I deeply mourn the passing away of Padma Shri Prof. Arvind Sharma, with whom I had the privilege of sharing a long and deep friendship for nearly thirty years, beginning with one of my early lecture tours of Canadian universities. His passing is a personal loss to me, but it is also a profound loss to the world of Indian scholarship.
Arvind ji was one of the tallest Indian academics teaching and writing in North America. His intellectual range was truly phenomenal. He was not merely an accomplished scholar of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, but he also possessed a remarkable command of the history and comparative study of religions, and had an unusually intimate acquaintance with Hindi literature and poetry. There was, moreover, a lesser-known artistic side to him. He was a skilled composer of Urdu ghazals. Three years ago, Kumud Diwan, the well-known classical singer, rendered some of his ghazals at a concert in Delhi. It was a delightful reminder that beneath the formidable scholar was a deeply sensitive and creative man.
His own intellectual journey was unusual. After serving in the Indian Administrative Service in Gujarat, he left the civil services to pursue higher studies in the United States. He studied economics at Syracuse University, theology at Harvard Divinity School, and eventually Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard, where he completed his doctoral work on the Bhagavadgītā. His academic career subsequently took him to Australia and, finally, to McGill University in Montreal, where he became Birks Professor of Comparative Religion. From there, for decades, he became one of the most important Indian voices in the academic study of religion in the West.
In my opinion, what distinguished Prof. Sharma was the delicate balance he maintained between the Euro-American academic perspective and the traditional Indian understanding of its own philosophical and religious texts. He could enter the most sophisticated debates of Western religious studies without surrendering the categories and insights of the Indian intellectual tradition. In this respect, his work was not simply a scholarship about India, but it was also an important exercise in allowing Indian philosophy to speak for itself in the wider world.
His oeuvre is enormous and innovative. Books such as The Experiential Dimension of Advaita Vedānta, Advaita Vedānta: An Introduction, Classical Hindu Thought, Modern Hindu Thought: The Essential Texts, Hinduism and Its Sense of History, The Study of Hinduism, Hinduism and Secularism, and The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedānta introduced generations of students and scholars to Indian philosophical traditions in a language accessible to the international academy. His Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography, Hinduism as a Missionary Religion, The Ruler’s Gaze, and Decolonizing Indian Studies demonstrated the extraordinary breadth of his concerns. He also edited or contributed to important comparative works such as Our Religions and Women in World Religions. His scholarship ranged from Advaita and Hindu thought to Buddhism, women and religion, human rights, secularism and the methodology of religious studies.
Arvind ji did something especially valuable for India: he carried Indian philosophical ideas into conversations in which they had too often been represented primarily through Western categories. Through his teaching at McGill and other universities, his books published by major international presses, and his participation in global interfaith and academic forums, he helped make Hindu philosophy, Advaita Vedanta and Indian approaches to religion part of serious international conversations. His involvement in global conferences on religion and human rights further showed his belief that India’s religious and philosophical traditions had something substantial to contribute to contemporary debates about humanity and ethics.
Of late, he had turned increasingly towards an analytical study of the Indian Smṛtis, producing important work on the Manusmṛti and even preparing a draft of a modern Smṛti in Sanskrit. This was characteristic of him: he never regarded the Indian tradition as a museum piece. He wanted to understand it historically, critically and sympathetically, and to ask how its intellectual resources might continue to speak to the present.
For nearly the last ten years, Arvind ji would spend his winter months in Delhi. During these visits he gave valuable talks, met scholars, encouraged younger researchers, and engaged everyone around him with his immense learning and quiet wisdom. Those winter months became, for many of us, a precious opportunity to listen to him and to remain connected with a mind that seemed to possess an almost inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge.
His life was a bridge between India and the world, between Sanskrit and the modern academy, between tradition and critical inquiry. Canada will remember a distinguished professor; the international academic world will remember a prolific scholar; India will remember one of its finest interpreters before the world; and I will remember him as a noble soul whose company enriched my understanding of philosophy and aesthetics.
He will be deeply missed in India and in Canada, and by his students, scholars and friends whose lives he touched, just like mine. I offer my heartfelt condolences to his family, colleagues and countless students.
May his atma attain sadgati!
