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The History of Literature
695 Ten Indian Classics (with Sharmila Sen) | My Last Book with Adam Smyth
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio at the Home Depot. Spring Black Friday is here and we've got 14 days of deals to transform your space. So what are you working on? How about a quick and stylish patio furniture update? And what's outdoor dining without a shiny new grill? Find a wide selection of grills under $300 like the next Grill 4 burner for only $229 at the Home Depot. Then add a little AMB with string lights. Shop 14 days of deals during Spring Black Friday, now through April 16th at the Home Depot. This episode is brought to you by Chevy Silverado.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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- [01:03]
Jack Wilson
Just be getting started. Visit chevy.com to learn more. Today on the podcast, a look at a project to make Indian classics as accessible as ancient Greek and Roman texts. We'll talk to the editorial director about that project, an anthology of 10 best to mark the 10th anniversary of it, and some of her favorite works from the world of Indic literature. Sharmila Sen plus, an Oxford professor and small press owner, discusses his choice for the last book he will ever read, all coming up today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. I'm Jack Wilson. You have choices. I think I said that last time too. Well, I'm glad you have chosen to be here with me. I hope you're doing well. These are some dark days indeed. But guess what? They cannot take your mind. Let's choose hope and let's choose it together. So this is a wonderful project. Have you seen the Loeb Classical Library books? Are you familiar with those? They are a triumph, a triumphant part of the history of publishing, prominent in all your best bookstores. Those green and red covers that line several shelves, hopefully with some good lighting. Hopefully because these are classic works of Western civilization. Green are for Greek, red are for Roman or Latin. As many of you probably already know. The only existing series, their slogan says that gives access to all that is important in Greek and Latin literature through original text and English translation. The books sit there on the shelves like building blocks, the very mortar and brick on which our intellectual tradition rises to the sky. Aristotle Cicero, Hippocrates, Livy, Lucian, Ovid, Tacitus, Plato, Suetonius, Catullus, Homer. The list goes on and on, including writers you might not have heard of and need to explore. Reddit has a Redditor who writes simply the complete Loeb Classical Library has taken an entire wall in my house and then he presents a photograph of it. It's like a Christmas wall, all red and green. And the top commenter replies, lovely set. I love the smell of lobes in the morning. Much better than napalm. Probably also smells like victory. Let me read the whole comment by this guy actually. Lovely set. I love the smell of lobes in the morning. I've long wondered if there was anyone else out there who had a complete or near complete set. You're the only other person I've come across that does. Yours is even more complete than mine, which tops out at volume 500. I still need to fill in the more recent additions It's a great feeling knowing you have more or less all the Greek and Latin classics ready to go when you want them. Do you smile every time you walk by your shelf too? Well, OP didn't reply to that, but let me tell you that I smiled thinking about these two with their walls of classics. It's a great feeling knowing there are people in the world who care about such things. And thank you Harvard University Press, who've been publishing these for almost 100 years. 1934 they be the Loebs, though, are older than that. They started in London in 1912, which was early enough to arouse the attention of Virginia Woolf, who said in 1917 the Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom. The existence of the amateur was recognized by the publication of this library, and to a great extent made respectable. The difficulty of Greek is not sufficiently dwelt upon, chiefly, perhaps, because the sirens who lure us to these perilous waters are generally scholars who have forgotten what those difficulties are. But for the ordinary amateur, they are very real and very great, and we shall do well to recognize the fact and to make up our minds that we shall never be independent of our Loeb. End quote. Well, guess what? We can thank Harvard University. Did I say that? Harvard University Press Stumbling all over myself Today we can thank Harvard University Press all over again, not just for their 90 years of good publishing stewardship, but for 10 years of good publishing stewardship. And not for classics of the ancient Roman and Greek world, but for classics of India, the Murti Classical Library of India, established thanks to a multimillion dollar gift from Rohan Murti and projected to be 500 volumes published over a century by Harvard University Press. That's a pace of five books per year. And guess what? They are on track as we will hear from Our guest today. 2,500 years of Indian literature to cover with all the different languages and voices of a continent teeming with literature and life, packed with genius and insight and emotion and spirituality, loss and longing and love. Thoughts for our heads and songs for our hearts. Let's let Sharmila Sen tell us about the project and about a special commemorative book, 10 Indian Classics, which select some of the very best that the Murti Classical Library has had to offer so far. Okay. Joining me now is Dr. Sharmila Sen, who is the editorial director of Harvard University Press, where she strategizes and oversees the press's acquisitions program. She's here today to discuss 10 Indian Classics, a selection of works that showcases 2,500 years of India's dazzling literary tradition. Dr. Sen, welcome to the history of literature.
- [07:47]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Thank you for having me.
