The Sāmaveda in Urdu?

 

The Sāmaveda in Urdu?

Shrikant G. Talageri

The news item that the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat has launched an Urdu translation of the Sāmaveda, by a Bollywood film producer Iqbal Durani, has evoked a variety of reactions. Before going into some of those reactions and certain aspects of the said translation, let me mention for the record that the Sāmaveda is one of the four Veda Samhitas, but the smallest of them in size, and consists mostly of extracts from the Rigveda set to styles of musical chanting or singing.

Some sundry aspects of the release of this translation, and of the translation itself, are worthy of note:

1. The translation was released by the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat at a function at the Red Fort on the 17th of March 2023. According to the Indian Express, the organizer of the function, Jeevakant Jha, told the paper that "a study of the Sāmaveda could foster love and affection between Hindus and Muslims" and that the Sāmaveda was for Muslims as much as for Hindus, since it was a "cultural text" and "not a religious text". The first claim, that "a study of the Sāmaveda could foster love and affection between Hindus and Muslims" is as silly as it is senseless, but the second claim, that it was a "cultural text" and "not a religious text" is out-and-out insolent: who has given anyone the right to make such declarations about Hindu texts (which are both cultural as well as religious)?

2. On the other side, there is a slew of tweets and comments by half-witted want-to-be-Abrahamic Hindus proclaiming that a non-Hindu (some even use the word mleccha) has no right to even study the Vedas let alone translate them, or even that it is wrong to translate the Vedas into any other language!

3. While any person competent to do so has the right to translate the Sāmaveda into any language, this particular translation, from some preliminary comments by a Hindu scholar, certainly seems to have certain elements which make it difficult to treat it very seriously:

https://www.facebook.com/jataayu.blore/posts/pfbid0SyzwaqFbaDtPh3JPngrda1wTx4m9EMpeVQnLL6DKzidrDAvqJHkud4pBgEs81Phml

As per this scholar Jataayu B'luru: "I was curious to see some samples from the translation. Thankfully 2-3 passages were read out on the stage, before Bhagwatji's speech. The language of the translation is good, but in the passages read out, the names Indra, Mitra, Varuna in the original had all become "Parameshwar" in the translation :( Such a thing is noticed in Arya Samaji renderings, and is perhaps triggered by the clamor for monotheism. But this is totally incorrect. The names of the Devatas should be given as such, and there should be glossary and explanations about the Devatas, properly. In this sense, even the English translations of Western Indologists are closer to the original, compared to such sanitized "Parameshwar" style Hindi translations".

If this is a sample of the translations, it is certainly not an honest translation of the original. It is like a Hindu, or specifically an ISKCON, translator, translating the Bible or Quran into some Indian language, and translating the words "Jehovah" or "Allah" as "Krishna".[Moreover, note that the word "Parameshwar" is neither a Vedic word nor an Urdu one!].

4. Even more distressing to any serious scholar is what the translator reportedly said at the function: "Aurangzeb lost today and Modi ji won"!!  Where do Aurangzeb and Modi ji enter into the picture? Such sycophantic references to Modi may help his translation to garner views and rake in the money. The Kashmir Files, a film which subtly referred To Modi in glowing terms, raked in the moolah (I am saying this although I am a very strong fan of both Vivek Agnihotri and "The Kashmir Files"), while "1921 Nadi Se Nadi Tak" (which nowhere referred to Modi) has been "released", the credit for the release given to Modi, and then completely stonewalled as if it was never released or even produced!!

5. Finally, one report, speaking about the release function of the translation, wrote the following: "Citing a story, the RSS chief said various persons can approach the top of a mountain using different paths. While they may believe that others have taken the wrong way, the one on the top can see that everybody is climbing towards the same goal, he said". Here I must admit that if this is an original by Mohan Bhagwat, I salute him. What he said is a very great description of the difference between the Hindu religious attitude towards other religions as compared to the Abrahamic attitude. Indeed the Hindu viewpoint is the viewpoint of a person who has reached the top of the (spiritual) mountain and is observing, in different directions from the top, all the other persons (i.e. other religions and their spokespersons) climbing up laboriously, each one of which/whom thinks his own path alone will take him to the top and that all the other people have lost their way somewhere (or are heading towards their doom).

6. Yes, all Hindu texts should be translated into all languages and should be read and understood by everyone. If that was the aim of the translator (his reference, in his speech at the function, to Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb, is a strong point in his favour), he should be given credit for it, even as the completely wrong perspective shown by him (in translating the names of the various Vedic Gods as a neutral and monotheistic single entity) should also be understood and highlighted.

