V. Raghavan

Venkataraman Raghavan (August 22, 1908– April 5, 1979) was a multi-faceted Indian academician, Professor of Sanskrit, and an accomplished dramatist, poet, and writer. He was renowned across the globe for his outstanding contributions in the fields of Sanskrit, Indology, music, dance, drama, and theater. He was a blend of tradition and modernity. An observant Hindu, he was a devout follower of His Holiness Sri Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati, the 68th Sankaracharya of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam. Aside from his traditionalist lifestyle, Raghavan was deeply appreciative of the many positive western contributions to India, including the English language, western literary classics, the sciences, the modern technologies, and educational and civic institutions. He had contacts worldwide with numerous renowned scholars, artists, and officials from various countries.

Raghavan was a recipient of numerous awards, including the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award bestowed by the Republic of India, Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters), and the Sangeet Natak Akademi (National Academy of Music, Dance, and Theater). He was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (1968 – 1972). He received the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature, Vidyā Vācaspati, from the Sanskrit University, Varanasi, Honorary Membership in École française d'Extrême-Orient (the French School of the Far East), Paris, honorary membership in the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, among others. A recipient of P.V. Kane Gold Medal from the Asiatic Society, Mumbai, Raghavan’s magnum opus, Śṛṇgāra prakāśa, received the Sahitya Akademi award. His unique original play Anarkali, in which he brought in synthesis of two cultures, Muslim and Hindu, received two awards for the best creative writing from the regional Sahitya Akademies of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

He was a member, chair, or advisor of numerous prestigious national and international committees and commissions. He was the Secretary of the All-India Oriental Conference (1951- 1959) and the General President of its 21st session (1961). He was one of the founding members of the Sanskrit Commission and was appointed the Chairman of the Central Sanskrit Institute by the Government of India. He was the Chairman of the First World Sanskrit Conference sponsored by the Ministry of Education, India (1972) and the President of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies (1972).

Among the many honors that Raghavan received, he cherished the title of Kavi Kokila for his epic-poetry on the Carnatic music composer Muthuswami Dikshitar titled, “Śrī Muttuswāmi Dīkṣita Charita Mahākāvyam”, and Sakala-Kalā-Kalāpa, for his multi-faceted scholarship, both special honors bestowed by Sri Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati.

Sanskrit

Dr. V. Raghavan, as he was widely known, joined as a Ph.D. student in 1934 under Professor Mahāmahopādhyāya Kuppuswami Sastri, Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at the Presidency College, Madras. His doctoral dissertation research under the University of Madras was on Bhoja’s Śṛṅgāra prakāśa, a Sanskrit work by the Indian king Bhoja on Aesthetics, Poetics, and Dramaturgy. Raghavan edited, translated, and annotated this treatise in 36 chapters, the largest known work in Sanskrit on aesthetics, and self-published it in 1961 with financial support from the Maharaja of Mysore Sri Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar, a friend and admirer of Raghavan. For this work and his commentary, Raghavan was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for Sanskrit in 1966 and the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1968. He published a revised edition in 1963 and a further revised third and enlarged edition in 1978.  Raghavan’s Śṛṅgāra prakāśa has been selected for publication under the Harvard Oriental Series (Vol. 53).

A prolific writer, Raghavan wrote widely on various branches of Sanskrit literature. Trained under veteran traditional pandits in his early years, he later studied Nyāya Vaiśeṣika and Sāṅkhya-Yoga along with comparative Indo-European Philology and other general subjects in Sanskrit under Professor Kuppuswami Sastri while also studying Kāvya and Nyāya with reputed pandits.

Raghavan authored several books numbering around 120 and more than 1200 articles at the time of his demise. Many of his unpublished works are being published, now numbering nearly 200, through the efforts of Dr. V. Raghavan Center for Performing Arts, Chennai. Among his rare works, Udāttarāghavam is a unique play on the Rama theme that he discovered from a single palm-leaf manuscript in Kerala. His critical edition by comparing with a few other manuscripts and transcripts of this work was published and released during his centenary celebrations in 2008. Earlier, he had discovered fragments of a rare manuscript of Sarvadevavilasa, a work on the Madras Presidency, its formation, people, and matters of the early 18^th Century, written in prose-poetry format. His translations of Vālmīki pratibhā and Natir pūjā of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and editing of Samskṛta Ravindram for Sahitya Akademi were unique contributions. The translated plays were also directed and staged by him under the banner of Samskrita Ranga, an organization he founded in 1958 for staging of Sanskrit plays.

In 1948, Raghavan curated and published an amazingly detailed diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, the Dubash (an Interpreter in Colonial India) of Puducherry, which dealt with the historical account of the cultural lives of people in the early part of the 18^th Century Madras Presidency and the French Administrators of Puducherry.

