Profiles

Krishnamoorthy joined the Sharada Vilas College in 1949 and worked there until 1952. During this time, at the behest of A R Krishna Shastri, he wrote an elaborate introduction to Ānandavardhana’s aesthetic method and translated Dhvanyāloka into Kannada. In the introduction, he outlined the concepts of kindred subjects that are essential to understand Dhvanyāloka, summarized the contents of the text and explained them with apt examples chosen from Kannada poems, both ancient and modern.

Just to illustrate with an example, let us take his paper titled, ‘A Note on the Date of Śaṃkara,’ which was published in The Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society.[1] The thesis is that Śaṅkara lived in the latter half of the sixth century and the former half of the seventh century CE, long before the destruction of Pāṭalīputra and Srughna.

During a conversation with S R Ramaswamy, he mentioned to me that in the 1940s, K M Munshi had asked Sastri to write about the Aryans in the first volume of The History and Culture of the Indian People. Sastri asked, “I can definitely write it but do you have the courage to publish it?” It turns out that a great nationalist of the stature of Munshi too didn’t have the guts to publish the entire essay and printed a paltry two-page summary of Sastri’s writing in the first volume.

Here is an example of a critique written by Sastri and what is noteworthy is that instead of it becoming merely reactionary, it offers a wonderful commentary on Indian culture.