A great Chinese Indologist’s death goes unnoticed in India

A great Chinese Indologist’s death goes unnoticed in India

Jaswant Singh

Ji Xianlin was doubtless an outstanding scholar.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2009/07/31/images/2009073155721101.jpg Ji
Xianlin’s greatest scholarly accomplishments were in the realm of “the
history of Indian Buddhism and comparative linguistics.”

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 Ji’s passing away.
Obviously this grief cannot be attributed to Ji’s 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 Buddha’s 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
Ji’s unsurprising departure at the ripe old age of 98 has not brought
quite the same flood tide in China as [say] Michael Jackson’s
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 Ji’s
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 China’s premier centre for the
study of Eastern languages.

Ji’s 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, Ji’s academic
achievements “represented the next wave of greatness within the long,
proud tradition of Chinese evidential scholarship.” Whereas Chen
Yinke, Ji’s 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.” Ji’s 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 today’s 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.)

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2009/07/31/stories/2009073155721100.htm