Transforming Tradition Cultural Essays in Honour of Mukund Lath

As a scholar of Sanskrit, a musician and musicologist, a connoisseur and collector of art, a poet and independent thinker, Mukund Lath reflects what in Indian aesthetics is called pratibha. The word describes the faculty of aesthetic perception shared by the poet or artist with the connoisseur. On his seventy-fifth birthday, colleagues and friends symbolically acknowledged what they received from him, from his pratibha and inspiration. For most of the contributors, he has been a pilot on their own explorations in the world of Indian thought.

Mukundji was born on 9 October 1937 in a business family in Kolkata. In 1951 he passed Senior Cambridge from St. James School, Kolkata. In 1956 he graduated with Honours in English from Delhi University. His proficiency in Sanskrit and Prakrit, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Rajasthani and Gujarati took him far afield in the realm of literature, From 1951 and simultaneously with his academic interests, he pursued the study of music and was trained as a vocalist. His teachers were the singers Pandit Maniram and Ramesh Chakravarti, a disciple of Nasiruddin Khan Dagar. He proceeded with these studies under Pandit Jasraj. In the period of learning from him, he travelled with Pandit Jasraj to different parts of the country and walked through the Uttarakhand Himalayas on foot, in this way exposed to an intense musical education by performing music and imbibing various live musical traditions. Concerts with his teacher also took him to many places elsewhere in India.

In 1965, Mukundji did his post-graduation in Sanskrit, with a First Division from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. From 1966 to 1968 he was Research Assistant in the Indian Section of the International Institute of Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in West Berlin, directed by Alain Danielou, an indologist famed as a pioneer in the field of Indian music studies. The fruit of this research was his Ph.D. thesis entitled "A Study of Dattilam", devoted to an ancient text on music and submitted in 1973 to the Department of Sanskrit of Delhi University. In the same year, Lath joined the Department of History and Indian Culture, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur as Research Associate (a post equivalent to that of Lecturer) and was subsequently promoted to the position of Reader. He was also associated with the Centre for Jain Studies of the same university. His position involved both teaching and research covering the broad spectrum of ancient Indian education, literature and philosophy, Jain history and music culture as well as history of religion. His research focus lay mainly on music and music culture in the Indian past and the ways in which this tradition was transformed (for collected writings on this topic, see Lath 1998). In 1976 he was awarded a Ph.D. for his work on Dattilam (published in 1978).

Simultaneously with his engagement with India's musical tradition, Lath brought out a English translation of the Prakrit Kalpasutra, a hagiography of Mahāvīra, the historical founder of Jainism, and a source text for our knowledge of early Jain monasticism (1977). In the same year he started work on Ardhakathanaka, the autobiography written in Hindi verse by Banarsidas, who was born during the reign of Akbar and wrote his work during the regnal period of Shahjahan in the 17th century. This book (1981) became seminal for our understanding of the Indian intellectual history of the period, particularly of the Jain merchant milieu, the debates on an interiorized reformed Digambar religion conducted in this, and the perception of intellectuals of themselves.

In 1979, Lath visited Japan at the invitation of the Japan Foundation in order to study the present state of traditional Japanese music and the new national trends in the field. In the earlier part of the 1980s a good part of his research and teaching was conducted abroad. In 1981/82 he was Guest Professor at the Department of Oriental Studies, University of Leuven, Belgium. Here he collaborated with Winand Callewaert on a text-critical study of the Hindi songs of the medieval poet Nämdev (published 1989). This work implies an attempt to reach back with a computer-aided method to the oldest corpus of the songs attributed to Nämdev as they where preserved in the most ancient available manuscripts. The book has an English translation of the songs and an elaborate introduction also discussing the oral musical tradition within which the songs were transmitted. The form in which the songs are available today is a result of this musical transmission. In 1984, Lath was again Visiting Fellow at Leuven for four months, and in the trinity term of 1985 he pursued his research and gave lectures on Indian aesthetics and classical music at the Institute of Oriental Studies of Oxford University, made presentations in Cambridge and Bonn, and, finally, attended the Eighth Rostrum for Asian Music, Ulan Bator,Mongolia.

The latter part of the 1980s featured a continuous engagement with the issue of the relationship between thought and music. In 1986, Lath first presented his ideas in the Alauddin Khan Lectures at Ustad Alauddin Khan Academy of Music in Bhopal. The lecture series was entitled "Music and Reflection". In 1990, he devel oped his thoughts on this topic further in his Vatsalanidhi Lectures in Delhi. This intense, enduring engagement with the topic took shape in the book Sangit evam cintan (1992), which in 2000 won him the Sankar Puraskär for the year 1999 and in 2003 the Nares Mehta Vänmay Puraskär of the Madhya Pradeś Pracãr Samiti.

In the summer term of 1991, Lath was Professorial Fellow at the University at Bamberg, Germany and also attended the International Bhakti Conference in Paris. In the year 1995 he joined the project "History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research under Prof. D.P. Chattopadhyaya as chairman. This provided him a platform for his inquiry into the history of reflection on the arts in India. In 1999, he presented aspects of this in his Jerusalem Lectures in Indian Civilization entitled "The Logos of Music" and "Music as Logos", organized by the Hebrew University and the Rothschild Foundation. In 2002 he delivered a series of three lectures on the history, aesthetics and theory of Indian music at the Sackler Museum of Art, Boston, Mass., organized by Meru Foundation in association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Mukundji's life-long achievements were acknowledged in 2008 by the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for his scholarship in music, and in 2010 by the Padma Śrī of the Government of India for his contribution to the Field of Arts. In 2011 the Government of India awarded him the rank of Fellow of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (Akademi Ratna).

Mukundji has over many years pursued the theme of the transformation of Indian traditions, be it in a chronological perspective or in the perspective of shifting media, such as literature versus music or academic versus creative writing. How intrinsic this issue is to his thinking is demonstrated by his own poetry, which is the fruit of his engagement with tradition. In the background of his creative poetical writing looms a central question, namely, how precisely to grasp the novelty of his Hindi poetry inspired by classical texts in Sanskrit or Prakrit. His reflections on this issue allow us a glimpse into his aesthetic and intellectual laboratory. The alchemical process taking place there crystallizes into poetic gems such as those which form the conclusion of this volume (taken from Tir rahi van ki gandh of 2004). In these he emerges as a poet who genuinely transcreates the ancient tradition, preserving the original in spirit while rendering it in a totally independent style and language; and in his theoretical reflections on this theme Lath presents himself as a foremost contemporary representative of a living and therefore ever-transforming Indian tradition. To let him have in this volume the final word-the word of poetry is a way of paying our tribute to his creative genius. He speaks in melancholy poems, poems about devastation and the eerie ruins of urban culture destroyed by war. There are other forms of devastation besides war. One of these would be to slough off tradition rather than to face the challenge of engaging with it and thereby transforming it. Mukundji's oeuvre warns against this.

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