Venkataraman Raghavan

Venkataraman Raghavan (1908–1979) was a Sanskrit scholar and musicologist. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Padma Bhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Award for Sanskrit, and authored over 120 books and 1200 articles

He authored several books on music and on aesthetics in Sanskrit .

In 1963, he edited and translated Bhoja’s Srngara-prakasa, a treatise in 36 chapters dealing with both poetics and dramaturgy, and the largest known work in Sanskrit poetics.For this work and his commentary, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Sanskrit in 1966. He was awarded the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1969.It was later published as volume 53 of the Harvard Oriental Series in 1998.

He translated into Sanskrit Rabindranath Tagore first drama, Valmiki Pratibha, which deals with the transformation of Valmiki from a bandit into a poet.

He discovered and edited an ancient Sanskrit play, Udatta Raghavam by Mayuraja.

He founded an organisation, Samskrita Ranga in 1958, that deals with Sanskrit theatre and has enacted Sanskrit plays.

He was known both for his command of primary texts and for making them accessible through his articles and commentaries.

He worked on The New Catalogus Catalogorum(NCC), the major project of his official career; toured Europe in 1953-54 and besides attending International Conferences, prepared an inventory of 20,000 uncatalogued manuscripts there and a survey of Sanskrit and Indological studies in Europe; toured U.S.S.R. in 1958 and 1974 visited for lectures, conferences, study and examination of manuscripts collections, the Countries of East and South East Asia, Australia, Mauritius, Canada and Mexico and visited Nepal twice for manuscripts Study.

As a musicologist, he specialized in Carnatic music. He was the secretary of the Music Academy, Madras from 1944 until his death. A “Dr. V. Raghavan Research Centre” has since been named after him.