Taking a trip down memory lane at the Bengaluru launch of the Murty Classical Library of India series, renowned Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock said that much of his understanding of Indian classical literature was defined by his long association with the intellectual tradition of Karnataka marked by a “special synthesis” of the local and global.
Speaking at the launch of the first five books in the MCLI series of which he is the founding editor, the American scholar said that “dear friends of Karnataka” like A.K. Ramanujan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and Girish Karnad had shaped his thinking on what is “the big tent of Indian literature”, with its capacity to merge the “ marga ” and “ desi .” This character, he said, was unique to India and especially to Karnataka, but impossible to find elsewhere.
The series funded by Rohan Murty, Prof. Pollock hoped, would introduce to the world the tradition of “over five million manuscripts of 2,000 years that Indian people have carefully copied and preserved.” He regretted that there were so few to draw from this rich tradition, which the MCLI hopes to bridge. His teacher in Old Kannada in Mysuru, the great scholar T.V. Venkatalacha Shastry, had no students, Prof. Pollock recalled.
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He remembered his first trip to Karnataka in 1987 when he was trying to raise funds for a Kannada Vidyapeeta in the United States, which never took off.