Dr. Aditya "Adi" Behl, associate professor of South Asia Studies, passed away on August 22, 2009, as a result of a chronic medical condition at the age of 42.

Adi was born in Jabalpur, India on 16^th December, 1966. He received his Secondary school education from The Doon School in Dehradun, India. He earned a BA in 1988 at Bowdoin college. He attended the University of Chicago where he was awarded both his Master’s in religious studies in 1989 and his PhD in 1995. Dr Behl taught Urdu and Hindi literature and the medieval cultural history of South Asia. He taught in the department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley until his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. As associate professor, Dr Behl went on to chair the department of South Asia studies for several years, seeing it through major transitions with vision and leadership. Dr. Behl’s scholarly interest was in Indo Muslim literature and culture of South Asia, particularly Sufi romances, but his competencies ranged across the history, religion, and the literatures of the sub continent and the fields of literary theory and religious studies. He published a translation with Simon Weightman of Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance in 2000 (Oxford), and this year had completed a translation of Mrgavati and large parts of a study on Sufi Romances to be called Hindavi Sufi Romances, Shadows of Paradise: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition. Before his passing away, he wrote a major review essay on Sanskrit literature, “Sanskrit’s Hidden Gold” which was featured on the cover of the Times Literary Supplement.

“Beyond these major works and a number of influential scholarly articles, Dr Behl was known for his Love of Hindustani music, and his deep knowledge of Hindi and Urdu literature, which he often recited to the pleasure of his listeners,” according to Professor Daud Ali, chair of South Asia Studies. “He was, without a doubt, one of the leading scholarly lights of his generation, widely known and deeply loved by his teachers, students, colleagues alike. At Penn, his service to both the school and the cause of South Asia was considerable, and he worked tirelessly to ensure that Penn remained among the top institutions in the field of South Asian Studies.”

Dr. Behl is survived by his parents, Col. S.K. Behl and Mrs Purnima Behl, his sister Aradhna Behl, Brother-in-law Ashwani Nagpal and nephew Anhad.

Autobiographical Account

I grew up passionate about literature, and knew early on that I wanted to spend my life reading and writing. My childhood was spent in a military family in India, in various places, and I finished my primary education in a boarding school in a valley in the Himalayas. An avid reader, I was approached by a football jock who wished to come to the United States for college and asked if, supplied with a fake identity card, I would take the Scholastic Aptitude Test for him. Curious, I asked what it entailed. Although the sample tests did not look impossible, I refused the request. A friend commented that I may like to take the SAT myself, but my career goal at that time was to read English Honours at Delhi University and become a novelist. Another friend suggested that many people were applying to colleges in the States, so, on a lark, I decided to send in applications to four colleges, one from each ranked category in Barron’s Guide. To my surprise, upon finishing school I was offered full scholarships by the top three: Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, and Hampshire College. Although I had secured admissions at Delhi University, I chose Bowdoin and arrived there in fall 1984. Similarly, my choice of major was quirky. I had thought to study English literature, but at orientation a charismatic classics professor invited me to his Greek class, and I enrolled. I discovered that I loved learning languages, and certainly coming from a family where Hindi, Urdu, Panjabi, and English were all spoken made it easier. Soon, I signed up for Latin as well, and had a blissful time reading Classics for my undergraduate degree.

At college, Terence’s motto about not supposing anything human to be foreign resonated strongly with me. I was President of the International Club and started a house where foreign and American students lived together. I also edited Bowdoin’s literary magazine, and ended my college career with a string of literary prizes. At the same time, there was in me a growing fascination with the country I had left behind, largely taken for granted while growing up. Courses in Indian religions and philosophy sparked my interest in the rich classical traditions of the subcontinent, and in my senior year I took up Sanskrit. I was also intrigued by Urdu poetry, and taught myself the script through the transliteration chart in an anthology of love lyrics. Although I graduated summa cum laude, with Highest Honours in Classics, and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, I left Classics to explore the worlds that I felt remained yet to be discovered in India. I started learning Persian in the summers in Delhi, and applied to graduate schools for South Asian studies. Again, I had a choice of three institutions, which : UC-Berkeley,  the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago. At Chicago, where I ended up, I had to choose between departments: History of Religions or South Asian Languages and Civilizations. I chose the former, thinking that Indian literature offered fewer academic opportunities than comparative religions. It was a wise choice, for it broadened me in numerous ways and gave me the training to cope with the religious aspects of much Indian literature, on which I have actually spent most of my teaching career.  I continued studying literatures: Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Hindi, and won a distinction in the Divinity School’s rigorous roster of qualifying examinations. I also edited a special double issue on the current scene in Indian literature for the journal Chicago Review, which became Penguin’s anthology of contemporary Indian literatures for the decade of the nineties (The Penguin New Writing in India, 1995).

