Let us be clear: the online petition signed by 132 Indian intellectuals and academicians, asking Rohan Murthy and his father, NR Narayana Murthy, to remove Sheldon Pollock as editor of the Murthy Classical Library Project at Harvard is DOA – dead on arrival. To ask a private millionaire to fire his own hire and who is paid for from private wealth is hardly the right thing to do. In any case, it won’t work.



The Murthy Classical Library project is about translating Indian literary classics into English, and Sheldon Pollock is an “American Orientalist” who would like Western scholars to tutor Indians on how to read their own classical literature, including Sanskrit literature, preferably negatively. Pollock is against the revival of Sanskrit, and would like to treat this mother of Indian languages as a dead cultural heritage, which can be dissected by Western scholars in their own orientalist way, as Rajiv Malhotra noted in his book, The Battle For Sanskrit.



However, it is surely unwise of Murthy, 33, to pretend that the petition holds no legitimacy. This is evident in how he dismissed the criticism: “It is quite rich to sit in the peanut gallery, pass comments and throw empty shells at those who are actually rolling their sleeves up and working on the ground,” The Economic Times quoted Murthy Jr as saying. It is unfortunate that Murthy should be saying this about 132 academicians and intellectuals who care about how Indian classical literature is portrayed by Hinduphobic academicians in the West.

As this writer noted while reviewing Malhotra’s book: