Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan.
Rahul Sankrityayan (1893 – 1963) was one of the most widely-traveled scholars of India, spending forty-five years of his life on travels away from his home. He became a Buddhist monk (Bauddh Bhikkhu) and eventually took up Marxist Socialism. Sānkrityāyan was also an Indian nationalist, having been arrested and jailed for three years for creating anti-British writings and speeches.
Sankrityayan was given the title of Mahapandit ("Great scholar") for his scholarship and he was both a polymath as well as a polyglot.
Rahul Sankrityayan , first name was Kedarnath Pandey . Later on he was famous as Rahul Sankrityayan .He was born on 9 April 1893 to an Orthodox Hindu- Bhumihar Brahmin family at Kanaila Village in Azamgarh district, Uttar Pradesh. His father, Govardhan Pandey, was a religious-minded farmer, a typical profession of Bhumihar Brahmins, from the village Kanaila of Azamgarh district in Uttar Pradesh. His mother, Kulawanti, used to stay with her parents at the village of Pandaha, where Kedar was born. He was the eldest of four brothers. He spent part of his childhood in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states of India. As his mother died at the age of twenty-eight and his father at the age of forty-five, he was brought up by his grandmother. His earliest memories as recorded by him were of the terrible famine in 1897. At age 9, he ran away from home in order to see the world, but later returned.
Sankrityayan only ever received formal schooling at a local primary school, though he later studied and mastered numerous languages independently, as well as learned photography.
Personal Life
Rahul's personal life was also unique and interesting. He was six feet tall, with a wide forehead and broad chest. He had that ancient Hindu Aryan look. He was married when very young and never came to know anything of his child-wife. During his stay in Soviet Russia a second time, accepting an invitation for teaching Buddhism at Leningrad University, he came in contact with a Mongolian scholar Lola (Ellena Narvertovna Kozerovskaya). She could speak French, English, and Russian and write Sanskrit. She helped him in working on Tibetan- Sanskrit dictionary. Their attachment ended in marriage and birth of son Igor. Mother and son were not allowed to accompany Rahul to India after completion of his assignment. It was Stalin's Russia. Late in life, he married Dr. Kamala, an Indian Nepali lady and had a daughter (Jaya) and a son (Jeta). He accepted a teaching job at a Sri Lankan University, where he fell seriously ill. Diabetes, high blood pressure and a mild stroke struck him. Most tragic happening was the loss of memory. He breathed his last in Darjeeling in 1963.
He studied Pali and Sinhalese languages and started reading Buddhistic texts in the original. He was slowly drawn to Buddhism and changed his name to Rahul (after Buddha's son) Sankrityayan (Assimilator).
After his release, he went to Bihar and worked with Dr. Rajendra Prasad (later President of free India) who became a close friend. In those days social service was part of freedom struggle and he engaged himself in constructive activities laid down by Gandhiji. He became President of Azamgarh District Congress as well. But the travel bug never left him. He undertook hazardous journey to the forbidden land of Tibet. There were practically no roads. Only nomads and petty merchants traveled with loads on mules. Disguised as a Buddhist bhikku (mendicant), He entered Tibet via Kashmir, Ladak, Kargil and started his journey on foot. Rahul visited Tibet, three more times. He mastered Tibetan language, wrote Tibetan primers, grammar and Tibetan-Hindi dictionary. Only first part of the last was published posthumously.
He again took to travel and visited Sri Lanka (where he taught Sanskrit), Japan, Korea, China, Manchuria and proceeded to Soviet Russia. He saw a fire temple in Baku and discovered an inscription in Devanagri script. From there he went to Tehran, Shiraz and Baluchistan and finally came to India.
Although he did not have any formal education, in view of his knowledge and command over the subject, University of Leningrad appointed him Professor of Indology in 1937-38 and again in 1947-48.
:: Books ::
He wrote 146 books, some of which are voluminous. Many works remain unpublished. Sankrityayan was a multilingual linguist, well versed in several languages and dialects, including Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, Bhojpuri, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Kannada, Tibetan, Sinhalese, French and Russian. He was also an Indologist, a Marxist theoretician, and a creative writer. He started writing during his twenties and had written around 150 books and dissertations covering a variety of subjects, including sociology, history, philosophy, Buddhism, Tibetology, lexicography, grammar, textual editing, folklore, science, drama, and politics, many of which were unpublished. He had translated Majjhima Nikaya from Prakrit to Hindi.
One of his most famous books in Hindi is named Volga se Ganga, meaning “(A journey) from Volga to Ganga” and is an attempt to present a fictional account of migration of Aryans from the steppes of the Eurasia to regions around the Volga river; then their movements across the Hindukush and the Himalayas and the sub-Himalayan regions; and their spread to the Indo-Gangetic plains of the subcontinent of India. The book is remarkable for More than ten of his books have been translated and published in Bengali. Mahapandit was awarded Padmabhushan in 1963 and Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958 for his book Madhya Asia ka Itihaas.
