April 13, 1919, marks a dark day in Indian history. Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikh religion, lost 379 unarmed civilians in a massacre orchestrated by British Brigadier General Reginald Dyer.

Thousands had gathered at [Jallianwala Bagh] (https://www.britannica.com/event/Jallianwala-Bagh-Massacre), a city park in the center of the city to protest the [Rowlatt Act] (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gentlemanly-terrorists/reforms-of-1919-montaguchelmsford-the-rowlatt-act-jails-commission-and-the-royal-amnesty/D97CA2DF6D0AEBDD9AD2066DB1504C04/core-reader), an oppressive law that denied the right of habeas corpus to individuals detained for certain crimes. The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre marks a key moment in India’s fight for independence from colonial rule and the scars of its violence still run deep.

A young Nanak Singh was present at the massacre – soon to become a famous Punjabi novelist and poet. When the shooting began, Singh fainted and lay underneath other fallen bodies. Deeply disturbed by this experience, Singh wrote Khooni Vaisakhi, an epic poem detailing the political anger before the massacre and what occurred on that infamous day.

Soon after its publication the British banned the poem and burned several copies. Singh continued to participate in a variety of civil disobedience movements that eventually led to his arrest.

100 years later, the poem is reborn. Khooni Vaisakhi: A Poem From The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919 features an English translation of the poem by Nanak Singh’s grandson H.E. Navdeep Singh Suri, Ambassador of India to the UAE, alongside the original Punjabi version. The book was released on April 13, 2019 to mark 100 years since the massacre. The book also features an essay by BBC South Asia Correspondent Justin Rowlatt, great-grandson of Sir Sidney Rowlatt, who authored the infamous Rowlatt Act.

On April 18, the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute will host a discussion with H.E. Navdeep Suri and Justin Rowlatt. The talk will be moderated by Toral Gajarawala, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with the Minister for Tolerance in the UAE, H. E. Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan as the keynote speaker.

In anticipation of the event and book release, The Gazelle sat down with H.E. Navdeep Suri to discuss the translation process and importance of poetry as a historical source.

H.E. NSS: It was hard because I’ve never translated poetry before and I always felt that I do not have much of a natural feel for poetry. I’ve translated prose before… two of my grandfather’s novels into English from Punjabi... Around June last year, I was back home in Amritsar for a short break and my parents brought it up, ‘Look, the centarary’s coming up and this is a great piece of history and family heritage. So we can’t think of anybody better than you to translate it.’ ... I said, fine, I’ll give it a shot. My first mission was to educate myself in the art of [the] translation of poetry, so I read up... A lot of advice I was getting was ‘don’t worry too much about rhyme and just do it in free verse.’

So, I actually did a first draft which was in free verse and somehow I wasn’t comfortable with it. There is this marvelous book by Douglas Hofstadter, an American linguist and cognitive scientist who is deeply interested in how our brains process languages. He has written this real tome on translation of poetry and in that, there’s one particular poem by Pushkin which has been translated by four different people... without telling you who has done what… So this was a fascinating thing for me to read and [was] my Eureka moment because four translators from four different countries [translated one poem] four different ways. But, all four of them made an effort to maintain the rhyme and rhythm of the original... cutting a long story short, that was my moment to say that I have got to do it in rhyme and I have got to try and capture the rhythm of the original, the cadence of the original. At that time, I hadn’t quite realized that when you commit yourself to that, you’ve lost 95 percent of the vocabulary available to you to express the same thought.

That is the challenge I took [upon] myself and now it’s for the readers to judge whether it works or not.... When you’re translating anything in literature as opposed to a legal document, let’s say, you have these twin challenges: one is fidelity to the original and the second is readability in the new, right? And I think everytime you try to get as fine a balance between those: how true you are to the original and how well does it read in the new.

H.E. NSS: Obviously, that is a huge part of the translation process. And I think both the choice of words and where they fit into the sentences come in handy... I could take just a few lines from the original and give you a sense of it. This is when the firing actually begins in the Bagh:

… I think the challenge of translation, you’re also talking about transcreation. If you were to even attempt a word-by-word or a line-by-line, you would lose the flavor so sometimes you take liberty switching a line back and forth because you think that it might read better in the new one.

