John Brough

Abstract

Fellow of the School since 1967, Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge since 1967, tragically died on 9th January 1984 after having been knocked down by a car within yards of his home.By his death Orientalist scholarship has been deprived of one of the most formidable Sanskrit scholars of his generation, who could nevertheless wear his deep learning lightly enough to love communicating its beauties to a wide circle; for he was a lover of beauty, not only in Sanskritand Greek-literature but also in the worlds of music and of flowers; he showed not only an intellectual awareness of European literature but a deep capacity for digesting and retaining it (he seemed to be able to recall whole chapters of Shakespeare, Milton, William Dunbar, Goethe, the Nibelungenlied and many more, at only the slightest prompting); he was by no means unrecipient to or intolerant of new ideas; and he always seemed to have time for his friends, who miss him deeply.John Brough was born in 1917, and educated at the Dundee High School.Later at Edinburgh University, where he found time to start the study of Sanskrit under Arthur Berriedale Keith, he achieved First Class Honours in Classics in 1939, and was awarded the Vans Dunlop Classical Scholarship.(He also found time, he told me, to ' learn to play the bassoon very badly'; I never heard him, but from my knowledge of Brough I should think that his competence was far more than minimal.)A major scholarship in Classics took him that year to St John's College, Cambridge, where his run of first class honours was continued: In Part II of the Classical Tripos in 1940, with distinction in comparative philology; in Part I of the Oriental Languages Tripos in 1941, in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit, when he was awarded the Bendall Sanskrit Exhibition ; and in Part II in 1942, when the Bendall Exhibition was renewed, he received the Brotherton Sanskrit Prize, and was elected to the Hutchinson Studentship.He continued at St John's while at the same time undertaking war-work in agriculture, where his slight frame was toughened by ' carrying bushel baskets ', moving on to becoming an assistant in agricultural research; but his major work was a critical analysis of difficult and corrupt late-Vedic material on Brahman exogamous clans,' The early clan and family system of the Brahmans, together with a translation of the Gotra-pravara-manjari ' in 1944, followed in only the following year by an edition and translation of the Nepalese Buddhist Sanskrit text Pdpaparimocana, with a critical analysis of the text and its Newari commentary.He also edited and translated a Newari collection of Buddhist tales, the Astami-vrata-mahatmya, Add.Ms.1366 in the Wright Collection of the Cambridge University Library.These dissertations won for him his Edinburgh D.Litt.degree and a Fellowship of St John's.By October 1944 he had already been appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts in the British Museum., where he was working on the descriptive catalogue of Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts, continuing Bendall's work of 1902, and throwing himself avidly into further studies of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.A year later came his first formal connexion with this School when he was appointed to the Panel of Additional Lecturers.He applied at this time for the Sanskrit chair at Edinburgh ; but-happily for us-the chair was not filled, and in 1946 he joined us use, available at https://