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Jack Wilson
So I think many of my listeners might be familiar with the Loeb Classical Library, which has been around since 1911. Could you start by telling us a little about the Murti Classical Library of India? When was that founded and what is its purpose and what's been going on with that?
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Of course. So the Murthy Classical Library of India was actually modeled on the Loeb Classical Library, which you correctly stated has been in continuous publication since 1911, over 100 years now. And it's a very important part of Harvard University Press's catalog. And so in 2010, Rohan Murthy gave a gift to Harvard and to the press specifically to start a book series that will be something similar to the Loeb Classical Library in that it would do for Indic classics what Loeb did for Greek and Latin classics. Right. Present facing page translations, by which we mean, you know, the original on the left hand side of the book and the English translation on the right hand side of the book. Really intended for general readers, not specialists, because specialists can obviously read the originals on their own and have it be very affordably priced, well made and published all over the world. And our real ambition, it continues to be that as we enter the 10th anniversary of publication, is that this is a series we hope outlasts us all and is around for at least 100 years. So the series was founded in 2010 with the gift, and we began releasing the first books in early 2015. So this is why this year, 2025, marks our 10th anniversary, by which I mean 10th anniversary of publication.
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Jack Wilson
And my understanding is that this book, 10 Indian Classics, is part of that celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the press.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Absolutely. It's 10 years, 10 Indian Classics. I wanted to do something special to mark this milestone and I wanted to put together one book in which readers perhaps who haven't encountered this series yet might be able to dip into Indian classics and who knows, maybe go on to read some of these books in their entireties or check out the bilingual editions and discover a new world of literature.
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Jack Wilson
Right. So has the press published 10 books or more than 10? I'm wondering if you had to select. I guess I could ask this question in two ways and it depends on how many books the Murti Classical Library already has. One would be to ask if you had to select out of those which 10 you would include here or if there have only been 10 so far. I guess the, the question would be how did you select the first 10 books to publish with the Murty Classical Library?
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Well, let me, let me start by first addressing the question of how many books we have published as part of the series. So by the end of 2025, which is this year, we would have published 50 books.
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Jack Wilson
Oh, wow.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Oh, yes. So I think publishing 10 books in 10 years would have been quite, quite modest. Set ourselves these amazing. Very ambitious.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, yeah.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
One was 500 books in 100 years. Because that kind of matches what Loeb did. Right. Loeb is now in its, you know, it's more than 110 years old.
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Jack Wilson
20 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Because we celebrated the centenary of the Loeb classical library in 2011. So now we are well on to working towards our 125th year. Loeb has 500 plus volume. So anyway, our goal was let's do 500 books in 100 years, which is roughly five books a year.
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Jack Wilson
So you're on track?
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
We're on track. We're on track. I mean, we're getting this started. This kind of ambitious publication series, as you can guess, for everybody involved, requires a certain kind of humility because I know full well we are starting something, laying the foundation for something that we will not be around to see it in its sort of full flower. But yes, I'm very proud to say that by October of this year we have a few more books coming out this calendar year. So by October of this year we would have published 50 books. And I selected 10 from our 50 simply because, you know, as I said, 10 years, 10 Indian classics.
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Jack Wilson
Right, right.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Sounded like a good idea and not too overwhelming for a reader.
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Jack Wilson
Well, it's a great book. I really have been enjoying going through it and I'm wondering, did you look for the 10 most famous, the 10 most influential, or that would kind of show a range of literary styles and themes and subjects and eras. And how. How did you come up with the 10?
