The ‘Classics’ in India: Unseen Presence, Cloaked Authority

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Published: Nov 8, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.25257
Keywords:
classics india British rule of India postcolonial literature sanskrit murty classical library of India Indian academic institutions cultural nationalism
Harish Trivedi
Abstract
The classics were taught not only in the West but also all over the colonised world –except in India, probably because India was acknowledged to have foundational classics of its own written in a language which was proclaimed by Western scholars to be fully a match of Greek and Latin. However, an earlier connection between Greece and India that began in 326 BCE with the aborted attempt by Alexander the Great to conquer India left enduring cultural traces which have been explored by creative writers and scholars alike. In the hey-day of British rule in India, the British governors and civil servants, who were themselves steeped in classical education, often fashioned themselves on the model of Pax Romana, so that the absence in India of a direct classical education was still not exempt from a pervasive classical penumbra.
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Author Biography
Harish Trivedi
Harish Trivedi, formerly Professor of English at the University of Delhi, was visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993), and has co-edited Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (with Susan Bassnett, 1999), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (2000), and Interdisciplinary Alter-natives in Comparative Literature (2013). He has contributed essays to the Cambridge Companion volumes on Gandhi, Kipling (both 2011) and Tagore (2019), and translated poetry and short fiction from Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit into English. He is currently an editor-contributor to a multi-volume project based in Stockholm for writing a history of World Literature.