"Baba"
A
PERSONAL TRIBUTE
A.L. Basham
I first met D. D. Kosambi during the 1949-50 university session,
when I had been a lecturer at London for only a year or two and had much to
learn. One cold day in autumn or winter (I forget which), a tall spare
Indian with greying hair and rugged but pleasant features came into my room
at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He introduced himself as D.
D. Kosambi, who had come to London partly to meet mathematicians and partly
to discuss his researches on Indian punch-marked coins with the
numismatists at the British Museum. His stay in England on that occasion
was a very brief one, but I had several long talks with him, and arranged
for him to give a lecture to my students. From that time onward we kept up
our friendship, meeting whenever possible, whether in India or in England,
and exchanging fairly frequent letters. I have met no one who could crowd
so much information into an air letter as he, partly by typing right up to
the edges of the paper and partly by extreme conciseness of expression.
We argued a great deal. I did not go all the way with him in his
Marxist interpretation of Indian history, though I agreed with many of his
conclusions; and when, early in the course of our friendship, I published a
lengthy review of his An Introduction
to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1956) in which I criticized
some of his theories (rather sarcastically) I feared reprisals; but he
accepted my remarks without rancour, and our friendship was in no way
impaired. Whenever I was in the neighbourhood of Bombay I would visit him
in his home in Poona, and, armed with a special stick which was equipped
with a chisel-shaped point for prizing microliths out of the earth, he
would take me and his dog Bonzo for long walks in the beautiful rolling
countryside, introducing me to village shrines and sacred trees, and
discussing their significance, as survivals of the prehistoric culture of the
Deccan, In the last few years of his life he often complained of arthritic
pain, but it rarely deterred him from his walks in search of microliths or
from working In his study until the early hours of morning.
At first it seemed that he had only three interests, which filled
his life to the exclusion of all others- ancient India, in all its aspects,
mathematics and the preservation of peace. For the last, as well as for his
two intellectual interests, he worked hard and with devotion, according to
his deep convictions. Yet as one grew to know him better one realized that
the range of his heart and mind was very wide. He had a great love of
literature in all languages. Once he impressed me by quoting passages from
John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress from memory. I was surprised that
he should know this seventeenth century English religious classic so well,
and suggested that his taste for Bunyan was rather incongruous in a
professed unbeliever. He replied that he loved Bunyan because his language
was so beautiful and simple, he was a product of the popular culture of the
time, and he imparted valuable moral lessons, even to one who had no faith.
In the later years of his life, when his attention turned
increasingly to anthropology as a means of reconstructing the past, it
became more than ever clear that he had a very deep feeling for the lives
of the simple people of Maharashtra. When he described local festivals, and
religious ceremonies or showed the excellent colour slides that he had
taken of them, one felt that he would have liked to participate, to
identify himself with the peasants worshipping at a village shrine or
making a pilgrimage to Pandharpur. Once, when he was mildly complaining of
the pains which the doctors seemed incapable of curing, it struck me
suddenly that they might be psycbologically caused, the product of the
tension between the unbelief, to which his reason compelled him and the
deep-seated traditions of his ancestral faith, which his reason had
rejected but which still, in reason's spite, affected his semi-conscious
and sub- conscious emotions. Very tentatively I made this suggestion to
him, and advised him, as a psychologist of the Jungian school might have
done, to goon a pilgrimage to Pandharpur and perform all the rituals of the
ordinary pilgrim, even if he had no belief in them, in the hope that his
health would improve. He laughed, and replied that he could not do this,
however beneficial to his health, for thus he would betray his faith in
reason and common sense.
Impatient with hypocrisy, inefficiency, bureaucracy, dogmatism
and intolerance, a man of very deep convictions and strong principles, with
a very powerful will, he may have made enemies as well as friends. Some may
have found him difficult to collaborate with as a colleague. As a friend I
found him always loyal, sympathetic and helpful. His company was invariably
stimulating; he was never at a loss for a subject of conversation and he
infected one with his own enthusiasm. It was with a deep sense of personal
loss that I learnt of the death of my very good friend "Baba".
It is as a friend rather than as a scholar that I shall chiefly
remember him, but this statement is in no way intended to disparage his
scholarship. I am not qualified to pass judgment on his work in mathematics,
and have hardly the right to assess his editions of Sanskrit poetical
texts, which, according to the specialists, are marvels of their kind.
As a historian he made very important contributions to the study
of many aspects of Indian history. His statistical analysis of the
punch-marked coins has produced one of the most convincing interpretations
of these so far to have been offered. His An Introduction to the Study
of Indian History is in many respects an epoch making work, containing
brilliantly original ideas on almost every page; if it contains errors and
misrepresentations, if now and then its author attempts to force his data
into a rather doctrinaire pattern, this does not appreciably lessen the
significance of this very exciting book, which has stimulated the thought
of thousands of students throughout the world. In his later publications he
continued to point the way to the only means whereby we can reconstruct a
convincing picture of the early history of India as a whole, rather than of
the India of pandits and dynasties-by a judicious combination of the
techniques of history, archaeology and anthropology. In his stature, his
intellect and his integrity of spirit, he was indeed a truly great man.
Web templates
|