A very nice interview with poet, author and artist Sukrita Paul Kumar in Muse India. I am publishing the full interview by GSP Rao below.
Dr Sukrita Paul Kumar, scholar, critic and poet of great sensitivity, has done significant work in diversified areas like women’s studies, literary translations, and cultural diversity and literary traditions of India. She has published important tomes in these areas apart from books of her poetry.She has been recipient of several national and international grants and fellowships and has lectured at Cambridge University, SOAS (London University) and several Canadian and American Universities on Indian literature. As a writer with wide exposure to traditions of both Hindi and Urdu literatures, she has interacted with leading writers of the sub-continent. As Director of a UNESCO project on “The Culture of Peace”, she edited a volume of Urdu short stories from India and Pakistan,Mapping Memories. She teaches in a Delhi University college. Her detailed profile can be viewed by clicking on her name at top left corner of this page.
She serves as the Contributing Editor of Muse India for Hindi and Urdu literatures. Here, GSP Rao, Managing Editor, engages her in a discussion on her work and motivations.
GSP : You teach, write poetry in English, are a scholar participating in several international seminars, have written and edited important tomes on Indian and South Asian literature, and were on the jury of several literary awards. You are also an artist who has had a solo exhibition of paintings. Is there a synergy in all these activities? Which of these roles is the closest to your heart?
>Sukrita : I am very conscious of the flow of time and unless I dive into it - swim in its stream - I feel like an outsider to life and suffer a strange sense of alienation. Perhaps that is what motivates me to remain engaged in the “here and now” constantly. I feel driven to go into deeper waters, always looking for something. In writing poetry or painting, there is the creative excitement of perhaps approaching something unknown, also of taking a journey within...An adventure which may not actually have any destination! The process itself seems to matter. My research and seminars etc are more outward and external but there too I try to remain close to my inner voice that gets tuned to the voices of other writers I may be studying. You mention my being on the jury for literary awards. I must say here, I do not enjoy sitting on judgement on writers and their writings and often I go against myself in accepting such assignments!
GSP : You seem to be deeply involved with life around you and derive inspiration from it for your creative work. What have literature and poetry meant in your life and how have they influenced you?
Sukrita : Literature and poetry are not separate from life… so, it’s difficult to say what they have “meant” to me. I write, teach, read literature and may be breathe it too. In fact, I have been brought up on literature! Writing a poem brings me into contact with my deepest self and I revel in that… this is what keeps me alert to poems lying all around … as much in the sunset or the full moon, as in the eye of the urchin on the road or the dog barking in the middle of the night.
As for teaching literature and sharing the joy of studying a poem together with my students and discovering its varied meanings, it is a collective and creative experience… How else would the same poem taught to a different set of students yield a fresh set of meanings? The classroom is a vibrant and dynamic workshop.
GSP : You have wide exposure to literary traditions of both Urdu and Hindi. They have similar linguistic sources and have gained significantly from cross-cultural currents. What are the abiding appeals of these two languages?
Sukrita : Hindi and Urdu have been a source of great strength to each other through centuries. Unfortunately, the language politics of the subcontinent have led to separation, nay a divorce, between them. Not only were they in complete unison at one point of time (it was difficult to decipher any dividing line between them) they remained interchangeable even while having two different scripts. The dialogue between the two languages churned a synergy and at the same time, each language strove to evolve its own identity through an inspired and sophisticated literary expression. Indeed, there has been a sharing of space as well as culture between them that nourished a healthy syncretism in the literary tradition of Hindi as well as Urdu. The politics of Partition and the well-known British strategy of “divide and rule” played an unfortunate role in communalising language identities. We must remember Gandhiji here who wished to have Hindustani, not Hindi or Urdu, as the official language of Independent India.
But, with Partition, despite the ousting of Urdu officially, can we say that we are done with it? Couched in people’s memory, Urdu poetry passes on from one generation to another and the role of Bollywood remains strong in keeping the language alive with us, within us…
GSP : Yes, Urdu ghazals and shero-shayari are particularly popular here and it is perceived as a language ideally suited for poetry. Both Hindi and Urdu literatures have long traditions and are very rich. To what extent have the important works of these literatures been translated into English and other foreign languages for them to be recognised in world literature?
Sukrita : I’m afraid, even though a lot of Hindi and Urdu literature may be found in English translation and some in other foreign languages too, there hasn’t been any significant impact of these literatures on world literature. To my mind, this is because we have not paid much attention to the quality of translations. Many times the power of the original creative writing in Urdu and Hindi does not get carried adequately into English… not in the same way as it happens in the case of say, Latin American or Russian literature. We have a long way to go in this regard.