In graduate school, I was actively involved with literature in its broadest sense, with analytical processes surrounding religious and cultural comparison, and with translation and identity. These literary and religious explorations were supplemented by a growing concern with politics and history, and all these interests shaped my studies with gifted teachers such as Wendy Doniger, A. K. Ramanujan, Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Inden, Sheldon Pollock, and others. Fascinated by the allure of the poetic text, I chose to focus my doctoral thesis on a single Hindavī Sufi romance, the Madhumalatī of Shaikh Manjhan Shattarī. The literary tradition was largely unknown and unjustly neglected, for two succeeding imperialisms, the Mughal and the British, and two modern nationalisms,  Indian and Pakistani, had done their best to wipe out and to misrepresent the cultural remains of the past. In my last year at Chicago, while still writing my thesis, I was hired to teach Hindi and Urdu at Berkeley. I was awarded the doctorate in 1995, after my first year of teaching.

As an assistant professor at Berkeley, I spent the next few years broadening my study of a single text into a study of the genre as a whole. In confronting one of the obscurest and most productive periods of premodern Indian cultural history, the pre-Mughal, I came face-to-face with the cultural effects of the partition of the subcontinent, which had occasioned my own family’s migration from the newly founded Islamic republic of Pakistan in 1947. I began to connect in my own mind the meanings of growing up in the afterglow of empire with my own research interest in what came before British colonialism, and to realize that my own scholarly responsibility lay in countering the growing tide of fundamentalist and essentialist readings of the past. I produced two books in that period, a verse translation of the Madhumalati, published with Simon Weightman at SOAS as an Oxford World’s Classic in 2000, and a larger monograph on the literary tradition comprising readings of the major romances of the genre, arranged chronologically. Although my writings won me tenure at Berkeley, Penn, and Minnesota, I chose to linger on the monograph because I felt that the precise mechanism of allegorical signification, a problem that had been obscure to critics since 1896, remained elusive.
Therefore, I spent the academic year 2000-01 at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, working on a different project: notions of religious difference in Mughal India and the translation of social and linguistic differences into categories for comparison. I was concerned to investigate the sources of South Asian  pluralism and to test the thesis of the Mughal period as characterized by tolerance. I ended up by focusing on a Persian encyclopaedia of religions from the seventeenth century, the Dabistan-e Mazahib (‘The School of Religious Faiths’).I found that the surface ecumenicism of the text covered a range of complex interpretative procedures: inclusion, exclusion, classification, translation, exegesis, hierarchization, and polemic. The encyclopaedia is likely to be the focus of a second monograph, on historical sources for pluralism and tolerance in India. An article is forthcoming in an important edited collection on forms of knowledge in early modern South Asia.

The year 2001 also saw a switch in institutional allegiance, as I was invited to join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in order to rebuild a great tradition of South Asian studies. Penn is heir to the oldest articulation of area studies in the United States, dating back to 1948, and to a tradition of Sanskrit philology inaugurated in 1880. Both traditions had fallen into desuetude in the 1990′s, with multiple retirements and the need for an intellectual and institutional rearticulation. As Chair of the Department of South Asia Studies, I have put in place a new ‘languages and disciplines’ model which preserves the best of the older models while letting in novel ideas from the post-Orientalist world. I have also seen the department through a generational turnover. While I have been happy to serve my university in the vital task of rebuilding an institutional  context, the last five years have also been spent without research or writing leave. Despite this, however, I have made major breakthroughs in my study of the genre of the HindavYen Sufi romance. In particular, cracking the narrative code of the quest as inner journey through my nearly-complete translation of another romance, the Mirigavati of Qutban, has been an exciting scholarly accomplishment. These findings were presented in a series of lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in summer 2005, and I am impatient to finish the book next year. I feel lucky to have spent my life in intellectual exploration, and look forward to discovering more brave new worlds.

In Memoriam: A personal note written by Shail Mayaram, Visiting Professor, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla

This has been a bad month. A fortnight ago, going over old newspapers I chanced upon Harsh Mander’s obituary of Ram Narayan Kumar. I had only met Ram a couple of times, but each time it was in the context of a workshop/seminar where acquaintance can sometimes become extraordinarily deep and where one learns of another persons interests, passions, questions articulated in speech and writing, in conference sessions and over lunch and dinner. Ram was exploring the underside of the state via law, a human rights perspective indispensable to organisations like the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR).

Then one morning Naim saab became the bearer of unsettling news, we have lost Aditya Behl. One of the most talented young scholars in his early 40s, Aditya became known for his work in Persian and Urdu but he was at home in many languages including Sanskrit, French, Greek and Hindi. Aditya was the bearer of intimations of being Hindu and Muslim, which are perhaps lost except to a few persons/communities in our times.

