An Indologist par excellence

The death of Professor M.B. Emeneau is a big loss to Indology, Dravidian studies in particular.

PROFESSOR Murray Barnson Emeneau (1904-2005) was the longest living Western Indologist of great distinction. In the early hours of August 29, he passed away in his sleep at the age of 101 in his house in Berkeley, California.

Emeneau's life is a saga of scholarly dedication and prolific writing on Indology, particularly on Dravidian themes. He taught several Indian students who have risen to important positions in the Indian academia and have made significant contributions to Sanskrit and Indian linguistics, inspired both by his scholarship and by his example. His Indian students always looked upon him as a guru of the true Gurukula tradition. The present writer is one of them.

Born on February 28, 1904, in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, Emeneau received his B.A. Honours in Classics from Dalhousie University in 1923. He went to Balliol College at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to earn a second bachelor's degree with honours in 1926. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1931. His dissertation on Jambhaladatta's version of Vetalapancavimsati was published by the American Oriental Society in 1934. As a research scholar at Yale he studied classics, linguistics and anthropology, with great scholars and teachers such as Franklin Edgerton, E. H. Sturtevant and Edward Sapir.

During 1935-38, he visited India and did extensive fieldwork on the language and culture of several non-literary Dravidian languages of South and Central India, such as Toda, Kota, Badaga, Kodagu and Kolami. On a short visit to northwest India (now Pakistan), he collected data on Brahui. Since then he published scores of papers, works on grammar and texts of these languages. Mention should be made of Kota Texts (volumes 1-4, 1944-6), Kolami, A Dravidian Language (1955), Toda Songs (1971), a groundbreaking work in ethnopoetics, and Toda Grammar and Texts (1984). He was the Founder-Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California in 1940 and served as Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics from 1943 to 1971. When he retired he continued there as Professor Emeritus.

Emeneau's range of scholarship and publications spanned many disciplines and interdisciplinary areas, involving linguistics, prehistory, anthropology, ethnology, onomastics, and folklore studies, with special reference to two major language families of India, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan. With 285 published items, including 25 books and 98 reviews, he made a mark on almost every branch of Indology. The impact of his work on world scholarship is considerable.

However, there are two major areas where his scholarly contribution has left a lasting imprint. His classic paper, "India as a Linguistic Area", published in 1956 explored the data and specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families - Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burman.

With his further contributions (published as a book in 1980 by Stanford University under the title Language and Linguistic Area: Essays by Murray B. Emeneau), this area has now become a major field of research in language contact and convergence all over the world. He thus provided scholarly substance for the underlying Indian-ness of our apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. Consequently, South Asia is now recognised not only as a `linguistic area', but also as a `sociolinguistic area', `a cultural area', and also `a translation area'.

HIS second monumental contribution is A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (Oxford 1961, extensively revised 1984), which he co-authored with the late Professor Thomas Burrow, another great Indologist, who was Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University. This had been a major life-long work of both the authors, representing cognates collected from 26 Dravidian languages, of which their own research and fieldwork was the primary source of at least 10 non-literary languages. Students of Indian languages and linguistics are eternally indebted to them for this lasting contribution.

Emeneau earned many academic distinctions. He was a member of 14 learned societies across the world: the prestigious American Philosophical Society (1952), the National Institute of Humanistic Sciences, Vietnam (honorary member, 1957), the Linguistic Society of India (honorary member, 1964), the Royal Asiatic Society (honorary fellow, 1969), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1970), and the British Academy (corresponding fellow, 1993). He was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1949 and of the American Oriental Society in 1964-65. He presided over the Sixth International Sanskrit Association held in Philadelphia in October 1984. He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by at least four universities, including the University of Chicago (1968), Dalhousie University (1970), University of Hyderabad (1987) and V.K. Kameshwarsingh Darbhanga Sanskrit University (1999).

Emeneau and his wife Kitty lived a simple and dedicated life. They had books all over the house but never had a television set; even in his later life, he did not use a computer. He used to type up all his papers and books, including the enormous manuscript of the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, on his portable Olympia typewriter, fitted with special linguistic symbols. They were very hospitable to the students and frequently invited them for dinner. When any visiting Indian scholar telephoned to meet him, he would invariably invite him or her for lunch or dinner.

After Kitty passed away in 1987, Emeneau lived alone in their house for the next 18 years. The present author had the honour of dedicating his recent book, The Dravidian Languages (Cambridge, 2003), to Emeneau, which he acknowledged with great delight.

With his passing away a glorious era of Indological and Dravidian research has ended. His scholarly output and his personal example will continue to influence and inspire future generations of scholars in India and abroad.

Bh. Krishnamurti is retired Professor of Lingusitics, Osmania University, and former Vice-Chancellor, University of Hyderabad.