Mark Twain called a classic a book which people praise but don’t read, while Italo Calvino remarked, “The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: “I’m rereading…” And so with the classics, we’ve either never read them or we’re constantly rereading them, which is to say we’re not really reading them at all! But as George Steiner observes, we don’t actually read a classic, it reads us. “Each time we engage with it, the classic will question us. It will challenge our resources of consciousness and intellect, of mind and body.” The classics exist in our present as invocations; we call upon them as if calling upon an ancient spirit or a wise old ancestor. But rather than ghosts of a forgotten era, the classics are perpetually reinvigorated by fresh translations and novel interpretations that speak directly to our lived present and common humanity.
What makes a classic a classic
But what exactly is a classic? Texts designated as classical are most often associated with notions of antiquity and literary sophistication, two qualities which classical Indian texts have in spades. The Vedas for example are considered one of the world’s oldest and most complex literary monuments, while texts on poetics reveal a robust tradition of linguistic analysis and critical theory. In other words, ancient Indians not only produced great literature, they also developed the analytical tools necessary to evaluate and critique their literature in highly sophisticated ways. Indeed, premodern Indian literature is a classical literary tradition par excellence: the longest continuous multilingual literary tradition in the world.
When we think of classical Indian literature, Sanskrit readily comes to mind, but so too should Old Tamil and various regional Prakrits, all of which contributed to the vibrant diversity of Indian literary production. But these are old classical languages: stuffy, intimidating, and hard to master. Most Indians do not read them; so translations, mostly into English, are the only way to access this ancient past. Today, a small group of Indologists, mostly non-Indians working in Europe and America, are the scholarly experts and primary translators of India’s literary past. As a result, we Indians require the expertise of the West to fully appreciate our own literature. In short, much of India’s classical heritage remains sequestered within the domain of Western academia.
As noted Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock argued in a 2011 piece titled “Crisis in the Classics”, “Colonialism would not only eventually render the literary past unreadable to most Indians: it would remake the literature of India according to its own image.” Addressing this unnerving rupture requires young Indians to read, reclaim and reenvision our classics. And this requires the art of translation, which, in and of itself, can function as a form of decolonisation. The postcolonial irony, however, is that we must translate Indian literature into English in order to fully appreciate it. English translations certainly make Indian classics accessible to a wider global audience, but more importantly, they allow Indians to better know themselves. For an ancient, multilingual culture like India, translation (in a broad sense) is integral to our daily lives, it is survival: a social necessity for a truly multilingual people.
To read well
In addition to enriching our lives with the time-honoured wisdom of the ancients, works of classical literature also serve another important function: they invite us to slow down, to take time for poetry, prose, and song. Classical texts demand something of us; they are not satisfied with passive perusal; they cry out for our focus and attention. “Philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all – to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1881 book The Dawn of Day. Slow reading “teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.”
Nietzsche’s exhortation to develop a habit of slow reading – to keep our mental doors ajar – seems infinitely more pressing now when so much reading has become shallow, fast, and frivolous. As I was reading The Dawn of Day, I noticed that on the first page, just below the title, Nietzsche chose to add a quote from the Rig Veda: “There is many a dawn which has not yet shed its light,” or perhaps, “There are so many red sunrises yet to dawn.” Like the Vedic seers who worshipped Usha for inspiration and enlightenment, Nietzsche looked to the dawn as the bright new hope of humanity’s future. Rather than bemoaning the fact that “India needs English to better understand India”, Nietzsche saw the meeting of East and West – a true fusion of classical worlds – as the key to the world's future prosperity. He wrote, “I imagine future thinkers in whom European-American indefatigability is combined with the hundredfold-inherited contemplativeness of the Asians: such a combination will bring the riddle of the world to a solution.”
The classics are more important now than ever before because they foster cultural dialogue and remind us of our common humanity. For Indians, reading the classics also means appreciating our own incredible cultural richness and social diversity. And finally, the classics help us slow down. They are an antidote to the lightning-fast pace of contemporary life, and a gentle reminder that our modern woes are but variations of those faced by our ancestors. The classics are our enduring gurus, always ready and willing to teach, guide and inspire us. All we have to do is to slow down and read.
