Jain Spirit 2005 06 No22

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 70

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HISTORY
Brown's approach to India was to a significant degree shaped by the years he spent as a child in India. His parents were missionaries in Central India for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). From the age of eight until he was thirteen, from 1900 to 1905, Norman Brown lived with his family in Harda and then Jabalpur, now Madhya Pradesh. He learned Hindi as he played with other children. Since his father, like most missionaries, was largely involved in educational work as a teacher and principal in mission schools, Brown was also exposed at this young age to the values of education.
with Bloomfield, but he also studied with two older graduate students who went on to become major scholars in their own right, Franklin Edgerton and E. W. Burlingame. Brown shared with Bloomfield, Edgerton and Burlingame an interest in story literature and folklore. His 1916 Ph.D. dissertation was on the relationship between the Panchatantra and modern Indian folklore. Part of this study was published in 1919 in the prestigious Journal of the American Oriental Society. One of Brown's distinctive contributions to Indian studies was to include the full range of Indic materials to interpret a classical text such as the Panchatantra. While he was fully competent in Vedic, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali materials, he used his ability in Hindi to add contemporary oral traditions to his studies. In the words of his later colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Rosane Rocher, "few indologists have shown such total involvement with India, in all ages, from the Indus valley civilisation to the
"FEW INDOLOGISTS
HAVE SHOWN SUCH TOTAL INVOLVEMENT
WITH INDIA."
Norman Brown returned to the United States in 1905 to attend preparatory school and then the college in Hiram, Ohio. In 1908 his parents returned to the States on leave, while his father George William Brown studied Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew at Johns Hopkins University. G. W. Brown earned a Ph.D. in 1910 under Bloomfield for his
dissertation entitled The Human Body in the Upanishads. (This was published by The Christian Mission Press in Jabalpur - then spelled Jubbulpore - in 1921.) The elder Browns returned to Jabalpur in 1910, where G. W. Brown resumed his post as Principal of the Christian Bible College. There he taught Old Testament History, New Testament History, Biblical Theology, Psychology and Hinduism.
W. Norman Brown joined his parents in Baltimore in 1908 and entered Johns Hopkins as an undergraduate student, earning a B.A. in Greek in 1912. He continued to study Greek in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, and added Arabic, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali to his studies. Most of his courses were
emergence of Bangladesh, from Vedic myths to current political questions. This feature ... may still be attributed in a great measure to the fact that the Vedic scholar trained by Bloomfield had had his first and lasting encounter with India as a boy."
Brown held post-doctoral and teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania from 1916 to 1919, and Johns Hopkins from 1919 to 1921. The stipends on such fellowships were meagre, so he augmented his income by proofreading and private tutoring. During the years 1921-22, he substituted for Bloomfield at Johns Hopkins while the elder scholar took a sabbatical leave in Europe. In 1922 Brown and his wite Helen went to India, where he studied For Personal & Private Use Only
Advaita Vedanta philosophy with a pandit in Banaras for several months. He then went to Jammu, where for two years he was Professor of English and Vice-Principal of the Prince of Wales College. In 1925 he returned to the United States. Positions in teaching Sanskrit and Indian Studies were quite rare in those days, so for one year Brown worked in the alumni office of Johns Hopkins. Finally, in 1926 he was appointed Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he occupied for forty years until his retirement in 1966. He died in 1975 at the age of eighty-three.
During these four decades Brown developed Pennsylvania into one of the premier centres in the world for the study of India. In addition to many shorter visits to India after World War II, when air travel made such short trips feasible, he also spent two yearlong sabbaticals in India, in both cases connected with manuscript research on medieval Jain literature.
Much of Brown's
scholarship between 1929 and 1941 focused on medieval Shvetambara illustrated manuscripts. In part, this represented an obvious continuity with his earlier interest in narrative literature and his work at Johns Hopkins. But whereas the other scholars were concerned solely with the literary aspects of this study, Brown integrated the study of the narratives with the study of the lavish illustrations of many of the manuscripts of the narrative texts. He described the genesis of this interest as follows:
"One December morning in 1922 there appeared at my door in Benares [Banaras] a man asking if I would purchase a manuscript. He unwrapped a cloth and showed me a book of brightly illuminated folios, written with gold ink on a specially prepared background of red, black, or blue, and enriched with seven primitive paintings of brilliant colour and skilled craftsmanship. The purchase was completed as soon as the price was named and this 'jewel' became my possession.
It was the first illustrated Indian