The Devil in the Punundrum
Sumanya Velamur
Sometimes what appears to be a recent passion can have long, tangled roots that reach into the past and lay bare the soul. This piece springs from one such moment when I was forced to almost therapeutically engage with my past and my history with language and, in extension, my identity. My vulnerability has found a home and I am glad.
M
aheshwari Miss, my fourth standard Hindi teacher, to my eight-year-old mind, was the devil. The first hint I had of this was when she drew blood — mine, no less. She stood, in a yellow, nylon sari, at the head of the classroom, facing rows of terrified children, flailing her arms in intentional, forceful arcs as the one-foot wooden scale she held landed on my calf. With every stroke, her cheeks jiggled. I always thought that when she spoke her chubby cheeks looked as though she was speaking through a mouth full of banana. Instinctively, I raised my leg like a stork and my hand went down to soothe the sting. After she tired of the calf, she moved to my palm. And during one of the strokes, the wooden scale broke in two, one renegade half flying away in revolt while the half that remained in her hand splintered through my palm. For the first time, a teacher had drawn blood. There was no greater evidence of violence and evil.
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The devil’s disciplinary moves notwithstanding, her lasting impact was through words. She declared, in a hoarse soothsayer’s voice, that I could never learn Hindi, and I just didn’t have the aptitude for it. Maheshwari Miss’ words set the tone and tenor of my relationship with the language. Hindi, forever after, became a language that I feared; one that would never be mine.
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I was recently reminded of Maheshwari Miss when I took on a translation project and quite early in the process, I was defeated by a pun. The pun, I realised, is diabolically untranslatable. It has the capacity to give you sleepless nights, steal your appetite and reduce you to a dishevelled mass of your basest self.
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The Hindi word ullu, for instance, refers both to “fool” and “owl”. In one particular Hindi short story, there is a conversation between a young man and a young woman where the woman uses it twice in a playful, flirtatious way, once to mean “fool” and the second time, to mean “owl”. A successful translation of the pun into English will retain the playful flirtation, correspond with the characters etched so far, not hinder either plot or character in any significant way AND contain a pun in English — either a play on the different meanings of a word or a play on two words that sound alike but have different meanings. How does one achieve all this?
Generic searches on Google revealed that I could do one of three things,
1. Add a footnote to explain the pun. (The mind baulks, the stomach churns, the insides cramp shut at the thought. A footnote can only mean defeat.)
2. Say “fool” and “owl” as per context and let go of the pun entirely. (But the pun is cute! And it helps establish the relationship between the characters. Not to mention how limp the translation will sound. As a last resort, I could choose to go down this route.)
3. Find a creative way out of this ‘punundrum’.
In the darkness of the night, when all noble things were asleep, I was awake like an ullu, struggling with Hindi and feeling like an ullu. Throwback to many other nights in my childhood, when Hindi and Hindi teachers were the bane of my existence.
Maheshwari Miss’ bleak prophecy notwithstanding, a move to Mumbai in seventh standard, when I was 11, ensured that I learnt a smattering of Hindi quickly. It was functional, and I could use it in my day-to-day interactions. I still stumbled through the gendered nouns and pronunciations of aspirated sounds, both absent in Tamil, my mother tongue. It lead to much mirth amongst my classmates. But importantly, far from Maheshwari Miss’ mediation, I found myself enjoying Hindi literature in spurts over the years. There was the lilting, rhythmic description of a dense forest by Bhavani Prasad Mishra in his poem called Satpuda ke ghane jungle (The Dense Forests of the Satpuda Ranges). The languid forest in a stupor, so dense that trees and flowers and leaves were still and silent because not even the wind could push through. And thrown amidst these lines, was a playful challenge to us, readers, “try, if you like, to enter” this impenetrable forest. Imagine an 11-year-old, with an inclination for the written word, albeit in a different language, coming across this description in an eminently recitable metre. I loved it. Two years later, I would visit the Satpuda forests as part of a Scout and Guide Camp and find that Mishra’s Satpuda ranges had become less impregnable. Was it all a lie? Was it just hyperbole? Or was it the dogged march of progress that had destroyed the Satpuda of yore — Mishra’s Satpuda?
