The last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe has passed away – and with her the ancient Bo language.

Boa Sr was the only surviving descendant of the Bo people, who inhabited the remote Andaman Islands off the east coast of India.

She died last week aged 83 after living through British rule, Second World War Japanese occupation and the 2004 tsunami.

Delhi-based linguistics professor Anvita Abbi told how Boa lost her sight and had been forced to learn a new language.

He said: “She was the only person left who spoke Bo. At times, she felt very isolated and lonely as she had no-one to talk to in her own tongue. She had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate.

“But throughout her life she had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious.”

The Abhayadev Memorial Bhasha Samanwaya Awards instituted by the Bhasha Samanwaya Vedi for Malayalam-Hindi periodicals and writers who undertake translation of literary works that help in boosting cultural unity have been announced.

Kavanakaumudi, published once in three months, received the award in the Malayalam periodicals section for publishing 22 translated poems from various Indian languages. Sadbhavana Darpan, published from Raipur and edited by Girish Pankaj, won the award in the Hindi periodicals section for publishing translated works in all Indian languages.
For translations

U.K.S. Chauhan won the award in translated works section for his translation of Mahakavi Akkitham’s poems into Hindi.

The awards will be distributed on February 9 at Kozhikode by Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University Vice-Chancellor Vibhoothi Narayan Rai.

Book: ‘Travancore: The Footprints of Destiny’ – Autobiography: Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, the former king (as told to Uma Maheswari); Publisher: Konark Publishers; Price: Rs.2,000

In 1924, when Mahatma Gandhi asked young Chithira Tirunal, the 12-year-old prince of the erstwhile princely state of Travancore in Kerala, if he would remove untouchability and throw open the temples to all castes when he became king, the boy answered, ‘Of course’. And he lived up to his word.

The former princely state of Travancore in Kerala, a staunch Hindu bastion, has always stood apart from the rest of 19th century royal India for its progressive ideas and non-alignment which were way ahead of its time.

Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, 88, the last ruler of Travancore, gives many glimpses of life as it was then in the first-ever autobiography of a former ruler from the erstwhile princely state, in ‘Travancore: The Footprints of Destiny’.

When Chithira Tirunal met Mahatma Gandhi in 1924 at the Pattom Palace, the prince was accompanied by his regent mother Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi. As promised, on his 25th birthday, Nov 12, 1936, the prince issued the Temple Entry Proclamation, which was a landmark event in the history of India.

The momentous decision that allowed devotees cutting across caste lines to enter an upper caste Hindu shrine set a precedent in India.

The autobiography, which chronicles all the major events in India and in Kerala since the birth of the surviving former ‘Rajah’ throws rare insights into Kerala’s engagement with the rest of the country – and the 20th century world at large – during the British Raj and post- Independence.

It is also a testimony to Kerala’s rich cultural heritage through detailed descriptions of the state’s festivals, palace rites, religion and life inside the portals of the ornate palace.

Central to the book, however, is the spiritual driving force of the 12th century (former) royal state – a temple of Lord Padmanabha, an incarnation of Mahavishnu – the presiding deity of Travancore.

The book, which has a foreword by former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, is divided into 11 chapters that covers Travancore and its heritage, the Vishnu temples and its rituals, birth and childhood of the Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, the life of his parents, Travancore’s military tradition, the royal weddings and the power shift to democracy.

The short texts are accompanied by rare pictures from the royal archives and blurbs to highlight important events.

The book, dictated by the 88-year-old former king to Kerala-based journalist-writer Uma Maheshwari, will be released by Abdul Kalam Jan 5.

Maheshwari, whose forefathers migrated to Thiruvananthapuram centuries ago to serve the temple of Padmanabhaswami, says ‘humility was the hallmark of the erstwhile Travancore royalty’.

The former south Indian principality, one of the most ancient in India dating back to the Chera dynasty, was spread across 7,625 sq miles with a coastline 168 miles.

In a major initiative, 50 rare work of English, Persian and Sanskrit would be translated into Gojri. “Fifty rare works of English, Persian and Sanskrit are chosen to be rendered into Gojri in order to widen the access to classic and modern languages,” Dr Javaid Rahi a senior functionary of Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages said here today.

He said that this long-term project was initiated to bring world class and landmark works into Gojri to enrich this ancient tribal languages spoken by the Gurjar tribe. Under this project, 21 classics were already published in Gojri, which include world famous work like Mathnavi Moulana Rumi, “Gulistan-e-Saddi” Rubiyat-e-Umar Khayam, Karwan-e-Madina, Shakespeare’’s Othello and King Lear, Sanskrit’’s Neelmat Puran, the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi “My Experience with Truth”, Shahan-e-Gurjars and others.

“This project is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2011″, Rahi said.

Contemporary Santhali literature has taken off in a big way since it became an official language of Jharkhand in 2003, but it has not come of age because the government has not added it to the list of official Indian languages, says a pioneer of the Santhali book trade.

