[INDOLOGY] Prof. Shivaram Dattatray Joshi, 15-8-1926 - 29-7-2013

[Jan E.M. Houben]

On behalf of Dr. J.A.F. Roodbergen,
I attach a personal remembrance of his of Dr. S.D. Joshi.

A personal remembrance.

I met Dr. Joshi for the first time during a train journey from Pune to
Guwahati, Assam, in early January 1965, six weeks after my arrival in India
(Pune, Deccan College) in 1964. An *All India Oriental Conference* had been
planned for January 1965. President of the *Conference* was Dr V.S.
Agrawala. I also met him on that occasion. I had been assigned to a group
of pandits, including Dr. Joshi, working in the Deccan College. Dr. Joshi
had just ended his activities there because of his appointment as a Senior
Lecturer at the *Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, *University of
Poona. The train journey was a long, tedious journey, three nights, four
days, I think, altogether more than 3000 kms. It was halted in Lucknow, due
to a misunderstanding regarding reservation. The result of the
misunderstanding was that our group had no valid ticket for the journey
from Lucknow to Guwahati. By good fortune the Indian Railways assigned us
to a third class, three-tier carriage, unreserved. The carriage soon became
occupied up to the last seat, the corridors and even the floor space within
compartments, not to mention the spaces between the coaches. Toilets were
unusable and inaccessible. One had to avail oneself of the opportunity at
the train stops. Before Lucknow I had already been introcuced to Dr. Joshi.
The conversation somehow turned to a hobby of both of us, chess. Dr. Joshi
had brought a small chess set with him, and so we played chess, two games,
as far as I remember. I lost them both. Later on I heard that Dr. Joshi,
during his stay in the U.S.A., had met another chess player and had played
with him. That was Bobby Fisher. So I felt comforted about losing the two
games.

In Dr. Joshi I have lost my eminent teacher and my best friend for a period
of more than 45 years. In Dr. Joshi, India lost its greatest scholar on Vyā
karaṇa since Nāgeśa.

Dr. J.A.F. Roodbergen, Amsterdam 31 July 2013



On 29 July 2013 14:30, Jan E.M. Houben <jemhouben at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> With sadness we learn of the demise of Prof. Shivaram Dattatray Joshi,
who has been for many decades, in the words of his friend, student and
close collaborator Dr. J.A.F. Roodbergen, “il maestro di color che sanno in
the field of Sanskrit grammar.” He will live on, to use Brendan Gillon's
terms, in "his published work" and in "his erudite students" (who have
become the teachers of Pāṇini-students of my own generation).
>
> A bibliography of his publications up to 1989 is found in:
> Pāṇinian Studies - Prof. S.D. Joshi Felicitation Volume
> (ed. by Madhav M. Deshpande, Saroja Bhate)
> Michigan: Univ. of Michigan, Center for South and Southeast Asian
Studies, 1991.
> The same publication contains a Preface by Prof. Madhav Deshpande with
further details about the life and career of Prof. S.D. Joshi (accomplished
vyākaraṇācārya before reaching the age of 20, “discovered” by Prof. D.H.H.
Ingalls in the early 1950s, Ph.D. at Harvard Univ. in 1960).
>
> After his 65th birthday, from 1991-2011, fourteen volumes on the
Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini appeared with the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi.
> Authors: S.D. Joshi and J.A.F. Roodbergen.
>
> Vol. fifteen in the series, prepared by J.A.F. Roodbergen alone (and
dedicated to S.D. Joshi), appeared in Pune at the Vaidika Samshodhana
Mandala in 2011.
>
> Other supplements to the 1991 list of publications (articles by him, by
him together with P. Kiparsky and by him together with J.A.F. Roodbergen)
can be found in the section “References” in A Dictionary of Pāṇinian
Grammatical Terminology (by J.A.F. Roodbergen),  Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental
Research Institute, 2008.
>
> See also: J.A.F. Roodbergen, “Suppl[e]ment to Dictionary of Pāṇinian
Grammatical Terminology” in Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research
Institute, vol. 90 (for 2009): 127-151.
>
> One of his last public speeches was probably his Keynote Address in
January 2009 at the Third International Computational Linguistics Symposium
in Hyderabad (see “Background of the Aṣṭādhyāyī” p. 1-5 in Sanskrit
Computational Linguistics : Third International Symposium, Hyderabad,
India, January 2009, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
5406, ed. by Amba Kulkarni and Gérard Huet, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag,
2009).
>


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