In memoriam

Daya Krishna 1924-2007

Professor Daya Krishna, who passed away recently in Jaipur, was one of those rare Indian philosophers and intellectuals who combined the age-old tradition of shastrartha with a remarkable modern sensibility and openness. His questioning spirit, untiring and inexhaustible, covered the ancient and the present, the classical and the modern. More than anybody else in recent times, he made us aware of the fact that the Indian intellect, as indeed the Indian intellectual traditions, did not dry up or whither away as is commonly believed in the Indological circles and colonial mindsets, but remain vibrant and active, though distanced from the mainstream gaze. In him we had a philosophical and reflective mind, neither overawed by the western canons of reason nor undermining the alternative Indian philosophical ideas and insights embodied in them.

Professor Daya Krishna was also an unusual scholar who did not think that ideas were the exclusive domain of intellectual disciplines. He openly acknowledged that literature and arts also have an ideational existence that constitutes a rich source of ideas as well as what may be called sensuous wisdom. Amongst his friends, therefore, apart from fellow-philosophers and thinkers, there were many writers, poets and artists. He took an almost physical delight in ideas wherever they came from, be it philosophy, metaphysics, shastras, mathematics, literature or music among others. He also had a remarkable capacity for weaving such disparate ideas into meaningful insight and liberating vision.

Professor Daya Krishna did not shy away from questioning tradition whenever necessary. For instance, he explored in depth the question as to why and how bhakti or creativity were not considered to be purusharthas by the ancients. He was able to see and show that Indian traditions were not closed systems, that they developed through self-interrogation and incredibly open debate and dialogue. This helped him elicit and grasp the innovative ideas that the Indian mind discovered and articulated in as diverse spheres as linguistics, poetics and metaphysics, not to speak of medicine, music and architecture.

Deeply immersed in western philosophy, Daya ji, with his sharp mind and persuasive skills was able to see and convince others that while tradition in India might have run into social distortions, it nevertheless has remained alive and dynamic in the realm of ideas. He laboured, and not just in his voluminous writing, to bring home this dynamic nature of tradition by organizing conclaves and dialogues between Sanskrit pandits, Arabic maulvis and modern scholars.

Towards the end of his life, and fortunately before he left the world, he completed a new and radical version of Rigveda, calling it the Jaipur edition of the Veda, bringing together all the hymns/verses attributed to a single rishi at one place rather than remaining satisfied with the age-old arrangements in which they were scattered. In the process he discovered more than 30 rishikas, lady rishis, who had contributed to the Veda. While the conservatives might raise a controversy, this is a great moment in the long life of this ‘original’ work – daring in imagination, bold in approach and revealing in many different ways. No one before had dared rearrange the Vedas, since they have been, over millennia, held to be inviolable. Daya Krishna has thus taken the third historic step in the long history of a great and seminal work. The first was, of course, when the various verses/hymns were put together to constitute the Rigveda; the second when, after existing exclusively in the oral tradition for nearly a thousand years or more, the text was written down.

Professor Daya Krishna was a most worthy heir to the great civilizational enterprise India has been, an enterprise which has grown through constant dialogue and interaction with other major civilizations. He inherited in good measure its legacy of irrepressible plurality, ever-present openness, bold creativity and liberal imagination. Often even great scholars are far too ‘possessive’ about their ideas, zealous in guarding their sanctity from others regarded as less than worthy interlopers. Here too, Daya ji represented a departure. Never the gate keeper, he always held open the door to admit, actually welcome, new entrants to the ongoing evolution of ideas, in particular younger students and colleagues.

Many of us, who had the good fortune of knowing Professor Daya Krishna, will miss him for his zest for life, his insatiable delight in and hunger for ideas, for his monumental intellect. But above all, as a warm-hearted, talkative and transparent human being.

Ashok Vajpeyi