[Reader-list] Bird-not-free in Kashmiri folk song

[Comet Media Foundation]

Dear Inder, Ananya and Kshmendra,

I'm tossing myself right into your conversation because Zia-ud-din Nakshabi
once did me a great favour or let's say I did myself a favour by relying on
his work so I have to defend him.

Kshemendra

1. Why are you getting after my man Zia, calling him a plagiarist? He lived
in the 14th century, when such concepts did not exist and he must have
thought he was sharing his delight and augmenting the reputation of the
works he was translating, re-contextualising and re-telling for a wide
Farsi-culture-influenced Central Asian public.
Incidentally, it's my reading that he cut the Tota's tales from 70 to 52
because he couldn't explain the cultural practices / references in some of
them to his readers, and with some other stories, he was afraid of getting
into trouble with the ulema. Apart from his literary work Zia was a hakim
and contributed to the incorporation of Indian ingredients into the Unnani
tibb. Call him a self-censoring coward or a bad translator, but such a
prayog-karta and rasik (man of science and art) cannot be labelled a
plagiarist!

2. The two weblinks you gave to the US National Library of Medicine are
nonsense. Even if he could do calligraphy and miniature paintings (though
it's not inconceivable) Zia could not have been painting in the18th century!
And if the word Kashmir in this ahistorical citation got you excited, let me
tell you he hung about in the shadow of then new Qutub Minar the whole time
he lived in India, in a mango garden and house of a nobleman patron in the
Mehrauli area who gave him the leisure to carry out his research and do his
compilations and translations.

3. Please write 'shuka' and not 'suka' when referring to the Shuka Saptati
(Seventy Tales of a Parrot). "Spashta uchcharan etc..." or at least as far
as we can take it Romanic letters.

Inder Salim
Can I speculate about sodur / sodras ? I think it is the metaphysical
concept of sudoor (सुदूर) -- a faraway, unknown, desirable and inaccessible
place -- that Lalleshwari was yearning for. Think of it as the sea, the
cloud-filled sky, the turbulent Wular in the monsoons. The pre-fix 'su'
indicates a positive attitude to the place, not a fearful one as in the
English notion of the 'unknown'. Rabindranath Tagore wrote "Ami
shudoorer-o-piyashi" or "I'm a seeker after the sudoor".

Ananya
Sharp, sharp! Slam on and provocate without inihibitions!

They say in my mother tongue, "Beshi katha, baaje katha", so I'll try to
stop my rotten kathas at this point.

With love to all

Jatasundari Devi (writing sneakily from some friends' office mail ID to
avoid detection)