Amita Bhose, from the great Ganges to Bucharest
I'm
going to tell you a story. A true story that begins in the City of Joy, Kolkata,
90 years ago, and the main character is a little girl with short hair and
lively black squirrel eyes. This little girl, Amita is her name, would
single-handedly build the cultural bridge between India and Romania, a distant
country of which she only knew it was in Europe. But until then, the little
girl Amita would learn to read and, returning home from school, she would
translate poems from English into Bengali for her mother. Perhaps,
in her heart, throughout her life, when she would translate for millions of
people, connecting worlds, these translations were dedicated to her mother whom
she lost at 13. To appreciate the true value of her cultural endeavor, we must
take into account the years when it took place - the 1960s, that is, more than
60 years ago. Amita has created a cultural bridge between two worlds with a
pencil, her mind and lots of love. In a time when there were no computers,
high-performance phones, e-mails, Facebook or Whatsapp. In the 1960s there were
only letters that took weeks on the road between the two countries.
Amita lived her childhood in an intellectual climate that left its mark on her later career. Her family was deeply involved in artistic and scientific activities. Her father, Sudhir Kumar Bhose, was a lawyer at the Calcutta Supreme Court of Justice as well at the New Delhi Supreme Court. He was awarded the “A.N. Dev” Prize by the University of Calcutta for research in the field of law and he was elected member of the University of Calcutta Senate and of the Asiatic Society. Her grandfather, J.C. Bhose, was a renowned orientalist and a member of the Asiatic Society, who was awarded the “Cobden” medal by the University of Cambridge for his research in the field of Indian Studies. Her maternal grandfather, T.N. Mitra, was the first to obtain his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Calcutta’s Faculty of Humanities. Various members of her family had made significant contributions to Indian culture. For instance, N. C. Bhose set up the Indian Boy Scouts organisation for young people, and her father’s uncle on his maternal side, N.C. Chunder, was one of mahatma Gandhi’s close associates. His son, P.C. Chunder, who was for a while minister of education and culture, was a scientist of considerable repute even outside India.
In 1953 she graduates from the Faculty of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics of the University of Calcutta and one year later she marries Dipak Kumar Ray, Ph.D., an engineering geologist. In 1959 she follows her husband to Romania, where he comes to specialise in oil geology. D.K. Ray being one of the first Indian to benefit from the scientific agreement concluded between the two countries.
In order to become familiarised with the mentality and spiritual life of the Romanian people, she enrols in a Romanian language and literature course at the University of Bucharest at the end of which, two years later, she passes an exam and is issued a proficiency certificate in the Romanian language. In a Romanian textbook she discovers the poem "Ce te legeni... – Why do you swing, o, Forest?” which, as she will confess, captivates her. ”My first contact with Eminescu’s poetry simply astonished me. I was discovering a whole world, in which the East meets the West, Europe meets Asia, the finite is unbordered and barriers are removed. Eminescu’s entire poetry (…) was thus revealed to me like an endless melody, blending all the borders of time and space.”
Truth is of course stranger than fiction. ”Otherwise how could a poem in a childrens’s book change the course of my life? It was just by chance that I came across that piece, and immediately it captured my imagination. A world of poetic phantasy revealed before my mind's eye. It was a poplar forest of late autumn, a forest bereft of leaves and deserted by birds. A forest which stood at the pivot of bareness between the colourful summer and the snow winter, with its branches swinging vertically. It swung between summer and winter, autumn and spring, empty and full, life and death, creation and annihilation. The poem called to my mind the image of Siva Nataraja, the lord of cosmic dance, who creates the universe with one step and brings its end with another. Like the Indian god, whose image was so artistically revived by Tagore, Eminescu’s forest was apparently withered, but under the garb of emptiness it preserved a great potentiality, an inconceivable force of regeneration.”
În 1961 she returns to India with her husband and she makes her press debut with an article entitled “Rabindranath in Romania”, published in Desh literary gazette. She becomes a regular contributor to various Indian magazines and newspapers, with articles in both Bengali and English on India’s culture or on Romanian culture and literature, from which she also translates. She also begins to be invited by universities, schools, cultural associations or by the radio to give lectures on various aspects of convergence between Indian and Romanian cultures.
