Rendezvous with Ukrainian Language

“I WAS WITNESS TO HISTORY IN KYIV”

Ms. Mridula, would you tell our readers about yourself?

I was born in Calcutta, it’s the capital of West Bengal State in eastern India. My father was a doctor and the family lived with my grandfather and two grandmothers. I grew up in a multilingual environment as several languages were spoken in the family. When we discussed certain subjects everybody would lapse into English or Bengali. We read prayers in Sanskrit and made commentaries in the same languages. Naturally, the children were taught three languages.

What languages?

I, for one, learned to write in Bengali, my mother tongue, also in English and Devanagari. Knowing Devanagari meant being able to understand most languages spoken in the north. It uses the same script as Sanskrit, Hindi, and lots of other dialects. Too bad the Dravidian languages of the south are no longer practiced there, but English is also taught in the south, along with the native tongue. It is an absolutely normal phenomenon. It’s taken for granted, no one forces you. The process of instruction was like a game; we would be taken to a park and then describe in English everything we had seen there. Next time we would describe it in another language...

So you have command of three languages.

I did, at first. Then I studied Hindi at school, later Sanskrit (it was a compulsory subject, five years of serious study, from Grade 6 till Grade 10; Indian philosophy was taught in Grades 11-12, so every student had to know Sanskrit).

You mean you were taught philosophy at school?

Not exactly, it’s just that Grades 11-12 are when the students take their major; they are taught philosophy and other subjects, as in higher schools. They are also taught French, German... When I was a college student in Calcutta, I chose Russian. Everybody was surprised (it was in 1979), but I wanted to read books in the original language. I didn’t trust anti-Soviet propaganda, but nor did I trust what the Soviets wrote, because I knew that it couldn’t be that simple, black and white, that the truth was somewhere in between. I studied Russian so I could read newspapers and get closer to the source. At the time I had no intention of traveling to the Soviet Union. It happened suddenly.

What is your original post-secondary education?

I majored in political science, economy, and history. And then I studied international relations at Kyiv University, under the Soviet-Indian student exchange program. I could choose another country to study, there were selection contests, but I still think I made the right choice. In fact, I could have studied at Oxford — I was a straight A in English and English literature — or I could have studied political science or economy in other countries. I chose the Soviet Union without hesitation.

You preferred Kyiv to Oxford?

Yes, I did. Many of friends said I must have taken leave of my senses; no one would have done so in my place. I told them that all I could count on after Oxford would be teaching English. Since the colonial times a great many of the Indian elite have traveled to Britain to study and returned after graduation. That’s all. Another intellectual stereotype. I am not saying that studying there is bad. I just wanted to have a different kind of experience.

When was that?

In 1984. However, when I flew to Moscow I didn’t feel like staying there; I had been told it would be like a huge village, that there were a lot of my fellow countrymen there, that they had various groups with different interests, speaking different languages, forming ethnic communities; that they were constantly faced with some problems. I wanted to live a creative life and meet with other people. I asked to be transferred to a different place. St. Petersburg was very cold and I was not adjusted to that climate at the time. I was told the only place where I could concentrate on my major was Kyiv. Whereas Moscow’s Institute of International Relations was a very prestigious place to study, the student body was from the socialist camp. It was then I discovered that India wasn’t a socialist country. This made Kyiv the only alternative. I learned that its university had very good faculties and teaching staff. So I went to Kyiv and got enrolled in the first year. I was very interested in local study, but communicating, asking questions was difficult at first.

What language did you use?

Russian. I had studied it at home a little. They tested me before leaving and said I was good enough for the first year of study.

Did you study Russian at the university?

No, I took a course in Russian sponsored by the Soviet consulate. Our teacher was a very serious woman. After six months of training I was given Eugene Onegin to read... I mean the attitude to the language was very serious. Chernenko was in office when I arrived in Moscow, then things began to happen... Honestly, I wanted to leave a year later ... but a correspondent of our national television in Moscow (he was in a hospital and I was visiting him) told me that leaving now would be a very bad mistake, because history was being made there, everything was changing; that if I stayed I would be witness to that making of history.

It seems the next logical question would be, what kind of history?