Over the years, I have enjoyed Hindi writers like Mahadevi Verma, Phanishwarnath Renu, and others. Their stories gave me a glimpse into rural North India in a language that was not entirely alien to that setting like English would have been. Krishna Sobti’s Sikka Badal Gaya (The Tables have Turned) provided a window to Partition literature. I didn't know it then, but this was an entire world, a small fraction of which was available to English language readers. At a time in the 1990s when communal tensions were on the rise and Mumbai was reeling from the aftermath of the riots of 1992-93, Hindu-Muslim relations, both bonhomie and tension, intrigued me. Sikka Badal Gaya speaks of the messy lives of common people in what are painted as starkly black-and-white events in popular media. In retrospect, I think this was the one brave, radical story that made it to our school textbooks.
My exposure was limited, however, to the literature I came across in Hindi school textbooks. I did not seek it outside school. Textbooks needed to be mastered, grades had to be accumulated, and Hindi had to be, eventually, abandoned so we could go on to conquer the sciences. As Maheshwari Miss had predicted many years ago, I was convinced that I couldn't learn Hindi even if I had wanted to. It didn't help that classmates mocked my Hindi, stymied any attempt I made at speaking the language and then berated me for not speaking it. In a nervous moment to thank a friend, I said ‘shukra’ instead of shukriya. I was rechristened shukra forever more. One classmate, the son of a naval officer, derided me for not knowing the “national” language. It is no surprise then that I did abandon Hindi at the first moment I could. I went on to do science. Maheshwari Miss had successfully steered me away to safety and success.
English, on the other hand, went from love to love. At first, I limited myself to reading, but in due course, I had the urge to write. I wrote. Like any writer, I was anxious about how well I wrote. But never in all my years did I ever think English was not mine. It was my first language; I came from six generations of English-educated Indians; one of my great-great-grandfathers was an editor of an English language nationalist newspaper in North Arcot district called The Patriot; and one of my great-grandfathers was a Professor of English Literature at Presidency College, Madras (now Chennai). I had no reason to doubt my proficiency in English. That is, until I received a rejection letter last year from an international literary magazine that commented that my story demonstrated “an insufficient command of English,” and suggested that I “ask a native speaker to go over it” — an almost Maheshwari Miss style, damning indictment.
Was English ever mine? Losing a language is like losing a home. It is a little disconcerting to become suddenly homeless (or at least to have one’s home rattle, like it had just weathered a quake) in your forties. The academic in me went scurrying to Google Scholar to explore the notion of the “native speaker”. Critical contemporary linguistics challenges native speakerism, the notion that privileges the native speaker with authority in a language over the non-native speaker. Much of this is linked to coloniality. In specific, this literature challenges the dichotomous and hierarchical relationship between the native speaker and non-native speaker. This critique, however, remains in the academic realm. Language teachers do not seem to have received the memo. English language teaching, for example, continues to rely on this somewhat dated understanding where the native speaker is considered the authority and standard for all things related to language. And there is even less critical discourse on native speakerism in popular media.
This discovery, while instrumental in re-establishing my confidence in English proficiency (until the next assault), had a huge influence on how I understood my relationship with Hindi ( and also my relationship with Tamil and Marathi, languages with which I share various levels and complexity of proficiency.) I had already started reading Hindi for pleasure some 10 years ago. I focused on the literature — the themes, the plots, the character arcs, the imagery, the idioms, the figures of speech, the rhythms — the things I loved most about the written word. I still feared speaking about this interest with other people. I still feared the language itself, often being tongue tied at the prospect of uttering gibberish in public. A part of me was (and is) always afraid that I will get the gender of a word mixed up; that I will be the centre of ridicule; that I will be found-out for being the imposter Hindi-speaker I am.
