LDM: You were talking about this kind of pilgrimage to and from different languages. So, the Hymns of Tukaram are coming from Marathi. Can you tell me a bit about what that process is like coming from Marathi into English?

JP: Sanskrit is the mother language in mainland India. English is as much her daughter as Marathi is her daughter. Almost all the languages in mainland India have some relationship to Sanskrit except for Tamil, which has its own grammar and its own history, and has an overlay of Sanskrit which now is being peeled back by Tamil activists. So, I think that’s one level. Sanskrit is a classical language; Marathi is a Prakrit, a language in everyday use. Perhaps it could be understood by looking at the role of Latin in Europe; it is a classical language and English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German are the languages of daily use.

I remember the poet and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra telling me that when an Indian language makes its first connection with the epics, it becomes a literary language. With the Marathi language, this started in the thirteenth century, the group of four young Brahmin siblings, Nivruttinath, Dnyandev, Muktabai and Sopandev. Dnyandev begins by writing the Dnyaneshwari. He says that in his verses, the reader would find the beauty of Sanskrit in his Marathi. This is as much a claim as a defence. He is saying: we can do this, we can use our everyday language to talk about the larger ineffable things of life.

Tukaram comes about 300 years later, in the early years of the seventeenth century. He’s a Kunbi, a low-caste person. He has a lovely poem where he says, thank you for making me low caste. If I had been born in Brahman, the top rank, the priestly caste, I might have ended up a hypocrite like they are. He had an interesting life. His parents were Shudras, but they had their own farmland, which is quite rare, and they also had a little shop that they ran, and they lent money. When Tukaram came of age, he was expected to take over all this. He was very bad at it. He lost himself in God from time to time, he didn’t pay attention to the fields. He lent out money to the poor without taking any surety. He could not ask for it back and he ended up, and he ended up bankrupt.

Tukaram has a poem where he says, thank you for making me bankrupt. Thank you for doing all this for me. And it is very difficult to tell whether he’s being sarcastic or being honest because both tones come through. And this is the lovely thing about the Marathi poets, they are not ashamed of expressing the completeness – the 360-degreeness of their association with God. So, there is worship of course, but they will also chide God. The great mystics of the West talk about the long, dark night of the soul, which is pretty much a plea to God. Like, you know, you showed yourself to me, you ou made my life rich and glorious, and now you’ve vanished and you’ve left me cold and dry and alone. This is what they were saying. So ‘nindastuti’, which is what we call it when the disciple chides God, is to be understood in the largeness of this relationship, in the fullness of this relationship. And for me, as a Roman Catholic brought up in, the Holy Mother Church, this was refreshing, beautiful and liberating as well.

LDM: You spoke about how these verses came to you first kind of through schooling, and they came as quite rigid texts that were repeated out of dogma. I’m wondering if you can tell me a bit about the journey, from that dogmatic view of classical poetry into this much more ecstatic vision that you currently have.

JP: I think to begin with, I feel that Indian schools ‘manhandle’ poetry. We make it about learning things by heart. For instance, we had ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ by Thomas Campbell, which is a very famous poem, the teachers would say: ‘verses seven and 19’ and you had to just had to run them in your head and say verse seven and if you said verse six by mistake, and you even said verse six perfectly and not verse seven, you were given minus marks. It was terrible. So, poetry felt like one of many impositions that education put upon me.

In school, we had three languages that we studied English, Hindi and Marathi. Then we added French: a school-boy French, conjugations and learning how to spell ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ with the right punctuation, nothing that would prepare you for a visit to Paris. You learned history, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, algebra, geometry …You learned it all, but there was never any attempt made at connecting what you were learning with the wider world. We approached poetry then as another meaningless enterprise that had been imposed upon us, by a school system, by our parents. We did not ask why we were learning this stuff. We did not know why we were learning it. We just learned it.

But many, many years later, when I started wanting to become a poet, when I began to feel the itch of language and the desire for creation somewhere under the skin, I think it was W.H. Auden who once said that poets should know hundreds of lines of poetry by heart. There is a long walk in Bombay by the sea, which begins in Nariman Point, land reclaimed from the sea, and ends on a hill, and the hill is the hill of death for the Parsis, where the Parsis expose their dead bodies to the vultures. I wanted to walk that entire stretch and recite poems all along the way. I wanted not to run out of poems that I had inside my head, thereby proving something to myself and the ghost of Wystan Hugh as well. Towards the end of this stretch, I was digging up poems from school and suddenly Tukaram’s poem surfaced. I realised I knew this poem, but I had no idea what it meant, ‘Je ka ranzale gaanzale’… I knew these words, but I had no idea what they meant. So, I thought it would be nice, now that I was in my late twenties, I should start to investigate what these words meant. And I started reading Sant Tukaram, I started trying to parse it myself, understand it.

Over time, I started reading a Sant Tukaram poem every night just to see. So, I read my way through the whole collected Tukaram, which is about the size of the collected Shakespeare, about 600 pages of a big chunk of a book. Once some poems get a foothold, then that process of translation starts to happen. Because at one level, when you’re reading in another language, some part of your brain is just translating for meaning, right? Unless you are truly bilingual and the whole poem presents itself to you in that language. I am not bilingual. But you also have the feeling that you’re doing this a disservice because you don’t want the meaning. You want a poem. The reason why you’ve come to a poem is for a poem, not for a meaning. So, you begin to think: is there a way I could make this a poem? Is there a way this could become a poem for me because that was the quest in the first place? That’s where that journey begins. Then when you first, like the first poem you succeed at in a way. That becomes, I’m afraid to say it but I will anyway, the ecstatic moment. It’s about language rather than about the religious or about the numinous but it is language becoming a spiritual experience.

Our book, Behold! The Word is God: Hymns of Tukaram (Speaking Tiger Books), offer two translations of each of the abhangs we have translated. Shanta Gokhale, my co-translator, is an atheist and one of the nicest, kindest persons I know. But her love of Tukaram is a love from childhood, a love from cultural memory, aesthetic memory. So, for both of us, the approach was the word, it was: ‘Behold, the word is God!’ It was not about God, it was not about Sant Tukaram. It was about this language, about the beauty of this language and some attempt to take it across the river.