Monday, April 20, 2015

Baardaan … Necessary Burden … (Tulu terms)

Among the more evocative Tulu terms that I came across was ‘Baardaan’ … this was again a term that I heard very frequently when I was in Mangalore … the term was used to refer to chaps who were utterly useless, but indispensable for some inexplicable reason … a sort of ‘necessary burden’ …  

I asked my father the actual meaning of this term … he then explained that boats and steamers, ships too, had to have a certain amount of weight to remain afloat in water and not wobble or topple … a sort of optimum weight, which involves some kind of physics related to ‘displacement’ and all that …  remember Archimedes and his eureka moment?  Yeah, exactly, that sort of thing … so, for the steamer or ship to have the optimum weight, it must have enough freight to carry, especially, if it is a cargo ship … sometimes there isn’t enough cargo to carry, but existing cargo must be transported, so, sand bags are dumped into the cargo hold to make up the required weight … these sand bags are only there to make up the required weight, and apart from that they don’t serve any purpose … but they are necessary, otherwise the steamer would wobble and topple … this burden has to be carried … it is a total loss to ferry these bags of sand, but you can’t do without them … so, these sand bags that are used to make up the requisite weight in a ship are called ‘BARDAAN,’ father said …  

As an aside, Bardaan might have some connection with Burden, you see … same consonant sounds … /b/ /d/ /n/ … maybe the word has Arabic or Persian origins … Mangalore has had trade links with Arabia for centuries before the Europeans came and screwed up everything … “White Man’s Burden” and that sort of thing … come to think of it, most of the Englishmen who were part of the Empire were just making up the numbers … ‘White Man’s A Burden’/‘Bardaan’ …
                                     
Whether ‘Bardaan’ is a Tulu word or not, I am not so sure … and I am not sure too if this term is used across languages in Dakshina Kannada, but it is part of Tulu language … and see, so much hidden behind a word … if only we care to look around …


(Those of you readers who are Tulu speakers or are from Dakshina Kannada … please do send me common words/terms of similar resonances to continue the thread … you could also write a whole post, and I would put them as ‘Guest Posts’ … )

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Vaikom Muhammad Basheer … another out-of-print book resurfaces … split into three (??) …

When I found The Love Letter and Other Stories the other Sunday at Abids, it set me off on a search for Basheer translations in English … I love book detective work … and after lots of surfing discovered that the two Sangam out-of-print editions The Love Letter and Other Stories and Voices/The Walls was available in one volume as Poovan Banana and Other Stories and was published by Orient Blackswan (Sangam’s parent) … Poovan Banana and Other Stories also has an extra ‘bonus’ story … the cover looks like this … I haven’t yet bought the book though …


I wanted more Basheer and wanted to know if the Penguin (Viking India) book ‘Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant (translator: R E Asher) was available anywhere … my friend Satish Poduval was working with Basheer stories for a while, long back in 1993 or so, and I remember seeing a hardback copy of this book with him … then when Satish, Srinivas Prasad, and I were on a trip to Ranchi, we stopped at Vijayawada for a day to meet Venkat (Acharyaha), and invariably ended up in a bookshop and there were saw a paperback edition of the same book … Srinivas Prasad bought that copy … after that I haven’t seen another copy of the book … the book contained three long stories (or novellas, one might call them) and was subtitled ‘Three Stories of Muslim Life in South India’ … the cover looked like this …


I tried to find a copy for myself to buy later, but couldn’t find one anywhere … at that time e-commerce and online shopping were not yet words that buzzed … and recently, I located one copy on amazon.com, but that was too expensive for me … but after I bought The Love Letter and Other Stories, the urge to buy Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant became more intense …


I visited all sites that came up when I hit the ‘search’ button with ‘Me Grandad … in the google window … I then went to ‘images’ … and then I saw this image of a cover with the name Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant which was different from the one I had seen earlier … it had the names of the author and the translators on the cover … there was a stylised ‘m’ on top, sort of the logo of the publisher … it didn’t look like a Penguin or Viking book … I clicked on the image and was taken to the Kerala Book Store site … and there I saw the cover clearly …  and more details … the publisher is Mathrubhumi Books and this book is a recent one, published this year … aah! … after all these years, the book surfaces with a new cover and a new publisher … how nice I thought … and I saw that two more covers (small images) of Basheer (English translations) titles were displayed on the same page … have they published more, I wondered, and clicked … one title was Pattumma’s Goat and the other was Childhood Friend … again I wondered … and then I realized … though I hadn’t read the book that Satish had, I remember him talking with his Malayalee brethren and sistren about Basheer stories and the names Pathummayude Aadu and Balyakala Sakhi  came up frequently … Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant, along with Pathummayude Aadu and Balyakala Sakhi  made up the “three stories of Muslim life” … yes, that one book has been made into three books now … and more importantly, these Basheer stories are now available again … thanks to Mathrubhumi  … and they are not expensive … I bought all three … 




