Regarding Cecil Pinto's take on the greatest Goan( below), perhaps Dharmanand D. Kosambi, an eminent Buddhist scholar and father of Damodar D. Kosambi, was even greater than the the son and has been mostly forgotten by India and Goa, or confused with the son! Please see further down Luis S. R. Vas> Message: 3> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 21:57:59 +0530> From: "Cecil Pinto" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> Subject: [Goanet] Greatest Goan ever> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID:> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1> > My personal favourite for the title of Greatest Goan ever would be> Abbe Faria with D. D. Kossambi coming a close second. Was just> wondering which other Goans would really be serious contendors for the> title. Can the Admin Team ask for nominations and have a poll?> > Cheers!> > Cecil> ==========> > Two Far Travelled Minds By Luis S. R. Vas On July 31, 2008, India concluded the birth centenary celebrations of Damodar D. Kosambi, a Goan polymath who ranged from mathematics to genetics to numismatics to history and archeology, making a significant contribution to each. In Goa, where Kosambi was born, the Vice-President of India Hamid Ansari inaugurated a ‘festival of ideas’ in his honour, which featured speakers like sociologist Meera Kosambi (Damodar’s daughter), historian Romilla Thapar, rural journalist P. Sainath and labour activist Vivek Monteiro, all of whom were greatly influenced by Kosambi. The celebrations also highlighted the role of Kosambi’s father Dharmanand, a Buddhist scholar of Sanskrit and Pali, who greatly contributed to his achievements: he provided the son with a Harvard education (although he could not himself afford to study beyond Std.V in Marathi), he introduced him to Marxist literature and demonstrated that Sanskrit and Pali scripture reflected divergent social values. Dharmanand Kosambi was the son of Damodar Shenoy from Sancoale, a village near Mormugaon. He hoped that Dharmanand would study Portuguese and become an escrivão da comunidade ( government scribe ) which was at that time a well paid job. But he was unable to master the language and in any case after reading school boys’ book on Buddha he was determined to study Buddhism in depth. But he was relegated to the position of a glorified padekar (coconut plucker ) in his own father’s coconut plantation. At the age of 16 he was given in marriage to a daughter of the Laud family of Chikali, a marriage he did not approve of in principle, but he had no say in the matter. Soon after Dharmanand’s first child, a daughter, was born, his father died and Dharmanand decided to leave his family for a while to study Buddhism. Dharmanand travelled to Pune to seek the advice of the great Sanskrit scholar Dr. R. G. Bhandarkar on the best way to study Buddhism. But Bhandarkar tried to persuade him that Buddhism was dead in India and not worth studying. Instead, he urged him to study Sanskrit and join his Prarthana Samaj, a movement of reformed Hinduism which he had launched. Dharmanand studied Sanskrit in Pune but did not give up his goal. When he thought he had studied enough Sanskrit he walked all the way to Varanasi begging alms on the way like a true Buddhist monk but was disappointed to find no reputed teachers of Buddhism and was instead directed to Nepal, to where he trekked accompanied by some Nepali Gurkhas. But in Nepal he found a distorted form of Buddhism. He was advised that to find the pristine form of Buddhism he was after he would have to go to Sri Lanka which he proceeded to do. He was admitted to Vidyodaya University there where he studied for three years and was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1902. Here he studied Pali and Sinhalise translating texts from the former into the latter. Here he changed his surname from Shenoy to Kosambi. Apparently, they are the only Kosambis in Goa, India or the world. From there he went to Burma and undertook a comparative study of Buddhist texts in the Burmese language. After spending seven years abroad and in Calcutta where he taught Pali, Dharmanand felt homesick and returned to his family in Goa during the Durga Puja holidays in October 1906. When he went back to Calcutta, he did so with his wife. His son Damodar was born on July 31, 1907. Dharmanand was hired by the Maharaja of Baroda to write one book a year for him, provided he lived within the then Bombay Presidency, whereupon he shifted to Mumbai where he met Dr. James Wood from Harvard University who invited him to Harvard to help edit and translate the Buddhist text Visudalhi Marg into English. He took his son to Harvard where they roomed together and the son was enrolled in the local school. Dharmanand had four extended