She is deputy editor-in-chief (1962-1971), literary editor at the Publicity Department of Damodar Valley Corporation, she works, at the same time, as the literary editor of Damodar Valley Project Reports. She also contributes with articles at Bharatakosa, an Indian encyclopedia in Bengali. She is the cofounder of the Bichitrita Association (a Literary, Music, Dance and Drama Society) in Calcutta, led by Prof. P.C.Gupta, an academically renowned historian and a close associate of Tagore. As secretary general (1964-1966) and, later on, literary secretary (1966-1971), Amita Bhose organises literature, folklore and theatre conferences, musical shows as well as a symposium on the history of Indian cinematography. From this moment on and in time, due to her thorough involvement in the research of Indian culture, she will attain a high level of specialisation and will be recruited into many famous cultural associations. Thus, she becomes a member of the Asiatic Society of India; "Rabindra Bharati" Society; Bangla Sahitya Parisad (the Association for the Study and Research of Bengali Literature) in Calcutta; or the Oriental Studies Association of Romania; she is also granted lifetime membership to Vishva Bangla Sammelan (Bengali Culture World Association) and to the Rama Krishna Mission Institute of Culture in Calcutta; she will also become a member of Presidency College Alumni Association, European Branch in London.
In 1965 she graduates from the
Bengali-English Faculty of the University of Calcutta and two years later, on
the invitation of Romanian Institute for Cultural Exchanges she comes to
Romania for the second time, establishing new cultural ties. One year later she divorces D.K. Ray. In
documents and publications between 1954 and 1971 she appears as Amita Ray.
Amita Bhose was a fine writer: Cenasonar baire (Beyond the Familiar World), the
journal of her travels to Romania was considered by Indian radio channels “the
best book on a foreign country”. For Jugantar,
an Indian newspaper, she writes about local traditions and social aspects, her
articles being published under the title Alapinir
alapani (Woman-to-woman Talk).
A very important moment
of her literary activity was in 1969, when she published in Calcutta Eminescu: Kavita (Eminescu: Poems). We
discover the details of the intense labour of translating these poems in her
paper “Eminescu read by Indians”, which she delivers at a University of
Bucharest conference: “My purpose was
not necessarily to reach a perfect translation of the physical body of words,
but to understand the poems’ spirit, to delve into their enigmatic and tempting
depth, to live the anguish felt by their author. […] For me, translating
Eminescu was not an artistic experiment or a language exercise; it was a
spiritual experience of living an inner existence, which I cannot define.” The
volume gathers 35 of Eminescu’s poems published both during his life and after
his death, translated into Bengali and accompanied by a short introduction to
the poet’s life and work . This was the first translation of Eminescu’s poems
in Asia, published in a volume. With a modesty
that only great spirits have, she said: ”Thanks to Eminescu
my name reached all the meridians of the world.” At the same time, also thanks
to Amita Bhose, the first Indian language into which Romanian literature was
translated was also Bengali. Amita Bhose penetrated into the enigmatic depths
of Romanian literature due to her love for this country. And for Eminescu's
work: the Indian world discovered, amazed, in a foreign poet, ideas and
feelings so similar to Indian ones. And many recognized Tagore's poetic
sensibility in Eminescu's poems. In the daily Jugantar, in 1970, the
writer Parimal Goswami noted: „The translation is cursive and it is done in
such a nuanced language that it does not even look like a translation. Through this
volume of poetry from a distant country, the translator built a bridge between
the two cultures, a fact for which our literature and culture will be
grateful”.
Of her own initiative she continues
to translate books, sometimes as a freelancer or renouncing her copyrights. She
translated dramas of the most representative playwrights – Ion Luca
Caragiale, Mihail Sebastian, Al. Mirodan,
Marin Sorescu. The plays were broadcast and performed on stages in
Calcutta. She also translated short stories of Romanian classics, a collection of modern
Romanian poems. She was the first Indian philologist to learn Romanian.
And from now the story continue on another continent.
In August 1971 her father dies and in December she enrols in a doctoral
programme of the Faculty of Romanian Language and Letters of the University of
Bucharest, on a scholarship from the Romanian government. Her thesis is The Indian Influence on Eminescu’s
Philosophy and her superviser is Prof. Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga, the
greatest exegete of the Eminescian work. Amita
identifies the sentimental reasons behind her decision to return to Romania.
