Happy Makar Sankranti!
तिल्गुळ घ्या, गोड गोड बोला। (Thank you![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mustela_nivalis for fonting me!)
I actually called my dad up yesterday, and was informed that sankrant fell on the 15th this year, because of mumblemutter obscure 'go look at a Kalnirnay calendar' reasons. Wikipedia tells me:
Happy Pongal to you as well! Growing up in Delhi meant that Sankrant was mostly my parents calling up the mothership back in Mumbai-Pune, and Pongal wasn't even mentioned during the school assemblies. But all my Bharatanatyam gurus were TamBrahms so of course, it got talked about in class.
The North-South, Aryan-Dravidian divide really depresses me when it starts veering into the 'inevitability of English' rationalisations. I can't stand the chauvinism and bigotry that gets tossed around in North India, and I sympathise with the resistance to Hindi hegemony. But at the same time, I'm really not convinced about the argument that English is equally alien. It was always way easier to transliterate all the padams and varnams I needed to write down in Devnagri than in Roman, and raga and tala were easy to notate because its not like Hindustani and Carnatic are so wildly divergent. And there are so many familiar words in those padams. Shanmuganan! Vanajaksha! Balgopal!
Let's face it though. While Hindustani music has a syncretic tradition born of Muslim as well as Hindu patronage, the South Indian classical dance and music vocabulary hails from a pretty exlusively Hindu tradition. And all those Sanskritised words come from a high-class and high-caste vocabulary, helped along by the Brahminisation of the arts during the 20th century revival and disassociation from all those fallen women the British turned their noses up at.
I'm fascinated by the linguistic implications of the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan ethnographies, and I need to start collecting recs for readings so that I can inform myself more about the subject. I have a theory that sister languages lend themselves more fluidly to intra-translations, and that even languages with different roots, like Tamil and Bengali, can be considered sisters by virtue of a shared cultural heritage. But when it comes down to constructing some sort of shared Indian cultural commonality that supposedly unites these languages, we run up really quickly against some pretty ugly Hindu upper-caste essentialising rhetoric.
So the test of my theory will be if the subaltern writings in these languages work better in indigenous language translation, rather than in English. I experimented with reading a collection of Mahashweta Devi's stories in Hindi, and the style did, indeed, seem more organic than when I had read her in English.
But so many obstacles to this goal of talking with each other! Foremost is the upward mobility impulse that makes the lingua franca of global superpowers a more practical second language to learn, and thus enabling the one-way traffic of translation INTO English. Meaning there are going to be more people speaking Kannada and English than Kannada and Gujarati. Then, the barriers of economics that prevent native speakers of languages and dialects isolated by poverty and illiteracy from gaining the tools (education, money, time, space, energy, audience) to translate, which is why most often folk stories and oral narratives are found documented by some Oriental Studies academic from abroad.
I need far more knowledge about the history of language wars and their effects on this country before I can find a comfortable position to support in the 'make Hindi the default national language of bilingualism rather than English'. My quest to find South Indian writers translated into Hindi is pretty nascent, since even were the books to exist and I were able to acquire them, I need to read a lot more, and get my Hindi reading skills and vocabulary up to a level to be able to appreciate what I'm reading with as much ease and sophistication as I can bring to English.
But there are certain translations friends have offered to lend me that I've shied away from. They are there in English, but I want to wait. It's sort of like the way I didn't go see Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility in the theatre, because I hadn't read the book yet. And though I watched it later, on a small TV screen, I'm glad I did it after having imprinted on its original medium first. I don't know for sure that reading Aandal in Hindi will be more sublime than reading her in English, but I do know that the Roja and Saathiya songs worked in Hindi where they just didn't in Bombay Dreams.
Today's Melawali, therfore, is a lady whose novels I have yet to read, but whose work I desperately want to exist in Kashmiri and Assamese and Maithili translations, so that those agitating for land rights and water rights and forest rights and the right to human dignity can read her in the language of their mothers. Bama Faustina (born as Faustina Mary Fatima Rani) in Puthupatti, is a Tamil Dalit Christian who gave up a job teaching in a convent school, and ended up writing what are by all accounts fierce, feminist novels. In a 2003 interview with The Hindu she says:
I'm reading a short story of hers now; Scorn, by Bama Faustina, translated into English from the Tamil story ‘Ellakaaram’ by Sarsa Rajagopal and Antara Dev Sen. I am really looking forward to seeing her at the jailitfest.
In my fantasies, we could have panels with interpreters seamlessly allowing Bama Faustina and Shanti Yadav and Amita Bharathi to talk about Savitribai Phule's poetry. But failing that, at least a chance for some young girl learning her क-ख-ग-घs or alif-beys to be able to read all four women out loud to her mother and aunts and grantparents, who don't have to watch the books that the first generation in their family can read, take that voice away from their tongue.
तिल्गुळ घ्या, गोड गोड बोला। (Thank you
mustela_nivalis for fonting me!)I actually called my dad up yesterday, and was informed that sankrant fell on the 15th this year, because of mumblemutter obscure 'go look at a Kalnirnay calendar' reasons. Wikipedia tells me:
But because of the Earth's tilt of 23.45 degrees and sliding of equinoxes, Ayanamsa occurs. This has caused Makara Sankranti to slide further over the ages. A thousand years ago, Makar Sankranti was on December 31 and is now on January 14. Five thousand years later, it shall be by the end of February, while in 9,000 years it shall come in June.This extremely amusing 'fact', is of course, marked [citation needed]. (I don't actually like tilgul much, and it was too fucking cold to go downstairs yesterday night to the neighbours' lori, but someday I would like to be in Gujarat for Uttarayan.)
