As told to Carey L Biron.
Years ago when I was a graduate student in Oriental Studies, I had a professor who was the epitome of academic eccentricity. E B was a philologist: he worked with words, a lot of them – Cherokee, old French, Hindi, Sanskrit and more. Word play was an obsession, and he often set his word games to music, composing such ditties as 'The Brain Behind the Face', 'Rig Veda X. 129' and 'On First Looking into Whitney's [Sanskrit] Grammar'. More importantly, one never knew what he would say or do next. His way of bringing a class to attention was to shout in a stentorian voice something so outrageous and irrelevant to what we were doing that we would gasp at first, but in the end almost always laugh. Instead of whisking us through a particular Sanskrit paradigm he would ask, for instance: Who watched the Johnny Carson show last night? Then there would ensue a long commentary not only on Mr Carson, but also a thorough examination of the state of American popular culture.
It was, I suppose, a kind of Zen that E B was practicing. He wanted to startle the student into some form of realisation that what we often do is absurd, and that too often we pursue the absurd as if it is intrinsically worthwhile. Far too often, E B let the details of philology overwhelm any consideration of theory and method; the reverse was also true in his case. But sometimes the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated things can lead to a new level of understanding. E B knew this well: put two unrelated things – say, Sanskrit grammar and a talk-show host – and no one can predict the result. Perhaps we can call this E B's proto-chaos theory.
Years later, when I too had become a professor, I found myself in front of a bright class of about twenty students, all eager to learn what they could about Indian civilisation. It was a cold December day toward Christmas, near the end of the fall semester when the seasonal hysteria was beginning to ramp up. I had announced the topic for my lecture: Soma, the powerful drink that plays such a prominent role in the Rig Veda and in Indian religion in general. If they had read their assignments, the students would have learned the basic things about the drink: that the word soma means something that is 'pressed out' of something else; that Soma was a golden-coloured liquid; that it was made from a plant that was not green; that sometimes it was red with white nodules on its top, and grew under the birch tree. It was also called ekapada, which means 'the one with one foot'.