GSP : Quality translations have been a big problem, not only in Hindi and Urdu, but all vernacular literatures. National institutions, universities and publishing industry don’t seem to be doing enough. Translations of important works should be commissioned and good translators paid well … any comment on that?
Sukrita: Mere commissioning of translations will not serve the purpose. There must be a close follow up in reviewing the process, have good editors for the translated texts and concerted efforts must be made at developing a culture of reviewing, studying and reading the translated texts. Some time ago I was invited to a couple of meetings of “Translation Mission” being set up by the government at the national level. I hope the project is on and that literary translation gets its rightful focus in a country that needs meaningful bridges amidst a plethora of languages, each abundantly rich with its own long literary tradition.
Continue reading "Cultural heritage: language, literature and politics" »
This much hyped and watched TV event seems to be the next logical step to ponder following Sujatha's recent post on language and grammar which soon morphed into language and thought in the comments section. So, IBM's Watson beat out the humans. But what was it thinking and in what language? What is the significance of coming up with the right moves and answers when an entity doesn't really understand what is being asked? Along with the NYT story linked above, see also this article which explains why despite the whopping defeat handed the men by the machine, language and information processing are not the same thing.
All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon. The "war" metaphor, incidentally, had been playing out for weeks, stoked by IBM and Jeopardy! to build public interest in the tournament. The press gladly played along, supplying headlines like the one in the Science Times from Tuesday, "A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans." IBM knew from the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue days that we're all suckers for the "man vs. machine" trope, going back to John Henry's mythical race against the steam-powered hammer. It certainly makes for a better storyline than, say, "Check out the latest incremental innovations that Natural Language Processing researchers are making in the field of question-answering!"
Take this, you English-mangling, bumbling writers blending in your regional dialects, oddities of phrase and grammar in your writing. A pontificating pundit from The Hindu ('India's National Newspaper') laments the death of good English in Indian writing, and herself commits more than a few cardinal sins in the process.
The first time I ever read Tagore was when I received a slim volume of his translated "Gitanjali" at the age of 12. I would read one or two little poems daily, mull it over briefly and get back to the busy life of a schoolgirl. The well-known "Where the mind is without fear" was already known to me, a staple in the Indian school syllabus as a prime example of the beloved Gurudeb's works.
That was a time when I was obsessed with the music, life,times of Meerabai, which I found more enchanting and romantic than abstract musings on a nameless Lord, rivers, storm clouds, moonlight, songs, flutes etc., that dominated what I read in the Gitanjali. The music was a prime factor; I could hear recordings of the Meera Bhajans and made every effort to figure out the meaning of even obscure words. It might have meant more to me, had renditions of Rabindra Sangeet, like this one been accessible.
A few days ago, I asked my co-bloggers to comment on an excerpt in the Guardian from Globish, a book by Robert McCrum whose blurb reads:
How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st century.
'Throw away your dictionaries!' is the battle cry as a simplified global hybrid of English conquers cultures and continents. In this extract from his new book, Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of a linguistic phenomenon – and its links to big money.
This particular portion of the Guardian piece dealing with Indian English caught author Narayan's attention:
The India of Hobson-Jobson has also found a new global audience. A film such as Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding is typical of the world's new English culture. The Indian bridegroom has a job in Houston. The wedding guests jet in from Melbourne and Dubai and speak in a mishmash of English and Hindi. Writing in the Sunday Times, Dominic Rushe noted that Bollywood English is "hard to reproduce in print, but feels something like this: "Yudhamanyus ca vikranta uttanaujas ca viryanavan: he lives life in the fast lane." Every English-speaking visitor to India watches with fascination the facility with which contemporary Indians switch from Hindi or Gujarati into English, and then back into a mother tongue. In 2009, the film Slumdog Millionaire took this a stage further. Simon Beaufoy's script, a potpourri of languages, adapted from an Indian novel, was shot in Mumbai, with a British and Indian cast, by Scottish director Danny Boyle, but launched worldwide with an eye on Hollywood's Oscars, where it eventually cleaned up.
India illustrates the interplay of British colonialism and a booming multinational economy. Take, for instance, the 2006 Man Booker prize. First, the result was broadcast on the BBC World Service from Delhi to Vancouver. The winner was The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, an Indian-born writer who had attended writing classes in New York. So far removed from any English experience, though steeped in its literary tradition, was The Inheritance of Loss that, finally, the British critic John Sutherland was moved to describe Desai's work as "a globalised novel for a globalised world". The writer herself is emblematic of the world's new culture: educated in Britain and America, she wrote her novel in her mother Anita Desai's house in the foothills of the Himalayas, and boasts on her website of feeling "no alienation or dislocation" in her transmigration between three continents.
