Beijing mourns the death of Sanskrit scholar

China is mourning the passing of one of its greatest scholars and Indologists, Ji Xianlin, who spent five years during the 1960s translating the Ramayana into Chinese.

Ji, awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government last year in honour of his contributions to cross-cultural understanding, passed away in Beijing on Saturday. He would have turned 98 next month.

In the 1960s, when Mao Zedong’s maniacal Cultural Revolution raged across China, Ji spent five years secretly translating the Ramayana into Chinese, retaining its poetic format.

The project was considered highly risky, given that it was a time when “intellectuals” were systematically persecuted. In his memoirs, published in 1998, he recalls that he considered committing suicide once during the Cultural Revolution, after being tortured severely. He survived and worked at a students’ dormitory, and completing the Ramayana translation by writing surreptitiously on slips of paper.

In addition, Ji, who travelled to Germany in the 1930s to study Sanskrit, wrote a short history of India, and several articles on ancient Indian languages, the spread of Buddhism from India to China and the flow of cultural ideas in the reverse direction.

“He also translated Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam and the Panchatantra into Chinese,” Prof Jiang Jingkui, head of the Hindi department and vice director of the Centre for India Studies at Peking University, told DNA.

Ji’s contribution, said Prof Jiang, speaking in Hindi, “was unique in that before his time, Chinese scholars only paid attention to Buddhist studies, not to Indian cultural or Hindu cultural studies. You could say he created the discipline of modern Indian studies in China.”

Ji, one of China’s greatest scholars of history, ancient languages and culture, had long held that translation works held the capacity to act as cultural bridges and induce transformations.

In 2006, while receiving a lifetime achievement award in China for his contributions in the area of translation, he said: “The reason our Chinese culture has been able to remain consistent and rich throughout its 5,000 years of history is closely linked to translation. Translations from other cultures have helped infuse new blood into our culture.”

Ji also likened Chinese culture and civilization to a “never-ending river… that has kept alternating between rising and falling, but has never dried up, because there was always fresh water flowing into it. It has over history been joined by fresh water many times, the two largest inflows coming from India and the West, both of which owed their success to translation.” It was translation, he said, that had “persevered the perpetual youth of Chinese civilisation.”

Jiang told DNA that Ji was inspired to study Indian culture and history because he felt that “the gods wanted the people of China and India to live together as neighbours…. He used to say people should obey the laws of gods and the laws of nature, not the laws of politics.”

Asked if there was continued interest in India among today’s scholars in China, Jiang said: “Of course. We are Ji’s pupils’ pupils, and we will keep alive the tradition that he started.”