Liudmila Viktorovna Khokhlova, a Russian national, was honoured with the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honours of India, this year. On 23 June, she was conferred with the prestigious honour by President Droupadi Murmu at the ceremony held in Rashtrapati Bhavan. Although the Padma Awards are not strictly reserved for Indians, why was this foreign national honoured? It goes back to how she spent a lifetime teaching and translating the languages of a country she was not born in.
Who is Liudmila Viktorovna Khokhlova?
Liudmila Viktorovna Khokhlova was born in Russia on 31 October 1945. Do not be surprised if you hear her converse in Hindi, much better than many NRIs. She was fascinated by Indian languages from a very young age. That is what led to her earning a Master’s in Hindi language and literature from Moscow State University in 1970. Later, in 1974, she achieved a PhD in Indian linguistics from the Institute of Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences, Moscow. Her doctoral thesis compared Hindi and Rajasthani, a subject few outside a small circle of linguists would attempt.Since then, she has taught Hindi and Punjabi at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at Moscow State University. She also teaches courses on the historical development of Western New Indo-Aryan languages and the grammatical structure of Hindi and Urdu. She has been instrumental in teaching generations of Russian students studying in India.Khokhlova has authored six books and 92 papers in Russian, English and Hindi, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology and lexical typology. A significant part of this work explores the origins and evolution of Sikhism. She has translated ‘Jap Ji’ by Guru Nanak from Punjabi into Russian, which opens the Sikh scripture Adi Granth, along with ‘Jap Sahib’, a text composed by the tenth Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh. Both are crucial texts in Sikh philosophical and historical studies. Her translations gave Russian readers direct access to material that had rarely reached them in their own language.
The Padma honour
Liudmila Viktorovna Khokhlova may not be Indian, but her contribution to the nation is significant. She was honoured with a Padma Shri this year (2026) for promoting Indian education, languages and culture around the world. She was bestowed with the prestigious honour in the Literature and Education category.“This award means a lot to me, both personally and professionally, and I will work as much as possible to make myself worthy of it,” Khokhlova said upon receiving the honour. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Indian Philology at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University.Fewer than ten Russian scholars have received the Padma Shri since it was instituted in 1954, which places her among a very small group. She was not born in India, but she has been promoting Indian languages in Moscow lecture halls since the late 1960s. Only a few scholars, Indian or otherwise, can claim to have spent as much of their life immersed in its languages, grammar, and scripture as she has.
