Newsletter No. 631
Editorial-Opinion
June 2, 2007

 

AN INDIAN REFLECTION ON URDU STUDIES IN JAPAN

The following article has been brought to our attention by Muhammad Yusuf (Shingetsu Member No. 142) of The Gulf Today newspaper in Sharjah. This article has just appeared in sify.com, an Indian online portal.

The author is the daughter of the well-known Amartya Sen, and she is the founding editor of an Indian literary journal called The Little Magazine. Although the author is not an Indian Muslim herself, she speaks at some length about Japanese studies of Urdu and other themes that touch upon Japanese cultural relations with the Muslims of South Asia.

NOT SAYONARA, JUST ADAABB
By Antara Dev Sen.

It’s a little uncomfortable to be in a foreign land where the only local word you know is ‘goodbye.’ So I refrain from greeting our hosts with “Sayonara!” Maybe there is some other word, something that would prove my linguistic enthusiasm and fondness for the host country? Sushi? Maybe not. I warmly clutch the hand of our host in Osaka. “Sony?” prompts my brain, “Toshiba? Asahi Shinbun? Mitsubishi?” Ah, maybe a thank you, to set the tone? Arigato gozaimasu!

By now my host has welcomed me cordially, and I seem to understand him just fine. Yes, it was a pleasant journey, thank you, I instantly reply in his language. Then realise why. This impeccable Japanese is speaking to our Indian delegation in perfect Hindi.

Professor So Yamane’s Hindi is far better than mine, as is his Urdu. Which is not difficult given my rudimentary Urdu and the grammarless enthusiasm of my street Hindi. But what is truly impressive is the way Yamane becomes a South Asian when he speaks our language. He laughs and jokes and makes complex references to our culture, hums Hindi film songs, makes snide remarks, bends and flips the language to fit his will and his every emotion with the agility of a native speaker. And in true North Indian style, he switches to Punjabi to take you places that Hindi doesn’t reach.

In Japan for a symposium on Indian literature, I move in a haze of Urdu and Hindi. The symposium is part of the India-Japan Friendship Year celebrations, organised by Sahitya Akademi with Osaka University of Foreign Studies and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. We talk of contemporary Indian literature and offer the Japanese a taste of our many language literatures, from Oriya to Kannada.

But the star of the show is Gulzar. The Urdu-loving Japanese are thirsty for his poems. For those who do not follow Urdu, the deft So Yamane does instant translations of Gulzar’s poems into Japanese. It seems to go down very well with the audience. So much for the belief that poetry cannot be translated.

In fact, Yamane, professor of Urdu literature at Osaka University, has translated Urdu poems and stories into Japanese, has written books in Urdu, and studied in Pakistan. From his book on Pakistan’s feminist poet Kishvar Naheed to the one on Ghalib’s Delhi, Yamane wanders the Urdu literary scene of the subcontinent not as a tourist, but as a local. If a different language is a different vision of life, as Fellini believed, then Yamane’s perspective on life would be kaleidoscopic, with his excellent command over Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Farsi (he spent a couple of years in Afghanistan as well) not to mention Japanese, and a smattering of Chinese. Urdu seems to be his strongest suit among foreign languages, and his dedication to it won him the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, the President’s Medal of Pakistan.

But a language brings with it a whiff of history, a glimpse of past glories -- which is probably why Yamane, an expert in Urdu and Farsi, is also a scholar of Islamic history. These were languages of ancient empires stretching from India to Persia, and much of that history was carved by Muslim rulers and enriched by Islamic culture.

And although a language by definition cannot have a religion, it is coloured by the cultures it grows in. When there isn’t enough diversity of users, language may even get a religious edge. This is mostly true of dead classical languages, like Sanskrit or Aramaic, which are identified with sacred texts of Hinduism or Christianity.

So in Japan, where Buddhism rules, you expect an interest in Pali, the original language of Buddhist texts, maybe even the hybrid Sanskrit favoured by Buddha, but certainly not Urdu or Hindi. And it’s a pleasant surprise to have Japanese society and culture explained to us in our own living languages. We are guided through Japanese culture in Hindi by veterans like Teiji Sakata, professor of Hindi best known for his seminal work on Indian and Japanese literary exchange and cultural influences, and in Urdu by young teachers Hisae Komatsu and Kensaku Mamiya, or enthusiastic students like Mayuko Nakamura.