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Yeah, that's a great question. Probably a little bit of all three of bricks you mentioned, but really I began with an attempt to show the range. Right, yeah. Because, you know, while it's easy to say, hey, the Murthy Classics is like globe but for the Indian subcontinent. Right. We knew it from the beginning. And as these years have gone on, I've realized actually how very different also the two projects are. Right, yes, of course, we have the similarity of having bilingual editions and, you know, it being made very accessible to general readers, etc. Etc. But those are only Greek and Latin classics. Whereas we have so many languages, so many different traditions. Right. Literary, philosophical, even in terms of writing systems. Right. Loeb only uses two scripts. We have so many different scripts on the left hand side of the book. But anyways, I did want to show the range. The other thing is our chronological catchment area is much wider than low, and some of that has to do with this very term, classic or classics, which is kind of an. Really an exogenous term in the Indian subcontinent. Right. In our Indic languages, you know, there probably isn't an equivalent. And classics really mean something in the Western tradition and particularly in English. Right. When we speak anything to each other in English. So what this really is, is premodern Indic text. But calling it premodern would have been, I think as a publisher, I would find that to be a bit of a, you know, it's a little opaque. Right. For it sounds a little forbidding. So, you know, it's. Classics is a term we all understand and it kind of means also books that are classic works, but it also refers to a time period. So we have, as you said, 2,500 years. And we've published in over 14 languages so far. These 50 books in this anthology, by the way, nine languages are represented.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
So my task, the task I set for myself was to, you know, in some small way, in the span of relatively short book, I didn't want to make a tome. I wanted to make really something that's appealing, just to be able to show the range of range of languages. Range, chronological range, genre range. There's poetry. There's historical chronicles, there is prose. There is also different parts of the subcontinent represented, perhaps not fully. That's always a thing I struggle with. I wish we had more languages that we could have published in. But, you know, it's a. It's something probably for our successors to work on. Right, right. So I was also trying to make sure that, you know, north, south, east, west, you know, these different parts of the Indian subcontinent are represented. And with it, of course, I'm also picking some of the works that are significant. Right. Significant because maybe readers know them, have a emotional connection. And I hope we can talk about that later in the podcast. So I did pick some that people would know. Right. Or they have heard the stories from their grandmother or from their parents while, you know, during bedtime. And some that, you know, we might be, you know, kind of lesser known jewels, sort of discoveries. So I'm also trying to kind of give people a few things that, you know, and a few that are kind of like surprises. The Loeb Library, I should say, you know, actually very much represents the same thing. You know, they're the. We have our. There's Plato, but there's also Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid. But they're all also things that, you know, maybe other than, you know, very specialized classicists for the general reader might be, oh, I didn't discover this. So we always try to do that is give people something that they know and love already, but along with that, something that's a special surprise and maybe something that can become a new favorite.
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Jack Wilson
And just to make sure we make it clear to the listeners about the time span and to draw the contrast with the Loeb Classical Library, we have things in this selection. 10 Indian classics. Some of them are from the third century before the Common Era, and some are as recent as the 17th or 18th century.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
That's exactly right. The earliest text in 10 Indian classics dates back to, as you said, 3rd century BCE that will be the. The. Or the Songs of the First Buddhist Women. Right. By the way, the anthology, I arranged it in chronological order. So we begin with the oldest texts. And the last one, Mirtakimir, who is an Urdu poet who is sort of synonymous with urdu poetry itself. That is the most recent, as it were. 1800 is very roughly a rule of thumb we have used as a cutoff point so far in the series. It might change and evolve with the coming years. I'm always very aware that this is a work in progress. Right. So new editors, my own successors, you know, people might reinterpret it. But the way we began was we kind of had to say what our cutoff point is, and it was 1800. Because, you know, scholars generally agree that something happens in the literary milieu of the Indian subcontinent around that time. No surprise what that something is. It's called the arrival of European empires, the British in particular. Right. And there is a shift in the literary traditions because, you know, of the kind of influences that are coming in from Europe.
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Jack Wilson
The changing social, political language, education.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Yeah, you got it. Aesthetic, Right. Like, great intermingling and often languages themselves. You know, what we call this is the modern version. For instance, I'm a native Bengali speaker. Right. I'm from the state of West Bengal in India. I grew up in Calcutta. So my mother tongue, Bengali, you know, Bengali that comes after 1800, roughly, is what we would call modern Bengali. It's not really. Our languages are not sort of. Or even history is not really divided into sort of antiquity, Middle Ages, early modern, Renaissance. You know, that kind of periodization historians of India have written about for many years. You know, that really represents a kind of a Western way of periodizing history.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
This is no different, by the way, for, say, Chinese classical literature, you know, which your readers might know that, you know, doesn't use the exact same language in periodizing that we do for your film languages.
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Jack Wilson
Right, right. Okay, well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and hear about some of the specific choices you made for the 10 Indian classics.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Avengers are gone. No one's coming to save the day.
- [22:15]
Jack Wilson
Their time I think we could be the people that are coming has come being the Shiro.
- [22:21]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Do references to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025 hey there, travelers.
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
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Jack Wilson
So don't just dream about that trip. Book it with Priceline. Go to your happy price, Priceline. Okay, we're back. So I thought we'd start with just kind of walk through the first three and then maybe let you pick one from the remainder so we can give listeners a sense. I thought actually the first three were quite different and give us a good sense of the range of things we'll see in the book in terms of style and subject matter and so on the first one, I just found this absolutely inspiring and fascinating, and I was really glad to get a chance to read these excerpts. I'm going to need you to help me with the pronunciation. Even though you've already said it once. Do you call it the tergatha?
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
The. Yeah, you're close. It's the. The. Okay. Were the. The elder Buddhist women or the. Or nuns? And Gatha is just means song.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah. So these are songs, poems by the Buddhist wise women in the third century BC or bce. Tell us about these poems. What are they about, and what do we know about their origins?
