This blog is a place for English translations of prose and poetry from Indian languages. Please consider this note to be a standing invitation for translation contributions. If you have a translation that you think is good enough to go online, then send me email. I am Crazyfinger. I can be reached at crazyfingerorg@gmail.com.
This poem by Malladi Ramakrishna Sastry, which I first tried to translate here, gave me the most heartache. Swarup pointed out the errors in my first attempt but I just couldn't get it right. M S Ramarao's singing (search for M S Ramarao in Singer category) makes me want to go back to being an old man in a village, waiting for his days, recalling poems, singing them to myself and soak myself in re-collections. This wish to sing for myself is not because I am turning solipsistic, but it is because it makes me feel humble even in front of a child, someone we always think we can easily overpower. It makes me feel I am already too much and just by being I am already intruding. That is the root of the desire for just not be anywhere, that desire to not to intrude in the very being itself. Songs like these bring tears of a kind for which there are no words other than the song itself. The song is a recollection. I am sure over and over again that a song like this compresses an entire universe's time span and shoves that into my being. I sound crazed but I am more alert than anytime before at moments like these; a love that is so much like home comes over me when I hear songs like these. And so, one more try...
This is a verse from one of 300 odd vacanas written by Akkamahadevi, the kannada mystic poet-seer from 12th century, during the fabulously democratic period in Karnataka. A time when women intellectuals numbering well over sixty held discourse with a few hundred fellow male truth seekers, philosophers and spiritual leaders as a normal course. The dialog between the male head at the assembly of the learned, at Anubhava mantapa and Akkamahadevi, who sought to participate in the discussions is lore. The questions and answers specifically referring to her naked body, and her spiritual quest in the public forum are rendered to this day as songs.
Prabhu to Akka: “Can you be one with God with a human form, a female body?”
Akka to Prabhu: “Would the sandalwood cease its fragrance when it's cut into pieces? Would a piece of gold, even when cut and heated, lose its lustre?
When you search for my bygone sins and hurl them at my face, the deprivation is yours.
O Lord, though you may slay me, I will never cease to love Lord Siva.”
Here she illustrates the superficiality of external appearance and the integrity of the inner core, and demonstrates the willingness to question authority, while putting her case across for acceptance into the fraternity of devotees.
Akkamahadevi, the one drunk with love for her lord Cennmallikarjuna, is beloved to the kannada people, her vacanas were not poems, but 'sayings', a given promise or commitment, for this was the time when the veera-shaiva movement challenged every tradition that lead to inequality, and that included trashing poetic rules of scale and metre.
In Chaitanya's word's:
"The Vacana literary form arose as a part of people's movement against oppression in the name of Sanskrit as the 'divine' language. The veera-saiva poets wrote in Kannada, refuting the millennia-old belief that 'native' languages were incapable of dealing with universal verities."
Of the many vacanas that I've heard while growing up, I chose the above one, as it is one that I read only as an adult, first in English then in Kannada. There are many works on Akkamahadevi, trying to understand her quests of dualities; of mind and body, the profane and scared, she will remain one to whom I will return again and again, for her sayings will reveal other dimensions of truth with passing age and changing experiences.
I am now at the stage when the physical body fascinates me. Menzes and Angadi in their book describe her thus:
"Her body simply did not exist -a burnt-up corpse, a dried up tank, a burnt cord. If she partly covers herself with long hair, it is for the sake of others, not her own. How else could she be Cennamallikarjuna's bride?" And to her narrative, they say:
"Akkamahadevi appears as a master-psychologist of a woman's heart. She dreams of her lover by night, and dreams of him by day.... she provides a probing of the feminine heart that offer a thorough, clinical analysis of love" and in comparison they say even, "Proust did not use his microscope for more realistic details of our consciousness when moved by passion."
I am not that inclined to explore the romantic or spiritual in me as much as I am interested in understanding the physical body. It is however difficult to separate these elements in Akka's vacanas, but I try, as girls and women negotiating the 21 century paradoxes, one needs to locate the one possession that we can fully claim as our own.
My body is my own. Not my mind, in the organic sense, for it has too many other influences that are not mine. Why is it important I know the body? Is it not enough to know and command just the mind? I could use Foucault's treatise to explain to myself the power-relations, oppression-subjugation and so on, of the male and female bodies and their relationships, with the entire society itself being centered around this one possession. And the myriad ways the mind is controlled through the manipulation of body ownership.
However, his methods of exploring the questions of body and sexuality are primarily through the Christian narrative. This leaves me quite inattentive and unable to relate it to my Indian reality. The institutions through which we receive and process information about our bodies in India are quite different.
There are a number of female poets who have unflinchingly addressed the body. But I choose Akkamahadevi not just for the completely radical approach she took to resolve issues, but more because of the familiarity with the language of her vacanas. Kannada is the language of my childhood and many of these verses are voices that inform my consciousness.
Though Foucault has few answers for the Indian women's narrative of the body and sexuality (at least to me), I strangely depend on the English language to reinterpret vacanas in adulthood. Is it because it is the language that first allowed me to know my body, at least in the biological sense? Quite possibly so!
Since the 12th century she has been written about by others, it has been noted that they have been mostly men, and the English translated books that I have been reading are also by men. I do not question their interpretation; I use their translated vacanas to study Akka's verses that explicitly refers to the body. Something that seems to have become completely out of reach for several centuries, right up to the present times for us.
Rarely will you come across Indian women comfortably addressing their body, its desires, its function and their control over all these. The disruption in the narrative of the body for which Akkamahadevi so simply and clearly leads the way, is astounding in its near complete silencing of women being able to talk directly about their bodies. This loss in vocabulary has contributed to it being relegating to some unnamable entity buried in layers of modesty, which are but, neat guises for the society's spin that continues to put women in ever reducing spaces, to be free as humans.
I leave you with this movie clip by Madhushree Datta with score set by Iliayaraja.
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Sources: Songs for Shiva. Vacanas of AkkaMahadevi. Translated by Vinaya Chaitanya.
Women writing in India. Vol I 600 BC to the early twentieth century. Susie Tharu and K Lalitha.
Vacanas of Akkamahadevi. Armando Menzes and S.M. Angadi.
One particular Urdu poem by Mirza Ghalib is a special favorite of mine. Here is my attempt at English translation. Ralph Russell translated only first 4 lines or so in his book. And who can not be transfixed by this wonderful television series...? If someone can help fill the <missing two lines> I owe you one.
First, the English transliteration:
Na tha kuch to khuda tha
kuch na hota to, khuda hota
Na tha kuch to khuda tha
kuch na hota to, khuda hota
duboya mujh ko hone ne
na hota mai to kya hota
hua jab gham se yoo behis
to gham kya sar ke kat ne ka
na hota gar juda tan se
to zaano par dhada hota
huyee muddat ke ghalib mar gaya par yaad aata hai
wo har ek bat par kehana ke yoo hota to kya hota
My English Rendering:
When nothing was, Almighty was
If no thing were, Almighty would have been
Becoming has drowned me
Had I not been, then what would be
When, as it is became lifeless like this by the suffering
Then what of the pain at the head's being cut off
<missing 2 lines>
Time being done, Ghalib passed away but comes back in memory
Saying everytime had it been this way then how it would have been
I thought we'd start off this new blog with a poem from Telugu poet Sri Sri's Mahaprasthanam. I wouldn't exactly call any of these attempts on this blog as "translations," as I think one can call them translations only when they are done right. I will stick to a somewhat loosy term "rendition." Here we go then...Comments are open and are not moderated beforehand.
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