Rahul Sankrityayan (born Kedarnath Pandey; 9 April 1893 – 14 April 1963) was an Indian writer, polymath and a polyglot who wrote in Bhojpuri and Hindi. He played a significant 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.
He was born as Kedarnath Pandey to a Bhumihar family on 9 April 1893 in Pandaha village, Azamgarh district, Uttar Pradesh. He slowly abandoned the name Kedarnath Pandey during the course of his life and became Ram Udaar Das Sadho as an initiate in a Vaishnavite order. Later he joined the Arya Samaj and called himself Kedarnath Vidyarthi. He was the eldest of five brothers and one sister. As his mother died early, he was brought up by his grandmother. From studying Brahmanical canons and classical Vedantic learning to Arya Samaj, Buddhism and Marxism, Indian scholar Rahul Sankrityayan’s life is a fascinating journey full of exploration and travelogues.
Early days
In the early days of his youth Rahul Sankrityayan was attracted towards the freedom movement. He was imprisoned in 1922 and then again in 1924 for his participation in freedom struggle. While he was incarcerated, he read Leon Trotsky’s Bolshevism and World Peace, composed verses in Brajbhasha, did Sanskrit translation of the Quran, learnt trigonometry and wrote his first novel, Baisvin Sadi.
Initially, he was a keen follower of Arya Samaj of Swami Dayananda Saraswati. Then he was attracted towards Buddhism. He learnt Pali and read the Pali text of Majjhim Nikaya, the Buddha’s middle-length discourse. He travelled to Ladakh in 1926. He met Ras-Pa, a lama at the Hemis monastery, and spent time studying Buddhist texts at the Rizong monastery.
Shift to Buddhism
His desire to study the Pali Tripitakas made him to join vidyalankar Parivena, a renowned Buddhist monastic school in Sri Lanka in 1927, where he finally found what he had been spiritually searching for.
Sankrityayan translated the Digha Nikaya and Majjhim Nikaya into Hindi, deepened his knowledge on epigraphy and archaeology, and learnt German and French to read the works of eminent European Indologists and scholars such as Sylvan Levi, Aurel Stein, Rudolf Otto and Sergei Oldenburg. Deeply influenced by the Buddhist philosophy, he dropped his original name Kedarnath Pandey and embraced the Buddhist name of Rahul Sankrityayan (Rahul being the name of son of Buddha and Sankrityayan after his Gotra sankritya). He was conferred the title of Tripitakacharya, a rare honour. The receptacles of the palm-leaf manuscripts of Buddhism on which were preserved the collections of texts of the Suttas, the Vinaya, and the Abhidhamma are known as Tripitakas. Tripitakacharya is one who has mastered all the above three texts.
The eternal traveller
The travelogue of European scholar Alexandra David-Néel, who sneaked into Tibet in the 1920s, inspired Rahul Sankrityayan, as did Ekai Kawaguchi’s seminal 1909 book, Three Years in Tibet. The journey to Tibet, an idea that had been brewing in Rahul Sankrityayan mind for years finally took shape in 1929. He travelled in disguise as a sadhu to reach Kathmandu valley. He mostly remained underground in the attic of a house near the Mahabaudha stupa clothed in Tibetan gown (chhupa). He took a route traversed by nomads that was considered risky with only a young Tibetan dog as his companion. The dog died midway, leaving him completely distraught. Rahul Sankrityayan wrote eight Sanskrit shlokas as an elegy to his departed companion.
Sankrityayan’s travel diaries, Tibbat mein Sava Vars and Yatra ke Panne, describe his ordeal. He spent months in Lhasa, trekking to nearby monasteries, often through frigid darkness. When Sankrityayan began his return journey to Kalimpong, it is said that he had to hire twenty-two mules to ferry manuscripts, paintings, and rare antiquities acquired during his stay.
Sankrityayan’s second voyage to Tibet in 1934 was preceded by his ordainment as a bhikkhu (a Buddhist monk) in 1930. This, along with his fame as a scholar of the Tripitakas, the holy canon of the Theravada school of Buddhism, carried considerable weight with Tibetan monks, who unlocked the vaults of their monasteries to the spiritual treasure. Rahul Sankrityayan spent all his time and energy passionately into his search for original palm-leaf manuscripts. These manuscripts had been taken from India to Tibet in the seventh century and from the ninth to thirteenth centuries. A serious study of these texts had the potential to not only open up new dimensions of Buddhist religion and philosophy, but also the Brahmanical and Jain traditions. The Dalai Lama also sent him several rare volumes carefully wrapped in yellow brocade covers.
During his third and fourth trips to Tibet in 1936 and 1938 Rahul Sankrityayan copied the manuscripts that contain the important works of philosophers and masters such as Nagarjuna, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Bhavya, Dharmakirti, Jnanasri, Ratnakar Sjanti, and Durvek Mishra. Finally, he managed to find the complete manuscript of the elusive Pramanavarttika, the magnum opus of the Indian Buddhist Dharmakirti, which is the most influencing book in Tibetan Buddhism.
A polymath and polyglot
Rahul Sankrityayan was a multi-dimensional personality. In 1930s he was influenced by Communism and translated the Communist Manifesto, was for a while closely associated with the Congress Socialist Party, and in 1938, became a prominent face of the peasants’ movement and the Communist Party of Bihar. He was arrested in a crackdown on communists and spent two years in Hazaribagh jail and the Deoli Internment Camp.
His monumental work Darshan-Digdarshan, a Marxist exposition on Greek, Islamic, European and Indian philosophy, another masterpiece, Volga se Ganga Tak, stretching through 8,000 years of history were written during this period. His works, totalling well over 100, covered a variety of subjects, including sociology, history, philosophy, Buddhism, Tibetology, lexicography, grammar, textual editing, folklore, science, drama, and politics. Unfortunately, many of them were unpublished. He is often acknowledged as the father of Hindi travel literature, including as the author of a slender book called Ghumakkad Shastra (A Treatise on Wandering) and no wonder he is acclaimed as Mahapandit.
Sankrityayan travelled through Europe, Japan, China, Korea, Manchuria, Iran, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Russia, and of course the Himalayas. He kept travelling through the Himalayas and lived a major part of his last few years in Mussoorie and Darjeeling. He was said to be proficient in more than 30 languages that includes Indian as well as foreign languages. His life is full of adventures, travels, religious exploration from Sanatana Dharma to Buddhism and ideological shift from Gandhian satyagraha to Marxism. In his 70 years of life, he spent 45 years in travelling across India and the globe. His published works include 10 Hindi novels, 4 short stories, 17 biographies, 10 books on diverse topics, 10 books on Tibet and 8 plays in Bhojpuri.
Personal life
Rahul was married when very young to Santoshi and probably he saw her only once in his 40s as per his autobiography: Meri Jivan Yatra. During his stay in Soviet Russia teaching Buddhism at Leningrad University, he married a Mongolian scholar Lola (Ellena Narvertovna Kozerovskaya) and has a son by name Igor Rahulovich. Later he married Kamala Sankrityayan, who was an Indian writer, editor and scholar in Hindi and Nepali. They had a daughter Jaya Sankrityayan Parhawk, one son, Jeta (professor of Economics at North Bengal University).
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. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958 for his book Madhya Asia Ka Itihaas. The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan in 1963.The Government of India also released a stamp in his honour in 1993. Rahul Sanakrityayan tourism award is given by the Ministry of Tourism, Govt., of India, every year for encouraging the original book writing in Hindi on the subjects related to tourism.
–Dr. B.N.V. Parthasarathi
Ex Senior Banker, Management and Financial Consultant, Visiting Faculty at Premier B Schools and Universities.
