Dr Dhanesh Jain (1939-2019) studied at the University of Delhi for his two Master’s degrees, one in English, and one in Hindi. In 1973, he got his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (USA). His thesis called ‘Pronominal Usage in Hindi: A Sociolinguistic Study’ was supervised by Professor Dell Hathway Hymes and Professor Franklin C Southworth. Dr Jain also taught Hindi at UPenn from 1966 till 1973. He decided to return to India that same year and then took up a teaching assignment at the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at JNU, where he taught linguistics to postgraduate students. His excellence in this field led to his being selected as a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (Shimla) in 1975. What marked Dr Jain’s research and teaching was his constant pursuit for elegance and perfection.
It was during this time that Dr Jain had to look after the family business of manufacturing buttons. Not compromising his pursuit for perfection and beauty, in three years he established the famous Aero Buttons that expanded rapidly and became a brand name for its unrivalled quality within India. He was looking for a space where he could combine his academic scholarship, business acumen and pursuit for perfection. This he found in Ratna Sagar, a publishing house he established in 1982. Its aim was to fill in the huge vacuum of the absence of quality and colourful books for children and school students. Ratna Sagar, for the first time in the history of Indian publishing, brought out 4-colour textbooks for primary level school children, focusing on ELT, Science, IT, Social Science, Maths, and Atlases. The same perseverance and feeling for quality he had demonstrated with Aero was brought to bear on his publishing business. Pedagogically, as well as in production quality, Ratna Sagar books are considered to be among the best in the country. In the 37 years of its existence, Ratna Sagar has managed to publish over 350 new titles, capturing the school-level textbook market. Dr Jain also established several imprints including Primus Books, the higher academic division of Ratna Sagar. In 2009, Primus Books entered the world of academic publishing with the release of 8 new books — all of them academic reference works in Humanities and Social Sciences. Thanks to Dr Jain, almost 10 years down the line, Primus has left its footprint as a leading academic publisher not just in India but across the world. For an obituary note written by Sridhar Balan, a publishing colleague of his, see
https://www.asianage.com/books/050419/goodbye-dhanesh-jain-ratna-sagars-gentle-giant.html
Dr Jain’s interest in academics, and specifically in linguistics, never flagged. He used to work behind the scenes, as the series editor ensuring high quality choices for the Motilal Banarsidass Series in Linguistics. He stepped out of the shadows just once, to telling effect. Working with his former teacher Professor George Cardona of Pennsylvania, Dr Jain edited a collection of essays entitled The Indo-Aryan Languages (Routledge, London). His method of recruiting authors was characteristic of the way he always functioned. He would come to an author’s home ostensibly for a personal visit and, over a cup of tea, would persuade him not only to write for the volume, but even to help recruit others for the neighbouring languages; it was very difficult to say no. To this day, that volume is regarded as a canonical reference work in the study of Indo-Aryan languages present and past.
In brief, Dr Jain was an extraordinary person, and more importantly, a rare person in the world of business and academics.
Rama Kant Agnihotri (with input from Probal Dasgupta), 9 May 2019
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