‘The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Volume I’

THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF WORLD RELIGIONS
Volume I: Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism
Edited by Jack Miles, Wendy Doniger, Donald S. Lopez Jr. and James Robson
Illustrated. 2,182 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. Sold together with “Volume II: Judaism, Christianity, Islam”; $100 for the set.



The god Krishna and Kaliya, the serpent king, from 17th-century India. Credit DeAgostini/Getty Images

DEC. 19, 2014
By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

By the end of the 19th century, almost all the major surviving classics of Greek and Roman literature had been translated into English. Since then a few new gems have turned up, mainly from papyri found in the rubbish dumps of the Egyptian town Oxyrhynchus. Here was found, for example, a tattered verse by Sappho and Pindar’s paeans to Apollo. It is unlikely, however, that many more great works of classical European literature will surface; the canon of ancient European literature we have now is likely to remain largely unchanged a century hence.

It is often assumed that the same is true for the other great classical literatures of the world, but this is very far from the case. In particular, the rich treasures of ancient Indian literature remain almost completely unexplored, even to those few who can read languages such as Sanskrit or classical Tamil. For there survives in manuscript form in libraries across South Asia a corpus of literature which is, at a conservative estimate, a thousand times larger than what has survived in Greek. Only a very small proportion of these manuscripts have even been cataloged, never mind translated — estimates range from 5 to 7 percent of the total, maybe 500,000 manuscripts of a surviving seven million; but there are really no accurate figures. The scholar David Pingree put the actual number closer to 30 million manuscripts. And such is the scale of the haul, and the poor state of their preservation, that several hundred Sanskrit manuscripts are destroyed or become illegible every week, their contents lost forever. Who knows what masterpieces of prose and poetry, what epics and chronicles, what vital works of sacred and secular literature could be disappearing every year?

If the project of conserving and cataloging the ocean of ancient Indian literature has a long way to go, then the business of translation has barely begun. Faced with the vast seas to be explored, the small band of professional translators of Sanskrit tend to feel like infants paddling on the foreshore of the Atlantic, looking wistfully, but impotently, out to the depths of the turbulent sea.

There are historical reasons for this neglect. Sanskrit eventually became an exclusively sacred language, the preserve of the Brahmins, and in the ancient Laws of Manu, any Dalit (untouchable) who attempted to learn it was sentenced to have molten lead poured into his ears. Partly as a result of this, before the arrival of the pioneering Orientalist Sir William Jones in Calcutta in 1783, there was almost complete ignorance in Europe about India’s classical literature. There began a stumbling progress that led to the translation of passages from the most prominent ancient Indian writers: Vyasa, to whom is attributed the Mahabharata; Valmiki, author of the Ramayana; and the greatest of ancient Indian playwrights, Kalidasa, who is to Sanskrit what Shakespeare is to English.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/books/review/the-norton-anthology-of-world-religions-volume-i.html?_r=0