Prabodh Bechardas Pandit died on 20th November 1975 at Delhi
at the age of 52 after a short spell of unconsciousness brought on by cerebral
haemorrhage. At the prime of his powers,
he was so much a part of the scene in Indian linguistics and Indian philology
that the conventional phrase ‘a grievous loss to scholarship’ comes home to one
in this with especial poignancy.
Born on 23 June 1923 a Valabhi in Saurashtra, the ancestral place of a
family of scholars, he was educated at Ahmedabad where his father, Bechardas Sukhlalji
Doshi, taught Sanskrit and Jain studies at the nationalist Gujarat Vidyapith.
B.A. from L.D. Arts College, Ahmedabad with honours in Sanskrit (1944),
M.A. in Comparative Philology from Bombay (1946), he was also taught Pali and
Prakrit at home. He went to jail twice in 1942 as a freedom
fighter. He then went to the School of
Oriental and African Studies, London (1947) to work with Sir Ralph Turner for
his Ph.D. (1949) in Indo-Aryan Philology. After
spending some time with Jules Bloch in Paris and with J.R. Firth and W.S. Allen
in London doing general linguistics and phonetics, he returned to India to join
I.D. Arts College (1950-55). Subsequently
he taught linguistics at Gujarat University, Ahmedabad (1955-64), the Language
Project of Deccan College, Poona (visiting 1956-57), Deccan College (1964-65),
the University of Delhi (1966-end), and Cornell University (visiting 1969-70).
In 1955-56 he was Rockfeller Foundation senior fellow at Yale University.
Indeed he played a leading rôle in the ushering in of modern linguistics in India
that Dr. S.M. Katre set going in the 1950s. He
traveled extensively and participated in many conferences, seminars, and committees.
Indeed lately he could have been called a roving ambassador representing
Indian linguistics to other disciplines, to the authorities, and to linguists
abroad. While he filled this rôle with distinction and his characteristic gusto,
his first love remained teaching and research.
He was the recipient of many honours – sectional presidentship of All-India
Oriental Conference (1964), Sahitya Akademi of Poona (1970), the Ranajitram Gold
Crescent of the Gujarati Sahitya Sabha (1974), to name but a few. He was closely associated with the Linguistic
Society of India (president 1968, committee on publication 1956-59 and 1971-73;
executive committee 1955, 1961-63, 1966 and 1969-71).
About the making of the scholar, I can do no better than quote from a two-page
“informal autobiography” that Prof. Pandit put together around 1956:
“My father spent the proverbial twelve years at Banaras, learning Sanskrit… Throughout my career I had never thought twice
about ‘the subjects I wanted to choose – languages”. (He know Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Rajasthani,
French besides Gujarati, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, and English.) “Gandhiji wrote … and spoke in a tongue understood
by all Gujaratis” in preference to the prevailing Sanskritized norm.
“This language consciousness probably influenced me” and led me “to look
at the living languages” and “speech”. “Malinowski…
opened my eyes to … language in society … listening to Professor Blanquert (of
Ghent) in London and … Professor Bloch in Paris, I was inspired to choose dialectology
as my field” within Indian linguistics; “the neglect of the spoken language in
various spheres of communication in present day India”, the misguided slogan of
“back to Sanskrit”, and the failure to carry on Grierson’s great work made a painful
impression.
Till about 1966 his interest chiefly lay in synchronic, diachronic, and
diatopic phonology. More recently his
attention centred on bilingualism, language planning and policy, and the social
dimension of language. It speaks for his
intellectual flexibility and the breadth of his interests that the transition
from textual study to historical phonology, and then to phonetics and descriptive
linguistics, and finally to applied and social linguistics came very naturally
to him at various points in his career.
When among scholars, he was apt to be the voice of common sense, reminding
them of practical realities; when among policy makers, he was the scholar holding
out for clear-headed objectivity. To the
young he was friend, philosopher, and guide.
To the elder statesmen of scholarship, he was the young Turk. He was equally
lucid in Gujarati, English and Hindi, in writing for fellow linguists and for
non-linguists, in the lecture hall and at the seminar table.
He is survived by his parents, his wife, Dhairyabala an economist, two
sons and a daughter, and of course his many students and colleagues.
Ashok
R. KELKAR, Central Institute of Indian Languages and
Deccan
College
The
Bibliography is a slightly revised an supplemented version of one prepared by
Udaya Narayana Singh for Pákhā Sanjam 8.1, 1976. Certain details have
been provided by Yogendra D. Vyas.
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1976.
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COLOPHON
This was published in Indian Linguistics 37:77-81, 1976.
