A N D Haksar has done a no-nonsense new version of the Kama Sutra. He tells Rrishi Raote about the pleasure and profit of turning Sanskrit into modern English.
In the course of your professional duties,” says the careful, cultivated voice on the telephone, “you may have come to Nithari.” This is Aditya Narayan Dhairyasheel Haksar giving directions to his home. It is in a leafy and quiet sector of Noida, not far from the village near which those terrible serial murders were committed five years ago, where the national media gathered as the news unfolded.
One doesn’t go looking for culture in Noida, and certainly not in the neighbourhood of Nithari. But here culture is, in the slim, straight, white-clad, bushy-eyebrowed, sharp-nosed person of Haksar. He is a retired diplomat and among the best-known contemporary translators of ancient Sanskrit secular literature for the non-scholarly reader. (Others are the late P Lal of Writers Workshop, Daniel H H Ingalls, various translators of the USA-based Clay Sanskrit Library, and so on.) His latest book is a translation of Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra, the world-famous text erroneously thought to be all about acrobatic sex. Penguin India has published it in a mildly suggestive, powder-pink cover (with a raunchy quote about “a woman’s itch” on the back).
Haksar is only the most recent to have worked on this text. The Victorian adventurer Richard Burton translated it into English first, in an 1883 private edition that ignited a blaze of interest. Since then there have been hundreds of editions, many illustrated, some small, some enormous, some with pop-ups. Most are based on the Burton translation — which suggests that few people actually read the text, because Burton’s prose is by now old-fashioned and occasionally clunky. Haksar’s is clean and no-nonsense; it is also without the thrill of illicit pleasure that a touch of coyness preserves. No “lingam” and “yoni” for Haksar: he is more straightforward.
But this makes sense, because let’s not imagine that Vatsyayana was any kind of Casanova. Of himself in the Epilogue Vatsyayana writes that “He composed it while observing / a celibate’s life, in full meditation”, and then adds that “these rules are for life in this world, / they are not for passion meant.” While Burton, at the end of his translation, added a line of his own to a line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, to produce something more wishy-washy: “So long as lips shall kiss, and eyes shall see, / So long lives This, and This gives life to Thee.”
“This” = sex, obviously. Haksar’s Kama Sutra, then, is both truer to the original and less titillating than Burton’s.
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Copulation, by the way, is the subject of just one of the seven parts of Vatsyayana’s book. The rest of it describes the rules for sensual life and pleasure in an upper-class urban household. Near the beginning, the Kama Sutra tells how a gentleman’s house is ordered. “It should be near water,” goes Haksar’s version, “have an orchard and separate quarters for working, and contain two bedrooms.” So much for the 2BHK. Then Vatsyayana makes his prescriptions for the bedroom: bed, pillows, incense, creams, garlands, drawing board, and so on. The point is that the house is a place of refined pleasure, not mere survival, not just “sex”.
Haksar’s house! Vatsyayana would approve of it. It’s not big, but is light and airy. The owners of the neighbouring plots have all built tall, so Haksar is left with a nice back garden surrounded by high walls. Trees and creepers turn bare brick into cascading green, so it is a pleasing as well as private space. A corner room on the first floor with a large window is — what else? — his study, where he does his translations.
He takes us upstairs for a peep into the sanctum, flitting lightly in his kurta-pyjama and chappals. The house is free of the predictable debris of a career in the Foreign Service; no carvings and hangings, only a few objets d’art. The study is spartan, with a simple desk facing a wall, a whiff of dust, papers and a bed in the middle of the room.
After all, translation, as Haksar says when we’re safely back in the garden, “is a very painful — no, a laborious and time-consuming process. You may spend a lot of time to find an appropriate translation of a single sentence.” He does literary translation, not scholarly, so his words have to convey the sense and atmosphere of the original, not its literal meaning. A professional historian of ancient India calls Haksar “a serious scholar” and says she reads him for pleasure, but does not use his translations for her academic work.
Haksar has a portfolio of over a dozen titles. “Most Sanskrit publications are directed towards scholars or devotees,” he says, and the vast corpus of what he calls secular literature (that is, neither theology nor philosophy) “somehow got a little left behind”. He focuses on texts from the katha or story genre — thus his translations of Simhasana Dvatrimsika’s Thirty-two Tales of the Throne of Vikramaditya, Dandin’s Dashakumaracharita, Bhasa’s plays, Narayana’s Hitopadesha, the Jatakamala or stories of the Buddha’s previous births, the Panchatantra and more. He also does Sanskrit poetry. Here, for example, are a few lines from the Subhashitavali, a collection of witty poetic epigrams that, says Haksar, was used as “an aide to conversation and repartee”: “Will a monk’s dress cure / the mind impure? / Why go after hair? / Tonsure care.”
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Vallabhadeva, the original compiler of the Subhashitavali, was a Kashmiri, like Haksar. Haksar’s last book, The Courtesan’s Keeper: A Satire from Ancient Kashmir, was the first translation of the Samaya Matrika of Kshemendra, an 11th-century Kashmiri. The next book, out in a few months, is “a collection of satires”, also from Kashmir, which pokes fun at “religious hypocrisy and governmental corruption” — so he expects it to be topical. The Sanskrit original, which he has in his study, is a definitive edition published by Osmania University in 1962 and ignored since.
All Haksar’s translations have been accomplished after his retirement. “As a diplomat I found I had no time to do Sanskrit,” he says. “Diplomacy is a full-time job, if you want to do it well.” In the IFS he learnt French and Bahasa Indonesia, and a little Portuguese. He served as mission chief in Kenya, Portugal and Yugoslavia. He spent some years in the US. At the start of Emergency in 1975, the New York Times and other Western papers reported that he was an MEA officer tasked with asking foreign correspondents to toe the line or leave India.
Though he did Sanskrit in school, Haksar says he took it up seriously as a post-retirement project. He was teaching himself, and translation was a means of self-study — until a friend at the Statesman newspaper asked for a serialised Panchatantra, one tale every Sunday. An editor at the National Book Trust, Haksar says, read these stories and asked for the whole book. Tales from the Panchatantra, his first book of translation, is in its ninth edition since 1992 and still in print.
Perhaps it is the diplomatic habit, perhaps the translator’s carefulness, but Haksar is a cautious speaker. He won’t offer his opinion on the state of Sanskrit studies, for example, and is slow to say what he reads other than Sanskrit (poetry mostly, in English, Hindi, Urdu). But where his words are steady, his sharp-featured face is active. His head tilts this way and that, his eyebrows rise and fall, his mouth purses or smiles, when he makes an observation the muscles on either side of his nose pinch together as if to congratulate each other. It is an extraordinarily intelligent, interesting and memorable face.
