Mother tongues revisited

A project named Mother Tongue Twisters run by poet Mohini Gupta aims to create contemporary poetry for children in Indian languages

When poet and translator Mohini Gupta was at Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK, in 2017 as a Charles Wallace India Trust fellow hosted by Literature Across Frontiers, she conducted a workshop with schoolchildren that inspired her to write more poetry for younger people in her mother tongue, Hindi. “There was a need to create more engaging contemporary poetry for children in Indian languages,” said Gupta. “I wanted to fill this gap.”

This idea gained muscle when she conducted another workshop with students of the Community Library Project in New Delhi, run by novelist Mridula Koshy and her husband, Michael Creighton. As the nation shut down to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus late last month, Gupta decided to use this opportunity to launch the Facebook page of the project she has named Mother Tongue Twisters (MTT).  

Gupta has been writing and translating poetry for children for a while; her transcreation of Vikram Seth’s “The Frog and the Nightingale” in Hindi is quite popular. She has also been working with Tulika Books. “I wanted to get people to write in their mother tongues,” she said, adding that because of several reasons — historical, economic — younger people these days do not engage with their mother tongue anymore.

The initial invitation she sent out to poets read: “Most of us in urban and metropolitan schools grow up looking up to English poetry by Western writers. The ‘mother-tongue’, and especially poetry in mother tongues, is taught in English-medium schools in the most uninspiring manner, full of uninteresting and obscure poetry.” She went on to invite poets: “While most translation work in India focuses on translating Indian language texts into English for the outside world, this project aims to look inwards and ‘give back’ to the languages through a reverse process.”

The response was spontaneous, with several poets such as Sampurna Chattarji, Subhro Bandopadhyay, Akhil Katyal, Shanta Gokhale and Creighton writing back. “I did not want to limit it to any one language,” Gupta said. The website for MTT is yet to be launched, but if you visit their Facebook or Instagram pages, you will find that it has been a busy time.

Every Thursday, there is a special translation event hosted by the page; those who wish to join can do so on Zoom. Mamta Sagar, poet and playwright, has already been featured on the weekly event called Translation Thursdays.  

Supreme Court lawyer and translator of Urdu poetry, Saif Mahmood, is scheduled to conduct one of these events, as is novelist Jerry Pinto. The increasing attendance is testimony to how much people are interested in listening to, and about, translations.

Besides the Thursday events, there are several other videos, with friends of MTT reciting poems in their mother tongues. One of these videos is of my friend, Priyanka Sarkar, an editor and translator. Having grown up in different towns of Rajasthan, her relationship with Bengali has always been different from that of people in Bengal. In the video, she recites a rhyme which her grandfather used to recite to her and her cousins when they were children.

“E bollo khabo, khabo / E bollo kothay pabo (This one said I want to eat, / This one replied where will we get),” the poem goes. Sarkar said the video was a wonderful way to recollect her childhood and reconnect with those memories. But it also made her think of the hundreds of people going hungry because of the lockdown.

As the lockdown was imposed with little time for preparation, it caught millions of migrant workers on the wrong foot. With little resources, several of them made desperate attempts to get back to their hometowns and villages, resulting in deaths from fatigue and hunger — scenes that reminded some of the Partition migration. 

“The poem is funny, my cousins and I would be rolling with laughter when my grandfather recited it,” said Sarkar. “But, at this time, I could not help but be reminded of how it is also about food and hunger.”

An original poem by Gupta, “Rhyming Rolling Rice”, is also about food and memory. The poem recollects how parents roll rice into small balls to feed children: “‘I won’t eat! I won’t eat!’ / I tell her so many times / She smiles, and with her magic hands / Rolls the rice into rhymes. / ‘This little one for Dada-Dadi, / That little one for Chachu / One more bite for Papa-Mummi / And the best last bite for you!’” Surely rhymes have never been more appetising.

The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published earlier this year