“After my father passed away, I went back to Romania in search of a love haven among the Romanian people”. She also says:
”Man's destiny cannot be foreseen.
I am an Indian in love with my
mother tongue and Indian culture. But
if (…) I happened to get acquainted with your country and devote myself to some comparatist research into Romanian and Indian spirituality, that was one of
the capital and revealing events of my life.”
She defends her Ph.D. thesis at
the University of Bucharest in 1975 – ”One of
the happiest moments of my life – she
said.” She received so many flowers that a few students had to carry them on to
the campus where she lived. Published
with the title: Eminescu and India, in 1978, the thesis establishes a
series of new points of contact between Indian and Romanian cultures as found
in Eminescu’s works, and attempts to change the accepted opinion of Romanian
literary critics on Eminescu’s Indian sources.„I must say at the very beginning
that I recognise this distinguished Indian intellectual as one of the most
serious contemporary Eminescologs. She bent upon the texts with an attentive
and unbiased eye and reconsidered the works of the Romanian national poet in an
unceasing comparison with the Philosophy and the Literature of India. She was
struck with the profound analogy between the courses of thought of Eminescu and
that of the poets of her country, from Kalidasa to Rabindranath Tagore. Then
she tried to return to the cause, which she researched and systematized with
the European scientific rigour and minuteness.” – Zoe Dumitrescu- Bușulenga[1]
”The work of Amita Bhose fills up thus a significant gap in the history of
Romanian literature. Besides possessing a good knowledge and a personal
meditation on the poems of Eminescu (being the translator of his works in her
mother-tongue Bengali), the authoress is conversant with the Indian texts, As
this advantage was lacking in all Romanian researchers till now, this aspect
distinguishes her from her predecessors in this field. Besides the original
texts of Eminescu, the authoress utilised an impressive bibliography of over
300 titles, for the purpose of documentation” (Dr. C. Poghirc[2]).
The first part of the work – chapters I-III - assigns the boundaries of
Eminescu’ s knowledge about India and the sources of this knowledge, the fourth
chapter substantiates an exceptionally valuable idea that the Indian influence
on Eminescu was not an external element, imposed as a fashion or as a whim, but
an internal necessity, a structural correspondence. The last three chapters
present a concrete study of this influence in three essential moments – Echoes
of Kalidasa, Encounters with Buddhism, Onward to the Vedas.
George
Munteanu, the poet’s well-known biographer, writes in his report on the thesis:
“This aspect of the poet (pandit-poet in the Indian world, ed.) was revealed to me when, after a longer meditation on his deep
relations with the ancient Romanian philosophy, with traditional wisdom, I
grasped that this should indeed be the basis for a new biography of Eminescu”.
Reports were also given by Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga, Sergiu Al-George, Şerban
Cioculescu, Constantin Ciopraga, Alexandru Piru.
For Amita Bhose, Eminescu "is the quintessence of the Romanian spirit. It wasn't intellectual curiosity that made the poet get closer to India, but his need for self-rediscovery." In her doctoral thesis Amita Bhose wrote: „Eminescu was not a philosopher and was more than a poet; he was a dārśanik (a seer), a kavi (poet and wise man) in the Indian sense of the terms.” Her comparative studies, the Eminescu-Tagore parallel drew attention of the existence of a common stock of sensitiveness, shared by the Romanian and Indian peoples, the idea supported by Sergiu Al-George too. ”In Romania, through Eminescu, the culture of my country reached the hearts of the Romanian people. His love and esteem for India have bound me inextricably to your country”. Eminescu’s Indianism was not accidental or an echo of German romantic Orientalism or a manifestation of Schopenhauer’s influence. His knowledge of Indian texts only served him to crystallize his thoughts, in order to reach a certain level of artistic excellence. The Indian influence was a structural assimilation.
To understand the importance of her professional
approach, in Romania, between 1900 and 1989, the year of the revolution, only
1600 doctorates were awarded, for all fields. 1600! And
one of these was awarded to Amita Bhose.
