In Memory of Ripley Moore

On a summer day, May 25, 1966, a young linguist of America - Ripley Moore died fighting a forest fire that raised in the Mussoorie Hills of Himalaya.

Robert Ripley Moore was born on April 9, 1933, in Guinea West Africa to missionary parents. He received his B.A. in History and Philosophy at Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota in 1956, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1965.

The topic of Ripley’s doctoral dissertation was “Hindi intonation.” His command of Hindi and Urdu was equal to that of any native UP Hindiwala. He was closely associated with the Peace Corps Trainees and Wisconsin University College –Year-in-India programme. The Wisconsin Year in India trained the American students for social work in India. In the Fall of 1965 academic session he was promoted to Assistant Professor of Indo-Aryan Linguistics in the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin ( Madison). I met him soon after my joining the university’s Madison campus in 1964.

Ripley was a good Christian soul committed to World Peace and Humanism and was sincerely working towards building the bridges between the East and the West. His times were the Cold-war years but was he inspired by the Gandhian ideals and had joined the President Kennedy’s Peace Corps missions to ward off the spread of communism among the poor Third World nations. Around this time the US had launched the bombing campaign over Indo-Chinese territories of Vietnam. Ripley was aghast of his country’s un-Christian war against the Asian peoples. He helped me organize many anti-war meetings.

We often discussed problems of meaning and dialects of northern India.. He was working on the Avadhi dialect of Hindi and had prepared a Reader in Conversational Hindi-Urdu for American students. As he was planning to go to Hyderabad ( Andhra Pradesh) to continue his work on Telugu language, we held many exchanges concerning inter-disciplinary problems and issues working in Indian social-political environment. In Summer 1965, as he was preparing to leave for India, he bought a classic publication: “ A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: etymologically and Philologically Arranged with special reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages” by Sir Monier Monier-Williams, published by Oxford University Press, First Edition 1899.

The Sanskrit-English Dictionary, comprising 1333 pages of large size was too bulky to carry to India. Ripley asked me to keep it for him while he may find another Sanskirt dictionary in India. He was stationed at Mussoorie teaching the Wisconsin College-year-in-India students. In summer 1966, it was unusually hot summer and the foothills of Himalaya witnessed that year many forest fires. The young linguist joined the locals in saving the small hill campus of the college where he taught just below “Cozy Nook”, Landour, Mussoorie. With a strong gush of firey wind he was thrown down the cliff and perished in the forest fire in our Himalaya.

The promising scholar of Indian languages left his mission incomplet. But many of his students in America have since followed Ripley’s mission.. Ripley’s young widow told me that he would have preferred you to keep his Sanskrit-English Dictionary. That volume is his last momento in my personal library.