In 1992, shortly after the great Hindustani classical musician Mallikarjun Mansur passed away, my father (H. Y. Sharada Prasad) penned an obituary in which he spoke about the great singer’s short 85-page autobiography “Nanna Rasayatre” (written at the behest of AaNa Krishna Rao and PuLa Deshpande). In his article, my father said that the title could roughly be translated as “My Emotional Pilgrimage”, but that this was so inadequate as there was no good English equivalent of the word “Rasa”.
A couple of years later, when I returned to India, I pestered my father to read the book out to me. I can’t read Kannada, and so needed the help of someone who could not only read it out to me but also explain the words which I didn’t understand. He still had his voice then, though that was soon was to be cruelly taken away from him by Parkinson’s disease. Over the course of about an hour, he read out the book — and it was indeed a little gem. What impressed me was the utter humility couched in the genius that was Mallikarjun Mansur. He did not attempt to document his whole life, or recount the honours. Nor did he try to explain the music and the complexities. Instead, in the simplest of tones, he conveyed the very essence of his being.
“Someone should translate this into other languages”, my father would say. I asked him why he didn’t translate it himself. (He was, after all, highly regarded as a translator, especially between Kannada and English, having as a young man translated RK Narayan’s “Swami and Friends” into Kannada, and then several of K Shivarama Karanth’s novels and the polymath’s autobiography from Kannada into English, apart from short stories by Masti Venkatesh Iyengar and others). He replied that he couldn’t do justice to it. For two reasons: first, while he could appreciate and follow Hindustani music, he did not possess the knowledge of a musician. Second, while he had grown up in Karnataka, he really did not understand enough about the Lingayat faith. It was a religion whose basic ethos differed in many significant ways from the various forms of Hindu faith with which he was familiar. (My father was not a religious man, but there was not a lot about Indian culture, and particularly the cultural richness of Karnataka about which he was unaware).
He then pulled out from his shelf “Speaking of Shiva”, written by his friend AK Ramanujam, arguably the greatest of translators. He flipped through a few pages, stopped to read a vachana. Then another. He struggled as he picked out another book, a much fatter Kannada tome, shrugged and then put it away. “Ramanujam may have been able to capture the ethos of this extraordinary form of Shiva-bhakti,” he said. “Perhaps also the music. But he too has gone.” I do not know why he did not consider Lankesh or Shivarudrappa.
A year or so later, I attended a concert by Mallikarjun Mansur’s son Rajashekhar. I went up to him afterwards, and asked him if anyone was translating his father’s autobiography. He replied that a student of his had embarked on a draft. Rajashekhar was a professor of English. When I informed my father that someone was translating it, he responded that the problem was that people thought it merely was a matter of someone knowing Kannada and English and writing well. Eventually the book did find a translator who knew the writer, the music, the tapasya, the unusual religious ethos of the Lingayats, and both Kannada and English well: Rajashekhar Mansur himself. However, the title he settled on, “My Journey in Music”, seemed as unremarkable as the clothes that Mallikarjun Mansur wore.
No comments:
Post a Comment