Such expert Hindi and Urdu speakers make Japan seem like home. But there were the young enthusiasts as well, who knew the language but not the connotations. And sometimes they made you acutely aware of how language falls short of perfection without the varnish of cultural sensitivities. The warm offer of a tiny cup of Sake at lunch with deep bows and the soft question “Aap sharaab peena chahte hain? (Do you want to drink alcohol?)” stings my good Bharatiya Nari sensibilities at first. But soon we are all politely saying, “Ji zaroor, hum sharab peena chahtey hain! (Yes, sure, we want to drink alcohol!)” with gay abandon at noon.

In Buddhist temples, we nod appreciatively at offerings of Sake to the Buddha. “Dekhiye is dargah mein Khuda ko hum kitney sharab pilatay hain!” explains a young Japanese enthusiast beaming with pride. “Khuda nahin, Buddha Bhagwan,” I snap instinctively. “Aur ‘dargah’ nahin, Buddhist temple…” The youngster is nonplussed: “Ji, hamare dargah mein hamara khudha hai Buddha. (Yes, in our dargah, our Khuda is Buddha.)” I realise that the words ‘khuda’ and ‘dargah’ have been shorn of all religious connotations and simply mean ‘God’ and ‘a place of worship’ for these new entrants into our culture. The original observation was merely a proud comment on the amount of religious offerings to God. The young Urdu enthusiasts speak a language uncontaminated by specific religions, a language that underlines the universality of faith.

This is impossible for skilled translators of any language, who must use words carefully, attempting to reweave the complex tapestry of cultural connotations in a foreign milieu. This is particularly difficult when translating between languages with totally different cultural backgrounds like Urdu and Japanese, and is a stumbling block in literary translations, especially for poetry. Nuances are lost, details evened out to offer the closest approximation in a foreign tongue with alien habits.

“No, it is not possible to keep every cultural detail,” agrees Tomio Mizokami, Professor Emeritus at Osaka University of Foreign Studies. Mizokami should know. He has translated hundreds of texts from Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi into Japanese, including works of Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Amrita Pritam, Gulzar, Kulwant Singh Virk, Ajeet Caur and several others. His book of 301 popular Hindi and Urdu film songs offered in Japanese is a hit among students. Conversely, he has also translated Japanese songs into Hindi.

Mizokami has an enviable grip on several Indian languages and flits effortlessly between Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu, depending on who he is talking to. He writes in all these languages as well. “The first Bengali story I translated was of Rabindranath Tagore,” he says shyly. “That was in the 1970s, when I was in Santiniketan.” Since then he has translated several Bengali texts into Japanese, including entire film scripts of Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (The Big City) and Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). To understand a society you need to feel its pulse, and films or popular songs are an essential entry pass into a foreign culture. So the clever professor also uses Bollywood films as an attractive teaching aid.

But popular culture cannot replace traditional and religious moorings. So Mizokami has translated into Japanese the Ramayana from Ramanand Sagar’s television serial. And he has rendered into Japanese sacred Sikh texts like the Japji Sahib and Sukhmani Sahib from the Guru Granth Sahib. Besides, every year he comes to India with a group of Japanese students to perform Hindi plays to packed halls in different cities. “We choose simple plays with a light touch,” he says, “so that everybody can understand them. Theatre is such a powerful medium of communication.”

And in communication lies the final success of a language -- be it for literature, the arts or just human bonding. It is essential to communicate, to understand each other, to use translation and link languages to build bridges that enrich our worldview. To try and overcome Wittgenstein’s fear that the limits of my language define the limits of my world.

So I work on expanding my world. As our Japanese friends chat and joke and appreciate ghazals in flawless Urdu, I learn the bare basics of Japanese. “Ohayo!” I say cheerily to alarmed strangers, “Good morning!” Or “Konnichiwa! Good afternoon!” I smile at the waitress at restaurants and exclaim in my best accent, “Sore de jubun desu! (That’s enough!)” And it would be so kashikoi (clever) if I could find a “nandemonai jin” (harmless man) to try out my “suki desu” -- or was it “Aishiteiru” (I love you)?

Relax, dear reader, your Bharatiya Izzat was unharmed! I refrained from such linguistic adventures.

As they say, the ability to speak several languages is an asset, but the ability to keep your mouth shut in any language is priceless.