John P. Clay

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John Clay was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1934. A 1957 graduate of Oxford University, Clay took first class honors in Sanskrit, Avestan and Old Persian. He went on to a long career in global investment banking with Clay Finlay, Inc, New York, and before that with Vickers da Costa, New York, and the London Stock Exchange.

In 1999 he decided that he wanted to give enduring patronage to his real passion: Sanskrit literature and his vision of a series that would make all the classics available to the general public for the first time. With his wife Jennifer, John founded the JJC Foundation and he shared his vision for the Clay Sanskrit Library with Richard Gombrich, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford since 1976 (and fellow old boy of St Paul’s school, London), and Gombrich agreed to serve as general editor of the Library. As John Clay himself remembers: “We were inspired by a spirit of exploration.” Clay then hired Somadeva Vasudeva and Isabelle Onians (themselves Sanskrit scholars) to be associate editors for the series, as well as more than forty leading academics from ten different countries, to produce new translations of all of the classical Sanskrit texts. The series, co-published with New York University Press, will consist of some 100 volumes upon completion.^[1]

Clay now lives in New York City, where the new joint general editor also lives. He is Sheldon Pollock, William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies at Columbia University.

One anecdote told of Clay is that on graduation from Oxford, Clay was invited to make an academic career. He is said to have responded that he would prefer to go out into the world and make his fortune, but he more or less told the Academy that one day he might be back. In his decades of intercontinental air travel he wished he had pocket-sized volumes with facing pages of Sanskrit literature and English translation, the Greek and Latin Loeb analogues of which he was able to carry in his pocket. His dream was and is thus to get the Clay Sanskrit Library on sale in airport bookshops.