After reading U.R. Ananthamurthy’s “What Does Translation Mean in India?” in class, I became intent on finding a Kannada short story to translate for the translation project. Until the age of three, I was only fluent in Tulu and a little Hindi and English. My relationship with Kannada began when I was four, my paternal uncle got married, and my aunt came to live with us. Mangalore has many small villages and towns that make up its culture, and while India is renowned for being incredibly diverse, a lot of that diversity can be found just in these places in Mangalore. My mother’s village in Udupi is located right in the middle of my father’s and uncle’s village in Mulki and my aunt’s village in Kundapur, both mere thirty minutes apart from Udupi. While the inhabitants of Mulki and Udupi primarily speak Tulu, those living in Kundapur are entirely detached from that language and are only connected to Kannada.
For the longest time, I would notice that my aunt only held conversations in English and Hindi and perhaps the chance ones in Kannada with my grandparents. Eventually, when my younger siblings were born and we started going to school, my entire family switched to speaking English in our daily conversations to make learning it easier for us. Tulu slowly faded into the background, reserved for all those conversations that we want to keep hidden from non-Tulu speaking people in public.
The limitation with a primarily Tulu childhood is that Tulu is simply a conversational language, no script whatsoever. I couldn’t read any children’s literature mainly because there were none. There are no Tulu writers, only Kannada ones. While Tulu is primarily the language spoken in Mangalore, it is more significantly the language of the fishermen castes. Since the ancient days, Kannada has been the only recognised administrative language in Karnataka. It is often speculated that the Tulu lipi (script) has Brahmanical origins, leading the tulunaad people (primarily of lower castes) to reject it. The existence of the Tulu script rapidly diminished except for its contribution in being the mother script for Malayalam.
When U.R. Ananthamurthy, in his essay, mentioned that Kannada exists in Udupi and is “perceived as the language of high culture”, I am reminded of every visit from my maternal grandmother, Ammama, where she would bring her weekly copy of Taranga, a subscription- based Kannada magazine that had short stories, poems and cartoons, and introduce me to different literary worlds. It was only suitable, of course, to recruit the help of my Ammama to embark on this translation project.
Initially, it was challenging to find a short story author. While there are many literary legends in Kannada literature, most are recognised as poets, playwrights and novelists. Furthermore, Kannada stories are most accessible to Kannada reading people, a demographic I don’t fall under. If accessible, they have already been translated to English to give it that higher accessibility status. Eventually, Ammama sifted through her old copies of another Kannada weekly magazine, Sudha, and found a famous Kannada fable. Huliyo Iliyo, Tiger...Mouse, by Panje Mangesh Rao, is a story that transcended across time, through Ammama’s and my childhoods, albeit with different endings.
My knowledge of Kannada, I would come to learn, did not include the nuances of punctuation and contexts. Although mainly from Kannada to English, my translation project comprised of multiple minor translations that were compiled to form the final product. While I know the odd few words and the rare sentence or two in Kannada, applying that limited knowledge to conduct a translation of it into another language entirely proved to be highly challenging. That meant that every sentence Ammama and I would go over, she would first translate it into Hindi or Tulu, and then I would frame that same sentence in English. Together we translated the three- page children’s story in an hour with this back and forth.
I’ve always found Kannada to be a fascinating language. Perhaps more so because I couldn’t speak it. Huliyo Iliyo. I was interested in the story from the minute I heard the title. Tiger...Mouse. Although I was familiar with the fable before reading the original Kannada version, I was curious about how Huliyo Iliyo fits into the story, so obvious perhaps to most but not to someone who knows these words as precisely what they are, words. To me, it is simply a misplaced phrase, one that made sense only in the sentence “Are you Huliyo Iliyo?”. Understanding and unravelling the context in which the few Kannada words I knew were put was the most enjoyable part of this experience.
When Ammama first told me that the story she had picked was a fable, I was sceptical. I had always found fables to be frustratingly preachy with “morals” that define the standard of etiquette. However, this particular fable, with its personal connection to Ammama’s and my childhoods, along with its subtle and unexpected humour, was an exciting piece of literature to not only read but to give another life to in another language.
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