The Inheritance of Loss is the literary representation of a contemporary experience. Desai says that her book "tries to capture what it means to live between east and west, and what it means to be an immigrant"; it also explores "what happens when a western element is introduced to a country that is not of the west". She also asks: "How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person's thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere over time?" Or, she might have added, in a linguistic and cultural sphere.
Narayan found very little that was enlightening or even particularly clever in McCrum's observations. His response:
An interesting article in the Slate about the propensity of people to distort the spirit of foreign words. The word in question is Kabuki. I had to note with mild amusement that the author uses the word "pundit" several times in the article which in English, has a somewhat scornful connotation - that of a pompous know-it-all.
Pundit (or Pandit) comes from Sanskrit and in most Indian languages it denotes an admirably learned person. A few decades ago, scholars in India were bestowed with this honorific formally or by universal public consent. The first prime minister of India, Jawahar Lal Nehru for example, was commonly referred to as Pandit Nehru by the public and in the media. There is nothing derogatory or dismissive in the usage. It is therefore somewhat ironic that author Jon Lackman, while taking to task others for being out of step with Kabuki, repeatedly misused pundit, another foreign word which too does not mean what pundits think it does.
Another famous saying from outer space turns out to be not quite what we think it was. "Houston, we have a problem," is a catchall phrase for SNAFUs that happen even outside of Houston but that is not exactly what the Apollo 13 astronauts actually said when they heard a bang aboard the spaceship. In this case, we know what the original words were without having to resort to an audio analysis decades later.
Moments after Apollo 13 crew members heard a sharp bang, the phrase that Space City can't seem to shake entered the atmosphere: “Houston, we've had a problem.”
Forty years ago today, a loud bang and vibration transformed a smooth flight to the moon into one of NASA's most successful failures. We remember the sentence that captured that catastrophe as “Houston, we have a problem,” but the correct version uses the past tense.
Presumably, some people knew and even used the phrase in the years after the Apollo 13 crew members miraculously — and heroically — made their way back to Earth.
But it was Ron Howard's 1995 film, Apollo 13, that cemented the misquoted version in our minds.
“The movie simplified the sentence for dramatic purposes,” says Charles Dove, director of Rice Cinema and a film lecturer at Rice University. “Most of the big 20th century phrases come from film.”
Indeed, “Houston, we have a problem” is No. 50 on the American Film Institute's list of top 100 movie quotes, behind other catch phrases we like even better: “Here's looking at you, kid” (No. 5); “Go ahead, make my day” (No. 6); and “You talking to me?” (No. 10).
Mother of all chichés
In real-life, the space scene went something like this: Jack Swigert — played by Kevin Bacon in the movie — saw a warning light that accompanied the sharp bang and said, “Houston, we've had a problem here.” When Houston base asked for clarification, Jim Lovell — played by Tom Hanks in the movie — repeated, “Houston, we've had a problem.” [emphasis mine]
When culture influences grammar. (Link: Dean)
Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It's one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn't quite fit the way we're used to viewing things.That's exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school. That's a lot to get from a grammar game.
Anyway, here's how you play. Every student gets a set of cards with nouns written on them. At the front of the classroom are three buckets, labeled "person," "place," and "thing." The students take turns sorting their cards into the appropriate buckets. "Book" goes in the thing bucket. "city" goes in the place bucket. "Gandhi" goes in the person bucket.
Ganesh had a card with "horse" on it. Ganesh isn't his real name, by the way. It's actually my cousin's name, so I'm going to use it here.
You might guess from his name that Ganesh is South Asian. In India, where he had been in school before coming to Ohio, Ganesh was taught that a noun named a person, place, thing, or animal. If he played the noun game in India he'd have four buckets and there would be no problem deciding what to do with "horse." But in Ohio Ganesh had only three buckets, and it wasn't clear to him which one he should put "horse" in.
In India, Ganesh's religion taught him that all forms of life are continuous, interrelated parts of the universal plan. So when he surveyed the three buckets it never occurred to him that a horse, a living creature, could be a thing. He knew that horses weren't people, but they had more in common with people than with places or things. Forced to choose, Ganesh put the horse card in the person bucket.
Blapp! Wrong! You lose. The teacher shook her head, and Ganesh sat down, mortified, with a C for his efforts. This was a game where you got a grade, and a C for a child from a South Asian family of overachievers is a disgrace. So his parents went to talk to the teacher.