stints at Harvard where Damodar also studied, earning a Summa Cum Laude degree in Mathematics. Dharmanand learnt Russian at Harvard and used it to teach Pali at Leningrad University in the then Soviet Union. Eventually both father and son returned to Pune, where Dharmanand taught Pali at Fergusson college and Damodar taught mathematics. “Until then Buddhism was known to outsiders only through the translations and interpretations of Westerners. Acharya Kosambi's interpretation was purely Indian, rooted in his knowledge of Sanskrit and Pali. He was fearless and honest to the core and many of his conclusions angered the traditionalists, including some Buddhists and Jains. But nobody could dare question his scholarship. He continued to translate many Buddhist and Jain works with detailed notes”, writes Dr. Jyotsna Kamat, a historian and biographer. After a while Dharmanand decided to join Mahatma Gandhi and his Civil Disobedience Movement for which he was arrested and spent several months in jail. By 1947 his health was in a poor state and he decided, under the influence of Jainisim, which he a had also studied in depth, to undertake the spiritual practice of Sallekhana ( voluntary fasting to death) since he thought he had accomplished all he could in his life and would now be a burden to society. On June 5 1947, he breathed his last at Sevagram, just a couple of months before India’s independence. Dharmanand authored several books including an autobiography, Nivedan, in Marathi which was never translated and one of the most popular biographies of Buddha Bhagwan Buddha which became a classic in Marathi and was translated and published in English and other Indian Languages by the Sahitya Akademi but is now out of print except in Hindi. In 1945 Damodar Kosambi was invited by Homi J Bhabha to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research ( TIFR) as professor of Mathematics. He commuted from Pune by the Deccan Queen and on this train wrote many of his books where he used Marxist tools creatively to rewrite ancient Indian history: An introduction to the study of Indian History; Culture and Civilization of Ancient India; Myth and Reality(where presented a study of the Goan Comunidade or Gaunkari system of land ownership and cultivation)… He exited TIFR in 1962 following differences with Homi Bhabha on the use of nuclear energy which he opposed. In Pune he undertook archeological studies and contributed to the fields of statistics and number theory. A path breaking article on numismatics was published in Scientific American in 1965. He died peacefully in his sleep on June 29, 1966 in Pune. Among his admirers were noted historians J.D. Bernal and A.L. Basham, author of The Wonder that Was India. He became a mentor to a whole generation of historians and received, posthumously, the Hari Om Ashram award from the University Grants Commission in 1989. Past & Present The Kosambis, father and son RAMACHANDRA GUHA D.D. Kosambi was a mathematician who trained himself to be a world-class historian. His father’s life was even more remarkable… A friend who lives in Goa writes to say that he is greatly enjoying the series of lectures being organised there to commemorate the centenary of the polymathic scholar D.D. Kosambi. The historian Romilla Thapar had spoken in the series, as had the journalist P. Sainath; two Indians one thinks the notoriously judgmental Kosambi would have approved of, both for the depth of their research and the commitment to their craft. Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi was a remarkable man. Trained as a mathematician, he then went on to train himself as a historian. His day job was as a Professor of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. On the train up and down from Poona (where he lived), and during the evenings, nights, and weekends, he gathered the materials to write some pioneering works of historical scholarship, among them A Study of Indian History and The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline. A pioneer Apart from his books, Kosambi also published collections of scholarly essays, in one of which he wrote about the village communities of his native Goa. The languages he knew well included Sanskrit, Pali, Marathi, and English. Among Indian historians, he was a pioneer in the use of numismatics, linguistics, and, above all, anthropology. Kosambi was a man of a fierce and at times truculent independence. He was sympathetic to Marxism, whose materialist approach he found useful in reconstructing the economic and social life of civilisations now long dead. But he abhorred the dogmatism and insularity of what was then the undivided Communist Party of India. It was impossible for him to follow a party line. In his political writings (which too