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Sure. Isn't it amazing? This is the oldest extant women's writing in the world, not just in the Indian subcontinent. In the world. I thought it would be fantastic for Harvard University Press to be able to present this to its readership, because I don't think many people know that this exists. People might know Sappho. Right. But you think about what this would mean to a general reader and sort of what kind of world we're opening up to them when it comes to kind of thinking about women and writing. So that's where we began. It also happens to be one of the first books we released back in 2015. Charlie Hallisi is the translator. He's a great Bali scholar and translator. He teaches here at Harvard. And this is translated from Bali. And I find it amazing that our oldest excerpt reads so modern. Yeah, there's something about it. It's. And that's not Charlie. Modernizing things in English. That's exactly how the poetry, you know, the songs are in Bali. And in fact, by being more faithful to the Original. He's actually show. You know, he doesn't sort of make it sound archaic or Victorian, which is a thing we. We are constantly pushing against, not making something sound exotic or archaic if that doesn't actually exist in the original.
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Jack Wilson
Right, right.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
It's not just the language, the directness, it's the content, the stories. You know, these are by women who have renounced the world, the domestic world or the material world. They're the first nuns. Right. And they come from all walks of life. They can be daughters of very rich men or wives of very powerful rich men. They be maids. They could be prostitutes. They are young, they are old. They talk so frankly about their sexuality, about their body, the sort of. The coarseness of the hair on their shaven head, the changes of their body for the. For the older women. Any reader, particularly women readers, I think you read it, and it seems like they're talking about a world we still inhabit, which was. I mean, one of the ways I wanted to begin this. Right, yeah.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
All the excerpts are like this. Because I also want to use this anthology to take people into worlds. Right. And worldviews that are absolutely different, not relatable. Right. It's also, I think, really salutary to discover, not just in Indic classics, but Western classics as well, how human beings lived and thought and the things that they were passionate about that might seem utterly alien to us. Right. I think that's great because it keeps us from becoming really solipsistic. But this one, to go back to the. The is one where we begin. And I think you could feel like this could have been written a few decades ago, not 2,500 years ago.
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Jack Wilson
Oh, I think so, too. There were two things that really struck me. I mean, the first was that often it made me realize how often in religious stories the women are off stage, that they're often back home while the men go forth on a spiritual quest. And these are women who have voices, who are doing this for themselves. And then the other thing that struck me was that we often think of the convent life or the life of a nun as being one of deprivation and kind of spiritual cleansing through giving a lot of things up. And here there is that renunciation, but it's the renunciation that leads to joy, the joy of being free, that it's being free from the things of the world and being free from your husband or from sex or from everything that holds you back. And in one, they mention houses and livestock and desire and anger and ignorance and craving and son, which I was Surprised to see even the. Even the sun listed there. And it makes you realize I can learn from these people the way I learn from all spiritual seekers who have a kind of spiritual goal and then work to approach it or achieve it. And I was really surprised by how much this resonated with me even across all of these centuries.
- [29:47]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
That's exactly right. I mean, it does also remind me of sort of, you know, medieval saints lives, you know, the few that are found to us by women. Right. And, you know, something you said a little earlier, you know, here are women and their voices. They're far from being invisible or silent or off stage. They're talking to each other.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
Think about how much we talk about this in terms of contemporary films or even contemporary fiction, that, you know, when women are present, when they do speak, there's always a man, you know, who are they addressing that women just talking to each other and then these daring things. Right. Because I think we can, perhaps we can kind of get behind a woman fleeing to use a. A wildly anachronistic modern term, say domestic violence. Right. Or a sex worker, again, using wildly anachronistic terms, wanting to be free of that life. Yeah. Women saying, I want to be free even of my children.
- [30:54]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
That's stuff that even, you know, I mean, even in contemporary culture, that's a kind of thing. There's a lot of taboo around that. Obviously, there are modern poets and, you know, who have written about this in the 20th century. Right. Like that motherhood itself can be something of a burden for women. And as you said. Yes. Free. I love this phrase. Charlie translates repeatedly as, let us go forth into homelessness. How? He uses a very common American English word, homeless. Right. Which is a thing we think is bad. You don't want to be that. But these women just keep saying, let us go forth into homelessness.
- [31:41]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
And that also made me kind of pause at the level of the word and think about what they're trying to communicate and you know, what sort of, of course, early Buddhist philosophy this represents for us.
- [31:57]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, you're so right that the fact that they're speaking to one another is. Makes this so vivid. I mean, I. Especially when we have examples of women writers from time periods where it's not that common or we're not expecting it to be that common. It's often this lone individual who is basically saying, I'm going to speak my piece because I have to, or, you know, it comes across to us as kind of an isolated voice. And here it really does seem like this is a community. There's camaraderie here. These are women who are in it together and who are part of this, what they're exploring. They're not alone. They are trying to help each other along.