Saturday, April 11, 2015

An out-of-print Vaikom Muhammad Basheer book of short stories and a couple more ... Book haul at Abids on 5th April 2015

I had walked the entire books-strewn stretch at Abids and found nothing of interest … I felt I would be returning empty handed … and then Vinod took me across the road adjacent to the GPO, where there was a lone seller with some books arranged on the pavement … there weren’t many books and I wondered what I would find there … I was on the pavement and Vinod was on the other side of the railing, on the road … the book titles were facing Vinod!  He spied a book and asked me to pick it up for him … it was then that I noticed this book … Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s The Love Letter and Other Stories (translated from the Malayalam by V. Abdulla) ... superb, I thought, and picked it up … Vinod had picked up a copy of this book a couple of weeks back and had posted a picture of its cover and I had envied him … this is an out-of-print book, but the cover was not as good as Vinod’s copy … but the rest of the book was in good condition and I picked it up … (Wikipedia has a fairly informative page on Basheer ...)

The cover is the reproduction of a lithograph by Laxman Pai - Illustration for Jayadev's Geet Govind No. 8
This book is published by Sangam Books, Hyderabad, and was first published in 1983, and this edition is a 1996 reprint … quite old, actually … I was aware that Sangam Books was a sort of imprint or division of Orient Longman (now Blackswan), based in Hyderabad … at the end of this book, there is a list of books published by Sangam and I saw that they had also published another translation of Basheer’s two ‘novelettes’ in one volume, Voices/The Walls (also translated by V. Abdulla) ... after I came home, I went online to the Orient Blackswan site and checked whether Sangam is still on and saw that it was … I eagerly scanned the Sangam books list to see if they still had their old titles … but alas, they publish only text-books sort of books now … what happened to their literary titles, I wondered … I checked the titles by Orient Blackswan and saw that they had a book by Basheer … Poovan Banana and Other Stories … I tried to see what stories this book contained, but the site had no information … I continued my search and there was this site called printasia.in which gave me this information … and what do I learn? … Poovan Banana and Other Stories is a combined edition of both Basheer books earlier published by Sangam, and one extra story!! … chalo, at least, these Basheer stories in English translations are not out of print, though the Sangam editions are … they are there in another guise … so, those of you who are looking for Sangam editions of Basheer’s books of stories, Poovan Banana and Other Stories is the answer … I did some more online book sleuthing to find out what happened to another Basheer book of 3 stories in English translation that seems to have gone out of print ... the happy result is for another post … 

I picked up another book from the same seller and also by the same publisher, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Pratidwandi … I had read this writer’s book Those Days earlier … the cover of Pratidwandi was also not in a good shape, but I did not want to let it go … Pratidwandi was made into a film by Satyajit Ray … I got both books for Rs.20 each … how do I protect their covers now?




The third book I got was The Two Ronnies - But First the News … Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett performed together in comedy sketch shows on BBC and this book brings tighter some of their jokes, dialogues, and repartees … very nice wry British humour … 


Monday, April 6, 2015

MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA – THE FIRST FIVE BOOKS

When the Murty Classical Library was announced around two years back (if I am not wrong), I was excited … this is almost the first time that something of this kind was happening … I had heard of Classical Library publications like the Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Library and was sort of aware of what would emerge if the Murty Classical Library of India project took off … the biggest surprise for me was the fact that Dr Rohan Murty, computer scientist, was funding the project … Rohan Murty is the son of N. R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys …

After the initial announcement, this information sort of went somewhere into some unmarked corner of my memory store … and in 16 January 2015 issue of OPEN, I saw this article by Tunku Varadarajan, “The Books of Civilization,” which told me that the first 5 books of the Library were released … the article begins with:

“If the Bharat Ratna has not been utterly debased by political whimsy and point-scoring—whether from the ‘secular’ left or the ‘Hindu’ right— I’d want that honour to be conferred, 25 years from today, on Sheldon Pollock and Rohan Narayana Murty.

The former, professor of Sanskrit at Columbia, is the general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India, a series of translated volumes of classical Indian literature that has been funded by the latter, a computer scientist from Harvard and the son (notwithstanding the missing ‘h’ in his surname) of N R Narayana Murthy, the billionaire co- founder of Infosys. With an endowment from Murty of $5.2 million, the series has enough capital in its vaults to keep going for 100 years, at the rate of five new volumes of translation per year—a ‘love-marriage’ of delicious elegance between new money and old glory.”