Raghavan translated many well-known Stotras along with notes. His collection of select verses and Stotras from various renowned works titled “Prayers, Praises and Psalms” was published in 1938 with a foreword by Mahatma Gandhi who expressed his deep appreciation for the succinct English translation of the Stotras by Raghavan. Other condensed editions that Raghavan wrote include Śrīmad Bhāgavata and Mahābhārata, which have had several printings from 1935 to the present.

Among Raghavan’s works in English written for the general readers is The Indian Heritage (1956), a selected and translated anthology of Sanskrit literature. With a foreword written by the President of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, this work was chosen by the UNESCO as one of the best in the Collection of Representative Works in the Indian Series. It was published by the Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore.

An expert in reading and deciphering palm-leaf manuscripts and proficient in Prakrit and Pali besides Sanskrit, Raghavan discovered, edited, and published several previously unpublished works during his long tenure at the University of Madras. In 1935, when he was still a Research Scholar, he was entrusted a project of revising a catalog of Sanskrit manuscript collections and supplementing them with relevant details in a revised series of catalogues named the New Catalogus Catalogorum. This marathon project was first started by Theodore Aufrecht, Chair of Indology, the University of Bonn, Germany in the late 1800s and early 1900. For this monumental endeavor, Raghavan embarked on collecting information on manuscripts in libraries, research institutions, monasteries, and private collections through personal visits to those places in India and abroad, library loans, and correspondence. In 1953 – 1954 he visited Europe as a representative of the University of Madras to search for Indian manuscripts in libraries, museums, and research institutions. By the end of this visit he had discovered and inventoried more than 20,000 previously uncatalogued manuscripts and about an equal number of catalogued manuscripts. Included were several rare manuscripts on Sanskrit poetics, Puranas, music, dance, and other subjects. Besides, he also surveyed Sanskrit and Indological studies in European universities and other institutions. He was invited to the U.S.S.R. twice, in 1958 and 1974, and to countries of East and Southeast Asia, Australia, Mauritius, Mexico, and Nepal where he continued inventorying manuscripts among other activities such as lecturing. He also undertook extensive surveys in India through the Sanskrit Commission appointed by Government of India. His own collection of rare palm-leaf manuscripts and transcripts of several unedited, unpublished works have been deposited at the Adyar Library, Chennai, which maintains these as a distinct collection in his name. Raghavan was an honorary editor of the Adyar library publications for nearly three decades.

Raghavan was a founding member of the Sahitya Akademi and the Sangeet Natak Akademi, and was the founding editor of Samskrita Pratibha, a journal of the Sahitya Akademi (1958 - 1979). The journal provided a forum for Raghavan’s keen observations on the ongoing Sanskrit activities, especially about modern and classical writings, his own poems and verses, his articles on special occasions, and on eminent men like Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and others. Another important measure that Raghavan undertook was to invite several senior colleagues, as well as vibrant and upcoming young scholars, whose works he felt deserved to be recognized, to contribute to the journal.

Music

As a renowned musicologist, Raghavan was an authority on Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam. He delved into historical and musical texts in Sanskrit and Tamil and wrote several scholarly treatises, research papers, and popular articles. An important contribution to music was his collaboration on “The Spiritual Heritage of Tyagaraja”, for which he wrote an exhaustive nine-chapter “Introductory Thesis: Saint Tyagaraja”. In his later years, he authored a monograph on Tyagaraja for Sahitya Akademi.

Raghavan was the Secretary of the premier institution, the Music Academy, Madras (now Chennai) from 1944 – 1979. Earlier from 1932 – 1942, he played an active role by presenting research papers at the Experts Committee sessions during the annual music seasons in December, as a joint editor of the Journal of the Music Academy, and as a joint secretary.  Later he continued as the principal coordinator and convenor of the Expert Committee sessions and the chief editor of the Journal. Through these roles, he imprinted a unique scholarly standard all through his tenure. Besides the Journal, he brought out many renowned publications of the Academy.  He was also the prime motivator for inviting several musicians and dancers from the North to perform Hindustani music and dance traditions during the Academy’s music seasons in Chennai.

Raghavan composed numerous songs in Sanskrit that have been set to music by the veteran musician Professor Balasubramaniam Krishnamurthy. Kavikokilamanjari. a three-volume compilation of Raghavan’s musical compositions and verses has been musically recorded and released by Dr. V. Raghavan Center for Performing Arts, Chennai. Some of the compositions have been sung by renowned musicians. Raghavan penned a special composition on Devi for the occasion of his wife’s first Varalakshmi Vrata Puja observed after their marriage, “Ehi Śriyaste Namaste Suswāgatam Devī”, which his musically trained wife, Sarada, sung on auspicious occasions. Another unique poetry that Raghavan wrote at the suggestion of the President of India, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on Bhāratamātā, the Mother India, set to Rāgamālika by the renowned musician Mudicondan Sri Venkataramier, is a rich tribute to the cultural renaissance in the independent India. This was first sung by Professor B. Krishnamoorthy and presented in a dance rendition by Raghavan’s elder daughter Priyamvada in 1960 before President Radhakrishnan at the Summer Music and Drama festival, New Delhi organized by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry of the Government of India.

