Ten Indian Classics

2,500 years of India’s dazzling literary tradition, translated from a wide range of classical languages, and introduced by an award-winning poet.

Romantic ghazals and devotional quatrains, medieval battles and separated lovers, Buddhist women on their journeys toward nirvana and Ram’s battle against a demon army to rescue Sita—all this and more can be found in the Murty Classical Library of India’s Ten Indian Classics.

Beginning in the sixth century B.C.E. and coming up to the eighteenth century, spanning the Indian subcontinent, the selections in this anthology include some of the oldest women’s writing in the world, exquisite Sanskrit court poems, verses from the Sikh sacred tradition recited by millions around the world, the renowned chronicle of the Mughal emperor Akbar, and Tulsidas’s retelling of the epic Ramayana that is cherished in north India to this day. Here, too, are the poems of Surdas, Mir Taqi Mir, and Bullhe Shah, which continue to inspire artists today and live on in contemporary music.

The anthology showcases original translations by leading experts from a vast array of India’s literary traditions: Hindi, Kannada, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu. With a foreword by the award-winning poet and translator Ranjit Hoskote, Ten Indian Classics is an invitation to readers worldwide to immerse themselves in a literary tradition that continues to shape modern South Asian culture and aesthetics in all its stunning diversity.

Poet, translator, and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote has authored more than thirty books of poetry, art criticism, cultural theory, and translation. His translation of the poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla. His translation of a selection of the eighteenth-century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir’s poetry has just appeared as The Homeland’s an Ocean.