(you can read the complete article here ... http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/the-books-of-civilisation )

Rohan Murty and Sheldon Pollock
And the rest of the article goes on to talk about each volume of the series … when I started reading, I thought these books would be beyond my reach, but Varadarajan assures us that though the handsome hardbacks were steep, the paperbacks were a “dazzling bargain” … I checked the prices online on two sites and there was some difference in prices and discounts and also shipping charges … I went back and forth till the evening and by evening amazon.in had made shipping ‘free’ … I bought all 5 in one go (that means I bought these books in January this year and am writing about them in April ... such a long journey, Jai?  ) … These are the first five titles of the Murty Classical Library:

  • Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women, translated by Charles Hallisey.
  • The Story of Manu, by Allasani Peddana, translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman.
  • Sur's Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition, Surdas, edited by Kenneth E. Bryant, translated by John Stratton Hawley.
  • Sufi Lyrics, Bullhe Shah, edited and translated by Christopher Shackle.
  • The History of Akbar, Volume 1 (the Akbarnama), by Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, edited and translated by Wheeler Thackston.
The first time I read some of the Therigatha Poems was sometime in 1994 when I bought Women Writing in India, Vol. 1, which had English translations of poems of the Buddhist senior nuns or theris, hence Theri-gatha … that gave me a good introduction to the earliest writings by women in India, dating back to 6th century BC … I don’t remember much of that now … Surdas’s poems are not entirely new, them being part of Hindi textbooks during school and with this huge volume, close to a thousand pages with notes and all, there is immense scope for more illumination … I have heard some sufi songs and qawwalies of Bullhe Shah over the years, but since they were mostly in Punjabi, the meanings were not apparent as one would like them to be, and this English translation might mitigate that, I hope, as and when I get time to read them … the other two books, The Story of Manu and the Akbarnama, I am completely unfamiliar with, except that one has read in school history books that Abul Fazl wrote Akbarnama … 

And by this rather weak round-up of these five volumes, it is evident that I haven’t read even small portions of these wonderful books … except the last two mentioned which are in prose, the first three contain verses, and so it might be easier to tackle them poem by poem, or read verses randomly and take it one at a time …

And these are the pictures of the covers of the books I bought … I know they haven’t come out well … but, well …




Published by the Harvard University Press, each volume is in the dual-language format with the original language and English facing … like this …


I wholeheartedly welcome this initiative and feel that this kind of series or library was long overdue … yes, we have the Clay Sanskrit Library, but that deals with only Sanskrit … look at the language range in the first five volumes of the Murty Classical Library – Pali, Punjabi, Telugu, Brajbasha, Persian – and there are many more to come, they have promised …


Thanks Rohan Murty and Sheldon Pollock …   

Friday, April 3, 2015

N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery … the other book I got at Sangeet along with the Becks on the same day …

As soon as I saw this book, the cover caught my attention first, then I saw the name of the author … at first I thought it was Khushwant Singh!  Then I saw that the actual author’s name was almost hidden among the leaves and clouds at the top … anyway, that fact was established … I had heard N. S. Madhavan’s name long back in connection with his well-known short story Higuita … a friend and fellow-researcher at CIEFL, M T Ansari had written a paper on the author and this short story ... this piqued my interest in the story and I had read the story in English translation then … and so when I saw the author’s name, I picked up the book … something lit up dimly in the dark recesses of my memory, which told me that I had either read a review or some reference to this novel … not a strong enough vibe to remember anything clearly … I felt I should buy this book … then there was a longish blurb by Khushwant Singh on the opening page, a part of which appears on the cover … at the back there were some more positive comments … and if I want to know more, then Wikipedia is always there for initial information … and this is what I got to know … Madhavan primarily writes short stories in Malayalam and has published five collections of short stories, all highly acclaimed, with Higuita being judged the best short story in hundred years of Malayalam literature … and Litanies of Dutch Battery written in 2003 (Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal) is his first and only novel so far … this novel was translated into English in 2010 …



And “the novel is about life on an imaginary island in the Kochi backwater, named after a 17th-century battery (bathery in Malayalam) of five cannons installed on its promontory by the Dutch (Lanthans in Malayalam). Jessica, the young narrator of the story, is the scion of a family of carpenters with a long tradition of boat building. Her remniscences start from the days when she was inside her pregnant mother's womb. The novel presents an intimate picture of life of the Latin Christians of the Kerala coast, descendants of poor, low-caste Hindus who were converted to Christianity by Portuguese colonists in the 16th century.