Limli, and a Saurashtra childhood

Sukhlal Sanghvi was born on 8 December 1880 in Limli, a village in the Saurashtra region of western India that lies today in Surendranagar district of Gujarat. It was a small settlement of the kind found across the peninsula, ringed by dry fields and dependent on the rains, and it stood within a countryside where Jain merchant and farming families had lived for centuries alongside their neighbours. He was born into such a Jain household, and the religious culture of that home, with its emphasis on restraint, scriptural learning and the authority of the ascetic teacher, provided the first materials of a life that would be given entirely to the study of texts. Nothing in the circumstances of the village suggested an academic career; there were no libraries and no schools of philosophy, and the learning available to a boy was the learning of the local religious establishment.

What followed makes the connection between the man and the village all the more striking. From Limli he moved outward to Varanasi, Mithila, Agra and Ahmedabad, and ended his life as one of the most respected interpreters of Indian philosophy of his century. He is remembered across India by an honorific rather than a place name, as Pandit Sukhlalji, but the village of his birth remains the fixed starting point of every account of him.

The loss of sight

At the age of sixteen Sukhlal contracted smallpox and lost his eyesight. In a village household at the close of the nineteenth century, the loss would ordinarily have ended any prospect of a livelihood requiring literacy, and it might reasonably have ended his education as well. Instead it marked the beginning of his scholarly life. Everything he afterwards achieved as an editor of manuscripts, a translator of difficult philosophical texts and a comparative philosopher was accomplished without sight.

The practical method was demanding and unhurried. Texts were read aloud to him by assistants, often many times over, and he composed, dictated and corrected through scribes; corrections to a critical edition, where a single syllable may decide a reading, had to be held in the mind and returned to from memory. Over decades he built a command of Sanskrit, Prakrit and Gujarati sources so complete that scholars who worked with him described a memory that functioned as a working library. He came to be known by the epithet Pragnachakshu, a name given to a person whose insight serves in place of eyes, and the title stayed with him for the rest of his life. His example gave the phrase an unusually literal meaning: the great editions bearing his name were prepared by a man who never saw a page of them.

Banaras, Mithila and the making of a scholar

In 1904 he joined the Shri Yashovijaya Jain Sanskrit Pathshala at Banaras, the traditional centre of Sanskrit learning on the Ganges, where he studied Sanskrit and Prakrit grammar together with logic and philosophy. The training there was of the older kind, conducted through the memorisation and oral exposition of foundational texts and their commentaries, a method well suited to a student who worked by ear. In 1911 he travelled to Mithila, in northern Bihar, long celebrated as a home of Indian logic, to study under the scholar Balakrishna Mishra. He continued his studies afterwards at Varanasi and at Agra.

These years gave his scholarship its distinguishing character. He did not read the Jain tradition in isolation. He worked through Buddhist and Brahminical philosophical literature with equal seriousness, and he habitually set the schools against one another, tracing how an argument formulated in one tradition was answered, absorbed or reshaped in another. That comparative habit, unusual among the sectarian scholars of his generation, is what later readers have valued most in his work, and it was matched by a rationalist and reformist temper: he was impatient with claims that could not be argued for, and he read his own tradition with candour rather than apology.

Teaching and the great editions

From 1922 he served as professor of Indian philosophy at the Puratattva Mandir of the Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad, the institution founded by Mahatma Gandhi, where research into Indian antiquity was pursued alongside the national educational programme. From 1934 to 1944 he held the chair of Jain philosophy at Banaras Hindu University, returning as a professor to the city where he had first studied as a young man without sight.

His editorial work is the core of his reputation. He produced a critical edition in five volumes of the Sanmatitarka of Siddhasena Divakara, one of the central works of Jain logic, an undertaking of textual scholarship on a scale rarely attempted. He prepared a Gujarati and Hindi translation with commentary of the Tattvarthasutra, the compact treatise that functions as a common doctrinal foundation for Jains of every denomination, making it accessible to readers without Sanskrit. He edited Hemachandra's Pramana-mimamsa, the medieval treatise on the means of valid knowledge, with detailed explanatory notes. And in an act of scholarly generosity beyond the boundaries of his own tradition, he edited the Tattvopaplavasimha of Jayarashi Bhatta, one of the very few surviving works of the Charvaka or materialist school, a body of thought known otherwise almost entirely through the hostile summaries of its opponents. His Gujarati essays were gathered in the collection Darshan ane Chintan, which brought his philosophical thinking to a general readership.

Honours and legacy

Recognition arrived steadily over three decades. He received the Vijai Dharm Soori Jain Sahitya gold medal in 1947 and an honorary doctorate of letters from Gujarat University in 1957. In 1958 the Sahitya Akademi honoured Darshan ane Chintan with its annual award. In 1961 the Government of India granted him a pension and a Sanskrit certificate in acknowledgement of his services to learning. Further honorary doctorates followed from Sardar Patel University in 1967 and Saurashtra University in 1973, the latter from the region of his birth. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974, and in 1975 Nav Nalanda Mahavihara conferred on him the title Vidya Varidhi, an ocean of learning.

He died on 2 March 1978, in his ninety-eighth year. The editions he prepared remain in use by scholars of Indian philosophy, and his comparative approach helped move the study of Jain thought from a devotional exercise into the mainstream of philosophical scholarship. For Limli, the village where he was born and where he began an ordinary rural childhood, the association is with a man who lost his sight at sixteen and spent the following eighty years reading, through other people's voices, some of the most difficult books written in India.