‘First modern novel – oldest language’: Sanskrit translation of Don Quixote rescued from oblivion

Translating Don Quixote into Sanskrit, one of the world’s oldest languages, was the wish of the book collector Carl Tilden Keller. Photograph: handout

There is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time.

Today, the same word might equally be applied to the efforts of the Bulgarian-born Indologist and Tibetologist who has rescued their text from decades of oblivion.