W. Norman Brown

William Norman Brown (June 24, 1892 – April 22, 1975)

W. Norman Brown was born in Baltimore on June 24, 1892, and went to India at the age of eight, as the son of missionary parents.[5] He was sent to a boarding school in Hiram, Ohio, when he was thirteen. His parents came back in 1910 and W. Norman Brown and his father both joined Johns Hopkins University, as an undergraduate and graduate student respectively. His father, George W. Brown, earned a PhD with a thesis on The Human Body in the Upanishads and W. Norman Brown obtained a BA in Greek. He then studied with the Vedic scholar Maurice Bloomfield, and received his PhD in 1916. His doctoral dissertation was published in part in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1919,^[6] and demonstrated his diachronic interest in South Asia. From 1916 to 1919 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and then returned to Johns Hopkins as the Johnston scholar in Sanskrit.^[7] He traveled to India in 1922, first to Varanasi for research, and then to Jammu where he became the professor of English and Vice-Principal at the Prince of Wales College.

Early career

The University of Pennsylvania was one of the first American academic institutions to offer courses in Sanskrit; already during the 1880s, the university offered a major and a minor in Sanskrit. Prof. Morton W. Easton (Professor of Comparative Philology, 1883–1912), taught Sanskrit courses at the University of Pennsylvania. Easton retired in 1912 and was replaced the following year by Franklin Edgerton (Professor, 1913–1926). Edgerton would eventually be replaced by W. Norman Brown, who was then teaching Sanskrit at the Prince of Wales College in Jammu.^[8] From 1916 to 1919, Brown had held the position of the Harrison Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He organized the American Oriental Society in 1926. After Edgerton left in 1926, W. Norman Brown was appointed in his place.^[9] Along with several specialists of the Near East, Brown founded the Department of Oriental Studies in 1931 at the University of Pennsylvania, after having played a key role in the discussions sponsored by the Committee on Indic and Iranian Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies.^[10] Though himself a Sanskritist, Brown was a polymath, and was interested in several ventures, including excavations at the Indus site of Chanhudaro for which he enabled funds in 1935–1936.^[11] It was during this time that he became interested in manuscripts, particularly the early western style. His interest in art extended to architecture, sculpture and other artifacts. He also served as the Curator for Indian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1931 to 1954, and supervised the permanent installation of a pillared hall from Madurai.^[12] In this period, Prof. W. Norman Brown also arranged for the collection of manuscripts from South Asia, ensuring that the South Asia Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries had the largest collection of Indic manuscripts in North America, and one of the largest in the western hemisphere.^[13] The history of the manuscripts has been narrated in many publications, and can be summarized thus: "Some of the manuscripts had been acquired in chance fashion by the Library and the University Museum before 1930, but in that year, at the request of Professor W. Norman Brown (1892–1975), Provost Josiah Penniman provided a sum of money to purchase Indic manuscripts. Shortly thereafter he obtained a donation from the late Mr. John Gribbel. Substantial contributions from Dr. Charles W. Burr, the Faculty Research Fund, and the Cotton Fund soon followed. The bulk of the manuscripts are the result of purchases made using these funds in India, between 1930 and 1935, under the direction of Professor W. Norman Brown."^[14] He served as President of the American Oriental Society in 1941–1942, and was the editor of the Journal of the American Oriental Society from 1926 to 1941.

Department of South Asia Regional Studies

The Second World War made the United States aware that there was a dearth of personnel trained in South Asian languages and culture, and contemporary South Asia at large. The University of Pennsylvania was the only institution with courses of intensive language and area study training during the war, and therefore it was at the University of Pennsylvania that South Asia Studies was born.^[15] In 1944, Brown had advocated for the serious development and funding of Oriental Studies in a draft document in which he wrote: "During the course of the war the US govt. agencies have needed information about the Orient to a degree far beyond anticipation...Our nation must never be caught so ill-equipped with knowledge and specialists on the Orient as it was at the end of 1941. The postwar Orient will also probably be freer than before to engage in trade with the Occident...To meet this new situation America will need to acquire information and develop personnel able to handle the increased political, business, and cultural relations."

Scholarship

W. Norman Brown published for over five decades, and his scholarly output is enormous. A list of his publications till 1962 appeared in the Indological Studies in Honor of W. Norman Brown edited by Ernest Bender^[24] and later in India and Indology: Selected Articles by W. Norman Brown edited by Rosane Rocher.^[25] He translated the