A series of fortuitous accidents led to the founding of the Murty Classical Library of India almost a decade ago.
Here's how it happened: In the early 2010s, Rohan Murty, son of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murty, became deeply interested in reading ancient Indian texts while doing his PhD in computer science at the Harvard University, Massachusetts. Ancient Indian science, philosophy, grammar, astronomy, polity - he read anything he could get in English translation. He told an Indian newspaper back in 2015 that every semester for three years, he even added one graduate course in ancient Indian studies to his curriculum.
Rohan's search for more ancient Indian books in English led to a conversation with a professor who in turn led him to books published in the Clay Sanskrit Library series. Rohan found the Clay series books, published by the New York University Press, useful. But the funding for them had run out and their series editor, Sheldon Pollock, was looking to raise funds to continue the work.
Murty then gifted $5.2 million (roughly Rs 44 crore today) to the project. Pollock came on board as general editor (the American scholar stepped down in 2022). And the Murty Classical Library of India launched in January 2015 with titles like 'Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women' (originally in Pali), 'The Story of Manu' (Telugu), 'Sur's Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition' (Hindi), 'Sufi Lyrics': Bullhe Shah (Punjabi) and 'The History of Akbar', Volume 1 (Persian).
Published by Harvard University Press, the Murty Classics are bilingual. Over the past decade, the Murty Classical Library of India has published more than 40 books - the plan is to do over 500 in a century. Ahead of its tenth anniversary, Murty Classical Library is launching an anthology of "romantic ghazals and devotional quatrains, medieval battles and separated lovers, Buddhist women on their journeys toward nirvana and Ram’s battle against a demon army to rescue Sita", spanning 2500 years. Titled 'Ten Indian Classics', the 272-page book is expected to release on October 18 with a price tag of Rs599.
Poet and translator Ranjit Hoskote, who has written a foreword for the book, said in a press release: “Ten Indian Classics embodies the vibrant diversity of South Asia’s literary traditions over a 2,500-year period. In the pages of this anthology, through the devoted work of scholarly translators and editors, we are invited into mysterious, magical, illuminating worlds. Selected from languages and literary traditions ranging across the subcontinent, the extracts in this anthology delight us with hymn and epic, biography and visionary utterance. These eloquent texts remain achingly alive to us, as relevant to the crises, dilemmas and joys of the present as they were to those of previous times.”
The release added that the "anthology showcases original translations by leading experts from a vast array of India’s literary traditions: Hindi, Kannada, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu."
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