were collected in several volumes, one of which bore the charming title Exasperating Essays) he was sharply critical of what he called the “Official Marxists” (or OM, for short). Among the community of Indian historians there is almost a “Kosambi cult” in operation. It is good that the civil society of Goa is joining academics elsewhere in India in paying tribute to his memory. But mostly forgotten in the meantime is a Kosambi who was perhaps an even more remarkable man. This was the historian’s own father, Dharmanand. I first heard of Dharmanand Kosambi from a friend who taught for many years at the University of California at Berkeley and is arguably the greatest living scholar of Jainism. His name is Padmanabha Jaini. It was in Berkeley on a cold January afternoon, years ago, that Professor Jaini acquainted me with the elements of Kosambi pére’s life. As a young man he felt the urge to learn Sanskrit; finding the urge irresistible, he left his wife and baby boy to go to Poona and study with the great Sanskrit scholar R.G. Bhandarkar. His studies inculcated further desires and ambitions; among them to make a deeper acquaintance with Buddhism. He travelled around the country, spending time in Baudh Gaya, in Sarnath, and in Kausambhi, near Allahabad, where the Buddha lived after attaining enlightenment. It was from this last place that he took the name by which he and his son came to be known. So far as I know, this remains the only “Kosambi” family in Goa, India, or the world. In search of a living Buddhist tradition, Dharmanand Kosambi also spent several years in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where he learnt Pali. By now, he was a world authority on the language and culture of early Buddhism. He taught briefly in Bombay and Poona before attracting the attention of the American academy, then (as now) on the look-out for world authorities to attract (or seduce). With his wife and son, Kosambi travelled across the seas to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was put to work editing Pali texts for a series published by Harvard University. Moved by Gandhi Dharmanand Kosambi spent a decade in the United States, in which time his son studied mathematics at Boston University (to add to the Sanskrit and Pali that he learnt at home). Reading about Gandhi’s movement made the senior Kosambi turn his back on America (and the scholarly study of Buddhism) to return to India and court arrest during the Salt Satyagraha. He was deeply attached to Gandhi; when the Mahatma moved to Wardha in 1934, Dharmanand Kosambi moved with him too. When I visited the ashram in Sewagram some years ago, an elderly (and knowledgeable) guide showed me the hut Gandhi lived in, as well as the huts occupied by his closest associates, such as Mahadev Desai and Mira Behn (Madeleine Slade). Then he pointed to a structure, as modest as the others, which he called “Professor Sahib Ki Kutir”. This was where the one-time Goan, Buddhist scholar, and Harvard academic had spent his last years. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this most remarkable man concerns the manner of his death. In the summer of 1947, with the country on the eve of independence, Dharmanand Kosambi decided he did not need to live any more. So, in the hallowed Buddhist tradition, he simply fasted to death. There is, I am told, some amount of biographical writing about the senior Kosambi in Marathi. Still, there is certainly room in English for a single volume study of Dharmanand Kosambi and his son Damodar. This would be a story of two utterly absorbing lives, and, through them, a history of Goa, India, and the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] PAST & PRESENT The life and death of a Buddhist Gandhian RAMACHANDRA GUHA
A portrait of Dharmanand Kosambi as revealed through the letters of Mahatma Gandhi. We do not know whether Kosambi agreed with Gandhi’s interpretation of the proposed temple to Buddha… After I wrote my last column on the Kosambis, father and son, I decided to check for references to them in that capacious repository of relevant knowledge, the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG). The Marxist historian D.D. is not mentioned, but there are as many as 29 entries pertaining to his father, the Buddhist scholar Dharmanand. The first dates from January 1922, when in an article written in Young India, Gandhi quotes a letter written to him from Cambridge (Mass) by the professor, enclosing a cheque for $ 156 collected by him for the Tilak Swaraj Fund, the money mostly contributed by “poor Indian students”. In this letter, Kosambi also told Gandhi that the “Press of this country [the United States] from the most radical to the most conservative is unanimous in praising you and the Indian national