‘Nobody In Rome Will Mind A Videshi Translating Aeneid'

Sheldon Pollock, one of the world’s most eminent Sanskritists and founder-editor, Murty Classical Library, was in the eye of a storm a few seasons ago. In India for a talk at Ashoka University, he reprises the themes in an interview with Sunil Menon.

- Sunil Menon

There are two tracks we can go down here. One is to stay in the deep, if not entirely still waters of the academic. But when a scholar emerges from the silence of the library, it’s a noisy world out there. The world of petitions. How did you negotiate this recent turbulent phase?

I knew that would be your first question! You see, for an obscure scholar of Sanskrit from a distant country to be invited to a briefing with the press is on the face of it very odd. Imagine an American scholar of Virgil who comes to Rome and is queried by the press about his attitude towards Aeneas! The good side is that people take the classical past in India very seriously. People care. I see this in many areas. Think how many rapes happen in the US every single day, but when something of that tragic sort happens in India, as we’ve seen in these months, Indians show a degree of empathy and collective sorrow that’s extraordinary. So there’s a sense that you are dealing with a polity, a collectivity, of people who are emotionally deeply eng­ aged with the world. However tragic the circumstances, I find that amazing. This is something I’ve been thinking about.

Do you think this tendency is new?

I have no idea. I raise this in the context of that question. There’s a side of the events of the last few years, and it obviously doesn’t just concern me, it concerns many scholars in the field of classi­ cal studies. The bottom-line is that Indians take the interpretation of their past with a degree of seriousness found virtually nowhere else in the world. I can’t see the Chinese…you know, three new series have appeared in the last five years in the West. The library of Arabic literature, the library of Chinese humanities and one more…. But the Chinese and the Arabs, they don’t