FINDING THE SOUL OF INDIA THROUGH A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

HIS week, I came across a book that I read last year and its value struck me afresh.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

Particularly because I am far from 'ashamed' of knowing the English language, despite the odd political opinion in Delhi on the very many Indians who freely inhabit the unparalleled depth and range of the Anglophone world. The book I found was the late scholar-economist Bibek Debroy's last published volume, Sacred Songs—the Mahabharata's Many Gitas, devoted to the 24 gitas in the epic apart from the Bhagavad Gita. It joined a luminous list of translations from Indian scripture by other scholars. People like Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who rendered the Bhagavad Gita and the sixteen principal Upanishads into English; C Rajagopalachari, whose abridged English translations of Valmiki's Ramayana and Vyasa's Mahabharata in the 1950s are still very much around in new editions; and Kamala Subramaniam, who produced monumental English translations of the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Srimad Bhagavatam.

The value of such works is that they used the English language to repossess Indian scripture and make it accessible to the millions of Indians trapped in the English language. People who still longed to know their heritage better but had to get on with life, study, find jobs, sustain family responsibilities, all of which consumed their time.