“Contemporary tribal literature does not get government grants – and flourishes on personal and individual enterprise,” Mangal Manjhi told IANS in an interview.

His modest Adim (ancient) Book Centre — which sells Santhali works written in the traditional Ol Chiki script — was set up 15 years ago in the tribal-dominated area of Parsudih on the outskirts of the steel city of Jamshedpur.

“It was the lone tribal bookshop in the region and also the first tribal shop to take part in the prestigious Jamshedpur Book Fair in 1994. Till today, Adim Book Centre is the only tribal representative at the fair,” Manjhi said.

His shop is currently one of the two surviving tribal bookshops in Jharkhand. “All the others have downed shutters because of resource crunch over the last five years. A couple of tribal hawkers sell books door-to-door in Ghatshila in East Singhbhum,” he said.

Since 2003, after Santhali — along with Maithili, Bodo and Dogri — was put in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution, contemporary literature has witnessed a spurt of new writers, Manjhi said.

Inclusion in the Eighth Schedule means the government is now under obligation to take measures for the development of the language. A candidate appearing for a public service examination is entitled to answer questions in the language.

“On an average, 50 new Santhali books are published every year. They are books on drama, poetry, novels, historical tales and religious texts,” Manjhi said. “The number of books can go up two-fold if the government recognises Santhali as an official Indian vernacular language like Bengali, Punjabi and Oriya under Article 345 of the Constitution.

“Tribal children are not encouraged to study Santhali — even in schools — because it’s not official.”

The writer-bookseller — who has written two books, “Hasur Bera” (The Last Fence) and Molong Anol (The Circle of Fate) — is now campaigning for it, along with a handful of intellectuals in Jharkhand and West Bengal.

“Santhali should be taught in every government school in tribal pockets,” Manjhi said. “We have managed to introduce it in a few schools on personal initiative.”

Santhals are the biggest tribal group in the Chhotanagpur region of which Jharkhand is a part — they form nearly 27 percent of the population.

Talking about his shop, Manjhi said: “Classical Santhali literature is still the most popular. Two books of drama by the creator of Ol Chiki script, Raghunath Murmu, titled ‘Kherowar Bir’ and ‘Bidu Chadan’, are still in demand.”

Murmu, who was born in 1905, felt the need to create a script because Santhali was written in the Roman script before that. By 1925, Murmu created Ol Chiki, the only tribal script without any compound words. “The creation of Ol Chiki gave birth to Santhali literature,” Manjhi said.

The dream to sell Santhali books was sown in Manjhi’s mind when he first visited the Jamshedpur Book Fair.

“I wanted to buy some Santhali books but I could not get any. It was a disappointment because the state was mine, but it did not have books in our language. I decided to sell my own books. Four years later, I was back at the fair as the lone tribal book shop owner in the region.”

Manjhi sells about 45,000 to 90,000 books priced between Rs.200 and Rs.4,500 (for the dictionaries) every year. “But it is difficult to procure rare Santhali books, though I have built a small stock of vintage texts over the years.

“As there is no help from the government, unlike in the other states, we fall back on small printing units in Kolkata to print tribal books at low cost.” He spends money out of his pocket to publish Santhali books and manage his book shop.

“Publishing each book costs Rs.16,000 to Rs.17,000,” he said.

Listing some of the most popular contemporary Santhali writers, Manjhi said: “Rameswar Murmu, Bhogla Soren, Barka Kisku, Yashoda Murmu, Joba Murmu and Barilal Tudu are now being read widely.”

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)

In a unique revolution in the publishing world, two Indian books have made their debut in the virtual world. Converted into the e-book format, both these books can now be downloaded on the e-book reader, Kindle.

Published by Indian publishing house Wisdom Tree, Mantras: The Sacred Chants by Swami Veda Bharati and Yogini: Unfolding the Goddess Within by Shambhavi Chopra can now be downloaded within minutes on the e-book reader.

The e-book versions, which have been uploaded on online retailer Amazon’s website, can only be downloaded on Kindle.

Talking about the response to the e-books since last week, Shobit Arya, publisher at Wisdom Tree, said: “The results in the first week itself are absolutely amazing. We sold the first Kindle version of Mantras within hours of it being available and sold eight copies within the first three days itself.”

Wisdom Tree has sent 15 of its books to be e-formatted on Kindle of which two have been done successfully while the rest are still in the pipeline, Arya added.

The only hitch in this is that Kindle is still not very popular in India unlike in the US. But according to Arya, it’s just a matter of time before the rage catches up here and these e-book reader gadgets are readily available here.

In Aspiring writers from India in The Guardian Anita Desai contrasts the situation there in the 1950s and 60s (”when it was an act of solitary confinement and the actual existence of writers was no more than a rumour spread by their books”) with the post-Midnight’s Children boom.
But there’s still a sense of nostalgia for the bad old days, where:

In this distinctly discouraging atmosphere, one could only withdraw to write without any hope of there being publishers who might want to publish what one wrote, still less of readers who might wish to read it

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who passed away in Hyderabad on September 16, was one of the most innovative, inspiring and widely honoured professors of English of her generation in the country. Each one of her major books charted out a fresh field and flung open new doors of academic enquiry — The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English (1971), Realism and Reality: the Novel and Society in India (1985) and The Perishable Empire (2000).

