Harold Walter Bailey

Sir Harold Walter Bailey, (16 December 1899 – 11 January 1996), who published as H. W. Bailey, was an English scholar of Khotanese, Sanskrit, and the comparative study of Iranian languages.

Life Bailey was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, and raised from age 10 onwards on a farm in Nangeenan, Western Australia, without formal education. While growing up, he learned German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek from household books, and Russian from a neighbour. After he grew interested in the lettering on tea-chests from India, he acquired a book of Bible selections translated into languages with non-European scripts, including Tamil, Arabic, and Japanese. By the time he had left home, he was reading Avestan as well.

In 1921 he entered the University of Western Australia to study classics. In 1927, after completing his master's degree on Euripides, he won a Hackett Studentship to Oxford where he joined the Delegacy of Non-Collegiate Students, later St Catherine's College. There he studied under Frederick William Thomas. In 1928 he was awarded the inaugural Nubar Pasha Scholarship in Armenian studies. The eminent Oxford Arabist David Margoliouth is said to have asked, upon awarding Bailey the scholarship, "By the way, Mr Bailey, do you intend actually to learn Armenian?".

After graduating with first class honours in 1929, Bailey was appointed as Parsee Community Lecturer in the then London School of Oriental Studies. In 1936 Bailey became Professor of Sanskrit (succeeding E. J. Rapson, who had held the post since 1906) and a Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge;

Bailey was not religious in his personal life. He was a vegetarian and enjoyed playing the violin.

He was known for his immensely erudite lectures, and once confessed: "I have talked for ten and a half hours on the problem of one word without approaching the further problem of its meaning."

Selected publications

Codices khotanenses, Copenhagen : Levin & Munksgaard, 1938. Zoroastrian problems in the ninth-century books, Oxford : The Clarendon press, 1943. Khotanese texts, Cambridge : The University Press, 1945 Khotanese Buddhist texts, London : Taylor's Foreign Press, 1951. Sad-dharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra [the summary in Khotan Saka by], Canberra : Australian National University, Faculty of Asian Studies, 1971. Dictionary of Khotan Saka. Cambridge University Press. 1979. 1st Paperback edition 2010. . The culture of the Sakas in ancient Iranian Khotan, Delmar, N.Y. : Caravan Books, 1982.

Honours and awards Bailey was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1944, and subsequently a member of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Academies. He received honorary degrees from four universities including Oxford; served as president of Philological Society, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Society for Afghan Studies, and the Society of Mithraic Studies; and chaired the Anglo-Iranian Society and Ancient India and Iran Trust. He was knighted for services to Oriental studies in 1960. He was also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.