it is a matter of hope that a new generation of translators has clearly come of age in India, and has already produced a great deal of exciting work. Admittedly the majority of these translators are active in the space of contemporary literature, but we have also produced some fine and accomplished translators of the classics who are working outside the traditional bastions of academia.

Do you have a favourite out of these 10?

It is really quite impossible to pick a single favourite from among 10 texts, each one of which casts its own unique spell over the reader, envelops us in its special aura of magic!

If you could include one more text in this book, what would you pick and why?

Ten is so perfectly and symmetrically representative of the decade of activity that the Murty Classical Library of India has logged in already, don’t you think? I would defer the inclusion of more texts to a future MCLI anthology, seeing the present one as a prelude to more such editorial offerings to come.

Finally, how did you become associated with this project?

I was appointed to the Editorial Board of the Murty Classical Library of India in 2023, and, when this anthology project assumed shape, was invited by Harvard University Press to contribute a foreword to it.