Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
.
Early life
Ingalls was born in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
and raised in
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...
. He received his A.B. in 1936, at Harvard majoring in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century" ...
He was appointed a junior fellow in the
Harvard Society of Fellows
The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intell ...
in 1939 after which he set off for
Calcutta
Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, the official name until 2001) is the Capital city, capital of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal, on the eastern ba ...
for the study of
Navya-Nyāya
The Navya-Nyāya or Neo-Logical ''darśana'' (view, system, or school) of Indian logic and Indian philosophy was founded in the 13th century CE by the philosopher Gangeśa Upādhyāya of Mithila and continued by Raghunatha Siromani of Nabadwi ...
logic with Kalipada Tarkacharya (1938–41).
His fellowship was interrupted by the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
during which he served as an Army code breaker decoding Japanese radio messages for the Office of Strategic Services (1942–44).
After the war, Ingalls returned to Harvard as Wales Professor of Sanskrit. He was particularly known for his translation and commentary in ''An Anthology of Sanskrit Court
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
'', which contains some 1,700 Sanskrit verses collected by a Buddhist abbot, Vidyākara, in
Bengal
Bengal ( ; bn, বাংলা/বঙ্গ, translit=Bānglā/Bôngô, ) is a geopolitical, cultural and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal, predom ...
around AD 1050. Ingalls was a student of the Indian grammarian
Shivram Dattatray Joshi
Shivram Dattatray Joshi (1926–2013) also known as S. D. Joshi, was an Indian Sanskrit scholar and grammarian based in Pune, Maharashtra.
Life
Personal life
Joshi was born in a family of Sanskrit scholars in Ratnagiri in Konkan, Maharashtra. ...
, and the teacher of many famous students of Sanskrit, such as
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born November 20, 1940) is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include, 'The Hindus: an alternative history'; ' ...
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born March 28, 1941 as Jeffrey Lloyd Masson) is an American author. Masson is best known for his conclusions about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. In his ''The Assault on Truth'' (1984), Masson argues that Freud may ha ...
,
Bimal Krishna Matilal
Bimal Krishna Matilal (1 June 1935 – 8 June 1991) was an eminent British-Indian philosopher whose writings presented the Indian philosophical tradition as a comprehensive system of logic incorporating most issues addressed by themes in Weste ...
,
Robert Thurman
Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman (born August 3, 1941) is an American Buddhist author and academic who has written, edited, and translated several books on Tibetan Buddhism. He was the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at ...
,
Sheldon Pollock
Sheldon I. Pollock (born 1948) is an American scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history. He is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. He was ...
,
Karl Harrington Potter
Karl Harrington Potter (August 19, 1927 – January 11, 2022) was an American-born writer, academic, and Indologist, from the University of Washington. He studied at the University of California, as well as Harvard University and is known for hi ...
Indira Viswanathan Peterson __NOTOC__
Indira may refer to:
People
* Indira (name)
Films and books
* ''Indira'', an 1873 novella by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
* ''Indira'' (film), directed by Suhasini Manirathnam
* ''Indira'' (1989 film), a Hindi film (Hema malini as Indir ...
, David Pingree, and Gary Tubb. He was renowned for the rigor of his introductory Sanskrit course. He was the editor of the Harvard Oriental Series from 1950 to 1983. He was an elected member of the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
.
Ingalls was the father of the computer scientist
Dan Ingalls
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr. (born 1944) is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that ...
and the author
Rachel Ingalls
Rachel Holmes Ingalls (13 May 1940 – 6 March 2019) was an American-born author who had lived in the United Kingdom from 1965 onwards.
He was also chairman of the department of Sanskrit and Indian studies and president of the American Oriental Society.
An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry
Volume 44 of the Harvard Oriental Series, 'An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry', is the acclaimed English translation by Ingalls of the Sanskrit text 'Subhasitaratnakosa' of Vidyakara. The book has a lengthy introduction by Ingalls containing an incisive analysis of the structure of the Sanskrit language, and also of Ingalls's perspective on Sanskrit literature in general, and Sanskrit poetry in particular. It also has a section titled 'On the Passing of Judgements' in which Ingalls criticizes some critics of Sanskrit poetry.
Criticism of nineteenth and twentieth century western Sanskritists
Ingalls writes that after the initial excitement at the discovery of Sanskrit literature, which produced the enthusiastic and positive reviews of British Sanskritists like Hastings and
Sir William Jones
Sir William Jones (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was a British philologist, a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India. He is particularly known for his proposition of th ...
, there was a long period in which English writers subjected Sanskrit literature to the literary canons of their own land. By doing this their judgements were sometimes "monstrous" according to Ingalls. The Sanskritist
Fitzedward Hall
Fitzedward Hall (21 March 1825 - 1 February 1901) was an American Orientalist, and philologist. He was the first American to edit a Sanskrit text, and was an early collaborator in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (OED) project.
Life
Hall was b ...
, writes Ingalls, being troubled by the sometimes erotic imagery in the poetry of the Sanskrit poet Subandhu, exclaimed that Subandhu "was no better, at the very best, than a specious savage" and A. A. Macdonell according to Ingalls found nothing to say of the great Sanskrit poets Bharavi and Magha except that they favored 'verbal tricks and metrical puzzles". The judgement of these scholars, explains Ingalls, was clouded with bias in as much as it was based on nineteenth century western morals and nineteenth century western notions of literature. "At no point was it enlightened by reference to the critical literature of Sanskrit itself", writes Ingalls. Ingalls then goes on to criticize the British scholar
Arthur Berriedale Keith
Arthur Berriedale Keith (5 April 1879 – 6 October 1944) was a Scottish constitutional lawyer, scholar of Sanskrit and Indologist. He became Regius Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology and Lecturer on the Constitution of the Briti ...
of whom Ingalls writes that although Keith was a great scholar of Vedic studies and modern Indian law, 'it is obvious from his works that for the most part he disliked Sanskrit literature' and that 'of Keith's reading, it seems to me, no word ever passed beyond his head to the heart'. Ingalls notes that when criticizing Sanskrit poets, Keith never applies the remarks of any Sanskrit critic to the work he is judging.