Remembering Ninian

My first contact with Ninian Smart was by letter. When I lived in India more than 30
years ago I applied, in 1969 I think, for an advertised position in the Lancaster Religious
Studies Department. I still remember the kind personal note from Ninian saying that there
had been strong competition at senior level, but that they had much appreciated my
application (Eric Sharpe was appointed then). Little was I to know then how often our paths would cross during many years to come, until his death on January 29, 2001.

Once back in Britain, we usually met once, twice or three times a year at annual conferences and meetings, whether at the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), the Shap Working Party, the Sociology of Religion Study Group, the Indian Religions Symposium, the London Society of Religion, and later the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). There were other international meetings, such as the Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) which I first attended in 1975 when it was held in Lancaster. There I also met Ninian’s wife Libushka for the first time, followed by many other meetings, whether in Lancaster or later at the AAR.  I also taught one of their daughters in the 19 70s, when she took a Religious Studies degree at the University of Leeds.

I remember another meeting around that time in Cambridge, when Ninian told me about
feminist developments in California and advised me jokingly that it was about time I should be part of these. Knowing full well that this was not a field he was into, I replied that I had been quietly busy with these matters for a long time already. He just said: “Oh yes, those quiet people are the most dangerous of all...”

I worked closely with Ninian first as Secretary and then President of the BASR, of which he had been President before me. In 1994 we celebrated the 40th BASR anniversary conference in Bristol and several previous presidents took part, including Ninian. I shall never forget that he arrived from abroad with a strong toothache and urgently needed a dentist. I drove him to my dentist two or three times, and he was most grateful, expressing his appreciation by giving me a large flowering orchid plant which stood for many years in the corner of my sitting room, reminding me of his visit. Libushka, who had been told all this, could still remember the incident on the day of his funeral.

More recently, I contributed an essay together with many others to the book published in
Ninian’s honour by Christopher Lamb and Dan Cohn-Sherbook, The Future of Religion — Post Modern Perspectives (London: Middlesex University Press, 1999 — ISBN 1898253269). I was very touched when Ninian sent me last summer a lovely handwritten “thank you” note from his Italian holiday — a memento kept in my copy of the book.

Our last meeting was during the AAR in Nashville, in November 2000, during Ninian’s
presidency, celebrated with much aplomb. A very memorable occasion and the last time I saw him alive, as did many others of his friends and colleagues. We agreed that he, Libushka, and I would meet during my January visit to Lancaster — and we did, but under very different circumstances than we had imagined. I was travelling up by train from Bristol on the morning of January 29 to read a paper “Is there a future for Religious Studies as we know it?” to the departmental seminar, and the arrangement was that Ninian and I would meet for coffee the next morning. When I arrived at Lancaster station at two o’clock I was greeted with the terrible news that Ninian had had a massive stroke and just died. So we went straight to hospital to be with his family and say good-bye to dear Ninian who simply just looked asleep.  It was so hard to accept that there was no more life in him and no more meeting beyond his committal to the grave a week later.

He loved flowers, I was told, and so we took flowers to his wife and family for the intimate evening wake, where those of us present felt like part of a much, much larger family surrounding a close, cherished friend. There were masses of flowers from an even larger group of people during his burial in the wind- and rain-swept Lancashire countryside. So many memories that will be with me until the end of my life of a greatly loved and valued friend, colleague and mentor, but as he, with his generosity of spirit and ever present kindness, would be the first to say, we have to carry on with our tasks rather than be downcast. That is the spirit in which he lived, and that is exactly what we did in Lancaster by holding the seminar as planned. Yes, there is a future for Religious Studies beyond Ninian, but it will be quite different without him, and he will be greatly missed by a great many people for a long time to come.

Ursula King, University of Bristol