Adriaan Scharpe (1913-1986)

 

I was his last student. And ever so proud to be this. How would you feel, when having the unique opportunity to spend a half day a week in private tuition, for two consecutive years, with one of the most outstanding international authorities in your field?

Indeed, Scharpe's academic credentials are impressive: After his studies in classical philology, he moved on to Utrecht (1939) to study Indo-Iranic philology with professor Jan Gonda (1905-1991). After a brief stint as a Latin language teacher in Berchem (Antwerpen), he joined Ghent University in 1942, where he would be teaching Sanskrit, Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, and the history of Asia until his retirement in 1980 - all the time developing excellence and an outstanding international reputation as one of the world's foremost experts in classical Sanskrit in general, and the works of Banabhatta (7th century) and Kalidasa (4th-6th century) in particular.

Professor Scharpe was the ideal guru for a student wanting to acquire an in-depth insight into Sanskrit grammar and literature in the shortest possible time. Ideal, yes, but demanding. I will never forget the kind the kind of shivers I felt all over my body when we had our first sessions together. I was expected to have learnt his almost mathematically brief but absolutely comprehensive grammatical overview In Usum Tironum (1970) by heart in the course of the first three months, after which we dived right into Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa, a masterpiece sometimes considered near-illegible by even the advanced scholar of Sanskrit, reading a twenty-odd verses per session, discussing each and every word, syntactical oddity, and poetical metaphore.

But, rather to his surprise and amazement, I kept coming to our appointments. It was the late seventies, la meglio gioventu!, the university campus was in turmoil and often simply not reachable, with students revolting, all of us in an Arafat shawl and Che Guevara buttoned outfit marching through the streets, being gunned away by the water cannons of the gendarmerie, shouting Neen aan de afbraak van de sociale sector van het onderwijs! (No! to downsizing the social services at the university!) - but, even if I was openly sympathetic to the student movement, I broke every student strike by going to my weekly Sanskrit appointments.

Nulla dies sine linea!, Professor Scharpe always told me: Work hard, reading at least one verse every day, 365 days a year, and the secrets of Sanskrit will come to you without ado. Do not study for exams, he said, for if you have worked all along there will be nothing extra to gain from this.

Apart from lessons in life galore, from Professor Scharpe I acquired my life-long love affair with maps. Being an ardent admirer of the Geographical Survey of India, and having devoted years of study and published articles (1965-1966) on the famous Degree Sheets (1905) and their relevance to philology, he never let go of an opportunity to share this passion with his students, and the practice of mentally travelling through a mapped world is a habit of mine which I owe exclusively to having had the honour to be his shiksha.

But most of all, what I learned from him is the insight that the essence of life is within every being, notwithstanding differences of cultural background. For instance: doing away with the Devanagari script in the study of Sanskrit, which he considered no less than a waste of time and energy, the Sanskrit literature as offered by Scharpe was one of a truly super-cultural nature, coming to me in a way as normal as if it would have been Homer, or Horatius, or Ovid. With Professor Scharpe, Indian and Asian literature and culture became part of one common cultural stream, flowing over and around the globe, border-less and universal - in which cultural and religious differences were mere trifles of coincidence, in no way bothering the core essence of humanity. In short, a vision which is subsctribed by Dunya to this day.

Links:

Scharpe books - Banabhatta - Kalidasa - Geographical Survey of India

- Francis Laleman -