Raghavan also wrote the important and well-known verse of benediction, “Maithreem Bhajata”, calling for world peace and harmony at the instruction of His Holiness Sri Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati. It was set to music by the film music director Vasant Desai and premiered by M.S. Subbulakshmi at the 1966 United Nations General Assembly gathering. Raghavan also wrote Śri Ramanātha Suprabhatam, and Śri Minākshi Suprabhatam that are widely renowned.

Dance

Raghavan wrote many research papers and popular articles and delivered lectures on various aspects of the performing Arts and Indian dance tradition especially on the theory and practice of the South Indian Bharatanatyam. In his younger days he reviewed performances of dance, Harikatha, and Carnatic music under the pseudonym “Bhāvuka” or “Bhāva Rāga Tāla” for well-known journals like Triveni and Sound & Shadow.

Among Raghavan’s major works of timeless value on dance and drama, the critical edition of Nṛtta Ratnāvalī of Jayasenapati (1254 A.D.) and Śṛṅgāra Mañjarī by Saint Akbar Shah (a Muslim saint of Hyderabad) of the 17th century, and the Nātakalaksanaratnakośa of Sāgaranandin, a 13^th century treatise on the Hindu theater translated by Myles Dillon (Irish historian, philologist, and celticist), Murray Fowler (Indologist and Linguist, University of Wisconsin), and V Raghavan, with an introduction and notes by the latter are significant. In addition to translating and extensively annotating Śṛṅgāra Mañjarī in English, he provided supplemental information in a detailed introduction with footnotes. Raghavan also provided comparative notes on concordance with Nāṭya Śāstra and its commentary Abhinavabhārati. Raghavan’s detailed paper on Bharatanatyam, which he presented at the first dance seminar at the Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, in 1958, covered both the textual and practical aspects of the art.

Raghavan was a great admirer of Tanjore Balasaraswati, one of the greatest exponents of Bharatanatyam. Raghavan took great efforts in propagating the art of Bharatanatyam during its renaissance period since the 1950s and was instrumental, as the Secretary of the Music Academy, for establishing the T. Balasaraswati Classical Bharatanatyam School at the Academy in Chennai. Raghavan’s two daughters, Priyamvada and Nandini, are senior disciples of Balasaraswati and Bharatanatyam exponents in their own right. Raghavan penned Sanskrit verses and specific compositions for Bharatanatyam repertoire, the prominent ones being Kalpakāmba payodhi taṭavana, on Goddess Kalpakamba enshrined in the renowned Sri Kapaleesvarar temple, Mylapore, Chennai, one on his favorite Carnatic music composers Sri Muthuswami Dikshitar for his bicentenary celebration, and another on Lord Subrahmanya of Tirupporur near Chennai.

Raghavan gave many talks in the All India Radio on different aspects of Bharatanatyam which were published in a book in Tamil titled “Nāṭṭiyakkalai” (The Art of Dance) by Kalaimakaḷ Kāriyālayam, Chennai. He also wrote a book on Bharatanatyam covering its history, evolution, Śāstra (rules), and Prayoga (performance). First of its kind as a useful guide for educating students of Bharatanatyam as well as enthusiasts and connoisseurs of this dance form, it included photographs of all the basic exercises of the style with his elder daughter Priyamvada demonstrating them step by step, while excerpts of the repertoire, both technical and interpretative stances were done by Balasaraswati herself. The book helped to authenticate the style of Balasaraswati as containing all the essential elements for a proper, firm, refined, and highly aesthetic rendition of Bharatanatyam. Published by the Southern Languages Book Trust, Chennai, the book was released in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada and was highly successful.

Besides Bharatanatyam, Raghavan also wrote about the dance-theater forms such as Bhāgavatamela, Yakṣagāna, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Vīthī Bhāgavatam, and Kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ. He brought out kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ and its great exponent Mani Madhava Chakkiyar from the temple precincts of Kerala to the urban platform for the first time in Chennai under the auspices of the Samskrita Ranga in 1961. One of Raghavan’s last works was Āścaryachūḍādamaṇi of Śaktibhadra, a production manual from the tradition of Kūṭiyāṭṭam Sanskrit drama, edited by Clifford R. Jones (American art history and dance scholar) with introduction and translation by Raghavan. His vast scholarship in the theory and practice of dance and drama can be seen in the many articles like the Kandyan Dance of Sri Lanka, the Performing Traditions of Ramayana in Southeast Asia, and the Western Interpretation of Dance. His own dance and music experiences in the west are featured extensively in his writings.

