by JAWED NAQVI
Google Translate has become among the handiest apps for a good reason. It discards the cliché about the meaning getting lost in translation and helps strangers to connect in a naturally multilingual world.
Many Indians who love Urdu poetry can do so because it was translated into English or reset in the Devanagari script. Same with Persian and Latin classics, not to speak of Russian literary treasures. The way some Indians talk knowledgeably about Helen of Troy often sounds as though she was kidnapped by an island king in the neighbourhood.
I asked Graham Earnshaw, my news agency’s Asia editor in the 1990s, to let me cover the raging Islamist insurgency in Tajikistan, but he tossed me a disarming question. “Do you speak Russian or Tajik?” As I could speak neither of the amazing languages, how was I hoping to report, say, an assault on the women of a minority community in a remote Tajik village?
There’s always another way of seeing the problem, though. Most foreign journalists assigned to South Asia, for example, speak little or no local language. Graham’s question, therefore, was a non-sequitur. Besides, there was a larger point at stake. The editor seemed surprised when he learnt that I used translators anyway, even to cover a story in Delhi’s neighbourhoods — not the stories journalists pick up along the highways, where dhabas and paanwallahs deal with assorted clients via a handy mishmash of connecting phrases and languages.
One could argue that an exceptionally erudite scholar of Hindi would perhaps feel challenged traversing India’s sprawling ‘Hindi heartland’, also called the ‘cow belt’. Try to connect conversations from, say, the areas bordering Pakistan in western Rajasthan to the eastern flank of Maithili-speaking Bihar, both notionally Hindi-speaking states, and come back with a cogent narrative.
Prof Higgins would struggle. It’s difficult to imagine a ‘Hindi heartland’ in which a Brij-speaker from a Mathura village in UP can communicate her story to an Awadhi-speaking village belle in Ayodhya, also in UP. It’s a tricky proposition at the very least.
Women writers in South Asia are legion. They write in myriad languages but are read in many more.
And this is what makes the award of the Booker Prize last week to Banu Mushtaq so important. Her collection of short stories was written in Kannada, a South Indian language with a dazzling cultural pedigree. It was crucial that the 12 stories selected from a corpus stretching over three decades of writing were published as Heart Lamp in English, the translation done by a scholar of Kannada and English.
Dawn for more