End of a spectacular intellectual dynasty

Sad news of the death of prominent sociologist, writer, and translator Meera Kosambi, in Pune on February 26, was received as
a double blow in her ancestral Goa. Many friends and admirers did not know she was ailing. The news was a shock.
There was also immediate recognition that an era had passed—76-year-old Meera Kosambi was the last living link to the prodigious intellectual legacy of her father, D D Kosambi, and her grandfather, Dharmanand Kosambi, who set out on foot from Sancoale in Goa in 1899 to found one of the greatest intellectual dynasties of the 20th century.
Every Indian schoolchild learns about the Tagores, but very few are taught about the Kosambis, despite three generations of truly exceptional achievement backed by pioneering work in multiple fields of research and scholarship. This ‘recognition gap’ can be attributed to the fact that the Kosambis stood alone, usually far ahead of their contemporaries.
Meera’s description of her grandfather aptly summarizes the family character: “solitary thinker(s)… refusal to court public adulation, coupled with plain-speaking and unwillingness to compromise.”
The combined story of the Kosambis is almost unbelievable.
Dharmanand’s powerful thirst for knowledge—first, about Buddhism—led him to leave his wife and infant daughter and walk out from Sancoale across the border of Portuguese India to Pune, then Varanasi, where he learned Sanskrit while subsisting like a mendicant.
He trudged to Nepal to study Pali, then to Sri Lanka where he was ordained a Buddhist monk. By 1910, he was working at Harvard University in the USA. After learning Russian, this intrepid Goan scholar went on to teach at Leningrad University as well.
Dharmanand returned to India to participate in the freedom struggle against the British. He was imprisoned for six years for his key role in the salt satyagraha. But he continued to write and teach about Buddhism—his influence led B R Ambedkar to convert.
When he sought to give up his life through voluntary fasting just before independence, Mahatma Gandhi prevailed upon him to reconsider, but Dharmanand was steadfast. He died at Sevagram in June 1947.
In the introduction to her masterly translations of ‘the essential writings’ of Dharmanand, Meera acknowledged: “I did not
know my grandfather”, but sought to “claim him as an intellectual ancestor”.
She did meet him as a child, and her rigorous, sensitive approach to translating his writings from Marathi —especially the spellbinding autobiographical ‘Nivedan’ —more than demonstrates a powerful connection.
Even stronger ties bound the adamantine scholar D D Kosambi to his devoted daughter.
Her last book ‘Unsettling the Past: Unknown Aspects and Scholarly Assessments of D D Kosambi’, was released in Goa in December 2013.
Meera’s father was a spectacular polymath with major contributions to the study of ancient history, mathematics, Sanskrit literature, numismatics, and energy policy.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1929, before returning to India and writing a long series of highly original papers—backed by painstaking, innovative fieldwork—that define the meaning of ‘Renaissance Man’.
Just as Meera’s terrific translations of her grandfather’s work have proven integral to Dharmanand Kosambi’s continuing relevance, her collection of D D Kosambi’s writings secured her father’s place in history.
The three essays on solar energy alone illustrate how far ahead he was of his time. If India had heeded him instead of his some-time nemesis Homi Bhabha, there is no doubt the country would be far ahead today.
The youngest link in the Kosambi intellectual chain was much more than merely the champion of her father and grandfather.
Meera was a strikingly distinctive feminist thinker and writer, as well as one of the most meticulous scholars and translators
of her generation.
Her books on urbanization, on media analysis, on social history and social ecology are formidable contributions, as are her books about the intriguing transnational trail-blazer, Pandita Ramabai.
Meera loved Goa, and also loved Konkani which she delighted in speaking on trips to Goa. Like her amazing father and grandfather, she was surprisingly shy and reticent at first meeting, but then crackled with humour and phenomenal intelligence.
Visiting Goa in 2012, Meera startled a young Kashmiri delegate to the festival she was attending by reading the couplet from ‘Faiz’ written in Urdu on his T-shirt, then quoting the rest of the verse from memory.
Then the septuagenarian insisted on accompanying the youth to see the ocean for the first time, walking the length of Miramar beach with a happy smile on her face, lit up by the last rays of a glorious sunset.