As I am nearing the end of 2024, I consider the dark contrast this year has presented between “by the end” and “at the end”. There was to be a celebration for the publication of Bibek Debroy’s latest addition to the glorious Purana series, the Kurma Purana this month, and as co-conspirators to this epic series, he and I were to have a party.
I may still have that party of one.
In the last three years, I have had the privilege of working with Debroy on four books across seven volumes, each a testament to his scholarship and dedication to the mammoth task he had undertaken — to make epic texts accessible to modern readers in India. Only the second person ever to have translated the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Debroy was a true Sankritist and historian. It was a vocation for him, to dive deep into complex spiritual texts, and to unfurl the stories within, into annotated and unbelievable simplicity for the rest of us mortals.
But his scholarship is not the only thing one remembers about him although it was easy to be intimidated by it. The wearer of many caps, he was an economist, a historian, writer and philosopher. A humorist too. And I approached him with some trepidation when we started working together on the Vishnu Purana in 2022. Some three years later, when I type and reminisce about him today, I can only look back on his kindness, mostly at his editors, his proofreaders, his designers, with whom he worked on the everyday trivialities of putting together a book. There is a strangely transient yet deep personal relationship that editors share with their authors that emerges from the everyday mundane. From the italic and the diacritic. The publishing date. The marketing plan.
As we travelled through the publishing process, I came to believe he could have done it all on his own, without any intervention from any of us. But of course, he was being kind to us, humouring us as we toiled over edits, book blurbs and deadlines. He intervened rarely and only to gently nudge us away from errors.
His prolific work with Penguin encompassed three volumes of annotated text of Valmiki’s Ramayana, 10 incredible volumes of the Mahabharata, seven volumes of the Purana series, the Bhagavad Gita, Jyotirlingam, and the story of Sarama, the ancestor of all dogs in Sarama and her Children. Not to forget, his Book of Limericks. And this is only a fraction of his contribution to literature and mythology. There were other books, columns, and poetry that he published regularly.
You are in awe. How did he find the time for it?
I also look back at the tremendous rigour he brought to his work, not just while he wrote and translated, but through the next six months of publication, checking in, asking questions, explaining, and guiding. My first blurb was terrible. He had one note, and I paraphrase. “Don’t go overboard on the complexity of the texts and how difficult it has been to translate them”. We want people to love the epics, not be intimidated by them. The blurb is simple, but it is not a summary. Make the effort to read the book.
And then, quite inexplicably, it was done. Water under the bridge. It did not affect him anymore. Once published, he was entirely nonchalant about this remarkable piece of scholarship he had produced. He had done something difficult, prolonged, and eventful. And when it was done, it was to simply be. He was happy letting his work weave its magic on others.
We shared the same alma mater, the Presidency College in Kolkata. And when I wasn’t talking deadlines with him, we talked about canteen food. He had travelled far and wide in his education, instruction and work, but I doubt he ever truly left anything behind.
Bibek Debroy lived many lives in his lifetime, and I am privileged that I got the opportunity to witness him in a tiny little fraction of it.
The writer is, commissioning editor- Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India.