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

[Kshmendra Kaul]

For Jatasundari Devi.
 
May you access this reponse as 'sneakily' as you wrote from  "some friends' office mail ID"
 
1. Your passionate defense of Nakshabi is understandable since he did you a favour, or rather, by relying on his work, you did yourself a favour.
 
2. I would never dare to 'get after' your man. I did not call Nakshabi a 'plagiarist'. Please read my mail again. 
 
3. You suggest that Nakshabi based his 'work' on Shuka Saptiti, confining himself to 52 instead of 70 tales. I did not suggest that. I only said that some say so. That includes you now.
 
4. You think Nakshabi can be called a  "self-censoring coward or a bad translator". I cannot say so.   
 
5. Thank you for the info that "Zia was a hakim and contributed to the incorporation of Indian ingredients into the Unnani tibb". 
 
6. You have called 'nonsense' the 2 weblinks from the US National Library of Medicine. I cannot say anything to that.
 
7. I agree that Nakshabi "could not have been painting in the18th century". Does not fit in with generally know biography.
 
8. I stand corrected. "Shuka" it is and not "Suka". Thanks. "Spashta uchcharan etc..." is important.
 
9. You falter (I speculate) in your 'speculation' about "sodras" (from 'sodur'). The lines in the poem talk about towing a boat across the "sodur" and about crossing shores.
 
Your mail was very enjoyable.
 
An educative digression: 
(apparently from Aditya Narayan Dhairyasheel Haksar's translation of a verse from Shuka Saptiti)
 
"The best of the lover's couches
is higher on the sides
sunken at the centre
it will also bear the strong
poundings of a couple's passion
 
The middling bed is flat of surface
so that the night will often pass
with rarely any contact
between the bodies two.
 
The worst is raised at the centre,
and both its sides slope down;
even adepts in the art cannot
make love on it continuously"

 
Kshmendra
 
 
 

--- On Wed, 10/7/09, Comet Media Foundation <cometmediafdn at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Comet Media Foundation <cometmediafdn at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Bird-not-free in Kashmiri folk song
To: "Kshmendra Kaul" <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
Cc: "reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>, "Inder Salim" <indersalim at gmail.com>, "Ananya Jahanara Kabir" <A.J.Kabir at leeds.ac.uk>, "bazaz002 at umn.edu" <bazaz002 at umn.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2009, 6:13 PM


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)