But, as many of the comments on social media have pointed out, the need of the hour is for the texts of Islam and Christianity to be translated into Indian languages to make Hindus aware of what exactly those texts contain. This extremely vital work was started by Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup and the books published by them through Voice of India, and, although those two pioneers of the Hindu Perspective would have been punished for it (as the example of what is happening to so many aware Hindus today, notably Nupur Sharma, shows) if they had been alive today, that nevertheless is the only path.

 

Appendix Added 19 March 2023:

Two points raised by someone:

1. Sanskrit texts simply cannot be translated correctly into Urdu.

2. Is it wrong if Modi is given credit for the fact that this translation took place under his regime?

1. Sanskrit texts simply cannot be translated correctly into Urdu.

This is a point of view which has become very popular in many Hindu circles nowadays, that Sanskrit contains many "untranslatables" and therefore Sanskrit texts cannot be correctly translated into any other language.

This is true, but not just for Sanskrit but for any language. Every language has its own peculiarities and nuances of semantics, grammar and vocabulary which get lost or obscured in translation. Every language has features, words and nuances which simply cannot be exactly translated into any other language without severe loss of its intrinsic meaning. Any Eskimo-Aleut language has scores of words for "snow"; the Japanese language has three layers of speech depending on the social status of the first, second and third persons of discourse; Marathi has three grammatical genders for neutral objects and abstract nouns, while Hindi has two and Kannada has one; etc.: likewise, German has three and English has one. One single Konkani form va:çāni ("did not go") would be translated into Marathi into the following different forms:

Konkani	Marathi
All persons	1st person	2nd person	3rd person
va:çāni	gēlō  nᾱhī or nᾱhī  gēlō	gēlᾱ  nᾱhīs or nᾱhī  gēlᾱs	gēlᾱ  nᾱhī or nᾱhī  gēlᾱ
	gēlē  nᾱhī or nᾱhī  gēlē	gēlī  nᾱhīs or nᾱhī  gēlīs	gēlī  nᾱhī or nᾱhī  gēlī
	―――	―――	gēlā nᾱhī  or nᾱhī  gēlā

PG Wodehouse is one of my favorite English writers, and I just defy anyone to translate any book by him into any other language without completely losing all the flavor of the original, and the same will apply to masters of the art of writing in any language.

Nevertheless, books are translated from one language to the other, using logical approximations or descriptive elaborations of the deeper meanings, and even where these are not absolutely exact in every sense of every word, the translations (if correctly done) have to be accepted as functionally correct. Or else, translations as such from any language into any language would have to be banned or rejected. Sanskrit may be an exceptionally rich language but it cannot be the only exception to the rule. When there are genuine mistakes in any translation, someone else just has to point out the particular mistake and correct it (as, for example, I pointed out Jamison's mistranslation of the Vedic word arati, and various other specific mistranslations by Indologists) but cannot object to the process of translation itself as a flawed process.

2. Is it wrong if Modi is given credit for the fact that this translation took place under his regime?

Giving credit to a ruler for everything that happens in the country ruled by him, unless it actually logically happened only because of his direct and deliberate intentional actions, represents a very weird way of thinking. Aurangzeb, because he was an Islamic religious fanatic, punished Dara Shikoh for his study of Hindu texts: so the only "credit" for Modi here is that he is not  an Islamic religious fanatic.

So far as giving credit to the ruler for anything and everything, is concerned, see what two masters of political thinking have written on the subject:

George Orwell depicts the situation in his "Animal Farm" as follows: "It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, "Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days"; or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, "Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!""

 

Sita Ram Goel, in his book "The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India", refers to people who seek to whitewash Islamic rule by saying: "Even during Muslim rule, we produced great poets like Tulsi, Mira, Sur, Kabir - apart from innumerable Sufi saint-poets", and points out that the achievements by individuals in any society, except an absolutely controlled totalitarian one where not even a leaf can move without official sanction, have nothing to do with the nature of the ruler, and that "Muslim rule had nothing to do with the rise of Hindu saints like Kabir, Nanak, Tulsi, Sur and Mira. They arose in spite of Islam, and flourished only because Islam could not reach out to kill them. Shall we attribute the rise of Solzhenytsin to the rule of Stalin? Human spirit is unconquerable in the long run". It is no-one's claim that the present BJP government would want to "reach out to kill" people who translate Hindu texts into other languages, but nor is there any sense in describing an Urdu translation of the Sāmaveda as a victory for Modi over Aurangzeb!

 

Appendix added 29 March 2023:

As if on cue, here is a tweet dated today, 29/3/2023, illustrating Orwell's example, by the Union Cabinet Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change: