$5.2-Million to Harvard U. Press for New Translation Series

Harvard University Press has received a gift of $5.2 million from the Murty family of Bangalore, India, to establish a new series of facing-page translations of classical literature in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other languages of the subcontinent. The press plans to release the first books in the fall of 2013.  A separate Indian edition is also planned, says Sheldon Pollock, inaugural general editor for the Murty Classical Library of India and a professor of Sanskrit and Indian studies at Columbia University.

He sees the Indian edition as key to the series’ mission. “I am deeply concerned about the future of classical studies in India itself,” he writes in an e-mail, “and can easily foresee a time when the number of people who have access to the premodern literary tradition-the longest continuous multilingual tradition in the world-will have reached a statistical zero.” Pollock hopes that an Indian edition, “meant to be affordable to students” will help renew interest in classical literature among Indian youth.

The fate of classical studies, both in and beyond India, has been a persistent concern for the scholar.  Pollock is working on a book for the Harvard press, tentatively entitled “Liberation Philology,” as a “polemic” in defense of the field and previewed his arguments in “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World” (Critical Inquiry, Summer 2009). Elsewhere he has used a Sanskrit proverb to express his alarm: “One should not wait until the house is burning to dig a well.”—Nina Ayoub