Ancestral voices echoing through the present

Bibek Debroy's last published volume, Sacred Songs: The Mahabharata's Many Gitas, uses the English language to repossess ancient texts

- Renuka Narayanan

Besides his prodigious public service record as an economist, the late Bibek Debroy (January 25, 1955 – November 1, 2024) contributed greatly to reviving the soul of India, which resides in her scriptures.

Debroy translated the unabridged version of Vyasa's Mahabharata into English, in a series of 10 volumes. He translated the Bhagavad Gita, the Harivamsa (an abridged Mahabharata also credited to Vyasa), the Vedas, no less, and Valmiki's Srimad Ramayanam in three volumes. His services to the Puranas were no less monumental. He translated the Bhagavata Purana in three volumes, the Markandeya Purana in one volume, which contains the Devi Mahatmyaham recited every year during Durga Puja, the Brahma Purana in two volumes, the Vishnu Purana in one volume, the Shiva Purana in three volumes and the Brahmanda Purana in two volumes.

Besides Manmatha Nath Dutt (1855-1912), he is the only other person to have translated both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in unabridged form into English.

For his translations, he was conferred the Sir Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar Memorial Award in July 2023 by the venerable Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. The institute had put the entire Mahabharata together in a critical edition released in 10 weighty volumes on September 22, 1966, by Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, then President of India. It is this milestone Sanskrit text that Debroy gamely translated into English in the service of modern Indians, many of whom are trapped in the English language as by-products of colonial education.