movement”. In 1930 the professor returned to India to participate in the Salt Satyagraha. He went into jail, and after he came out, started work on a temple devoted to the Buddha. It was to be called Naigaum Vihar, and the Mahatma had been asked to help. Gandhi, in turn, wrote to the Maharashtra Congressman B.G. Kher, urging him to oversee the collection and disbursal of the money for the project. Kher answered that he could do the job (of monitoring expenses) until the temple was built, but after that had to excuse himself. For, “how am I to work on a Buddhist Vihar committee?” enquired Kher: “Are they all going to become Buddhists? Where is the need?” Gandhi’s interpretation To this Gandhi replied: “There is no question of anyone becoming a Buddhist. The temple is meant to be one dedicated to Buddha as temples are dedicated to Rama, Krishna and the like. There is no proselytising taint about this movement. At the most it is to be a Hindu temple of an advanced type in which a very learned man will be keeper or pujari. That is how I have understood the whole scheme of Prof. Kosambi. You may share this with the Professor, and if he endorsed my position, with Shri Natarajan [presumably another promoter of the temple idea] so that there may be a common understanding about the temple”. We do not know whether Kosambi agreed with this interpretation of the proposed temple to Buddha — would he have accepted that it merely represented Hinduism “of an advanced type”? But we learn, from the CWMG, that Kosambi worked in the early 1940s for the Hindi Sabha, and later joined the Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad to teach Buddhist literature. In September 1946, Gandhi, then in Delhi, heard that the Professor had gone on a fast. He wrote urging him to desist. He suggested that Kosambi restrict himself to cow’s milk and boiled vegetables which “too would be a kind of fast”. Apparently, the advice was not immediately accepted. Three days later, Gandhi wired a colleague to tell Kosambi “not to be obstinate”, and to at least take milk and fruit. Five days later, another wire was on its way, with Gandhi saying that “I cannot understand this obstinacy on Kosambi’s part. Please plead with him again [to] desist”. On death The fast was called off. The next relevant letter in the CWMG is dated May 5, 1947. This was written by Gandhi in answer to a postcard of Kosambi’s on an important subject, possibly the most important there is. “Death is our true and unfailing friend”, remarked the Mahatma: “He takes charge of one when one’s time is over”. Then he added: “So, if you must depart, first enshrine Rama in your heart and then go to meet Him cheerfully”. So evidently death was very much on Kosambi’s mind. A week later, from Sodepur in Bengal, Gandhi wrote to a follower asking him to “keep me informed of any changes in Kosambi’s condition. I prefer cremation but I shall not insist on it”. (A foonote in the CWMG explains: “Kosambi had expressed a desire to be buried after death, it being the least expensive disposal of the body”.) Ten days later Gandhi wrote to Kosambi directly, saying that he got “regular reports” about him, that he was “very happy that you are staying in the [Sewagram] Ashram” and that he had “no doubt that you will depart in peace”. A letter to some ashramites followed, asking them to tell Kosambi that Gandhi would ensure that his wishes to send Indian students to study Pali in Sri Lanka were carried out. Gandhi then asked that Kosambi be requested “to forget about such matters and fix his mind on withdrawing himself into a state of inner concentration whether the body subsists a little longer or withers away soon”.Dharmanand P. Kosambi left this world on June 4, 1947, after voluntarily and deliberately fasting to death. In my next column I shall write of what the death of this Buddhist Gandhian meant to the Mahatma [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dharmanand Kosambi: Dying with Dignity We learn from the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) that Dharmanand Kosambi’s middle initial was “P”. Did this stand for “Pai”, or “Panandikar”, or even “Pai panandikar” perhaps? These are all Goan names, although in the journey of his life (and death), the Buddhist scholar was to move very far from his Goan origins. When the elder Kosambi fasted to death in May-June 1947, one of the men most moved was his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was then in Delhi. In a prayer meeting on June 5, he paid tribute to his recently departed follower. The audience would not know of him, said Gandhi, since “we are so made that we raise to the skies anyone who goes about beating his drum and indulges in political acrobatics but fail to appreciate the silent worker.” To his Delhi