For the last-named book, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize for the best book of the year in English, thus becoming one of the four or five literary critics to have won it in the last 50 years. Her latest book, an intellectual biography of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), was launched in Delhi on Wednesday, as fate would have it, the day after she died.

Mukherjee began her teaching career in Patna where she had been a student and where she met and married Sujit Mukherjee, one of her professors who distinguished himself no less as a scholar, translator and later academic publisher. The two were perfectly matched in temperament as well as academic inclinations and wherever they lived, their home became a warm and welcoming social and intellectual adda.

Mukherjee taught successively at the University of Poona, Lady Shriram College, New Delhi, the newly-founded University of Hyderabad, and then back in Delhi as a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. In between she was also a visiting professor at Chicago, California and Texas. A whole legion of her devoted former students and colleagues are to be found all over the country as well as abroad.

Not only did her own work contribute to giving a new orientation to the discipline but she also helped build up institutions that would bring together senior and younger scholars and enable them to present their work and share ideas. For 12 years, between 1993 and 2005, she was the Chairperson of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS), which under her leadership went from strength to strength, increasing its membership from under 50 to over 400.

Of the major international conferences she was instrumental in organising during this period, one was held in Shimla in 1994 and resulted in a book which she and I co-edited, Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996). The other was a grander conference in Hyderabad in 2004, in which some of the most distinguished literary scholars and theorists in the world, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha,  participated, and which led to the publication of as many as three books.

A defining characteristic of Meenakshi Mukherjee both as a person and as a scholar was her simplicity. In an age of increasing scholarly jargonisation and even obfuscation, no one ever had any difficulty in following whatever she spoke or wrote. But such simplicity always went hand in hand with solid and substantial scholarship and a degree of persuasiveness that more complex ways of formulation would often have failed to achieve. She said the kind of acute things that clever people do not say.

As in her work so in her life, she was the most genial and forthcoming of human beings. Her modesty, affability and quiet charm were most in evidence when she was with young researchers and teachers who had most reason to be in awe of her. She could instantly establish a rapport with them which often turned into life-long friendships. She was a rare scholar and a rarer human being.

Harish Trivedi, the author of this piece, is Professor of English, Delhi University, and is the current Chairperson, Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS)

The views expressed by the author are personal

Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India in Hindi and Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist in Marathi — mainstream English publishers are trying hard to create ripples in regional-language market

“In a country where the primary spoken language is not English, it is lopsided not to publish in Indian languages,” says Minakshi Thakur, editor of Harper Hindi that came into being last year. What began with 11 books now has 40 titles a year. But regional-language market is tough to crack. As Thakur says, “The Hindi market is highly price-sensitive. It’s a market where hardbacks are available for Rs 100-150 and paperbacks for Rs 30-50. We cannot match those prices but can manage to come close. We will give the readers better-produced titles and value for their money.” Vaishali Mathur, senior commissioning editor, Penguin, agrees, “Also, the distribution across a varied cross-section of readership offers its own challenges.”

Read the whole article here

Puffin, an imprint of Penguin, the country’s leading English language publisher, has ventured into comic book publishing with its new offerings: comic book versions of two stories from Satyajit Ray’s famous Feluda mystery series and “Where’s Hanuman?”

“Comic book publishing is a fast-growing segment within the publishing industry. There are hardly any comic book versions of Indian characters in book stores therefore these books are unique. We are planning more comic books on Indian characters,” says Puffin’s editorial director Sudeshna Ghosh.

Now on sale, “A Bagful of Mystery” and “Beware in the Graveyard” are comic book versions of Satyajit Ray’s popular Feluda stories and are said to be full of thrills and excitement accentuated by a crisp storyline and dramatic illustrations. A well-known professional detective in popular fiction, Feluda uses his super-sharp brain and teams up with cousin Topshe and friend Lalmohan Ganguli to capture devious culprits and solve puzzling mysteries.

Priced at Rs.99 each, the Feluda comic books have text by seasoned writer Subhadra Sen Gupta and art by Tapas Guha. Slated for publication in 2010 are three more comic book versions from the Feluda series: “Murder by the Sea”, “The Killers of Kathmandu” and “Danger in Darjeeling”.

Scheduled for release later this month is “Where’s Hanuman?”, a picture activity book. It will offer the young reader the challenge of locating Hanuman and his friends from among dozens of other characters. The comic book will illustrate brilliant, memorable scenes from the Ramayana and also tickle the funny bone through humorous characters and amusing scenes.

Authored by Alister Taylor and illustrated by Christopher Woods and Ben McClintic, the book is priced at Rs.125.