This article was downloaded by: [Prashant Keshavmurthy] On: 20 June 2012, At: 23:29 Publisher: Routledge Informa

Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

South Asian History and Culture

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20

I, Lalla: the poems of Lal Ded, translated from the Kashmiri with an introduction and notes by Ranjit Hoksote
Prashant Keshavmurthy
a a

Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Quebec, Canada

Available online: 20 Jun 2012

To cite this article: Prashant Keshavmurthy (2012): I, Lalla: the poems of Lal Ded, translated from the Kashmiri with an introduction and notes by Ranjit Hoksote, South Asian History and Culture, 3:3, 472-474 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2012.693735

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

472

Book reviews

status as full citizen, in no way less than the people. Though the study is limited to only two settings, the situation is not very different at other places. Mahtab Alam Independent writer and activist based in Delhi Email: activist.journalist@gmail.com 2012, Mahtab Alam http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2012.693734 I, Lalla: the poems of Lal Ded, translated from the Kashmiri with an introduction and notes by Ranjit Hoksote, New Delhi, Penguin Books, 2011, 246 pp., Rs 450 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-670-08447-0

Downloaded by [Prashant Keshavmurthy] at 23:29 20 June 2012

What are the ethics of translation? That there must be such an ethics rst comes as an affective demand to any translator with a sense of the originating lifeworld of the text to be translated. That is, any translator who has dwelt a while with a texts polyvalence in its original language and the cosmology, psychology and aesthetics of the historical culture its author inhabited feels obliged to convey as much as possible of this historical specicity while still remaining grammatically and poetically acceptable in the contemporary form of the target language. The ethical demand to be faithful to the original, then, is in fact a bi-directional rather than a unidirectional demand: the translator must be faithful to the original by variously emphasizing its foreignness for us while, in a counter-move, also familiarizing it for us by replicating its motions in a contemporary poetic idiom of the language into which he/she is translating. This ethical obligation weighs especially heavily on a translator into English today because the English-language publishing industry the world over has succumbed too often to the temptation to boost the international sales of a translation by demanding the reader be addressed in an easily consumed idiom that is unfaithful on many levels to the original. Some of the translations of the thirteenth-century Persian mystical poet Rumi in circulation today are cases in point. Occasionally, however, we are given a translation that, avoiding the cannibalism of commercial English translation, scrupulously submits itself to this bidirectional conception of delity. Ranjit Hoskotes I, Lalla: the Poems of Lal Ded offers the reader willing to dwell with it a pleasurable introduction to the texts, reception history, theology and genre aesthetics of the fourteenthcentury Kashmiri mystic, Lal Ded, who is also variously known as Lalleshvari or Lalla Yogini to the Hindus and Lal-arifa to the Muslims. Moreover, it does so in a manner that is faithful to the original texts but addresses us in a crisply contemporary poetic English and in response to a contemporary cultural exigency rather than seeking to be an antiquarian exercise in mere philological reconstruction. Though revered in more or less non-sectarian ways for 700 years by Kashmirs Hindus and Muslims, Lal Deds poetic legacy has increasingly been received, since the eruption of political turmoil in Kashmir in the late 1980s, through the mutually exclusive interpretative frames of Kashmiri Hindu and Kashmiri Muslim nationalism. One of the stakes of Hoskotes accomplishment is to retrieve the interpretative inclusiveness of the preceding 700 years during which the Lal Ded corpus came to be consolidated. This point brings us to another sense in which Hoskote has endeavoured to be faithful to Lallas poetic legacy. Rather than pruning away texts most likely composed in Lallas name long after the historical Lalla died, Hoskote includes such texts in his translation on the basis of what he terms a contributory lineage of interpreters. Taking a lesson from the comparatively more advanced eld of study centred on the fteenth-century North Indian mystic weaver-poet,

