Died 2002 | ||
Dr. Shridhar Vasudev Sohoni (1914–2002) was an eminent scholar of Sanskrit, and a noted antiquarian and numismatist. He was an officer in the Indian Civil Service (British India), and later in his career served as the Chief Secretary of Bihar, Lokayukta of Bihar, and the Vice-Chancellor of Lalit Narayan Mithila University and Tilak Maharashtra University. As a scholar, he published extensively and authored and edited several books and essays on a variety of subjects, including archaeology, architecture, Buddhism, literature, music, Sanskrit, sculpture, and administration. His son Shrinivas Sohoni, also in the Indian Administrative Service, was the Secretary-General of the Rajya Sabha and retired as Secretary to the President of India. Dr. S.V. Sohoni was honored with many awards and a festscrift recognized him as one of the founders of the Academy of Indian Numismatics and Sigillography. A festschrift celebrating his Sanskrit scholarship had already been published a decade earlier. He was conferred D.Litt. degrees by four institutions, University of Delhi, Vikram University, Lalit Narayan Mithila University, and Nalanda University.
Biography
Shridhar Vasudev Sohoni was born in a Chitpavan Brahmin family in Agargule in Ratnagiri district. His father was well-acqainted with the Persian language. He grew up in Bombay and attended the Robert Cotton Money School. He studied for a B.A. in Economics at the University of Bombay, and studied Indo-Greek and Gupta history under Father Henry Heras. He then passed the Indian Civil Service examination and went on to study at the University of Cambridge. In 1937, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society. Sohoni returned to India in 1938 and served as district collector in various locations in Bihar and Orissa. In the aftermath of partition and independence, he was charged with negotiating with various princely states in Orissa. He played a very important role in ensuring that the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library was retained in India after partition.
In 1973 he was appointed the Lokayukta of Bihar, and was appointed to various committees and commissions.Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, English, Marathi, Hindi, and Gujarati were the languages in which he was fluent. His scholarship in Sanskrit was praised by Dr. Vasudev Vishnu Mirashi, who called him " a critical and imaginative researcher of Sanskrit literature and ancient Indian history." Dr. S.V. Sohoni's name appears in hundreds of publications in most unexpected places, as seen in the chapter on South Asian cartography in the Historical Mapping section of the The History of Cartography (eds. J.B. Harley and David Woodward). His numismatic expertise has been described by Mr. Sanjay Godbole, when he explained how just feeling a coin was enough for him to recognize a fake.