Rahul Sankrityayan
Statue of Sankrityayan in Darjeeling
Born	Kedarnath Pandey (1893-04-09)9 April 1893 Pandaha, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, British India
Died	14 April 1963(1963-04-14) (aged 70) Darjeeling, West Bengal, India
Occupation	Writer essayist scholar
Nationality	Indian
Subject	Sociology, Indian nationalist history, Indology, Buddhism, Tibetology, lexicography, philosophy, grammar, textual editing, folklore, science, drama, politics
Notable awards	1958: Sahitya Akademi Award 1963: Padma Bhushan
Spouse	Santoshi, Ellena Narvertovna Kozerovskaya, Kamala Sankrityayan

Rahul Sankrityayan (born Kedarnath Pandey; 9 April 1893 – 14 April 1963) was an Indian writer and a polyglot who wrote in Bhojpuri and Hindi. He played a pivotal role in giving travelogue a 'literary form'. He was one of the most widely travelled scholars of India, spending forty-five years of his life on travels away from his home.^[1]

He became a Buddhist monk (Bhikkhu) and eventually became a Marxist.^[1] Sankrityayan was an Indian patriot, having been arrested and jailed for three years for his anti-British writings and speeches.^[1] He is referred to as the 'Greatest Scholar' for his scholarship.^[1] He was a polymath and polyglot.^[1] The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan in 1963.^[2]

Childhood

He was born as Kedarnath Pandey to a Bhumihar Brahmin family^[3] on 9 April 1893 in Pandaha village.^[4] His ancestral village was Kanaila Chakrapanpur, Azamgarh district, in Eastern Uttar Pradesh.^[5]

Philosophy

Initially, he was a keen follower of Arya Samaj of Swami Dayananda Saraswati. Then Buddhism changed his life. After taking Diksha in Sri Lanka he became Rahul (son of Buddha) also used his gotra (Sankritya) with his name and was finally called “Rahul Sankrityayan”. Later he became a Socialist and rejected the concepts of reincarnation and the afterlife. The two volumes of Darshan-Digdarshan, a collected history of the world's philosophy give an indication of his philosophy where the second volume is much dedicated to Dharmakirti's Pramana Vartika. This he discovered in a Tibetan translation from Tibet.

Travels

Rahul Sankrityayan's travel history began in 1910, when he set out for the Himalayas. He traveled with monks at first, but later journeyed alone.Sankrityayan's travels took him to different parts of India including Ladakh, Kinnaur, and Kashmir.^[6] He also travelled to several other countries including Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka,^[7] Iran, China, and the former Soviet Union. He spent several years in the Parsa Gadh village in the Saran district in Bihar. The village's entry gate is named "Rahul Gate". While traveling, he mostly used surface transport, and he went to certain countries clandestinely; he entered Tibet as a Buddhist monk. He made several trips to Tibet and brought valuable paintings and Pali and Sanskrit manuscripts back to India. Most of these were a part of the libraries of Vikramshila and Nalanda Universities. These objects had been taken to Tibet by fleeing Buddhist monks during the twelfth and subsequent centuries when the invading Muslim armies had destroyed universities in India. Some accounts state that Rahul Sankrityayan employed twenty-two mules to bring these materials from Tibet to India. Patna Museum has a special section of these materials in his honor, where a number of these and other items have been displayed.

Books

Sankrityayan understood several languages, including Bhojpuri, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, Magahi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Kannada, Tibetan, Sinhalese, French and Russian.^[1] He was also an Indologist, a Marxist theoretician, and a creative writer.^[1] He started writing during his twenties and his works, totaling well over 100, covered a variety of subjects, including sociology, history, philosophy, Buddhism, Tibetology, lexicography, grammar, textual editing, folklore, science, drama, and politics.^[1] Many of these were unpublished.^[1] He translated Majjhima Nikaya from Prakrit into Hindi.^[1]

Rahul's Tombstone at Darjeeling. This tombstone is established at a place called "Murda Haati" which is a cremation ground downtown in the lower altitudes of Darjeeling around 25 minutes drive from the ChowRasta. The same place also has the tombstone of Sister Nivedita.

One of his Hindi books is Volga Se Ganga (A journey from the Volga to the Ganges) – a work of historical fiction concerning the 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 begins in 6000 BC and ends in 1942, the year when Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian nationalist leader called for the Quit India movement. It was published in 1942. A translation into English of this work by Victor Kiernan was published in 1947 as From Volga to Ganga.^[8]

His travelogue literature includes:

• Tibbat Me Sava Varsha (1933)
• Meri Europe Yatra (1935)
• Athato Ghumakkad Jigyasa
• Volga Se Ganga
• Asia ke Durgam Bhukhando Mein
• Yatra Ke Panne
• Kinnar Desh Mein

More than ten of his books have been translated and published in Bengali. He was awarded the Padmabhushan in 1963,^[9] and he received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958 for his book Madhya Asia Ka Itihaas.

Personal life and family

Sankrityayan on a 1993 stamp of India

Rahul was married when very young and never came to know anything of his child-wife, Santoshi. Probably he saw her only once in his 40s as per his autobiography: Meri Jivan Yatra. 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 the birth of son Igor Rahulovich. Mother and son did not accompany Rahul to India after the completion of his assignment.

Late in life, he married Kamala Sankrityayan, who was an Indian writer, editor and scholar in Hindi and Nepali. They had a daughter Jaya Sankrityayan Parhawk,^[10] one son, Jeta. Jeta is a professor of Economics at North Bengal University.^[11]

Death

Rahul accepted a teaching job at a Sri Lankan university, where he fell seriously ill with diabetes, high blood pressure and a mild stroke. He died in Darjeeling in 1963.

Rahul Nivas in September 2015

Eponymous awards

Works

See also

• Hindi literature
• List of Indian writers
• Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi
• Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan

References

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rahul Sankrityayan.

• Ram Sharan Sharma, Rahul Sankrityayan and Social Change, Indian History Congress, 1993.
• Himalayan Buddhism, Past and Present: Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan centenary volume by D. C. Ahir (ISBN 978-81-7030-370-1)
• Prabhakar Machwe: "Rahul Sankrityayan" New Delhi 1978: Sahitya Akademi. [A short biography including a list of Sankrityayan's works]
• Bharati Puri, Traveller on the Silk Road: Rites and Routes of Passage in Rahul Sankrityayan’s Himalayan Wanderlust, China Report (Sage: New Delhi), February 2011, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 37–58.
• Alaka Atreya Chudal, A Freethinking Cultural Nationalist: A Life History of Rahul Sankrityayan, Oxford University Press, 2016. (ISBN 978-01-9946-687-0)