Happy Pongal to you as well! Growing up in Delhi meant that Sankrant was mostly my parents calling up the mothership back in Mumbai-Pune, and Pongal wasn't even mentioned during the school assemblies. But all my Bharatanatyam gurus were TamBrahms so of course, it got talked about in class.
The North-South, Aryan-Dravidian divide really depresses me when it starts veering into the 'inevitability of English' rationalisations. I can't stand the chauvinism and bigotry that gets tossed around in North India, and I sympathise with the resistance to Hindi hegemony. But at the same time, I'm really not convinced about the argument that English is equally alien. It was always way easier to transliterate all the padams and varnams I needed to write down in Devnagri than in Roman, and raga and tala were easy to notate because its not like Hindustani and Carnatic are so wildly divergent. And there are so many familiar words in those padams. Shanmuganan! Vanajaksha! Balgopal!
Let's face it though. While Hindustani music has a syncretic tradition born of Muslim as well as Hindu patronage, the South Indian classical dance and music vocabulary hails from a pretty exlusively Hindu tradition. And all those Sanskritised words come from a high-class and high-caste vocabulary, helped along by the Brahminisation of the arts during the 20th century revival and disassociation from all those fallen women the British turned their noses up at.
I'm fascinated by the linguistic implications of the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan ethnographies, and I need to start collecting recs for readings so that I can inform myself more about the subject. I have a theory that sister languages lend themselves more fluidly to intra-translations, and that even languages with different roots, like Tamil and Bengali, can be considered sisters by virtue of a shared cultural heritage. But when it comes down to constructing some sort of shared Indian cultural commonality that supposedly unites these languages, we run up really quickly against some pretty ugly Hindu upper-caste essentialising rhetoric.
So the test of my theory will be if the subaltern writings in these languages work better in indigenous language translation, rather than in English. I experimented with reading a collection of Mahashweta Devi's stories in Hindi, and the style did, indeed, seem more organic than when I had read her in English.
But so many obstacles to this goal of talking with each other! Foremost is the upward mobility impulse that makes the lingua franca of global superpowers a more practical second language to learn, and thus enabling the one-way traffic of translation INTO English. Meaning there are going to be more people speaking Kannada and English than Kannada and Gujarati. Then, the barriers of economics that prevent native speakers of languages and dialects isolated by poverty and illiteracy from gaining the tools (education, money, time, space, energy, audience) to translate, which is why most often folk stories and oral narratives are found documented by some Oriental Studies academic from abroad.
I need far more knowledge about the history of language wars and their effects on this country before I can find a comfortable position to support in the 'make Hindi the default national language of bilingualism rather than English'. My quest to find South Indian writers translated into Hindi is pretty nascent, since even were the books to exist and I were able to acquire them, I need to read a lot more, and get my Hindi reading skills and vocabulary up to a level to be able to appreciate what I'm reading with as much ease and sophistication as I can bring to English.
But there are certain translations friends have offered to lend me that I've shied away from. They are there in English, but I want to wait. It's sort of like the way I didn't go see Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility in the theatre, because I hadn't read the book yet. And though I watched it later, on a small TV screen, I'm glad I did it after having imprinted on its original medium first. I don't know for sure that reading Aandal in Hindi will be more sublime than reading her in English, but I do know that the Roja and Saathiya songs worked in Hindi where they just didn't in Bombay Dreams.
Today's Melawali, therfore, is a lady whose novels I have yet to read, but whose work I desperately want to exist in Kashmiri and Assamese and Maithili translations, so that those agitating for land rights and water rights and forest rights and the right to human dignity can read her in the language of their mothers. Bama Faustina (born as Faustina Mary Fatima Rani) in Puthupatti, is a Tamil Dalit Christian who gave up a job teaching in a convent school, and ended up writing what are by all accounts fierce, feminist novels. In a 2003 interview with The Hindu she says:
"Karukku" was radical because I have used the local dialect of the people and not the formalised text. This is a departure in Tamil literature.[...]I don't think of it as a burden already in Tamil literary world this has been categorised as Dalit literature and I don't mind. [...] Dalit people welcome me. They are curious to read my writings and for the younger generations, specially women I am a role model. But there are many who don't like me because I am writing about discrimination, oppression. This is a kind of fighting through literature and they don't like it.
I identify myself as a Dalit woman writer...There are many writers available to write about other issues but few for Dalits and there are many issues that have to be tackled. If and when Dalits are respected and treated as equal human beings then only can I write about other things.
I'm reading a short story of hers now; Scorn, by Bama Faustina, translated into English from the Tamil story ‘Ellakaaram’ by Sarsa Rajagopal and Antara Dev Sen. I am really looking forward to seeing her at the jailitfest.
In my fantasies, we could have panels with interpreters seamlessly allowing Bama Faustina and Shanti Yadav and Amita Bharathi to talk about Savitribai Phule's poetry. But failing that, at least a chance for some young girl learning her क-ख-ग-घs or alif-beys to be able to read all four women out loud to her mother and aunts and grantparents, who don't have to watch the books that the first generation in their family can read, take that voice away from their tongue.