- [32:46]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
That's right. I mean, you know, there is this. First of all, we don't have a kind of the sole voice representing all women. Right. This is a kind of a cacophonous.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
- [33:00]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Group of women.
- [33:01]
Jack Wilson
And they have different names. And this is what my name means. And this. It's really exactly.
- [33:07]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
I mean, there's. It's like that sense of, as you said, that word community, yet they are not anonymized. Right. So that's why I wanted to begin with this one.
- [33:17]
Jack Wilson
It was a great way to begin. It really did surprise me. And I could spend the whole episode on just this chapter, but I want to move on to the next one. And I would say that the next selection. And again, I'll ask you to help me with the pronunciation. But I think it might have been a little closer to what I was expecting when I open the book. And this is Arjuna and the hunter.
- [33:41]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Yes. So the next one takes us, you know, we're jumping across centuries here, of course, and we are in the 6th century of the Common Era or AD and this is an instance of a Sanskrit, what you would call a court poetry literally translates into great poem. Maha is great, gavya is poem. But that's too literal translation. To just call it the great poem makes it sound kind of a little weird and foreign. What it is, it's a kind of poetry written for the court. You know, a lot of these had rich royal patrons, as you can guess. Bhagavi is a very well known, renowned Sanskrit poet of this period. So. And this is edited by Indira Peterson, who I should say something here that I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I was also conscious of another aspect when I was selecting it. I mean, none of these things were the only ruling principle, but they were all swirling in my mind last year as I was making the selections is I wanted to make sure that we also represented women translators because, you know, in here's where I would like to consciously deviate a little bit from Loeb. A wonderful series that it is. But Loeb was started, what, 1911? I don't know right now, off the top of my head, like when we see the first woman translator of Greek and Latin appear on the spine of a load book. But I can tell you it's probably at least not for the first 80 to 90 years.
- [35:39]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Dr. Sharmila Sen
I wanted to make sure that for the Murthy series that we had a little less of this kind of gender disbalance when it comes to who the translators are. You'll Notice of these 10 Indian classics, I only have one that was written by a group of women. The other nine are written by men. Right. Okay. Well, that's what the record is, but I can think about what it means. And it is a kind of a very quiet point I'm making that women also translate. And this is an Indian woman. Vanamala Viswanatha is another one. Nikki Guninder Singh is another one. So, you know, I'm also trying to gently, maybe veer away. It's the 21st century, you know, we don't need to have great Indian or Indic. To be more specific. It's a little clumsy. It just refers to the. The subcontinent. Right. Like a. More as a civilizational idea that can incorporate multiple modern nation states. I just didn't also want to present something where it's like, here are these great texts from the subcontinent, all of them translated by Western male scholars.
- [36:54]
Jack Wilson
Right, Right. Yeah, Very important.
- [36:56]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
So anyways, this is Indira Peterson, a great Sanskrit scholar. Arjuna and the Hunter is basically an episode from the epic Mahabharata, which, you know, maybe your readers are familiar with. What's really cool, I would say about this, and this is. This is a way for us to get into that these are not dead classics. Right.
- [37:20]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [37:20]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
That even if one hasn't read Bharvey in Sanskrit, but we know the story. What's fascinating here is, you know, and this is kind of simmering under the page, but I want to share this with your readers. Right. Is that this is, of course, part of a written, high literary tradition, but the stories, the epics also live on in the Indian subcontinent in the diaspora, through oral retellings. People would know of this little episode. And you don't have to be a particularly highly educated person, someone with very fancy college degrees. This is the kind of stories our parents and grandparents would tell us maybe during meal time to.
- [38:13]
Jack Wilson
Right. They've made their way into. To television series and films and things like that as well.
- [38:18]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Got it. It's, of course, then it becomes part of popular culture in all sorts of ways. Right. Comic books and. Or modern fiction. Right. Where they're kind of retelling. So in this case, you know, Arjuna, the great sort of warrior, one of the five protagonists of the epic the Pandavas, he's seeking some special assistance from Shiva and he goes, and he's sort of, you know, doing a penance in the. In the Himalayas. And, you know, Shiva appears in the form of this hunter. And they have an exchange, they have fights, and in the end all works out. Arjuna gets what he set out to get.