After her doctoral thesis, she is granted a two-year
postdoctoral scholarship so that she can take part, together with other
specialists, in the scientific editing of Eminescu’s work. Thus, she is asked to join the Eminescu Team
formed under the aegis of the Museum of Romanian Literature. In this capacity,
she writes a study on the influences Indian philosophy had on Eminescu’s
literary prose. And also gives the final version to the text of the Small Sanskrit Grammar by Fr. Bopp,
translated by the poet but never published, and adds the specific critical
apparatus. Eminescu’s manuscript is transcribed by transliterating Sanskrit
words with Latin letters and diacritics. This three-year-long labour and the
study were published in Works series,
by the Romanian Academy Publishing. Amita Bhose’s books and
subsequent studies, articles, bring "a more precise location of decisive
crossroads and confluences the Romanian contribution represents in the world
culture." (Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga)
Amita Bhose was not only researcher, writer, translator, but also a very dedicated teacher. Between 1972 and 1991 – almost 20 years – she taught, using only the Romanian language, practical courses in Sanskrit and Bengali and theoretical courses on Indian civilization and aesthetics at the University of Bucharest. She wrote a Bengali Course, followed by a Bengali-Romanian dictionary – 850 pages - and a Bengali Handbook, all three handwritten with the help of her students, as the printing house did not have Bengali characters. In time, following a serious study of the methodology of teaching Sanskrit to foreigners, she successfully wrote a 300-page-long Sanskrit textbook. This was unique to European languages. The three-volume Sanskrit textbook appeared posthumously. She had to do everything from scratch.
In my memory, Amita Bhose remains as a teacher. Many enrolled in her courses out of curiosity. Curiosity turned into passion and the students remembered the first exciting moments when they became children again, studying the letters of the Bengali or Sanskrit alphabet to enter the fascinating world of India. With a great ability of analysis and work, she translated, gave courses and conferences, developed manuals and dictionaries, wrote articles and comparative studies. She was an earnest and demanding person, with a fine and ironic humor. And very warm. She had a strong personality, despite her fragility. Without exaggeration, Didi was the University's most beloved professor. So we call her Didi. She happily attended our personal events and we were honored to have her as a guest at our homes.
The Bengali and Sanskrit classes were optional, two hours a week - but Didi worked a lot privately with us, her students, without any financial demands, only with love. The students did not even receive a graduation certificate. And yet, many synthesis works were written during that period; there were translations done from Bengali and Sanskrit, some of which were published by prestigious cultural magazines. In the literary-artistic shows organised by Amita Bhose in Bengali and Sanskrit between 1974 and 1986, her students played and directed Rabindranath Tagore’s Sesh raksha, translated by Amita Bhose from Bengali into Romanian. This was the first performance of an Indian play in Romania. Fragments from this production were included in Romanian radio shows for foreigners and broadcasted by the local TV channel in Calcutta.
What motivated and spurred on these remarkable accomplishments? The loving relationship between students and their teacher, their feeling of mutual respect in the true Indian tradition.
And following her articles published in the Indian press, about the Bengali and Sanskrit courses held by her at the University of Bucharest, the Indian students, impressed, sent to the Romanian students the textbooks from which they themselves learned.
As a professor, aided by the
renowned Sanskritologist Sergiu Al-George, she sets up and runs an Indian
Studies Circle within the Indian Civilisation course delivered at the
University of Bucharest. It is appropriate
here to mention a few words about Sergiu Al-George, the greatest Romanian
Indianist, the best Romanian translator from the Sanskrit language, whom we
celebrated this year his 100th birthday. "A
scholar forgotten before he was known", as Didi sadly stated. He
learned Sanskrit by himself, he also knew the Pali, Prakrit and Tibetan
languages. Apart from contributing a number of papers on Indian Philosophy and
Linguistics in Romanian and foreign journals, he translated the Bhagavad-gita,
Samkhya-karika and Tarka-samgraha from Sanskrit, with explicative
notes on Sanskrit terms and Indian philosophical concepts. At international
level he was considered one of the three non-Indian experts on Panini. He
visited India at the invitations of the University Grants Commission in 1972.
