Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c10.101

v2.c10.101

Since the 1980s, with the improvement of the bilateral relationship and the rapid economic and social development of India and China, Indian scholars show unprecedented enthusiasm for Chinese literature. The Indian novelist and poet Vikram Seth was attracted by poetry during overseas study in Britain and began to learn Chinese, and later studied ancient Chinese poetry in Nanjing University. In 1992, he published *Three Chinese Poets*, which includes 34 representative poems of Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, such as *On the Mountain Holiday Thinking of My Brothers in Shandong*, *Autumn Evening in the Mountains*, *Watching the Lu Mountain Falls*, *The Daunting Route into the Region of Shu*, *Dreaming of Li Bai*, Soldiers’ Song, etc. The Sinologist Prof. B. R. Deepak in Jawaharlal Nehru University has not only published several works studying the India-China relationship, but also has been devoted to the translation of Chinese classical poetry. His *Chinese Poetry: from 1100 BCE to 1400 CE* (*Cheeni Kavita: Gyahrvin Shatavdi Isa Poorv se Chuahdvin Shatavdi Tak*, *Hindi text*) has selected 88 Chinese classical poems from *The Book of Songs* to Yuan verse, and introduced the development of Chinese ancient poetry in the preface. This work won the Special Book Prize of China in 2011. What is more, *The Selected Translation of the Book of Songs* by Sridharan Madhusudhanan, the former Indian diplomat in China, was laumched at the Tamil Cultural Center in New Delhi on February 25, 2012. This is the first *Book of Songs* directly translated into Tamil from Chinese, and includes over 30 poems of different styles. Bai Juyi’s poems also began to be translated into Kannada.