I have a hard time referring to animals (birds and mammals especially) as "it."
Are scientists on the path to deciphering the Indus Valley script? The story here and here.
An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.
"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.
The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.
In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present.
Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one.
Continue reading "Cracking a 4000 year old linguistic mystery? " »
First the Iowa Supreme Court, followed by the Vermont Legislature and now Noah Webster? Will the fact that dictionaries are giving a nod to same sex unions in their definition of "marriage," smooth the way for gay marriage?
Opponents of gay marriage generally have relied on two authorities, the Bible and the dictionary—the divine word and the defined word. A 2006 friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of anti-gay-marriage organizations in a Maryland marriage case cited no fewer than seven dictionaries to make its point. And when the Iowa Supreme Court legalized gay marriage last week, it ignored the state's plea to abide by a dictionary definition that limited marriage to "the legal union of a man and a woman."
But in their latest editions, the dictionaries have begun to switch sides—though until recently, no one seemed to have much noticed. The American Heritage Dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Webster's have all added same-sex unions to their definitions of marriage.* The right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily broke the news in March about Webster's, reporting that the dictionary had "resolved the argument" over gay marriage by applying the ancient term "to same-sex duos."
How, exactly, has the wording in the dictionaries changed? American Heritage went first, adding this to its definition of marriage in 2000: "A union between two persons having the customary but usually not the legal force of marriage: a same-sex marriage." In 2003, Webster's included in its definition "the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage." In 2004, in its eighth edition, Black's added "same-sex marriage" to its marriage entry, recognizing that "same-sex couples have successfully challenged the laws against same-sex marriage" in a number of states. Even more interesting, 2008's Webster's Contemporary School and Office Dictionary says nothing gendered about marriage at all. The entry simply states that marriage is "the state of being united to another person as a contractual relationship according to law or custom." And the king of them all, the Oxford English Dictionary, since 2000 has included in the definition of marriage the phrase "long-term relationships between partners of the same sex."*
There may be many a slip between the cup and the lip. But do you know that the drinking cup is etymologically a close cousin of the skull? I did but that knowledge is tucked away in a distant enough corner of the brain that it doesn't color the way I look at my tea cup.
I am an avid tea drinker. I like "real" tea - the slightly acrid and soothing liquor made with tea leaves, both black and green. I drink the former with milk and the latter without. Not for me the new age concoctions contaminated with orange, lemon, pomegranate, elderberry, wild flowers and other unnecessary flavors although I do occasionally enjoy jasmine, ginger, chamomile, mint, Indian chai masala or a few strands of saffron in my brew. But mostly, I like to partake of the undiluted version of the beverage. There is no special tea ceremony in our home. The kettle is put to boil whenever the craving strikes for a hot refreshing cuppa.
I grew up around copious tea drinkers. Tea was served all year round at breakfast, at afternoon teatime and when guests came. Though not particularly tempted as a child to drink the beverage of the adults, I was nevertheless fascinated by the paraphernelia of the tea tray. My mother owned three sets of tea service made of fine English bone china. They were part of her bridal trousseau - gifts from her father. One was an elegant and sedate cream color set with green and gold edging. Another, a dainty design of pink roses on pristine white. The third, my childhood favorite, consisted of a very round teapot surrounded by globular tea cups of impossibly thin and exquisitely translucent beige china festooned with tiny red, deep blue and gold birds, flowers and berries. Although I did not start drinking tea regularly until I entered college, the sight of the steaming amber-gold liquid being poured from one of the gorgeous teapots into a waiting cup was an aesthetic experience even my childish eyes could appreciate.
Perhaps it says something about my austere mother's indifference to material possessions that those beautiful pieces, an anomaly in our otherwise un-ostentatious Bengali kitchen, were not stowed away in a cupboard for special occasions but put to daily use by the family as well as guests who regularly dropped by for a cup of tea. It is therefore not surprising that most of the tea cups and pots from the collection were gone by the time I began drinking tea in my late teen years. Isolated pieces of the beautiful china remained - a few cups and saucers, a mate-less creamer from one set and an unmatched sugar bowl from another. The teapots were all gone - chipped, cracked or broken due to years of use and careless handling. We then drank tea from non-descript ceramic cups and tea pots. No one bothered to go out and shop for good china. When I earned my first pay check, I bought my mother a set of eight cups and saucers (no teapot, creamer or sugar bowl) made of locally produced bone china. They were not half as elegant as my mother's old collection but she accepted the replacements with whole hearted enthusiasm.