Dazzling in his scholarship, repertoire and bearing, Aditya had carved out for himself an area of expertise in the genre of Sufi romances. He was one of the successors to the scholarship of an entire generation including Annemarie Schimmel, Christopher Shackle, Carl Ernst, Bruce Lawrence and Simon Digby (who accompanied him on some of his travels).

I met Aditya for the first time at the University of Chicago in the winter of 1990-91. He was deeply into Sufi studies (much before the subject had become fashionable!). I was then distant from South Asian studies, and instead immersed in European theories of state formation. He spoke to me of the patronage of Mughal and Maratha rulers of Gwalior and Indore and the creativity of sufis.

Over the last twenty years my own area of interest has developed in Muslim identities in Persian/Urdu/Rajasthani texts and the Hindu-Muslim city and I have come to deeply appreciate Aditya’s understanding of facets of Hindu-Muslim relations. I was enthralled by his translation of Mir Sayyid Manjhan Rajgiri, Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi romance, done in collaboration with Simon Weightman and published in the Oxford classics series.

In the last decade our interests grew closer. He was also mining the medieval Rajput-Charan texts that I was using. When I convened a double panel on the Universes of Indian Islam for the Conference on Indic religions, which my colleague, Madhu Kishwar, was organizing, Aditya’s was one of the first names that came to my mind. Illness-presaging perhaps the present moment-came in the way of his participation.

In September 2006 he gave a Seminar at CSDS on the Dabistān-i mazāhib, an Encyclopedia of Religion. By then he was holding the chair of South Asian Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. It had been a long day at work, but the seminar was invigorating. I have in my notes of that evening the words, “As always I like his work and the way it opens up a vista.” The Dabistān-i Mazāhib is a 17th century text, “authored” by a Zorastrian who has a surface duplex identity with two names, Zu’lfaqar Ardistani and Husaini Shah. The author identifies various groups such as Zorastrians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims. The “Hindus” refer to a geographic category and include a variety of sects, Aditya pointed out. The Zorastrian group from Azerkhaiban had suffered persecution under the Safavids and had come to practice taqiyā-using the tools of the conqueror against them. Aditya read the text in terms not of identity but as difference. My question for him had been that instead of the incommensurable difference he read, the text suggested to me numerous encounters and conversations: the reference to yogic breathing and other techniques; the Prophet being described as a disciple of Gorakhnath who taught him yoga; the description of Sarmad’s identity who is a Jew-Sufi. There is a reference to divisions, of course, that China and India will send forces that will reverse the Muslim expansion! The larger picture is of the Mughal Empire with its imperial bureaucracy in place, its agricultural productivity and considerable prosperity, and hence, the movement of holy men. I debated with him later that material prosperity alone does not explain this movement, particularly when it comes to holy men in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. What one needs to know more about is the popular support for holy men, the interaction between the village/town and these figures. I recall on the occasion Shuddhabrata’s comments that the last group of Mutazzilites was in Patna and that this was a period conducive to the writing of such “encyclopedias.”

In the last few years Aditya had become interested in the figure of Nazir Akbarabadi (1735-1830), immortalized in Habib Tanvir’s play Āgrā Bāzār. Nazir, the proponent of the language of the street and the bazaar, the poet of the carnivalesque kite flying and Holi festivals, the portrayer of vendors such as the watermelon seller, and of the sensual. He presented his work at the Delhi School of Economics and later wrote it up in, “Poet of the bazaars: Nazir Akbarabadi 1735-1830.” This was published in A wilderness of possibilities-Urdu studies in transnational perspective, edited by Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld. Aditya in this paper is interested in the formation of the Urdu literary canon, how Nazir’s verse was seen as vulgar by Mustafa Khan Shefta, characterized as “psychological impotence” by Shamsur-rahman Faruqi and seen as distant from the “high-minded Islamic revivalism” of Altaf Husain Hali. His interest was in Nazir’s poems on pleasure and how it requires a sensual sensibility, quite anamolous for the Urdu canon.

Aditya, I miss you already, the many conversations real and imagined that we had and could have had. You opened for the English reader a magical, miraculous world of medieval Sufi poetry, the premākhyāns notably Manjhan’s Madhumālati, Jayasi’s Padmāvat and Qutban’s Mrigavatī. A glorious Sufic contribution to Hindavi, but also to Brajbhasha and Avadhi and of thinking beyond “religion.”

You were an exceptionally talented person and explored a beautiful universe. Now you know more than any of us, what its deepest secrets are, of fanā and baqā, and the truths of wahdat ul wujūud and Alakh Niranjan!!