- [38:59]
Jack Wilson
It's such a great. I mean, I actually read this one to my. I have a son who's a high school senior who's writing for a philosophy class. The essay, the subject that he chose is strength. And he wanted to talk about different forms of strength and why, you know, sometimes we will equate strength with physical strength and courage in battle and things like that, but other times in, you know, the ability to listen to others or to self sacrifice in some way. And this is, I mean, this was so perfect because here's an example of Arjuna as a warrior, but he's also seeking self discipline and self control. And again, he's on kind of a spiritual quest. And the God really challenges him and says, why are you clad in armor as if you're ready for battle? If you really want to be ascetic, you would only be wearing deer skin and bark. Are you a person of detachment? If so, why are you carrying a bow and arrows? And I just presented that to my son and he immediately wanted to go check it out and see, well, how does Arjuna respond and how does he live with that dramatic tension? How does he resolve it in himself?
- [40:17]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
That's, I mean, you, you nailed it. And I think I love hearing the story of your son, a high school student, being intrigued by this. Right? This is exactly right. I mean, the Hindu God that Arjuna is trying to gets something from is Shiva. He's a very powerful God. He represents destruction. The iconography usually depicts him. He is a great ascetic himself, right? He's got sort of matted, dreadlocked hair, his ash smeared. He's super powerful. Right? And so this is, I think it's an interesting way of thinking about, perhaps for young men like your son, about. Also about self control, power, right? Maybe masculine power. That is it, about being a warrior and, you know, being great. Arjuna is, by the way, amazing at archery, right? That's a special skill. He is sort of, you know, in the story of the Mahabharata, he's one of the best in archery. He never misses. Okay, but his test here is self control. This particular one I selected because I wanted to give an instance of Sanskrit, which of course, people will expect to see in any kind of anthology covering the Indian subcontinent. But I also Pick this particular episode, because I'm. Without saying it, I'm also trying to show none of this is really dead. Right. This is one way of accessing it. And we should certainly know about, you know, here's this guy writing about it in the 6th century. But even in the 21st century, people who can't read a word of Sanskrit in India could know the story. You know, in a way, these classics are more alive perhaps than western classics because our gods are not dead and have not been turned into heroes. I always say that, you know, there is obviously an understood kind of rupture, if you don't want to call it rupture. Something happens in the west and that is the coming of Christianity. Right. So like the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans, the story come literary stories or stories of heroes and you know, nobody really cares about, you know, how Zeus is represented here or oh, what on earth, you know, Apollo or Hera is doing. That's not the same in the case of India. Right. Because the literary heroes are also gods. Right. Shiva is not just a literary character from the 6th century. People are actually worshiping Shiva in temples in India as we speak.
- [43:12]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [43:14]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
That brings a different kind of valence also, which I think readers around the world, I think that'd be something interesting for them to keep in mind.
- [43:22]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. So the third chapter, this one, I've never read anything like this. It's a 13th century poem about a king who suffered for his commitment to one paramount value, truthfulness. And there's a vision here, this. This vision of fire with creatures who are burning and desperate and begging for mercy. And I found it disturbing. Also kind of inspiring and just as a fan of literature, just bracing and kind of invigorating that it was as vivid as it was. And it made me intrigued and wanting to read, to see what would happen to this king. But also just, you know, the idea of truthfulness in a leader, you know, what a concept. Right? I mean.
- [44:16]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Yes, exactly. Right. And yes, I mean, Harishchandra, the story of Harishchandra, again, is a story that almost every Indian child is told about. Just like in the U.S. you know, young children are, you know, grow up with you know, just sort of George Washington and his story of how he couldn't tell a lie. And the retrie story, Harishchandra is like that. Right.
- [44:40]
Jack Wilson
For.
- [44:41]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
For kids in India, what we have here is a telling of this narrative in the language Kannada, which is a language from the southern part of India, from the state of Karnataka, which is probably Best known in America today, that state, because that's where Bangalore is, which is very famous for its tech industry, Right? But this is again translated by a woman, Vanamala Vishwanatha, who lives in Bangalore. And this is a Kannada story from the 13th century. So again, we've jumped almost seven centuries from the last chapter. And it's. You're right. I mean, it's amazing. So Harish Chandra, because he is this commitment to truth, not only himself, it's his family, right? His wife, his children, they have to undergo amazing ordeals, right? So it's not sort of he's a man who doesn't compromise. And the descriptions of the cremation grounds, and there is really some very graphic descriptions of all kinds of horrors in there. It's an extremely popular and beloved classic of old Kannada literature. Here it starts getting interesting for us because another thing I was hoping to show is the different regions of India, right? And you had asked me at the beginning, was I picking texts that are popular or well loved already? And I want to go back to that and say that in some cases, it could be popular or well loved in a particular region, relatively unknown in another. Imagine if the United States had a kind of a diverse and very regionally specific literary culture where there's sort of a great novelist from the state of Maine that everyone from Maine, you know, loves and has been a favorite since the 13th century. If there was Maine in the 13th century century. But. But no one in the District of Columbia really is aware of this person, right? So that's another thing this anthology aims to do, and that really, that part of it, remember, we publish worldwide, right? And this book came out in October of 2024 in India. I published it about three months in advance in India, and it was released at the end of January, January 28, in fact, of this year in the United States. We went a little early in India because it's beginning of what we call the festive season. And it's a season where, you know, a lot of people buy books to give as gifts. So I wanted to make sure that this book was included. But what I'm really trying to do here is have Indians discover their own literature from another part, from another state. Right. So no one from the state of Karnataka would need to be told who Raghavanka is. But I can tell you that a lot of people from Punjab or from Bengal might be unfamiliar. So that's another kind of peculiarity, or reality, if you will, of the Indian subcontinent, where we have so many different languages. And literary languages that one of the goals of this series from the very beginning is we wanted young readers in India to discover their own heritage and their literary traditions. Because often we know a lot more about, or at least people who are middle class and above of Western literature, because that's what our schools taught us. And we might know one or two classics from our mother tongue, but we might not know it from right across the border. So that's another thing I'm trying to do as we move from different literary traditions, different languages.
