On Thursday, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen will be inaugurating a series of books in New Delhi which is, arguably, unlike any set of works published before. For, Sen will be launching the first five books of the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI), set up at Harvard to publish English translations of ancient Indian classical texts, not only from Sanskrit but a host of Indian vernacular languages, from Bengali to Telugu to Hindi to Kannada.
The books, five of which will be published every year for the next hundred years, will offer readers around the world and in India access to unique works that one would otherwise find difficult to find in a library, let alone a book store. For instance, among the first works being released is Therigatha, an anthology of poems in Pali written by the first Buddhist women which might well be the oldest examples of women’s writing.
“I started this (MCLI) four years ago, when I was in Harvard University. In Harvard, for example, if you want to learn classics, they teach you only Greek and Latin. Our question was why only these, why not old Tamil poetry or Punjabi play or Malayalam text? So, now, we're doing these translations and making them available to people in India and the US,” Rohan Murty, who had donated $5.2 million along with his family to launch MCLI, had told Business Standard earlier. Murty did his PhD in computer science from Harvard University and had recently taken leave from the university to spend a year as executive assistant to his father and Infosys founder Narayana Murthy. “This is the first time this is being done with Indian texts — people are used to seeing Greek and Latin texts, now they will start seeing books in ancient Tamil, Hindi and other Indian languages,” he said. Murty was clear that though there would be some works in Sanskrit the focus would be on the vernacular languages.
The books, five of which will be published every year for the next hundred years, will offer readers around the world and in India access to unique works that one would otherwise find difficult to find in a library, let alone a book store. For instance, among the first works being released is Therigatha, an anthology of poems in Pali written by the first Buddhist women which might well be the oldest examples of women’s writing.
“I started this (MCLI) four years ago, when I was in Harvard University. In Harvard, for example, if you want to learn classics, they teach you only Greek and Latin. Our question was why only these, why not old Tamil poetry or Punjabi play or Malayalam text? So, now, we're doing these translations and making them available to people in India and the US,” Rohan Murty, who had donated $5.2 million along with his family to launch MCLI, had told Business Standard earlier. Murty did his PhD in computer science from Harvard University and had recently taken leave from the university to spend a year as executive assistant to his father and Infosys founder Narayana Murthy. “This is the first time this is being done with Indian texts — people are used to seeing Greek and Latin texts, now they will start seeing books in ancient Tamil, Hindi and other Indian languages,” he said. Murty was clear that though there would be some works in Sanskrit the focus would be on the vernacular languages.
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