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Gulzar conferred Tata Lit Live poet laureate 2016

Pavan Varma and Gulzaar also discussed the idea of not being prejudiced by the English language nor blinded by one’s own mother tongue.

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Poet-lyricist, filmmaker and novelist Gulzar saab was conferred the Tata Literature Live! 2016 poet laureate on the second day of the literature festival. While festival host and founder-director Anil Dharker said, “This is an honour for the festival,” the poet himself was his usual modesty personified. 

“I’m touched that you considered me worthy of this,” said Gulzarsaab amid applause and added with a smile, “When Anil called to tell me of this honour I first thought I’d misheard. I’ve always felt I don’t write too badly, but I’m very glad that Anil thinks so too.”


A poem specially composed by Gulzar on the occasion of being conferred Poet Laureate 2016.

This was followed by a conversation between him and author-diplomat Pavan Varma who has translated several of Gulzar saab’s works. When Varma lamented how “increasingly Indians were becoming linguistic orphans as they distance themselves from their own mother tongues and are still not exactly adept at English” Gulzar felt, “People should not get too blinded by their love for their own languages or be prejudiced against English.” According to him, “Indian English is now coming into its own in a way far removed from the Queen’s English of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Nirad Chaudhari. People have owned the language and given it the flavour of this land. I will not be surprised if English comes to be seen as one of our mother tongues.”

He also expressed sadness over how prejudice was coming in the way of Urdu being recognised. “We are all speaking Urdu and we hear it everyday. But we don’t see it because of our prejudice.” He emphasised how Urdu was a language born in India. “It has borrowed so much from our languages like Awadhi and Bhojpuri. Where do you think the characters Ta, Thha, Da, Dha or Pa, Pha, Ba, Bha have come from? These were taken from Sanskrit. And they have many beautiful things which have come from Persian and Arabic too. We should not allow our own bigotry to get in the way of accessing something so beautiful.”

Varma spoke of the challenge of translating a poet like Gulzar saab. “He articulates the most complex thoughts in the most simple, lucid way. The moment you try to bring that into English the magic is lost,” he said and added, “Its like transferring perfume from one bottle to another. Some of the fragrance is inevitably lost.” 

Gulzar saab protested saying this wasn’t true. “Pavan Varma’s translations are so good that they work independently as poems. I’m often tempted to go translate them all over again.” He spoke of his own latest project where he’s translating works from 32 Indian languages himself. “Its like a poem a day and is my next compilation.”

He gave audiences a whiff of his in-the-pipeline work, ‘Suspected Poems,’ by reading out poems on Dalit identity (Backwaters of Kerala), silencing of voices of dissent (Goonga) and disconnect between the political system and the masses (Jalsa). 

 

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