Murty's perpetuating Indian lietarature
Narayanamurthy family of Infosys, as we all know, are well known for their philanthropic activities. In fact they are more in news today due to these rather than Infosys. And we now came to know that they are doing a lot to preserve ancient art and literature of India too.
Today, their first such initiative, Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) will see a series of five books being launched in New Delhi by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
These books will be an English translation of ancient Indian classical texts and every year, for the next hundred years, five such ‘Indic’ books will be published by MCLI. This will open up the world to India’s ancient literary works. The first work 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.
MCLI is Rohan Murty’s brainchild started at Harvard. He started this four years ago when he saw ancient Greek and Latin books being translated into English, finding a worldwide audience. Rohan and his family donated $5.2 million to launch MCLI. Thus this idea of bringing to the world ancient Indian classical works, translated into English. MCLI aims to make available the great literary works of India from the past two millennia. Many classic Indic texts have never reached a global audience, while others are becoming increasingly inaccessible even to Indian readers. The creation of a classical library of India is intended to reintroduce these works to a new generation of readers. So thanks to the Murty’s, the world will now see ancient books of Tamil, Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Telugu, and Urdu. The text in the appropriate regional script will appear alongside the translation. An introduction, explanatory commentary, and textual notes will accompany each work with the aim of making these volumes the most authoritative and accessible available.
The threat posed to knowledge, as fewer and fewer people today can gain access to the great works of literature and thought of their classical past, is MCLI’s reason for being. The series provides original texts, often newly edited, that are as reliable as they can be. We also offer rich annotation to help readers wherever literary allusion or historical reference may be difficult to comprehend. The works are printed in the appropriate Indic script as well—with a large number of fonts designed specifically for the series. Surely would be a unique and interesting way to see our ancient Indian literature finding a new world, rather than dying in obscurity.