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A great Chinese Indologists death goes unnoticed in India
Just the other day Mathew Rudolph sent me a mail from the U.S. informing me of the death of Ji Xianlin. He was a greatly venerated Chinese scholar who had secretly translated the Sanskrit-Hindu text of the Ramayan into Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. Ji Xianlin died on July 11 at the age of 98.
This news saddened me greatly, and for a variety of reasons. Foremost amongst them was, of course, the passing away of such a great scholar. He was foremost amongst those responsible for keeping alive the delicate plant of South Asian studies in China between the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and the revival of popular Chinese interest in India in the late 1990s.
What I found as even more remarkable was the spontaneous outpouring of popular grief and the official Chinese sentiment at Jis passing away. Obviously this grief cannot be attributed to Jis lifelong connection with India, but his great scholarship of Indian languages was renowned, and I do not know that for those Chinese who think of Ji and India together it is largely the romantic view of India as the land of Buddhas birth. Also, certainly for some Chinese, the spiritual elements of Hindu mythology and thought.
Timothy B. Weston of the University of Colorado, paying his tribute, writes to say: It has been moving to watch the response in China to the July 11 death of renowned scholar, Ji Xianlin (1911-2009). While Jis unsurprising departure at the ripe old age of 98 has not brought quite the same flood tide in China as [say] Michael Jacksons unexpected death a few weeks earlier at age 50 [did] in the United States (or around the world) the manner in which this venerable scholar is being remembered in Beijing is truly remarkable. The Communist Party paid handsome tributes and leaders followed suit. Long lines of people wishing to pay their last respects waited for hours to gain entrance to a memorial ceremony held on the Beijing University campus where Ji taught. The press was full of tributes to the man from academe.
This is the other aspect that saddens me; the knowledge that Jis death went almost entirely unnoticed in India. I certainly came across no reference to it. And this made me reflect whether an elderly Indian scholar would receive similar attention (or any) in India?
Ji was doubtless an outstanding scholar. His career was noteworthy for its singular achievements and cosmopolitan dimensions. Originally a student of Western literature at Quinghua University, Ji travelled to Germany in 1935 for study. At the University of Gottingen he moved in a new direction, choosing to major in Sanskrit and other ancient Indian languages under the direction of Ernst Waldschmidt and Emil Sieg. Ji received his Ph.D. in Germany and after World War II returned to China where he took a position at Beijing University and founded the Department of Eastern Languages. He chaired that department for the next three decades and built it into one of the most important academic departments and Chinas premier centre for the study of Eastern languages.
Jis greatest scholarly accomplishments were really in the realm of the history of Indian Buddhism and comparative linguistics. According to his former student Zhang Baosheng, now a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Beijing University, Jis academic achievements represented the next wave of greatness within the long, proud tradition of Chinese evidential scholarship. Whereas Chen Yinke, Jis patron and celebrated historian, used literary works as a means of verifying history, Ji pioneered a method of using comparative linguistics to verify historical events and to track changes over time. Jis scholarly findings over the course of his career won for him academic prizes in India, Iran and Japan.
In his later years, Ji had become a living symbol of the ideal Chinese scholar, and as such of a type of person who it is ever more difficult to find in todays fast-paced, money-crazed Chinese society. Here was a man who had been born and raised in the old society, who knew the classics, who had attained great fame and yet who did not attempt to convert his glory into power, wealth, or celebrity, who in fact talked down his achievements and continued to work hard at his research as long as he was able. He was not a Confucian philosopher but he did come to be seen as a Confucian sage who personified the committed life of the scholar. His integrity and wisdom, not just his outstanding scholarly achievements, led to his being recognised as a national treasure, though he himself rejected such labels.
I pay my homage to this great Indologist from China.
(The writer is a Lok Sabha MP for the Bharatiya Janata Party and a former External Affairs Minister.)
The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : A great Chinese Indologist’s death goes unnoticed in India
Just the other day Mathew Rudolph sent me a mail from the U.S. informing me of the death of Ji Xianlin. He was a greatly venerated Chinese scholar who had secretly translated the Sanskrit-Hindu text of the Ramayan into Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. Ji Xianlin died on July 11 at the age of 98.
This news saddened me greatly, and for a variety of reasons. Foremost amongst them was, of course, the passing away of such a great scholar. He was foremost amongst those responsible for keeping alive the delicate plant of South Asian studies in China between the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and the revival of popular Chinese interest in India in the late 1990s.
What I found as even more remarkable was the spontaneous outpouring of popular grief and the official Chinese sentiment at Jis passing away. Obviously this grief cannot be attributed to Jis lifelong connection with India, but his great scholarship of Indian languages was renowned, and I do not know that for those Chinese who think of Ji and India together it is largely the romantic view of India as the land of Buddhas birth. Also, certainly for some Chinese, the spiritual elements of Hindu mythology and thought.
Timothy B. Weston of the University of Colorado, paying his tribute, writes to say: It has been moving to watch the response in China to the July 11 death of renowned scholar, Ji Xianlin (1911-2009). While Jis unsurprising departure at the ripe old age of 98 has not brought quite the same flood tide in China as [say] Michael Jacksons unexpected death a few weeks earlier at age 50 [did] in the United States (or around the world) the manner in which this venerable scholar is being remembered in Beijing is truly remarkable. The Communist Party paid handsome tributes and leaders followed suit. Long lines of people wishing to pay their last respects waited for hours to gain entrance to a memorial ceremony held on the Beijing University campus where Ji taught. The press was full of tributes to the man from academe.
This is the other aspect that saddens me; the knowledge that Jis death went almost entirely unnoticed in India. I certainly came across no reference to it. And this made me reflect whether an elderly Indian scholar would receive similar attention (or any) in India?
Ji was doubtless an outstanding scholar. His career was noteworthy for its singular achievements and cosmopolitan dimensions. Originally a student of Western literature at Quinghua University, Ji travelled to Germany in 1935 for study. At the University of Gottingen he moved in a new direction, choosing to major in Sanskrit and other ancient Indian languages under the direction of Ernst Waldschmidt and Emil Sieg. Ji received his Ph.D. in Germany and after World War II returned to China where he took a position at Beijing University and founded the Department of Eastern Languages. He chaired that department for the next three decades and built it into one of the most important academic departments and Chinas premier centre for the study of Eastern languages.
Jis greatest scholarly accomplishments were really in the realm of the history of Indian Buddhism and comparative linguistics. According to his former student Zhang Baosheng, now a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Beijing University, Jis academic achievements represented the next wave of greatness within the long, proud tradition of Chinese evidential scholarship. Whereas Chen Yinke, Jis patron and celebrated historian, used literary works as a means of verifying history, Ji pioneered a method of using comparative linguistics to verify historical events and to track changes over time. Jis scholarly findings over the course of his career won for him academic prizes in India, Iran and Japan.
In his later years, Ji had become a living symbol of the ideal Chinese scholar, and as such of a type of person who it is ever more difficult to find in todays fast-paced, money-crazed Chinese society. Here was a man who had been born and raised in the old society, who knew the classics, who had attained great fame and yet who did not attempt to convert his glory into power, wealth, or celebrity, who in fact talked down his achievements and continued to work hard at his research as long as he was able. He was not a Confucian philosopher but he did come to be seen as a Confucian sage who personified the committed life of the scholar. His integrity and wisdom, not just his outstanding scholarly achievements, led to his being recognised as a national treasure, though he himself rejected such labels.
I pay my homage to this great Indologist from China.
(The writer is a Lok Sabha MP for the Bharatiya Janata Party and a former External Affairs Minister.)
The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : A great Chinese Indologist’s death goes unnoticed in India
