Bibek Debroy loved his dogs as much as he ever loved any book. It is forgotten today that one of his early pioneering books was on dogs in Indian itihasa texts and scriptures.
Every meal with him that I ever had in a restaurant ended with the call for a doggy bag for his dog-children. Always a sparse eater, Bibekda, as we called him adding the honorific usually given to an elder brother, was careful about what he wanted to eat, and in recent days, as his health faltered, avoided anything with spices. But whatever the ailment or discomfort, he had a ready quip about it.
On a recent visit to my home, when guards at the gate did some usual writing on the register for visitors, and Bibekda had already spent some time in traffic getting there, he told me while getting off the car, "Well, they were asking for the histories of the ancestors but I did not have that readily available."
This quip was delivered straight-faced. This was his style. At best, when even he thought his quip was too funny, there would be a smile at the corner of his face.
When I asked him too many questions, he sometimes teased me with the words of the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam:
“Ami Chalo-Chanchol, Thomoki Chhomoki
Poth jete jete chokite chomoki
Fing diya dei tin dol;
Ami chapola-chapol Hindol”.
("I am always restless, I move and dance,
Suddenly on my feverish path, I swing, leap,
And make three somersaults.
I'm always-moving Hindol.")
Bibekda, always exuding an ineffable calm, knew that my mother had named me after Nazrul's words, and he enjoyed laughing at my restlessness. This was a calm he brought in many lives. He had created a certain centredness within himself amid the relentless work that he had taken up in his life translating vast texts, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas and the many Gitas.
In a world where noted authors remain in their own realm, Bibekda assisted almost every young author who ever approached him. Volumes can be written about all the people, many of whom never even met him, but wrote to him for advice on various things, from understanding policies to nuances of various Hindu texts and documents, research that they might be doing, and intricacies they were finding hard to comprehend.
Facts, ideas, arguments poured out of his encyclopaedic mind ceaselessly, a Ganga of civilisational knowledge in which we all dipped in from time to time to understand ourselves better.
Bibekda had the patience to explain, to anyone who asked, word by word, line by line of different verses of various shlokas to help people understand the deeper, hidden meanings of our endless wealth of spiritual knowledge.
To listen to him was to see the mantras and the shlokas come alive and address our everyday lives, our needs, our failings and our wants. More than any other person in contemporary India, Bibek Debroy worked to make timeless Indian texts available in the English language for audiences both at home, around the world, and across age groups.
Countless people who do not read Sanskrit got access to original material — and not interpreted by someone else — from the source of our ancient texts in a manner and format that they could easily comprehend all because of the tireless work of Bibek Debroy.
I once spent hours discussing some paintings in his house, especially one magnificent painting of Bhairava Baba. The conversation moved to secrets rites and rituals in shakti peeths in different parts of the country and his own experience in travelling to various such shrines, and what he had seen and learnt there, and his interpretations of these experiences using vast scriptural knowledge.
It is said that one of the great traditions of Bharat is that no one ever returned home empty-handed from the home of the truly wise, and this was true of Bibek Debroy. No one ever left his presence without having learnt something new.
(Hindol Sengupta is a historian and author.)
