श्रृद्धांजलि: प्रो. रोनाल्ड स्टुअर्ट मक्ग्रेगोर
कविता वाचक्नवी
प्रथम हिन्दी>अंग्रेजी व्याकरण के लेखक तथा हिन्दी भाषा व साहित्य के क्षेत्र
में ऐतिहासिक योगदान करने वाले प्रो. रोनाल्ड स्टुअर्ट मक्ग्रेगोर Prof. Ronald Stuart McGregor (केम्ब्रिज वि.
वि.) नहीं रहे। 19 अगस्त को उनका स्वर्गवास हो गया।
न्यूजीलैंड में जन्मे व स्कॉटिश माता-पिता की सन्तान प्रो. McGregor को बालपन
में फ़िजी से प्रकाशित हिन्दी के एक व्याकरण की प्रति किसी ने दी थी, जिसने
उनके जीवन का रुख हिन्दी की ओर मोड़ दिया। 1964 से 1997 तक में वे केम्ब्रिज विश्वविद्यालय में हिन्दी पढ़ाते रहे। सर्वप्रथम 1959-60 में इलाहाबाद
विश्वविद्यालय में हिन्दी की पढ़ाई करने वे भारत आए थे।
उनका पीएच.डी. शोध 1968 में पुस्तकाकार प्रकाशित हुआ था, जिसका शीर्षक था "The
Language of Indrajit of Orchā - A Study of Early Braj Bhāsā Prose"। (ध्यातव्य है कि इंद्रजीत स्वयं ब्रज भाषा के ख्यात कवि थे और वे ही प्रसिद्ध कवि केशवदास के संरक्षक भी थे )।
यह हिन्दी का दुर्भाग्य है कि इस भाषा को अंतरराष्ट्रीय स्तर पर प्रतिष्ठित
करवाने वाले एक विद्वान के निधन पर हिन्दी क्षेत्र में किसी ने एक शब्द तक 20
दिन में नहीं लिखा, यद्यपि भारत के एक अंग्रेजी समाचारपत्र में अंग्रेजी के
पूर्व प्रोफेसर (दिल्ली वि. वि.) ने एक लेख अवश्य लिखा है। उस लेख को भी यहाँ अंत में पढ़ा जा सकता है ।
उनकी कुछ कृतियों की सूची यों है-
* 1) -The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary / published 1993 — 2 editions
* 2) - Shorter Oxford English Dictionary by R.S. McGregor, Lesley Brown (Editor) / published 2002
* 3) - Outline of Hindi Grammar: With Exercises / published 1972 — 5
editions
* 4) - Exrcss Spoken Hindi Cassette
* 5) - Devotional Literature in South Asia /published 1992 — 2 editions
* 6) - The Language of Indrajit of Orch: A Study of Early Braj Bhāsā Prose
(University of Cambridge Oriental Publication / published 1968 — 2
editions
* 7) - Exercises In Spoken Hindi by R.S. McGregor, A. S. Kalsi / published
1971
* 8) -The Round Dance Of Krishna, And Uddhav's Message by NandDas, R.S.
McGregor / published 1974
=============================================
The storyteller of Hindi
Harish Trivedi
> hrshttp://
www.indianexpress.com/news/the-storyteller-of-hindi/1162437/0
McGregor chronicled the emergence of Hindi as the great popular language
of
north India.Ronald Stuart MCGREGOR taught Hindi at the University of
Cambridge from 1964 to 1997, and was a fellow of Wolfson College there
until he passed away on August 19. He had earlier taught at the School
of
Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. A philologist,
grammarian, literary historian, translator and lexicographer of the
front
rank, he probably did more for Hindi studies in the West than any
other
scholar of his generation. McGregor was born of Scottish parents in New Zealand, where he took his BA
in English. On a scholarship to Oxford, he studied early English philology but then turned to learning Hindi, a language to which he dedicated the
rest of his life. He had, as a teenager in New Zealand, been given a copy of a
Hindi grammar book published in neighbouring Fiji, where migrant Indians formed a large part of the population. That wind-blown seed grew into a mighty tree. McGregor first visited India in 1959-60 to study Hindi at the University of Allahabad. He had already met in London a student of Indian history,
Elaine, who was now researching at Calcutta; they got married there in
1960.
