Phyllis Granoff

Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies

Phyllis Granoff, B.A. Radcliffe College, Ph.D. Harvard University, faculty member at Yale since 2004: You possess a once in a generation knowledge and understanding of classical Indian religions. Your stunning facility in twelve languages allows you to enter the imaginative worlds of classical Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu texts; the scholarship in modern languages that addresses them; and the contemporary worlds that continue to circulate and debate the meaning of these traditions. Language for you is a route into epistemology and particularity; language is the vehicle and the itinerary that enables perception of subtle philosophical debates and obscure medieval humor. Reading across traditions and genres, you masterfully think about confluences, composites, and competitions, arguing against the silo of single-tradition knowledge. Your insistently comparative work suggests that to think without thinking across cultural conversation is to be blind to the contingent interconnectedness of literature, philosophy, and art.

It seems you have addressed every major topic in the study of religion through your vast published writings. You have written about dying noble deaths, monastic rules, and the ordination of children; you have written about miracles, healing, sacred space, and pilgrimage; you have written about temples and temple cities, relations between poets and philosophers, ritual meaning and ritual eclecticism, and biographies of saints, kings, artisans, scholars, and warriors. You have written about attitudes toward language and the metaphor of god, the violence of nonviolence, and worship as commemoration. You developed a specialty in Indian art, offering your discerning attention to sculpture, painting, textiles, and more. Like your ability to read Jain drama alongside Buddhist doctrine alongside Hindu ritual manuals, your capacity to analyze literary productions alongside fine art has produced textured, informed, and vivid work on Asian culture.

Despite being a passionate expositor of thinking about the ancient and the medieval, you are someone with a vivacious, life-affirming presence in the now. As a scholar, you have forged an international network of committed interlocutors. As a translator, you brought English twentieth-century Bengali stories to English readers, demonstrating a gift for vernacular expression equal to that of your classical linguistic work. Your monograph on a twelfth-century Sanskrit poet made you a scholarly star, but your editorial work on the Journal of Indian Philosophy made you the global arbiter for classical and modern Indian thought. You trained a group of devoted, brilliant students united against bromide and banality.

You bring mirth and practicality to any departmental conversations that drift into ambiguity and obtuseness. You are a legendary scholar with a gift for friendship; you are a reader of novels and an introvert who throws the best dinner parties. Even when you lose a particular battle, your thinking and scholarly being affect students and colleagues at Yale for the better. You remind us of the value of relationship, of deep and wide reading, and of sharing a long laugh at the absurdity of everyday life. We wish you a life of deepening creativity, kinship, and pleasure in the days to come.