Sanskrit Scholar

When an Indian Sanskrit scholar came upon some valuable Sanskrit manuscripts in a remote Tibetan barn he sent some of the first photostatic copies to Daniel Henry Ingalls. This was natural since, as an Assistant Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Editor of the Harvard Oriental Series, Ingalls is the unofficial leader of a new breed of Indian historians.

To Ingalls the mixture of Sanskrit scholarship and Indian history is vital, since he as long viewed them as inseparable. He is one of the few Sanskrit scholars to study the language in Indian. He and his wife sweltered almost a vear in Calcutta while Ingalls struggled through difficult tests with a logician poet called Kalipada.

Ingalls sojourns in India have been more than musty perusals of dwindling philosophies. His second trip, during the war, was for the O.S.S. for which he did secret work throughout the East. His final excursion this fall was a combination of study and teaching. For some months he worked with a Jain monk "in a perfect Ivory Tower." Then he went on a tour of colleges lecturing in English on Sanskrit philosophy. He found that. The education system built by the British still survives. It was designed to turn out administrative officers...a type that India has less need of now. But the Indians have made the system even more rigid than before. As a result most students specialize very early and work just for grades."

Ingalls himself has done anything but that. Brought up in the mountain country of Virginia, he graduated from high school at the age of fifteen and persuaded his father to let him study music in Germany. "In Munich," he says, "I learned how to ski and speak German and that I wasn't a musician." After a year in Germany Ingalls came back to enter Harvard with the class of '36. He majored in classics, and took his first Sanskrit course, "out of curiosity." In the spring of his first year, he was "dropped" for failing to show up at an examination. He caught up in his sophomore year, stayed on Dean's list and graduated cum laude in Classics with his class.

As a lecturer, he has a colorful, dynamic style. In describing the Bengali flood plain he can wax eloquent, or in quoting Macauley he can turn on a mild, elegant English accent. His oratorical style has brought one student to complain that. That rooms they give him are too small. He'd sound better in Memorial Hall."

Ingalls' favorite teaching job is History 186, The History of Modern India. He tries to see the troubled peninsula, as few Westerners do, from an Indian point of view. "Most people think important to her is to stay out. The antithesis of communism and Democracy is not applicable to India. Her past doesn't presuppose either of them...Indian society is like a spring top, a little above, and some below, but the thickness of the thing comes in the middle.

All this is said mildly--as Ingalls says most things --but with a certain vehemence of authority. For Daniel Ingalls sees in the unfolding of modern India the echoes of the Nyaya's, the Veda's, and Vedanta's--the Indian philosophies he loves, and knows, so well.