As a person who loves tea and tea sets, I do own some nice tea cups and mugs. But sadly, my kitchen pantry is currently devoid of a good china / clay teapot. I have owned a few ceramic and clay ones since I set up independent house keeping after marriage. They were all traditionally attractive, affordable and eminently serviceable fat bellied pots. They are now gone and I currently own a few glass, stainless steel and pewter ones. My "formal" dinner set did not come with a teapot. By the time I went back and searched in a catalog of Mikasa's line of accessories, the design had been discontinued. I never got around to buying a suitable tea pot to go with the set. Perhaps this nostalgic blather will act as an impetus to begin a new search.
My sudden outpourings about tea, teapots and cups was set in motion by an excellent article, Fragments of Bone and Clay by Aditya Dev Sood, a new writer at 3 Quarks Daily. Among other observations about the culture of tea drinking, Aditya goes into deep musings over bone china and the the drinking cup.
The form of a teacup awaits and anticipates its human users with intimacy, affording a second finger leverage, varieties of opposition for the thumb, and of course, that slippery kiss. But it has still more intimate links with the human body: the word ‘cup’ has Indo-European roots, being linked to cupola, as in dome, as well as the Latin cephalus and the Sanskrit kapala, both cognate words for skull. The kapalika-s, of course, are members of that now nearly extinct sect of Saivism, who carry around a human skull, from which they both eat and drink. I believe it is a false calumny that their skull belongs to someone they have killed, but rather that their purpose is, like Hamlet, to be in proximity and awareness of death, the better to feel their own quickness and capacity for live action. How much does it matter whether one’s cup be found whole in nature or be crafted by human hands? Whether it be a human relic or a fine puree of mammalian bones? The important thing is that a cup can serve as a means for dialogue, for silent communion, for mutuality and shared sustenance.
For more on the kapala - cup connection see here.
John McCain never tires of reminding us that he is a "maverick," a dissenter "who marches to his own drum," he said in his acceptance speech. We know the common dictionary meaning of the word that referred originally to wayward cattle and later to a public figure with an independent mind. The owner of the maverick cattle herd who gave us the word in its current form was Sam Maverick, a South Carolinian turned Texan. Maverick fought in the Texas Revolution, spent time in a Mexican prison, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as a state legislator and the mayor of San Antonio.
Columnist Rick Casey writes in the Houston Chronicle that there were other Mavericks before and after Sam, the lousy Texas cattleman and some of them too were mavericks.
After a shaky start, the Republican National Convention picked up tempo by midweek. The party reached its high point on Wednesday, the 3rd of September, when John McCain's running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska brought the house down with her acceptance speech. McCain wrapped up the convention the next day with a patriotic story and a promise to "change" Washington during his own address. Those of us who watched the convention coverage on TV, saw the razzle dazzle and choreography of the orchestrated events. Now it is being reported that the GOP stagecraft wasn't exactly flawless. For example:
"My friends, my dear friends ... please, please don't be diverted by the ground noise and the static," McCain said. "I'm going to talk about it some more, but Americans want us to stop yelling at each other."
What McCain must have known but didn't say, is that the protesters, who were "escorted" out by security guards were not mere "ground noise and static". They were Iraq War veterans who have hounded McCain at other public events because of his support of the war but not of those who are fighting it.My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. His [Obama] plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.
Perhaps McCain had so little to say on this issue because he doesn't really believe that health care is a problem for most Americans. John Goodman, a health care adviser to the McCain campaign has claimed that there are no "uninsured Americans" because everyone has access to the hospital emergency room. (McCain's campaign has now disassociated itself from Goodman)
Senator McCain has admitted that he doesn't understand economic issues very well. It is therefore not a surprise that he did not address the challenges facing the US economy in his speech. The day after the GOP convention ended, the US Department of Labor released a report showing that the US unemployment rate rose in the month of August to 6.1%, the highest in five years. Perhaps it is time for the McCain campaign to hire an economic adviser like Goodman who can redefine joblessness and declare, "There are no unemployed Americans; there are only persons of leisure with access to eBay where they can sell at a profit all the accumulated junk in their basement and make a living."
Post Convention Updates:
The Invisible Sarah: The upcoming Sunday talk shows will be bristling with the presidential candidates answering questions of reporters and making their case to the public. One candidate who will not speak to the media is Sarah Palin. The McCain campaign says that she will speak "directly to the American people."
Pray Away The Gay: The church attended by Sarah Palin has planned a conference to promote the conversion of homosexuals to heterosexuals through the power of prayer. The "Love Won Out" conference is scheduled for the 13th of September in Anchorage, Alaska.
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