- [48:53]
Jack Wilson
Right. And I'm afraid we're kind of running out of time. But you had mentioned early in our conversation passion, and I wanted to give you a chance to explore that a little bit more. Were you about to say that you were hoping that these stories would be ones that can arouse the passions in readers?
- [49:11]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Absolutely. I hope these stories are a discovery for readers across the world. It's a very delicate kind of tightrope we must walk because it's easy to say we're a global publisher, but all publishing really is tied to local contingencies in North America, where I am right now, as we're having this conversation, of course, I want this to be a gateway for people to perhaps discover a literary world that they might not know a lot about. Right. And go delve a little deeper. Maybe they'll be intrigued by the Urdu or by the Bali or by the Punjabi and they might want to explore more for India. I really want this to be for young Indians, for, for school age kids. When this project started, I have three children. My own children were then all, you know, under the age of 10. Now they're all adults. And Rohan Murthy and I talked a lot. He didn't have any children then. He has a one and a half year old son now. And we talked a lot about how we are making also these books for the next generation. So that of course, in a nation like India where we still struggle with a lot of basic human issues like poverty or access to, you know, clean water, housing, medicine, infrastructure, that's important. And people choose certain subjects to study because that's what leads to jobs. But in the process, we wanted to make sure that we weren't becoming an English only population. Right. Because English is the language of business and of the world. Right. So a lot of Indians now are very fluent in, in English, but they might not really read in any other Indian language. You'll notice I said other Indian language because I believe English is an Indian language now. But it's one of our Many languages. So we would love for people to read literatures in their own mother tongue or the mother tongue of another state in India. It's very old fashioned but I grew up in an India in the 70s where we still believed in what was called a three language education system where I went to an English medium school, I spoke Bengali at home. But we always also studied the language of another region that's not our own. And I think for my parents and grandparents generation this was a kind of an attempt at national integration if you will. This was a small way of trying to also give future generations of Indians in India a look at their own traditions and traditions of their co citizens. So this is why I chose these 10 classics and I hope one day someone will come and do 25 Indian classics.
- [52:32]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [52:32]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
We celebrate our 25th year.
- [52:35]
Jack Wilson
Exactly right. Well there's so much we didn't cover. The other chapters. There's chapter about the power of cosmic love. There's the Mughal empire collapsing under invasions from the northwest and the arrival of the British East India Company. There's an emperor's ideology of divine kinship and indic and Islamic hymns and, and more. I it's just wonderful. Eye opening book that belongs on everyone's shelf in my opinion.
- [53:02]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
I'm so glad you pointed that. Can I just add one thing?
- [53:06]
Jack Wilson
Sure.
- [53:06]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
I'm glad you pointed out the, you know, that's the Persian 1. Abu Fazl's Chronicle of the Third Mughal Emperor Akbar, who's often referred to as the Great Mughal. We have Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. Right. And his poems we have Mir Takimir writing in Urdu. One of the great sort of audacious things that this series has tried to do is to put languages next to each other that have often been seen as separate in contemporary times, often for kind of superficial political reasons. So where Urdu and Persian become seen as sort of the language of Muslims and Sanskrit is the language of Hindus and I guess, you know, so we have also different religious communities represented here and languages. Right. So from Bali of the first Buddhist women to the Punjabi poems of. That's part of the scripture of Sikhism to Urdu and Persian commingling with Sanskrit. No one had done that before. It was usually like here's the Sanskrit canon, here's the Persian canon. Right. These are kept. But in the subcontinent, the two 500 year history and hopefully it will be so in the future, there's always been an intermingling of people, of languages, of writing systems, of aesthetics, ideas, philosophy, religion. These have not been kind of compartmentalized and partitioned. So in one small book with 10 excerpts, I hope we could show a little bit of that vision of South Asia.