South Asian History and Culture

473

Kabir, Hoskote avoids the positivist indelity of much colonial and post-colonial philology that would dismiss as inauthentic texts composed after the historical poets life, but in her persona and poetics, and whose Ur-texts are, in the rst instance, in question. In this sense, what we infer of the author Lallas life from the spirit and empirical references of her poems is more faithful to her reality in Kashmir than what apparently interpretation-free positivist techniques of verication would assert. Having said this, in the course of his 70-page Introduction and nearly a hundred pages of Notes to the Poems at the books end, Hoskote does offer us literaryhistorical contexts of two different scales for Lallas texts. The introduction outlines, among other things, the concepts and practices of Kashmir Shaivism, Tantra, Yoga and Yogacara Buddhism at whose conuence the historical Lalla and her interpreters came to utter her poems. The detailed commentaries on nearly each of the poems in Notes to the Poems offer us the rst lines of the originals in the Roman script with diacritics, explications of the technical terms peculiar to the afore-mentioned spiritual practices, of the allusions to the many artisanal contexts of Lallas poems as well as of the genre logics governing these texts. Hoskote situates Lallas poetry within the substantial, vigorous and heterodox counterculture [that] existed in Kashmir between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. This counterculture that the historical Lalla drew on and that had its counterparts in other parts of the Indian subcontinent Hoskote terms the Tantric underground. It was this trans-caste movement rather than the later Su-mediated Islam, he speculates, that initiated the unusual disappearance of intra-caste solidarity and inter-caste antagonism in Kashmir. We may not be incorrect to suggest, in turn, that one of this books timely interventions is to restore the doctrinal and social complexity internal to Kashmirs pre-Islamic HinduBuddhist traditions that, in the wake of the historically more recent and thus better known Islamic ones and in the wake of Kashmirs even more recent political and cultural crisis, have been imagined in monolithic terms by different parties to the crisis. The genre of Lallas poems translated here is the vakh. Hoskote: Lallas poems are among the earliest known manifestations of Kashmiri literature, and record the moment when Kashmiri began to emerge, as a modern language, from Sanskrit-descended Apabrhamsa-prakrit that had been the common language of the region through the rst millennium CE. The word vakh, applicable both as singular and plural, is cognate with the Sanskrit vac, speech, and vakya, sentence [ . . . ] I would prefer to translate it as utterance. A total of 258 vakhs attributed to Lalla have circulated widely in Kashmiri popular culture between the mid-fourteenth century and present, variously assuming the form of songs, proverbs and prayers (pp. xxi; ellipses mine). Of these Hoskote has translated 146 for this book. A vakh comprises four lines with a sequence of four stresses in each rather than a denite quantity of syllables. As such, this genre was continuous, Hoksote argues, with the pan-Indian use of the doha for sacred poetry in Apabhramsa and articulates the transition from this early form of Indian vernaculars to modern Kashmiri. In demonstrating this by extending the implications of the extant scholarship on the Central Asian provenance and pan-Indian equivalents of the vakhs meter, Hoskote takes issue with the characterization of Lalla as an inexplicable singularity. Here, to give the reader an anticipation of the aphoristic compression and lyrical intensity of the vakh, is one of Hoksotes translations:
My mind-horse straddles the sky, crossing a hundred thousand miles in a blink. It takes wisdom to bridle that horse, he can break the wheels of breaths chariot. (Vakh 77)

Downloaded by [Prashant Keshavmurthy] at 23:29 20 June 2012

474

Book reviews

Hoksotes commentary on this vakh in his endnotes tells us that the wheels of breaths chariot refers to prana and apana, the two principle life-breaths within the subtle body. In the Yogic system, the coordination of these life-breaths into a steady rhythm is an essential step towards preparing for the experience of enlightenment. He thus allows the reader the pleasure of a text that reads like a good modern English poem while also offering him/her the pleasure of subsequently re-reading the poem with an attention to its otherwise unmarked technical references. Penguin Books, too, deserves praise for publishing poetry at a time when the novel seems to monopolize money and attention; and for doing so in a format capacious enough to do justice to those of us seeking to enjoy a poem rst as a free-standing English text and then again as a critical contemporary mediation of a medieval non-English text. Prashant Keshavmurthy Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Quebec, Canada Email: prashant.keshavmurthy@gmail.com 2012, Prashant Keshavmurthy http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2012.693735 People without history: Indias Muslim ghettos, by Jeremy Seabrook and Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, New Delhi, Navayana, 2011, 257 pp., Rs 295 (paperback), ISBN 978-8-18905944-6 The publishers of this book, Navayana, claim to
Indias rst and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from anticaste perspective. . . . Navayana publishes the best of socially engaged writing from India: B.R. Ambedkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Kancha Ilaiah, Gail Omvedt, Meera Nanda, Dilip Menon, Anand Teltumbde . . .

Downloaded by [Prashant Keshavmurthy] at 23:29 20 June 2012

There is, however, no anti-caste perspective here. This book claims on its front cover to be about Indias Muslim ghettos, declares Indian Muslims to be a people without history, and simultaneously, claims on its back cover to be about life in the inner city areas of Kolkatas main Muslim settlements. The question remains how plausible it is to label the study of three ghettos in one city in eastern India as a denitive account of Indias Muslim ghettos. How credible is claiming Iqbals verse as Faizs in the Introduction? These rhetorical questions are also real perhaps this is actually a critique of the editorial intervention. This is a collection of many narratives on how Muslims in Calcutta live, work, love and die, but it does not analyse how social and political institutions work to create and maintain the opportunity-denying, soul-deadening poverty that it describes. This information merely restates what is common knowledge for the Indian reader. The book was originally published by London-based Pluto Books, and one is forced to wonder why Navayana chose to distribute this book in India. Consider the following extracts.
We pay only 200 rupees in rent. My daughter works with me cutting rubber for the factories in Shivtala. She collects the work from the factory and returns it at the end of the day. There are several hundred women and girls doing this work here. It is easy, even young children can do it. I have one boy who is rag-picking. Some days he comes home with 30 or 40 rupees. Sometimes nothing. It is dirty and dangerous work. You can understand why even children