Judicial scholarship
While releasing the book Inner Fire last week, Chief Justice of India T S Thakur acknowledged that it was the first time that he was presiding over a book launch which had nothing to do with the legal profession. Inner Fire is a translation and analysis of the Zoroastrian sacred verses, the Gathas, which date back to the age of prophet Zarathustra, somewhere between 6500BC to 1000 BC. The Gathas were passed on from generation to generation through oral tradition and the language in which they were originally composed is dead. The book’s author is Thakur’s fellow judge, Justice Rohinton Nariman, an ordained Zoroastrian priest who painstakingly reconstructed the original meaning of the words through comparisons with Sanskrit, since ancient Avestha and Rigvedic Sanskrit have much in common. Another legal luminary and linguist, former Justice B N Srikrishna, used Sanskrit to translate the Zoroastrian prayer on truth, Ashem Vohu, for the audience. Both Justices Nariman and Srikrishna follow in the tradition of another philologist judge, Justice William Jones, who sat on the Calcutta Supreme Court bench in the 18th Century and mastered 18 languages. The author’s father, leading jurist Fali Nariman, proudly acknowledged that in spiritual learning, his son had left him far behind.
While releasing the book Inner Fire last week, Chief Justice of India T S Thakur acknowledged that it was the first time that he was presiding over a book launch which had nothing to do with the legal profession. Inner Fire is a translation and analysis of the Zoroastrian sacred verses, the Gathas, which date back to the age of prophet Zarathustra, somewhere between 6500BC to 1000 BC. The Gathas were passed on from generation to generation through oral tradition and the language in which they were originally composed is dead. The book’s author is Thakur’s fellow judge, Justice Rohinton Nariman, an ordained Zoroastrian priest who painstakingly reconstructed the original meaning of the words through comparisons with Sanskrit, since ancient Avestha and Rigvedic Sanskrit have much in common. Another legal luminary and linguist, former Justice B N Srikrishna, used Sanskrit to translate the Zoroastrian prayer on truth, Ashem Vohu, for the audience. Both Justices Nariman and Srikrishna follow in the tradition of another philologist judge, Justice William Jones, who sat on the Calcutta Supreme Court bench in the 18th Century and mastered 18 languages. The author’s father, leading jurist Fali Nariman, proudly acknowledged that in spiritual learning, his son had left him far behind.
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