H.E. NSS: I was actually very curious to answer this question for myself because you know there is something called poetic license. Poets can get carried away by their flow of words and emotions. So one of the reasons that I did the research that I did, which wasn’t strictly essential for the translation itself, was to better educate myself and to check some of these things... So pretty much, all of it is historically accurate.

In a sense, this has been a tradition at least in Punjabi poetry so you had poets like Shah Mohammed… he wrote long epics about the battles between the Sikh... and the British forces. Because they’re contemporaneous, they are as much accounts in terms of history as they are pieces of literature. I really think that there is a lot of space for us to look at it from that perspective.

There is also this thing: who writes history? The truism is that it is the victor who writes history. I’ve had the privilege of serving in Australia, and in the United States and in South Africa. In each of these three countries, the white man wrote the history. It is almost if there wasn’t a history before the Europeans arrived… What these poems give you is the other perspective, that even the oppressed have a voice through a poet which gives their viewpoint.

H.E. NSS: You know, my grandfather was clearly so traumatized by the event that once the poem was banned, it is almost like the poem didn’t exist for him. The only reference that we have to the poem is, the first edition of his autobiography was written in 1949 and in his autobiography, there is a fleeting reference to Jallianwala Bagh and Khooni Vaisaikhi. Within the family obviously, my dad and my uncles and all knew about it, but nobody had seen it. [However] my dad was persistent and he kept persisting.

In the 1980s, the Home Minister for India: Giani Zail Singh, as a Sikh who later on become President of India, was a great fan of my grandfather’s writings. In 1971 when my grandfather passed away, he came to my house for the funeral. So my dad kept pursuing him, he was Chief Minister of Punjab and then he became Home Minister at the federal level. Eventually, [Zail Singh] must have taken [my father] seriously and asked somebody to dig through the archives and managed to find a copy.

… In the same year, there [was] a popular literary magazine published out of Punjab called Jagriti. In that, my dad came across an essay written by one Dr. Gupta speaking about my grandfather Nanak Singh as a poet. This was curious because [Nanak Singh’s] reputation really was as a novelist and that essay made detailed references to Khooni Vaisakhi...

So [my father] contacted the editor of the magazine and said ‘I want the address of this guy who wrote this article and I want to speak with him…’ [Dr. Gupta] said that his grandfather was a great collector of these pamphlets that were published and they were all lost in his house in some little village. Then they were moving to the city and literally there were sacks of these books and pamphlets that they brought... Dr. Gupta, himself a professor in Punjabi… was just sifting through this old stuff and saw this pamphlet Khooni Vaisakhi… he realized that he had something important in his hand.

We had two different strands converging around the same time and so banned in 1920, it was re-published in 1980. 60 years later.

H.E. NSS: Thanks to the Internet, when I was doing research on Jallianwala Bagh and Sir Sidney Rowlatt who wrote the Rowlatt Act, I stumbled across a reference to Justin and discovered that he had actually been a BBC South Asia correspondent in Delhi. That made it easy because then I made a few calls to my friends in Delhi... and [I] contacted him in London.

[I] asked him, ‘would you write?’ I told him my family background and said it is a funny coincidence that we are both related to the incident. And he said ‘yeah, I would.’

H.E. NSS: It was and you know, [I] had to deal with it at multiple levels. When you are translating something from your family, you are under that additional layer of scrutiny from all your cousins and everybody else who is out with a fine comb to say why did you do it like this?

H.E. NSS: It did and it increased my respect further for my grandfather. I was only 12 when he passed away and the respect came at two levels: he had no formal education, he was orphaned when he was 10 and when you asked him how much did you study, he would say you could call me “fourth pass or fifth fail.” That is all the education that he had and yet in the course of the poem, not only do you see the recounting of history but you see references to other people who had martyred themselves for a principle in medieval times.

I realized how little we know of his youth… despite the fact that I have read and reread his autobiography. For a twenty-two year old with no formal education, he had these fairly advanced thoughts. The other was the raw courage [he displayed] because [he was] up against an oppressive regime... There is a section called the Martyr’s certificate to Dyer and it somewhere says:

It took a lot of courage to put those words under print in your name and have them published at a time when the Rowlatt Act was around and martial law was around.