Obituary: Professor Sir Harold Bailey

Harold Bailey was an academic Titan who dominated international philological research for over 60 years. At Cambridge University where he completed his career as Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit he extended our understanding of all the ancient Indo-Iranian language groups and thus, indirectly, of the folklore, history and religions of Central and South-Eastern Asia. In the opinion of some Cambridge academics he was the greatest scholar of his college - Queens' - since Erasmus.

The chief goal of his life-work was to direct his formidable intellect and gift for mnemonic retention towards the task of tracing the development of the one language (first attested in Hittite records of about 2000 BC) from which the Indian and Iranian languages evolved. He also investigated the linguistic and literary aspects of Indian Buddhist culture, particularly among the peoples of Chinese Turkistan. He was fascinated by the nomadic Sakas who inhabited the kingdom of Khotan (Marco Polo's "Land of Jade"), now forming part of China's Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and spent years studying the Khotanese Saka scrolls discovered by the archaeologist-explorer Sir Aurel Stein in May 1907.

These writings had lain hidden for over 1,000 years in the "Caves of the Thousand Buddhas" (Ch'ien Fo-tung) when a Buddhist priest first revealed them to Stein on that momentous occasion. In his book On Ancient Central Asian Tracks, he writes, "The priest summoned up courage that morning to open before me the rough door closing the entrance to the rock-carved recess . . . The sight disclosed in the dim light of the little oil-lamp made my eyes open wide. Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to 10 feet from the floor." Thanks to Bailey's efforts these once virtually inscrutable texts have since been published with commentaries, translations and the monumental Dictionary of Khotan Saka (1979) that constitutes Bailey's greatest gift to posterity.

The great historian Arnold Toynbee, who was his colleague in the Foreign Office's Research Department in the Second World War, describes in the 10th volume of his Study of History the implausible circumstances in which Bailey discovered his calling. As a child of 10 he was taken from his birthplace at Devizes, Wiltshire, to Australia where his parents had decided to start a new life.

In the outback, on a farm 200 miles from Perth, his life would surely have run a different course had not certain books, as Toynbee puts it, "descended from Heaven". These comprised an encyclopaedia together with four volumes on the French, German, Italian, Spanish and Greek languages; a further work, acquired later, set forth the rudiments of almost two dozen other languages including Hindustani, Japanese and Old Swedish. Thus it was, writes Toynbee, that his parents observed him "with a bemused but whimsical gaze while, during the noonday rest from their common labours in the field, he would be conning his Avestan grammar in the shade of an Antipodean haystack".

In 1927, equipped with scholarships and a Classics degree from the University of Perth (Euripides' religious beliefs were his special subject), Bailey returned to England to study Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European grammar at Oxford. As his brilliance was manifested he was soon selected to become the first Lecturer in Iranian and Zoroastrian Studies at the School of Oriental Studies (now SOAS) in London. This post, which was financed by the wealthy Parsee community in Bombay, led to the formation of lifelong friendships with Minorski, Benveniste and other leading philologists.

It was now that Bailey discovered the spiritual power of the Zoroastrian religion. Perhaps he became a secret Zoroastrian at this time; certainly he devoted years of study to the Zoroastrian holy book, the Bundahishm ("Primal Creation"). In the early stages, when he found that the Scandinavian academic Kaj Barr was working on the same material and preparing to have it published, Bailey, instead of viewing him as a rival, gave him access to all his own work in a typical gesture of spontaneous generosity.

Throughout his life Bailey spurned all creature comforts and he never married, preferring a total commitment to his work; and, though he claimed not to be religious, he displayed all the love of sacred texts and all the courtesy, austerity and striving for scholastic excellence associated with the Benedictine monastic tradition. Yet, as in most monasteries, there were diversions in his Cambridge home. For many years he presided over "Orientalist teas" and played the violin or the viola in a chamber group led by Sir Gilbert Wiles, a talented musician and former Secretary of a Governor of Bombay. Thus could strangers identify Bailey's rooms at Queens' by the strains of Mozart and Beethoven quartets wafting from his windows.

In his prime Bailey was a man of exceptional physical strength and much enjoyed setting out on purposeful walking or cycling holidays - investigating, for example, varieties of spoken Welsh in remote Welsh villages or visiting the reputed settings of the Arthurian legends. Other journeys were required by official work. One such excursion was made to the Caucasus in 1966 when he attended celebrations marking the 800th anniversary of the birth of the Georgian poet Rustaveli. It was on that occasion that he astonished and delighted the assembly by delivering short speeches in both the local Ossetic languages. On his return to Cambridge his college commissioned a painting of him wearing the cherkeska (mountaineer's coat) that was presented to him in Tbilisi by Professor Georgi Tsereteli.

In his last years Bailey focused lifelong botanical interests on the gardens of Brooklands House, a property that he helped purchase as the Cambridge headquarters of the Ancient India and Iran Trust, of which he was the chairman. It was here that he placed his immense library and here, amidst manuscripts and piles of books, that he resided with his cat, battling against blindness and studying and corresponding with scholars around the world and entertaining with the help of the linguist and Arabist James Cormick.

A task now facing Bailey's colleagues is the elucidation of his rhyming diaries. When told at our last meeting that the course of a lifetime had transformed these into an epic of over 3,000 verses in a private language concocted from classical Sarmatian inscriptions, I asked Bailey why he was so fond of obscurity. "Well, the diaries are not really so obscure," he said. "Indeed I'd say there's hardly a line that could not have been understood by any Persian of the fourth century."

Alan Rush

Harold Walter Bailey, philologist: born Devizes, Wiltshire 16 December 1899; Professor of Sanskrit, Cambridge University 1936-67 (Professor Emeritus); Fellow, Queens' College, Cambridge 1936-56 (Life Fellow 1956, Honorary Fellow 1967); FBA 1944; Kt 1960; President, Royal Asiatic Society 1964- 67 (Gold Medal, 1972); Chairman, Ancient India and Iran Trust 1978-91; died Cambridge 11 January 1996.