Nirgrantha-2

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 13

well, he thought this was incorrect; 3) The overall approach in the writing, he felt, reflected a bias arising from the Svetambara standpoint. Dr. Jain was a master of Hindi language and had been teaching it at the University level. In the long correspondence that ensued, we clarified our position on all points he had raised: 1) The Hindi of the academic world in the northern provices is much too Sanskritized and to our sensing it at moments borders on artificiality. While in our writing we, for certain, had copiously used Sanskrit words, for bringing in the right shades of meaning and a greater degree of force together with elegance of prose, a few much too wellknown Urdu words were also employed in the phraseological constructions. (In point of fact, in Gujarati, hundreds of Arabic and Persian words have been absorbed. And nobody there ever had proposed, even contemplated, to kick them out and replace them by Sanskrit approximations !) Hindi, as a national tongue, is, by Constitutional provisions, assumption, and expection has to be facile and open enough to absorb words from other languages. So we had followed that dictum instead of steadfastly using the Hindi as prevalent in any particular province where it is a native language. (English is today the richest of all languages of the world because it has readily absorbed, and still continues to absorb, words from other languages.) 2) As for 'Harman' (f), that was the rendering in Nagari done by Dr. Jacobi himself as he had communicated it to Dr. Hiralal Rasikdas Kapadia, we explained to Dr. Jain. 3) In our write up, we had not taken sectarian stand but had criticised with impartiality and in equal measure the Śvetambara scholars (including the revered munis) as well as the Digambara learned writers, one group for their stark ignorance of facts and weak handling just as naïve explications they offered, the other for their sectarian approach and attitude. exhibiting undue self-righteousness. During my last meeting with Prof. Jain, I carried an impression that he had understood, and to a large extent conceded to, our views.
In one of the early meetings in Bombay, I had requested him to permit us to dedicate the second issue of the Nirgrantha as a felicitatory number to him, the first one was already decided by the Trustees to offer as congratulatory to Pt. Dalsukh Malvaniya. Prof. Jain agreed to my proposal, but, after a moment, was seen contemplative and next sunk into quiet sadness. (Was it a premonition that he will not see this number in print in his life time ?)
And we all were shocked when the news about his passing away reached Varanasi and Ahmedabad. The gloom was too profound, so much so that a mental numbness overpowered me for long months. The pleasure of preparing the Felicitatory Numberwhich, to our profound regret, had become Commemorative-suddenly had vanished. At last, we surrendered to the invariate reality and decided that we must dutifully restart working on it. We now publish it to his sacred memory as a mark of our profound reverence, the esteem in which we had held him, and as a token of admiration by all those who knew him. I, for one, will miss him and his very benign affection-radiating face as much as his kith and kin do, and still find it hard to reconcile with the fact of his absence which, alas, is now permanent.
M. A. Dhaky