“What you consider to be baits are ayats/ They direct the mind to the beloved” – so sang Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689-1752), the medieval Sufi poet-saint of Sindh. His baits, or verses, composed spontaneously and sung out loud, are saturated with the exquisite agony of a lifelong yearning for the Beloved. According to him, they were like ayats, verses of the Quran, composed with divine inspiration that came through him, not from him.
Shah Latif was one of the first to compose in Sindhi, not Persian, the language that dominated poetry in that era. His beautiful verses evoke the people and folktales and landscape of Sindh, and the finer, nuanced landscape of human experience, embellished further with ingenious alliteration and rhyme. Not for nothing has he been likened to Hafiz or Shakespeare. Fittingly, among connoisseurs of Sindhi literature, he is often referred to simply as Shah, meaning ‘king’. Across the border, in Sindh, Shah Latif and his poetry have become a symbol of Sindhi culture, the emblem of Sindhiyat par excellence. And yet, most Sindhi Hindus in India or in the diaspora today, are not familiar with Shah Latif’s poetry.
Eight decades ago, when Sindhi Hindus migrated to India during the Partition, the urgent need of the hour was resettlement and rehabilitation. Scattered, anxious to assimilate, and often looked down upon for being Sindhi, for being needy refugees, for being perceived as ‘quasi-Muslim’, they focused on rehabilitating themselves economically while downplaying their ethnicity. With no state or linguistic region to call their own and with precious little patronage, their language and literature began to decline. As the professor and writer Rita Kothari has astutely observed, it is ironic that the Sindhi community is defined as an ethnolinguistic minority – based on their region of origin and language – but the region itself is practically inaccessible to Indians, and Sindhis themselves are becoming more distanced from their language.
{{/usCountry}}Eight decades ago, when Sindhi Hindus migrated to India during the Partition, the urgent need of the hour was resettlement and rehabilitation. Scattered, anxious to assimilate, and often looked down upon for being Sindhi, for being needy refugees, for being perceived as ‘quasi-Muslim’, they focused on rehabilitating themselves economically while downplaying their ethnicity. With no state or linguistic region to call their own and with precious little patronage, their language and literature began to decline. As the professor and writer Rita Kothari has astutely observed, it is ironic that the Sindhi community is defined as an ethnolinguistic minority – based on their region of origin and language – but the region itself is practically inaccessible to Indians, and Sindhis themselves are becoming more distanced from their language.
{{/usCountry}}Given the current state of the language in India, how can Sindhi Hindus access the treasure of Sindhi literature? Every community needs a sense of its own history and culture and the Sindhi community has, over the decades, turned from Sindhi to English (and very occasionally Hindi) to explore its own roots. Translations of Shah Latif’s Risalo (meaning ‘treatise’ or ‘compendium’), therefore, are very precious, not only for a wider audience interested in Sufi poetry, but especially for Sindhis, bridging the gap between them and their literature, history and culture.
Given this backdrop, it is quite a coincidence, then, to see not one but two translations of the Risalo available in India in recent months. One is by Rita Kothari, translating into Hindi, a language much closer to Sindhi, and therefore a closer interpretation. The other translation, into English, and published by the Murty Classical Library of India, is by Christopher Shackle, a professor emeritus from SOAS, who has specialised in Sufi, Ginan and Islamic poetry as well as Sikh literature. This is, however, a reprint of an earlier 2018 American edition; the Indian edition has dispensed with the original verses in the Perso-Arabic script, given its dwindling readership.
It is quite a challenge to translate Shah Latif’s Risalo with its hundreds of verses. For many translators, their starting point is the definitive annotated compilation of the Risalo by the writer and professor Kalyan Advani, which won him the Sahitya Akademi award in 1968. This path breaking publication ‘translated’ the Risalo from medieval Sindhi, thereby unlocking it for future readers and translators.
The dilemma of loyalty to form versus loyalty to essence is an old one. It is well-nigh impossible for any translator to successfully reproduce the alliteration and the rhyme so intricately wrought by Shah Latif, or the redolence of his earthy Sindhi. Translators of Shah like Anju Makhija and Shabnam Virmani stand out for being among the few who can successfully convey in English the essence of his poetry in a lyrical way, accessible to a wide range of readers. In the bargain, though, there is some departure from the original literal text.
In Shackle’s work there is considerable fidelity to the original text. Although it may not immediately appear lyrical, the serious reader will spend time with each verse and arrive at the lyrical meaning contained within it at their own pace. Shackle’s is an enormous oeuvre, running to more than 1,600 verses: no mean feat. It is in accessible modern-day English, and not the flowery, almost archaic English found in many other, older translations.
It is deeply ironic that Shah Latif’s verses, which were meant to be sung out loud by the common people, are now being pored over in books by a few, and understood only with difficulty, through the filters of translation. And yet, in the borderlands of the Thar desert – Kachchh and Rajasthan in India, and Thar Parkar in Sindh – the pastoral communities that Shah Latif himself had visited, and depicted in his poetry, continue to sing his verses, to quote him aptly and effortlessly at every turn of life. For these communities, Shah is far more than a poet: he is a saint, he is an anchor. With the verses and their music and their message passed down orally through the generations, it is these communities who are the true heirs to Shah Latif.
Nandita Bhavnani has been researching Sindhi history and culture since 1997. She is the author of Sindhnamah and The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India.