audience, Gandhi filled in the details of Kosambi’s life. Born in a village, a Hindu by birth, he embraced Buddhism and studied its scriptures out of the conviction that “no other religion gave as much importance to non-violence, piety, etc., as Buddhism did.” Kosambi had “no equal in India in scholarship”, and gave “freely of his profound learning”... “In scholarship I cannot compare myself with Kosambiji”, said the Mahatma, adding: “I am merely a barrister who became one by attending dinners in England! I have a very meagre knowledge of Sanskrit.”The last daysGandhi then arrived at the manner and meaning of Dharmanand Kosambi’s death. He spoke in Hindi — the official English translation follows:When Kosambiji realised that he was no longer physically fit to carry on any work, he decided to give up his life through fasting. At [Purushottamdas] Tandonji’s insistence I made Kosambiji, very much against his wishes, give up his fast. But his digestion had been severely affected and he was not able to eat anything at all. So, in Sewagram, he again gave up food and keeping himself only on water gave up the breath after forty days. During his illness he refused all nursing and all drugs. He even abandoned the desire to go to Goa where he was born. He commanded his son and others not to come to him. He left instructions that no memorial should be set up after his death. He also expressed the desire that he should be cremated or buried according to whichever was cheaper. Thus, with the name of the Buddha on his lips he passed into that final sleep which is to be the estate, one day or another, of all who are born. Death is the friend of everyone. It will visit us as destined. One may be able to predict the time of birth, but no one has yet been able to predict the time of death.“I beg you to forgive me for taking so much of your time over this”, said Gandhi, a remark suggesting that he understood that his Delhi audience may not exactly have had the same interest in the subject. Three days later, in another prayer meeting in Delhi, Gandhi returned to the matter of Kosambi’s death. The Manager of the Sewagram Ashram, Balvantsinha, had written that “he had not witnessed such a death so far. It was exactly as Kabir described in the following couplet: The servant Kabir says: Although we wear this sheet with ever so much care, it has to be given up even as it is”.Then Gandhi added: “If we can all befriend Death in this manner, it would be to the good of India”.It is evident that Gandhi had been deeply affected by the manner of Kosambi’s going. On June 9, 1947, he wrote to an associate saying that, following the professor’s wishes, “we should send to Ceylon as quickly as we can some Indians who follow Buddhism and are desirous of learning Pali. Do you have some students in mind? Try to think over what rules we should frame for selecting such students and give me some suggestions. For instance, what would be the expense of each student, etc…” Efforts for a memorialThis associate (unidentified in the CWMG) appears to have given an estimate of Rs. 25,000 as the money required to sustain the initiative. On September 24, Gandhi wrote to the industralist Kamalnayan Bajaj asking him to help in collecting this amount for the “Dharmanand [Kosambi] Memorial”. Another letter of the same day requested Kaka Kalelkar to “work as the chairman, secretary and peon all rolled into one in regard to this scheme”. He suggested that the politician B.G. Kher, the educationist James H. Cousins, and the Theosophist and philanthropist Sophie Wadia be asked also to help. It appears that all of the above were unavailable or unwilling, since on October 11, 1947 Gandhi wrote to Kalelkar from Delhi that if he and Kamalnayan Bajaj could not collect the Rs. 25,000, “I am in any case going to take up the burden”. And there the Kosambi trail in the CWMG ends. We do not know whether the money was collected — even if it was, it is unlikely that any Indian students were sent to Sri Lanka to study Pali. For, less than three months later, death called upon Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The meeting was not (as Gandhi always knew to be the case) at a time and place of his choosing. But, when the moment came, he met death with the dignity and equanimity of his Buddhist friend and follower, Dharmanand Kosambi. Kosambi’s life and death seem a subject fit for a full-length book, although the humdrum medium of biography may not be able to fully capture its manifest moral grandeur. Perhaps a feature film, then, or, better still, a play written by that most brilliant of modern playwrights, Girish Karnad _________________________________________________________________ Chose your Life Partner? Join MSN Matrimony FREE http://www.shaadi.com/msn/matrimony.php