McGregor's PhD thesis was published as The Language of Indrajit of Orchha
(1968). No one had heard of this Indrajit, a minor prince who was a patron
of the major poet Keshav Das (1555-1617) but also himself a pioneering
writer of prose in Braj bhasha. This early discovery was characteristic
of
McGregor's scholarly method: not to lose sight of the minor in the glare
of
the canonical, and to see the text in its wider context, including its
vital
social and cultural affiliations.
As a pioneering language teacher, McGregor produced next An Outline of
Hindi
Grammar (1972, revised ed. 1995), which remains a standard work of
reference. He then contributed to a multi-volume History of Indian
Literature not one, but two volumes on Hindi literature, the first on
the 19th and the early 20th centuries (1974), and the second, from the
beginning to the 19th century (1984). Together, they constitute probably the most authoritative history of Hindi literature yet available in English.
In these volumes, McGregor sought to modify the periodisation of Hindi
literature which Ramchandra Shukla had put in place in his foundational and still canonical history (1929). He gave more space to the early period
and
paid the same kind of nuanced attention to some minor poets such as
Nand
Das
(whose major works he translated), Vishnu Das and Bhikhari Das as he
did
to
Kabir, Meera or Tulsi.
The work that McGregor is most widely identified with began modestly
enough, when the Oxford University Press asked him to update the classic
Dictionary
of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884) by John T. Platts. Like
many famous sequels, it soon assumed a divergent life of its own. As
McGregor noted, the priority and ascendancy of
Urdu had long since vanished,
there had meanwhile appeared a huge new dictionary, the Hindi Shabd Sagar
(1922-29), and altogether, Hindi had "developed dramatically in scope,
status and literary versatility". McGregor's Oxford Hindi-English
Dictionary (1993), which was 20 years in the making, now stands supreme as the
ultimate go-to resource of its kind. Whenever any Hindi-English bilingual is in doubt
or distress, she can do no better than "look up McGregor".
His last significant work, a 45-page essay on the "Progress of Hindi"
from the 14th to the 19th century (in Literary Cultures in History, edited by
Sheldon Pollock, 2003), is in a sense a fine distillation of McGregor's life's work, his gaagar mein saagar (the ocean in an earthen pot).
He highlighted here the abiding vitality of Hindi in small but culturally confident centres such as Dalmau, Gwalior, the "Braj district", Orchha
and
Banaras (in implicit contrast with the metropolitan Persian-Urdu
centres
of
Delhi, Lucknow and Lahore), and the emergence of Hindi finally as the
great
popular language of north India. In his dictionary too, McGregor had weaned colonial "Hindustani"
lexicography away from its Perso-Arabic genealogy, to ground Hindi meticulously in its etymological basis in Sanskrit and in its vast
tadbhava resources of indigenous dialects. Instead of a composite culture, he
spoke, acutely and perhaps more accurately, of a "cultural rapprochement" and
of a
"bipartite culture".
Stuart McGregor was a gentle and modest man, always quietly dedicated to his work. At the end of a lecture I once gave in Cambridge, he took me
aside to diffidently ask of me a favour: to find in Delhi and send him a
particular Hindi-to-Hindi dictionary that he needed. He graciously
acknowledged the receipt of the book in the form of a self-composed
doha in Braj bhasha, to express a feeling we could not have shared in
English. He was more deeply steeped in Hindi sensibility and literature than many of its contemporary native speakers are, and he did as much to
propagate
and promote Hindi as anyone.
The writer is a former professor of English, University of Delhi--
साभार: "विश्वम्भरा" : विश्वहिंदी-भाषा-लेखक संघ By - (डॉ.) कविता
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