And then I read a book. It was a book of short stories, starkly written and on dark themes, all in Hindi. Set in contemporary India, the book explored sexuality, power and abuse in gendered and sexual relationships, the complicated relationship between sex and rape, betrayal, criminality, and more without being judgmental. The writing was simple and matter-of-fact and in adopting this style, the author had effectively demonstrated the conflict between the ideals of the modern world with the traditional social context of our times. I had never before read the kind in Hindi literature. For the first time I was overcome by a desire to render what I had read into English. The idea was intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because what if I could not do it? Exhilarating because what if I could actually do it? Could it be that Maheshwari Miss was wrong? Did I dare hope I could recast my relationship with Hindi with this one act?
Why this need to translate in the first place? Much of this urge comes from my training as an ethnographer. Ethnography has a lot in common with the project of translation. In his influential essay entitled Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture, anthropologist Clifford Geertz illustrates how in a given culture, when we observe an action, its interpretation must be done within several layers of meaning structures to arrive at an understanding of that culture. A gesture, such as a boy contracting one of his eyelids to communicate with another, can only be understood within the meaning structures in which it occurs. Perhaps it is a conspiratorial wink. Perhaps it is a flirtatious wink. Perhaps it is an elaborate ruse to communicate a conspiracy where none exists. Interpretations are rooted in context. Representation of the interpretations are mired in more layers of such semantic structures. Writing itself may be considered a representation of reality. In actual fact, the squiggles on a white sheet of paper make no sense to anybody. A translation is a re-rendering of a representation of an interpretation.
Like ethnography, translations are concerned with power, representations and positionality. What kind of power dynamics exist between English and Hindi, for instance? How does a translator represent the author, the community and ideas in their translation? How does the translator’s personal history with the languages, the author, and the subject influence the work they do? For instance, the story of Maheshwari Miss begins to tell you about my relationship with Hindi. Like ethnography, translation’s antecedents are entrenched in the colonial project. Like ethnography, the discipline of translations is also grappling with this colonial past, forever demonstrating different ways of interpreting culture, so as to represent people and cultures responsibly. To me, translating, like an ethnography, is an interpretation of a culture.
In her memoir, My Broken Language, both heart-warming and heartrending all at the same time, Quiera Alegria Hudes, Pulitzer prize-winning writer, Broadway playwright and feminist, paints a complex personal history of her Puerto Rican roots struggling, penetrating, surviving and flourishing on American soil. And for a writer, this is best captured by the two languages she straddles, Spanish and English. Throughout the book, this West Philly girl from the barrio shares with us her anxieties at not being able to call English her own. She recounts one of the first lessons that she learns from Paula Vogel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University is that, “language that aims to perfection was a lie”. “Your Spanish is broken?” Paula said. “Then write your broken Spanish.” In essence then, Hudes’ anxieties were unfounded and this fragmented nature of her language was in fact her strength. Her broken language provides a meta commentary on culture.
Translating a story, I believed, would give me an opportunity to use my fragmented language to interpret cultures, mine as well as the text I was translating. It would tell me what I could and could not do with Hindi. Translating the pun represented to me the ultimate test. Was Hindi mine? I did find a somewhat satisfactory solution to the pun. I had to find a word that could both be a nocturnal being as well as something intended to offend, albeit playfully. I did find such a word. Was it an elegant solution? I will let readers decide. But am I glad Maheshwari Miss will not be pronouncing her judgment on this! As for the prophecy, while Hindi—fragmented or otherwise—may not ever be mine, I am certainly hers.
Sumanya Velamur
Sumanya Velamur is a researcher, social worker, impact consultant, and writer. She is based in Bengaluru. She has fiction, non-fiction and academic writing to her credit. Her fiction is published in Kitaab, USAWA, MeanPepperVine and Out of Print Blog. She has been shortlisted for the BWW R.K Anand Prize 2024 and The Deodar Prize 2024. The latter story has been included in the Deodar anthology as well. Her non-fiction has been published in Feminism in India. She works as a social impact consultant and has Co-founded Chisel for Impact. This work marries her interest in ethnographic research and her commitment to fostering empathy across cultures. Something that writing also does.
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