My point of view today!
WE OWE!
We really owe a lot to our writers who write in our regional languages.......
We certainly owe a lot to our folk artists as well..........................
We owe to ...................
people who are constantly acting as a bridge between the forgotten and slowly diminishing cultural arenas and what has remained as a residue of culture mingling and getting polluted very fast with the urbanised sensibilities of culture.
A sad occassion though, death of *Lakshmi Holmstrom, but I take it as an opportunity to have a reason to relook into our indigenous, rustic elements of culture which are so quintessential to any native land. The life of people like Lakshmi Holmstrom and their contribution should be a more celebrated objective rather than mourning for
- merely their - physical disappearence one day!
One of the best poems, songs, dramas, nautankis, basic instruments rests in and gets nurtured in the rustic laps of our folklores, folk music and folk dance linking us back to our tribes and a forest connect.
As a storyteller I keep connecting with children, people from all walks of life existing almost at drastically different ends. Rural, urban, semi -urban - they occupy positions of extreme oppositions of practising culture, formulating a typical psyche of people, especially children and their conscious belongingness to their indigenous identity.
Whenever and whichever way, I find time to interact and have a meaningful dialogue with growing children, there are always those few special poems and stories which often manifest in my endeavour towards transforming it into a dynamic conversation. Surprisingly, if given an opportunity, growing children reason and open up beautifully to talk about their native connect. Although, it's always very disheartening for me, to learn that parents and school authorities seldom understand and hardly give any space to artists or storytellers to talk to children beyond the pre-determined and defined limitations of curriculum and escapist ways of imparting education.
I am often reminded of a lovely and one of the most important poems of Hindi literature by Nagarjun while interacting with children. Mainly, because it opens the gates of the first circle of belongingness ( going closer to far) through Hindi only, thus slowly giving way to seep in through their dialects and native cultural elements.
अकाल और उसके बाद
कई दिनों तक चूल्हा रोया, चक्की रही उदास
कई दिनों तक कानी कुतिया सोई उनके पास
कई दिनों तक लगी भीत पर छिपकलियों की गश्त
कई दिनों तक चूहों की भी हालत रही शिकस्त।
दाने आए घर के अंदर कई दिनों के बाद
धुआँ उठा आँगन से ऊपर कई दिनों के बाद
चमक उठी घर भर की आँखें कई दिनों के बाद
कौए ने खुजलाई पाँखें कई दिनों के बाद।
It's such an irony that children in metro cities don't relate to any of these elements in the above poetry easily. On the contrary,as a storyteller I have found, that many children from the lower economic strata, specially those who have migrated from rural areas have a high receptivity for poems and stories like these. So much so, that they are able to come forth with many other poems, songs and stories out of their rural associations in their own regional languages and dialects. Increasingly, conservation of these kinds of rural cultural associations is becoming an impossibility. Mainly owing to the rampant and indiscriminate nature of the migration and translocation of these children.
Amidst, all this we find people like Lakshmi Holmstrom, one of the greatest translators of Tamil literature, and many other artists and poets who contribute throughout their lives; consciously and painstakingly putting an effort to carry from one language to another, thus, also taking care of our regional literature and indigenous constituents as a whole!
We owe a sense of gratitude for these people,doing their spade work towards conserving these rural cultural associations.
(Courtesy: Mumbai Mirror)
*Lakshmi Holmstrom, one of the greatest translators of Tamil literature, and award-winning translator of short stories and poetry from the Tamil canon, passed away yesterday.
(Excerpt from Mumbai mirror)
"I've always been fascinated by what is said in one language and how that may be 'carried over' into another; what works and what doesn't and why. Meanings aren't in dictionaries alone," she said in an interview in 2013.
(Excerpt from Mumbai mirror)
