Discovering My Grandfather

I’ve known my paternal grandfather Professor Krishnanand Pant only through photographs. Black and white photographs from another era on the walls of the vast house he left behind that bore his name - ‘Krishna Kutir’.  Growing up I learnt that that he was a learned man; the head of department of Hindi at what was then the prestigious Meerut College. 

I have grown up surrounded by books and the house in Meerut was no exception. Visiting the house during the holidays I was drawn towards the bookshelves and the many books in the house.  But amongst all the books there were many written in a script that my sister and I had never seen before. But to us children they were just strange and mysterious books and we never paid any attention to them. 

When my father passed away he left behind images of his life, old grainy black and white photographs painstakingly pasted in albums and scrapbooks. I’ve kept them all and at times I take them out and go through the pages. In his scrapbook there were news items and tributes paid to my grandfather after he passed away in his sixties. 

I had been always been curious to learn more about this man whose smiling face reminds me so much of my father and my father’s family. Sometimes when I laugh in a chortling manner I get reminded of my father's and uncle’s laugh and wonder whether my grandfather laughed like this too. 

There is one advantage of living in an information age. So through the power of Google with random searches over the years I have been able to gather bits and pieces of information. 

- Government gazettes from 1920 giving notifications of job appointments in universities. 

- Little snippets that brought forth some more information to light, teasing me but not enough. 

 Then this year while between projects I wanted to expand my my searches and did I find more information! I found that his name was listed in Sahitya Academy’s first edition of ‘Who’s Who of Indian Writers’ published in 1961 

 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.278465/page/n255/mode/2up

Now finding your grandfather’s name in such a prestigious institution was a proud moment that I shared with the extended family group that I have on Facebook. But this also gave me some concrete names for books to search. 

 I wanted to find the books that he had authored and I found two on archive.org. The major work is Prabandh Sagar co-authored with Pandit Yagyadatt Sharma This book can also be found on multiple websites https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.401740?view=theater 

 The next work that I found was Aalochna Ke Sidhant https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.346639 

The search for finding the books Hindi Sahitya ka Vikas and Kavya Dipika is still on and I hope to find them. 

Oh and those books in in the house? It turns out that he was also a Prakrit scholar and those books were written in that ancient language.  He was also a Sanskrit scholar and I found an acknowledgement of that in his colleague Professor B. R. Chatterji’s book on India and Java where my Grandfather had translated the Sanskrit inscriptions from Java, Sumatra and Borneo. 

 But these are all works of academic excellence, works to admire the scholarship of the man. But in my search I finally came across a very personal piece penned by him. About an incident that affected him greatly and reading these words I really felt as if my Grandfather was addressing me. Talking to me about something that left a lasting impression on him. This time I felt connected to the man in the photograph with a gentle smile that played across his lips. From page 25 onwards in the link https://www.anandamayi.org/anandavarta/Vol5No3.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0Z1wdB-skr804lQjb-rPKPzXWwIbZbp7yodMCF9roXe9bply_vMCkZz1g

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