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My Ode to My Literary Hero
How Scholar, Translator & Author Extraordinaire, Bibek Debroy, Made My Dreams Come True
Sometimes dreams come true. Once, when I was a rosy-eyed student full of ideals and dreams, I stood at a conference organized around Indic themes and said one of my dreams for myself, for the Hindu community at large, was to have lucid, accessible English translations of our Itihaasa and Purana. At that time, I was fascinated by the Mahabharata but had restricted access to it, due to the lack of my ability to read and understand Sanskrit, other than some heavily abridged translations and archaic texts that were difficult to obtain in full and digest. Within years, I came across the books of Bibek Debroy, who had embarked upon the daunting project of translating in full into lucid, modern English prose the unabridged Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. I eagerly collected each volume as it came out — in hardcover, then when it was available, paperback, and Kindle.
I cannot describe the rush of joy and gratitude I felt when the collection was complete. Now nobody could take from me my inheritance, as a Hindu and as a human, of the greatest literary epic ever told. Now I could discover it for myself, without intercession and without the biases that have tainted most English translations which date from colonial times. Yes, it is true that no translation can match the grandeur and authenticity of the original, but the plain reality is that for many of us — who have been deprived of Sanskrit education, again, through those same colonialist mechanisms — English is the sole recourse we have to the shastras. Just as the Ramakrishna Mission once nobly brought to us genuine translations of the Upanishads and other Vedantic texts, bringing Advaita Vedanta to new generations and new worlds, Bibek-da (as I fondly referred to him) bestowed us this gift of the Itihaasa-Purana.
Our gratitude, personally and as a civilization, is profound and bottomless. I have rarely seen such a uniform outpouring of grief as I witnessed today from Hindu leaders and citizens worldwide upon the news of Bibek-da’s untimely passing. That he left us on the day of Govardhan Puja, which commemorates the day on which Sri Krishna shielded the inhabitants of Gokul from devastating storms unleashed by Indra, is only fitting. Sri Krishna has taken him into his protective embrace…