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The Long Road to Tibet: Rahul Sankrityayan’s quest for travel and learning

Rahul Sankrityayan was a scholar and a ghumakkar whose endless curiosity about the world made him a pioneer in many fields. His life is illustrative of the limitlessness of human potential. In his travels, collections, and writings, he found his kingdom.

Tibet, Rahul Sankrityayan, xylographs, manuscripts, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Delhi, Patna Museum, Tibbat mein Sawa Varsh, Bihar, Swami Ramodardas, Buddhism, Congress, France, England, Germany, Malaya, Japan, Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, indian express, indian express news Scholar Rahul Sankrityayan on his debut book, Tibbat mein Sawa Varsh.

An exhibition of rare statues, thangka scrolls, xylographs and manuscripts collected by Rahul Sankrityayan — organised by Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Delhi, in collaboration with Patna Museum — has been on show at the IGNCA since March 17. These precious antiquities will be on view till April 9, his 125th birth anniversary. It’s a glimpse into the mindscape of an outstanding, free-spirited scholar, who authored 140 seminal books and is generally seen to be a pioneer of the Hindi travelogue — his debut book, Tibbat mein Sawa Varsh, an astonishingly well-written collage of histories, geographies and prescient observations on Tibet, transformed travel writing in Hindi when it was published in 1932.

Born as Kedar Pandey on April 9, 1893, Sankrityayan ran away from home at an early age. His quest for learning took him to Varanasi, where he lived with a group of impoverished students and studied Sanskrit. A chance meeting with the mahant of a well-known Vaishnav math in Bihar changed the course of his life — he soon acquired formidable knowledge of ancient Sanskrit and Brahminical canons. Chosen as the heir of the math, he took on the name of Swami Ramodardas. But his anarchic energy took him on a voyage to south India where, for some time, he was part of an unbroken tradition of classical Vedantic learning. Showing a rare heretical willingness to take a stand against Vedantic rituals, he turned to Arya Samaj and began writing in Hindi and Urdu, under the name of Kedarnath Vidyarthi, and, eventually, swerved towards Buddhism in his quest for a rational philosophy.

Sankrityayan’s political life began in 1919 when he joined the Congress and became an important leader of the Non-Cooperation movement in north Bihar. He was arrested twice in quick succession and wrote his first novel, Baisvi Sadi, while in prison. He came out of prison in 1926, and travelled through the Himalayas, before taking up a teaching assignment in a Buddhist monastic school in Sri Lanka in 1927. Here, his critical engagement with Buddhism canonical texts like Tripitaka began. He also began the process of restoration of lost Buddhist texts by restoring the Abhidhammakosh to Sanskrit from the Chinese Tripitaka. In order to follow the work of European Orientalists, he also taught himself French and German.

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Sankrityayan’s interest in Buddhist philosophy and ability to embrace the unpredictable took him to Tibet, a rarely visited land then. He journeyed in disguise, in harsh conditions, with no contact with the outside world. He stayed in Lhasa for 15 months, studying lost Buddhist texts. Most of the manuscripts he collected were hand-lettered manuscripts or had been printed using carved wood-blocks. A few were written with gold and silver powder. In addition to scriptural canon, there were histories and texts on metallurgy, medicine, tantra, art astrology, herbology and technical subjects.

On his return to Sri Lanka, he was made a Buddhist monk by a monastic college and, finally, took on the identity of Rahul Sankrityayan. In this new persona, he continued his voyages, travelling to France, England, Germany, Malaya, Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, crossing Siberia on the trans-Siberian railway too. His memoirs, therefore, evoke different landscapes, infused with historical and metaphysical nuances. Later in life, he wrote on the science of wanderlust in a book named Ghumakkar Shastra. His book Volga se Ganga (published in 1942) also had a distinct ghumakkar spin. Sankrityayan’s second trip to Tibet, in 1934, led to the discovery of original Sanskrit hand-lettered, palm-leaf manuscripts. Many of them were translated and were part of the Tibetan canon stored in vaults at Sakya, Pyokhang, Ngor and other monasteries. He also transported Tibetan xylographs and dozens of exquisite Tibetan scroll paintings. During subsequent trips to Tibet, he also discovered and photographed many Sanskrit manuscripts that are housed in the form of glass negatives in Bihar Research Society.

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By 1930 he had weaned himself away from Gandhian politics and was one of the founding members of the Congress Socialist Party. During this phase, he studied Marxist literature and also translated the Communist Manifesto. By 1938, he became a prominent leader of the peasant movement in India and founded the Communist Party in Bihar. In 1940, he was elected president of the All-India Kisan Sabha and was, for some time, the editor of Hunkaar, its official news organ. He was also imprisoned for two years at Hazaribagh Jail and at the Deoli internment camp for his radical politics. But just when it seemed like he had settled for a lifetime of Left politics, he again left India in 1944 for Iran and, later, Leningrad, on an invitation to teach Sanskrit at the faculty of Oriental Languages. He returned in 1947 and spent the rest of his life in the Himalayas and in Sri Lanka. His most important essay on Buddhist dialectics was published posthumously in 1970. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his monumental two volume Madhya Asia ka Itihas (1956-1957) — a history of Central Asia, and the Padma Bhushan in 1963, the year of his death.

Sankrityayan’s life is illustrative of the limitlessness of human potential. In his travels, collections and writings, he found his kingdom. His writings survive, as do his precious collection of manuscripts, that would most certainly have been destroyed or imperilled after Tibet was occupied in the 1950s. However, his daughter has been raising serious concerns about the custodianship of the manuscripts. According to her, “there are 6,400 or more Tibetan manuscripts lying in a locked room of the Bihar Research Society. Some of them have been digitised by the National Mission for Manuscripts. Scholars from the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, have prepared a catalogue too, but that doesn’t quite cover the entire spectrum. What is needed is their increased accessibility and collaborative effort by scholars to translate and restore them. It’s a legacy that must be protected for future generations,” she says.

First uploaded on: 08-04-2018 at 00:00 IST
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