Book review: Vikram Seth uses tech to enhance rhythm in Hanuman Chalisa

The Hanuman Chalisa
Translated by Vikram Seth

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Pages: 104    

Price: Rs 399

Vikram Seth made his debut as a novelist in 1986 with The Golden Gate. It was a novel written in verse composed of 590 stanzas or sonnets that narrated the story of a group of young people living in San Francisco, interpreting life, searching for adventure and trying to understand the meaning of love. In subsequent years, Seth wrote several other novels, the most famous of them being A Suitable Boy, which cemented his place among India’s top fiction writers in English.

Almost 38 years after he wrote his first novel, Seth has returned to the verse form. But this time he has chosen to translate one of the most popular and widely recited poems of Tulsidas, the 16th century Vaishnava poet who wrote in Sanskrit, Awadhi and Braj Bhasha. It is a short poem — Hanuman Chalisa — which is a hymn to Hanuman, the supremely powerful monkey in the Ramayana whose unparalleled devotion to Rama and his wife, Sita, elevated him to the status of a god. It has 43 couplets and is commonly recited by many Hindus not only on religious occasions but also to ward off evil or to ensure success in any endeavour.

There is no precise reason why Seth decided to undertake the translation of Hanuman Chalisa into English. A plausible reason could be that he wanted more people to understand the intricate nuances and connotations of how Tulsidas celebrated the power and greatness of Hanuman. Tulsidas wrote Hanuman Chalisa in Awadhi, a language that is not easy to comprehend even for Hindi-speaking people. The other reason perhaps is his own love for this poem. In a brief introduction to 

his translation, he recalls that “Bhaskar, the precocious young mathematician in A Suitable Boy, would recite Hanuman Chalisa during his childhood.

The short poem, running into just about 100 pages, has been translated with a lot of care and sensitivity keeping in mind what should make the poem more accessible to the readers. There are no endnotes or footnotes to explain the poem’s context and relevance. Nor does Seth needlessly dwell on the intricacies of the metre that Tulsidas uses and the rhythm that he manages to achieve. He avoids them so that these explanations (so detailed and boring that they could often sound pedantic) do not come in the way of readers enjoying the simplicity and pristine appeal of the poem. The translator achieves that goal quite remarkably.

Yet, Seth employs a highly evolved technique to help readers enjoy the rhythm and flow of Hanuman Chalisa. Apart from the English translation, each of the original Awadhi couplet of Tulsidas is presented in Devnagari script, followed by its simple phonetic transliteration in English alphabets without any superscript, subscript, italicisation or diacritical mark. In the transliteration exercise, he follows a simple set of rules to indicate short vowels, long vowels and diphthongs. Following a widely used practice, he separates two vowels sitting next to each other within a word with a hyphen.
 

Similarly, he shows retroflex letters as capital letters to distinguish alphabets like T, D and R from their dental equivalents. But a more interesting aspect of this approach is that the transliteration follows a pattern in spelling the words in the poem just as the way they are pronounced in Awadhi. Thus, the transliteration deletes the vowel at the end of those Awadhi words like chatur, meaning clever or rup meaning form, when they are pronounced as though the vowel does not exist. This is a commonly faced challenge in getting the right diction for most Indian languages, where the pronunciation of a vowel depends on its usage. Seth has resolved this problem with considerable ease.
 

The entire transliteration, therefore, turns out to be a complex and arduous exercise. But by following it, Seth has ensured that non-Awadhi readers too can enjoy the original lilting rhythm that Tulsidas had created. Indeed, the English translation too has followed the same principle of keeping the original tune intact. Seth’s emphasis has been not so much on a literal translation as on transcreation, as he wished to “convey something of the incantatory pleasure of the original”. This is a remarkable feat even as the translation remains faithful to the original text. The reader of this translation is a net gainer from such an approach.

Additionally, the English translation has succeeded in arousing the Bhakti Rasa or the devotional spirit as effectively as the original poem by Tulsidas.
 

Seth confesses that he completed the translation more than ten years ago “as a labour of love”. Why publish it now? There is no clear explanation except his disclosure that he had “only recently been persuaded to publish it.” A hint of a more detailed explanation is perhaps available elsewhere.
 

He has dedicated the translated Hanuman Chalisa to Bhaskar (remember that this is a character in A Suitable Boy, who had read the poem “before he was five, but who spent his fifties fighting the chauvinism and intolerance to which this and many other well-beloved religious texts and rituals have been put”. Seth regrets that nothing could be farther from “the humanity and inclusivity of the best of Hinduism”. And he hopes that the poem would “continue to spread joy, expand imagination and give strength and solace to its many past and future readers”. That a translation of a poem by one of India’s foremost Vaishnavite poets carries such commentary in its introduction is also a reminder of the times in which India is currently living.