Rahul Sankrityayan's Death Anniversary

Rahul Sankrityayan (born Kedarnath Pandey), who passed away on 14 April 1963, in Darjeeling, was an Indian author, essayist, playwright, historian, scholar of Buddhism who wrote in Hindi and Bhojpuri. Known as "father of Hindi travel literature", Sankrityayan played a pivotal role in giving Hindi travelogue a literary form. He was one of the most widely travelled scholars of India, spending forty-five years of his life on travels away from his home in locations like Russia, Tibet, China, Central Asia, etc.

Knowing around 30 languages including English, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, Russian, Arabic, etc., Sankrityayan almost always wrote in Hindi. The honorific mahapandit ("Great scholar" in Hindi) has been applied before his name since his lifetime.

Sankrityayan wrote extensively, his collection of works spanning more than 100 books on various subjects like Indology, Communism, Buddhism, and philology as well as various short stories, novels and plays. He was awarded the 1958 Sahitya Akademi Award for his 2 volume "Madhya Asia ka Itihaas" (History of Central Asia). The Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, the country's third-highest civilian award, in 1963. He died the same year, aged 70.

Shamshad Begum's Birth Anniversary

Shamshad Begum, born on 14 April 1919 in Lahore, British India (present-day Pakistan. was an Indian singer who was one of the first playback singers in the Hindi film industry. Notable for her distinctive voice and range, she sang over 6,000 songs in Hindustani, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and Punjabi languages, among which 1287 were Hindi film songs. She worked with renowned composers of the time, such as Naushad Ali and O.P. Nayyar, for whom she was one of their favourites. Her songs from the 1940s to the early 1970s remain popular and continue to be remixed.

Ali Akbar Khan's Birth Aniversary

 

Ali Akbar Khan, born on 14 April 1922, in Shibpur, Bengal, India [now in Bangladesh], was a composer, virtuoso sarod player, and teacher, active in presenting classical Indian music to Western audiences. Khan’s music is rooted in the Hindustani (northern) tradition of Indian music.

Khan was trained by his father, the master Alauddin Khan, and began performing at age 13, soon becoming the court musician to the maharaja of Jodhpur. He remained in that position for seven years, until the death of the maharaja, at which time the state conferred on him the title of master musician (ustad). In 1955 the violinist Yehudi Menuhin invited him to New York City, and thereafter he often performed and recorded in the West, frequently in collaboration with his brother-in-law, the composer and sitarist Ravi Shankar. As a composer, Khan is known for his film scores—notably for Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960) and the Ismail Merchant–James Ivory production The Householder (1963)—and as the creator of many ragas. Khan was the first Indian musician to record the long, elaborate manifestations of Indian music performances; among his many albums are The Forty-Minute Raga (1968) and Journey (1990). He founded music schools in Kolkata (Calcutta; 1956); San Rafael, Calif. (1967); and Basel, Switz. (1985). In 1991 he received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

 

 

Dr B.R. Ambedkar's Birth Anniversary

 

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born on 14 April 1891, in Mhow, India, was a leader of the Dalits (Scheduled Castes; formerly called untouchables) and law minister of the government of India (1947–51).

Born of a Dalit Mahar family of western India, he was as a boy humiliated by his high-caste schoolfellows. His father was an officer in the Indian army. Awarded a scholarship by the Gaekwar (ruler) of Baroda (now Vadodara), he studied at universities in the United States, Britain, and Germany. He entered the Baroda Public Service at the Gaekwar’s request, but again ill-treated by his high-caste colleagues, he turned to legal practice and to teaching. He soon established his leadership among Dalits, founded several journals on their behalf, and succeeded in obtaining special representation for them in the legislative councils of the government. Contesting Mahatma Gandhi’s claim to speak for Dalits (or Harijans, as Gandhi called them), he wrote What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945).

In 1947 Ambedkar became the law minister of the government of India. He took a leading part in the framing of the Indian constitution, outlawing discrimination against untouchables, and skilfully helped to steer it through the assembly; the adoption of the constitution on January 26, 1950, is today celebrated as Republic Day, a national holiday. He resigned in 1951, disappointed at his lack of influence in the government. In October 1956, in despair because of the perpetuation of untouchability in Hindu doctrine, he renounced Hinduism and became a Buddhist, together with about 200,000 fellow Dalits, at a ceremony in Nagpur. Ambedkar’s book The Buddha and His Dhamma appeared posthumously in 1957, and it was republished as The Buddha and His Dhamma: A Critical Edition in 2011, edited, introduced, and annotated by Aakash Singh Rathore and Ajay Verma.