Legacy

A prolific writer and author, Raghavan has left his legacy in over 120 books and 1200 articles, poems, plays, short stories, devotional hymns, and newspaper and magazine articles in Sanskrit, English, and Tamil.

In 1958, Raghavan founded the Samskrita Ranga, an organization to enact Sanskrit plays as a means to revive and propagate Sanskrit theatre and also published the Samskrta Ranga Annual which carried well-researched articles on performing arts. He acted, coached, and directed plays, appearing in each play as the Sutradhāra (Stage Manager). During his lifetime, he produced and directed about 50 plays and staged them annually in Chennai, in Ujjain at a festival named after the Sanskrit playwright Kalidasa, on All India Radio, and at many other venues.

Raghavan was among those instrumental in founding The Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute (KSRI) in 1944 in honor and memory of Mahāmahopadhyaya S. Kuppuswami Sastri who, besides his professorship at the Presidency College, University of Madras, was also the first Principal of the Madras Sanskrit College in Mylapore, Chennai. As the Founder Secretary of the Institute, Raghavan organized and coordinated to the institute’s activities. During his tenure, Raghavan was responsible for inviting many world-renowned scholars and eminent personalities to conferences and lectures at the institute. He was also responsible for assembling a collection of rare manuscripts and books for the institute’s library.  Another contribution of Raghavan was his editorship of the Journal of Oriental Research, a widely read Sanskrit research publication started by Professor Kuppuswami Sastri.

Raghavan advised and supervised 22 Ph.D., M. Litt., and non-degree students in their research and publications. He remained a life-long mentor and promotor for a large number of students from all over the globe.

Whether in the field of Sanskrit, music, dance, or drama, Raghavan took special interest in bringing to limelight highly deserving but lesser-known scholars, liturgists, musicians, musicologist, and performing artists by providing a venue in Chennai for discourses, performances, other professional opportunities, nomination to national honors, and fellowships.

Personal life

Venkatarama Raghavan was born on 22 August 1908, in Tiruvarur, Tanjavur District, Tamil Nadu, India. He lost both his parents when he was only 7 years old and was raised, along with his three elder brothers and two younger sisters by his mother’s eldest sister and maternal uncle. After completing his early schooling at the Board High School in Tiruvarur, he joined the Presidency College, Madras (Chennai) with an intent to major in Botany but owing to the prevailing communal politics had to settle for Ancient History (Greek and Roman), Logic, and Sanskrit for his Intermediate Course (1925 – 1927). This led him to continue in Sanskrit for his M.A.(Honors), graduating from the Presidency College in 1930 with distinction and earning three college prizes and five university medals. His M.A. was in Sanskrit Language and Literature with Comparative Philology and four schools of Indian Philosophy. For his Ph.D. under Professor S. Kuppuswami Sastri, he specialized in Alańkāra and Nāṭya Sāstra. He also studied Sanskrit in the traditional way including speaking and writing. After a brief tenure as the Superintendent of the Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji's Saraswathi Mahal Library, he joined the research department of his Alma Mater, Madras University in 1935 as a Lecturer and rose to the rank of Professor and Head of the Department of Sanskrit, the latter until his retirement in 1968.

Raghavan married Sarada Srinivasan in 1938. Sarada (1923 - 2008) was musically trained, a skilled homemaker, and a supportive life-partner to Raghavan. They are survived by their four children, Raghavan Kalidas (Jeya), Chemical Engineer, Vice-President of Sanmar Corp., Chennai, President Samskrta Ranga, and Trustee, Dr. Raghavan Centre for Performing Arts, Chennai; Raghavan Charudattan (Dharini), Botanist, Plant Pathologist, and Weed Scientist, Emeritus Professor, University of Florida, President & CEO, BioProdex, Inc., Gainesville, Florida, USA; Priyamvada Sankar (T.S. Sankar), a renowned Bharatanatyam exponent, teacher, and an expert on Sanskrit, Hinduism, and Indian culture, Montreal, Canada; and Kalaimamani and Sangeet Natak Akademi Awardee Nandini Ramani (R.V. Ramani), also a renowned Bharatanatyam exponent, teacher, choreographer, resource person, art critic, author, publisher, Secretary Samskrta Ranga, and Managing Trustee, Dr. V. Raghavan Centre for Performing Arts, Chennai; six grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.

Raghavan was a devout Brahmin who was unfailing in his performance of religious observances and obligations such as Pitṛtarpaṇa and Śrāddha with great dedication. Even when he travelled, he performed Rāmāyaṇa Pārāyṇa, Gāyatrī Japa, and thrice-a-day Sandhyāvandana. He firmly believed in religion as the pillar of sustenance in a man’s life.

External links

• Article in Sruti magazine.
• The Music Academy
• "A Colossus Remembered"
• "Dr.V.Raghavan". www.drvraghavancentre.com.