- [54:58]
Jack Wilson
Well, I think you've done just that. The book is called 10 Indian Classics with excerpts selected by my guest today, Dr. Sharmila Sen. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [55:10]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Thank you for having me.
- [55:22]
Jack Wilson
Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, McDonald's meets the.
- [55:53]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
Minecraft universe with one of six collectibles and your choice of a Big Mac or 10 piece McNuggets with spicy nether Flame sauce.
- [56:00]
Jack Wilson
Now available with a Minecraft movie meal at participating McDonald's for a limited time, a Minecraft movie only in theaters. And finally, today we close out this celebration of books and literature and preserving what's good between pages with a man who's done a lot of that himself, Adam Smythe, who is a professor of literature at Oxford University and who runs a small press in his barn, kind of in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, cracking out, cranking out pages on their table in their Bloomsbury home. What will this devotee of handmade books, who's also a historian of bookmaking and bookmakers, what will he choose as the last book he would like to have in his hands? Let's find out. Okay, we're joined now by Adam Smythe, an expert in the history of the book and the author of the book the A History of the book in 18 lives. Adam, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [57:32]
Adam Smythe
Wow, that's a great question. I mean, my list of books I haven't yet read is a long one, as for most people. But if I was to think about one book that would be my last book, I think I'd turn to the Argentinian librarian and writer Borges, who produced a series of dazzling they're not long texts. They're not long stories. A series of dazzling short stories, playful stories that deal with Ideas of infinity and gathered in a collection called Labyrinths. But there's one in particular called the Library of Babel from 1941, written while Borges was a librarian and was kind of fed up with cataloguing, I think, and wrote this as a kind of counter to that. And it's a short account of an infinite library, of a library that contains every possible permutation of all the letters in the Alphabet. Borghes was fascinated with the idea of permutation, with the idea that the space and the period and the comma and the letters of the Alphabet could produce an infinite number of books. And the Library of Babel is a story which is short, but it has the idea of every possible book within it. So that would seem to me like a. Like a good choice for a last book to read. So I think that would be my.
- [58:50]
Jack Wilson
Selection to imagine it. And then maybe you close the covers of that one, you pass to the other side and find that the Library of Babel is waiting for you.
- [59:03]
Adam Smythe
That may well be. We'll see. We'll see in time.
- [59:07]
Jack Wilson
Sounds like heaven to me. Adam Smythe, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [59:14]
Adam Smythe
Thank you very much.
- [59:20]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. My thanks to Adam Smythe and Sharmala Sen for being my guest today. You should check out those books if you're looking for something to celebrate books and literature and maybe introduce yourself to some new classics, new to you, that is. Or maybe these are not new to you, but you'd like to comfort yourself with something familiar. Either way, they are there for you. Speaking of which, our podcast is here for you, and we'll be with some more episodes this week and the week after and the week after that. We're still on this crazy pace of 104 episodes in a year. Sorry, Elon, you can't stop that. Or at least not yet. Try as you might, we're winning. John Ruskin, listener took me to task for not knowing enough about him, and then she educated me. He's a very fascinating figure indeed, as are fairy tales in Europe. Just how determined were they to whiten those things up? And what did that mean for the stories? And what has it meant for all of us? And then an old favorite, Dante, with some of my favorite people in the world discussing one of my favorite books, the underrated classic La Vita Nova. I'm Jack Wilson. Happy to have a little Nova in my vita. Thank. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. Hey, everyone, it's Danielle from National Park After Dark, the chart topping podcast that's received over 42 million downloads. If you love the great outdoors or are just morbidly curious about what can go wrong out there, this is the show for you. Each week on National Park After Dark, my co host and I dive into the darker side of nature. Epic survival stories, tragic history, animal encounters, and yes, even some paranormal encounters. But it's not all chills and thrills. We also share inspiring tales and our passion for protecting the wild places we all love. So lace up your hiking boots and take a walk on the dark side of the wilderness with us on National Park After Dark.
- [61:34]
Dr. Sharmila Sen
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the news.
- [61:36]
Jack Wilson
Cycle, you are not alone. I'm Emma Varvalukas and along with Progress Network founder Zachary Carabell, I host what Could Go Right, a podcast that looks beyond the headlines to uncover progress happening in the world, even in difficult times. Each week we sit down with experts to discuss today's biggest challenges without ignoring the hard stuff. We bring nuance, insight and a forward looking perspective to help make make sense of the current moment. Fight the urge to do scroll tune into what could go right instead. Wherever you get your podcasts.