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How Hoskote approached the selection
In his foreword, Hoskote presents the anthology as a gateway into a much larger body of translated writing. The MCLI has made available works spanning wisdom traditions, worldly poetry, biography, epic narrative, devotional hymns, mystical lyric, and other genres. Rather than claim that ten choices can represent the whole tradition, he uses them to invite readers into its geographic breadth and what he calls its “multilingual plenitude.”
The count of languages is deliberately unsettled in Hoskote’s account: he says the selections come from eight languages, then notes that the voice in his head insists on nine. That hesitation fits the larger argument. India’s literary history cannot be neatly contained by a single language, period, or genre. Hoskote cites the Constitution’s 22 scheduled languages and figures from the 2001 Census—122 “major” languages, 1,599 “other” languages, and 30 spoken by more than one million people—to convey the scale of the linguistic landscape. Those are figures he cites, not current language counts.
The anthology’s 2,500-year span is likewise a frame for its range, not a claim of completeness. Hoskote’s sequence reaches from the Therīgāthā, associated with the sixth century BCE, to the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir. The selection also crosses religious and courtly settings, and includes works whose authorship or transmission complicates the idea of a classic as a fixed text by one person.
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What the ten selections reveal
Hoskote’s choices are most useful to read as a set of contrasting entry points: distinct voices, languages, forms, and routes through which literature has been preserved and shared.
Early Buddhist voices and Sanskrit court poetry
- Therīgāthā (Pali; translated by Charles Hallisey): Songs associated with early Buddhist nuns. Hoskote emphasizes their compressed form and the detailed accounts of women’s lives and renunciation they make possible.
- Bharavi’s Arjuna and the Hunter (Kirātārjunīya; Sanskrit; translated by Indira Viswanathan Peterson): A court epic centered on Arjuna’s encounter with Shiva disguised as a hunter. Bharavi’s dates are uncertain; scholars place him somewhere between the fourth and seventh centuries CE.
Narrative poetry in Kannada and Telugu
- Raghavanka’s The Life of Harishchandra (Hariścandra Cāritra; Kannada; translated by Vanamala Vishwanatha): A thirteenth-century poem about a king who remains committed to truth despite devastating consequences. Hoskote notes that its prosody follows patterns close to contemporary speech and lends itself to song.
- Allasani Peddana’s The Story of Manu (Manucaritramu; Telugu; translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman): A sixteenth-century work associated with Vijayanagara’s literary culture and the court of Krishnadevaraya.
Devotional traditions in Panjabi, Braj Bhasha, and Awadhi
- Hymns by Guru Nanak (Panjabi; translated by Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh): Hoskote situates them within the linguistic and devotional crossings of Panjab, including Siraiki, Khari Boli, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic.
- Sur’s Ocean (Sūrsāgar; Braj Bhasha; translated by John Stratton Hawley): Devotional poetry attributed to Surdas. Hoskote cautions that “Surdas” can refer to a literary tradition as well as to an individual author.
- Tulsidas’s The Epic of Ram (Rāmcaritmānas; Awadhi; translated by Philip Lutgendorf): Composed in 1574 CE, this work circulated through singers, reciters, and scholars.
- Poems by Bullhe Shah (Panjabi; translated by Christopher Shackle): Eighteenth-century Sufi poetry whose appeal, Hoskote writes, crosses national, religious, ethnic, and generational boundaries and remains present in performance and popular media.
Persian court history and Urdu lyric
- Abu’l-Fazl’s The History of Akbar (Akbarnāma; Persian; translated by Wheeler M. Thackston): A court history that also served to legitimize Akbar’s ideology of divine kingship.
- Poems by Mir Taqi Mir (Urdu; translated by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi): Lyric shaped by political upheaval and displacement. Mir lived from 1723 to 1810.
Why transmission matters as much as the written text
Hoskote’s premise is that a classic’s life does not end at the page. He writes that “South Asia’s literary classics must therefore be seen as texts continually caught up in a lively interplay with many other forms of cultural expression available through oral narrative, scribal record, performance, and print, as well as ranging across the classical, folk, and mediatic domains of experience.” The examples in his selection make that argument concrete: Tulsidas’s poem circulated among singers, reciters, and scholars; Bullhe Shah’s poetry continues to travel through performance and popular media; and the Kannada poem’s rhythms connect it with speech and song.
Hoskote also quotes A. K. Ramanujan’s observation, “No Hindu ever reads the Mahābhārata for the first time.” Ramanujan’s point, as quoted in the foreword, is that people may first encounter epic material through family, teachers, storytellers, or professional bards, in different languages and settings. Literature is transmitted through lived experience as well as through a printed or translated edition.
Translation therefore is not a neutral window onto an untouched original. Each selection in the anthology has a named translator, and its English text joins a longer history of interpretation and circulation. For readers, the anthology offers an encounter with translated excerpts; the larger MCLI editions are the route to sustained engagement with individual works. Publishers Weekly described the MCLI books as facing-page editions, but that layout should not be assumed for the anthology itself.
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How to use the anthology as a starting point
A reader can approach the ten selections by following a question rather than trying to treat them as a complete survey. For instance, compare how literary works travel across forms, how devotional writing speaks in different traditions, or how poetry and history respond to power and upheaval. Each excerpt can point toward a longer work, a language tradition, or the translator’s choices.
Hoskote’s foreword excerpt appeared in Scroll.in on October 18, 2024. Ten Indian Classics was published by Harvard University Press on January 28, 2025, in the context of the MCLI’s tenth anniversary, according to Publishers Weekly. That outlet reported 47 MCLI volumes published at the time; it is a dated catalogue figure, not a current series total. The anthology’s present formats, retail availability, and price are not established here.