He participated in the Fifth International Sanskrit Congress at Benares in 1981
as a guest of the Unesco. He died in
1981, within a week of his return from India. His last book, Archaic and
Universal, is a monumental work in the field of comparative and
inter-disciplinary studies.
As a translator in Romanian, Didi gave us one of the most representative Sanskrit plays, Mrcchakatikan (Căruţa de lut) by Sudraka – the first translation of a Sanskrit play into Romanian. She also translates Natyasastra from Sanskrit, with her best student on Sanskrit, Constantin Făgețan. Romanians read the most beautiful Indian love story translated from Bengali – Radha and Krisha by Chandidas, they also read poetry, theater, fairy tales, modern short stories, Bengali, Sanskrit proverbs and, especially, Rabindranath Tagore; Didi being the first and only one to make translations of Tagore directly from Bengali. She translated directly, without dictionaries– they didn't even exist, she wrote the Bengali-Romanian dictionary herself. And every time she went to India, on holidays, she established new cultural ties.
During her lifetime, she published, in both foreign and Romanian magazines, over 56 literary translations from Romanian into Bengali and from Bengali literature into Romanian, and over 90 articles and studies about Eminescu, Romanian and Indian Culture. She delivered over 100 conferences and spoke on radio broadcast, and she gave over 20 interviews on cultural topics.
On all roads, Didi walked untrodden paths. Of course, she could have achieved a lot more, but our destiny is decided beyond our power of will. When she was 59 years old, in October 1992, just one month after returning from holiday in India, Didi – Amita Bhose – left us after an unsuccessful operation in a Bucharest hospital. At her family’s request, the urn with Amita Bhose’s ashes remained in Romania, as a natural, yet premature fulfilment of the destiny of a woman who, for 30 years, served Romanian culture with utmost devotion.
As a result, in Romania, Amita Bhose was awarded the Romanian Writers’ Union Prize for her translation of Eminescu into Bengali. In India the Romanian Ambassador awarded her the medal commemorating Romania’s Independence, for her activity in the field of Romanian culture. And she received the great prize of the Romanian people: love and gratitude.
Her name is at letter B in the General Dictionary of Romanian Literature, edited by the Romanian Academy.
The National Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest hosts a permanent exhibition dedicated to her, including manuscripts, photographs, personal items.
This is, in short, Didi’s life - Amita Bhose - the older sister of Eminescu, Romanians older sister. From 1971 to her death she lived in Romania, "the country she loved perhaps more than many Romanians do, and served with her intelligence and her pen" (Zoe Dumitrescu-Buşulenga, the scientific advisor of the thesis, who calls Didi "a noble friend".) A noble friend who taught Romanians to love and appreciate their own culture. For Didi - Amita Bhose - Romania did not meen a foreign country: ”Romanian are akink to Bengalis as regards affective structure, characterologic features, artistic options. This is why I never felt I was a foreigner in your country. Otherwise how could I have stayed among for you a quarter of a century, not as a mere neighbour? How would you account for my interest taken in Eminescu and your spirituality if it had not been for the extraordinary relations between two old and valuable cultures?”
She also said: „The Romanian creative demarche made me not only learn Romanian in its country of origin, study Romanian literature, write in Romanian, translate from Romanian, but I have even come to dream in Romanian. Do you think I am exaggerating if I tell you that in my dreams my grandparents speak Romanian?”
Her life was guided by the verse from the Bhagavad-gītā, so well rendered by Sergiu Al-George in Romanian: "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”
Blessed be their memory. The story is told further, from the great Ganges to Bucharest.
Carmen Mușat-Coman
Selected Bibliography
www.amitabhose.net
www.edituracununidestele.ro
Amita Bhose – Eminescu and India.
Dialoguri cu Amita Bhose: Eminescu este magnetul care mă atrage spre România.
Amita Bhose – Eminescu și limba sanscrită.
Amita Bhose – I started dreaming in Romanian.
[1] Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga (1920-2006). Professor and Head of the Department of Universal and Comparative Literature, University of Bucharest, scientific advisor of Amita Bhose’s doctoral thesis.
[2] Cicerone Poghirc (1928-2009). Professor and Head of the Department of Classical Languages, University of Bucharest. President of the Association for Oriental Studies, University of Bucharest.
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