Before the perestroika campaign your people would ask themselves questions but remain silent; they would discuss things in the kitchen only... Now a process was underway with people opening their hearts, thinking aloud, voicing their opinions. I thought it was a very serious process. I still think that it was a cultural transformation, your country showed in a new light — I am not saying that it was so very different before; you’d always had that potential, just as man always remains true to his innate self. I think that something else had happened: your people were free to do something they hadn’t been able to do before. They could combine thoughts with words. It’s very important for a major breakthrough. I was witness to that historical process ending in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A LANGUAGE CAN’T BE VARNISHED

We have a joke saying we are lucky to have our Big Brother [i.e., Russia]. India used to be a colony and you had your big brother, the British crown, and the English language. Likewise, Ukraine was a colony of the Soviet empire and Russian was imposed on it. Do you see a resemblance? How do you feel about the big-brother concept?

That’s a rather sophisticated subject. One could hardly draw a historical analogy here. India used to be colony, indeed, yet English was cultivated by an extremely narrow bureaucratic stratum, mostly in terms of official paperwork. Our people, our lifestyle never became English. You will never find a family communicating in English, you’ll never hear English spoken in a single Indian village. I mean we’ve managed to preserve our national tradition, language included. Yes, we have people that speak and write English. We have three authors writing in English, but theirs is a special version of English, adjusted to the Indian environment, worked out by Oxford scholars. Any language used in a strange land undergoes certain transformations. When a certain language is predominant, there appear certain aspects one cannot always keep under control. The whole process becomes spontaneous. It can get risky in the presence of several similar languages. Our languages are very different from English. The languages originating from India have a very firm footing, no one has been able to make us change our clothes and folkways. It’s impossible.

Indeed, but there is a certain aspect involved. English as the language spoken by the aggressor. Has this been the case?

It certainly has. We had our [national liberation] movement, there were such moods, but we then had personalities capable of introducing a moderate attitude. Nothing to do with the language; a language just exists as such, it is the carrier of a certain culture. English is the language of Sir William Shakespeare. It is a great language, but it cannot be used to destroy another language. This attitude prevailed and English has helped many of Indians get a foothold in this big world of ours. English remains our second official language and we aren’t ashamed of it. This offers us additional opportunities to integrate into the international community of nations.

How do you see our situation with the Ukrainian and Russian languages? Of course, we are exposed to a lot of complexes, we have inner unhealing wounds, hence the aggressive attitude to Russian as the second official language — mostly because both languages are so close to each other. Russian may well crowd out Ukrainian. And this, of course, leads to another question: How did you manage to study Ukrainian?

It may have been easier in my case, for I wasn’t a Russian or Ukrainian native speaker. My attitude was a third-party one. I figured that I could learn Ukrainian if I could learn Russian. There is one thing, however; Russian and Ukrainian aren’t the same language, meaning that each is equally entitled to exist and enrich itself with each day. Each has its literati, carriers, and the process will continue. Likewise, there are different languages in Europe — in France, Germany — such as Flemish, Norwegian, Swedish. Every people has its own language. It’s a unique process. One must understand that languages, however similar, must not get assimilated. Why should they? It’s like demarcation or territorial delimitation. Languages have historical elements of cultural delimitation.

What’s your opinion of the language debate in Ukraine?

I think that there is a very interesting experience. Leafing through history, you wonder about dead languages. Where do they come from? Take Sanskrit. It is self-centered. Sanskrit means adorned, perfected, something varnished, meant for the elite. The vernacular was Prakrit, meaning something very natural [from prakriti, primal matter or substance in Sankhya philosophy, from which the physical and mental universe evolves]. And they did coexist. You can’t allow any language to get Sanskritized ; such conservation would be most unnatural. Canonizing languages makes them rigid and aloof from real life. That’s what I mean by Sanskritization. Philologists are likely to object. Well, I am not a philologist — when I studied Sanskrit I read statistics saying that a thousand families spoke it in India. Very likely no one speaks in India today, as is the case with Latin...

“TATO” SOUNDS THE SAME IN SANSKRIT

Would you say that knowing Ukrainian helps you live and work in Ukraine?

No, I wouldn’t. Frankly speaking, I don’t understand the kind of Ukrainian I hear them speak around me. If you will pardon my saying so, I feel like a cripple in need of help; I need an interpreter.

But you did understand Ukrainians, using your knowledge of Russian, didn’t you?

Yes, I did.

Perhaps there is another mechanism involved, including the ability of being independent in arriving at your own conclusions, having your own sense of the language, being able to communicate?

I have always placed myself in the situation of my language. In my homeland, Hindi is an official language. I can perfectly understand anyone speaking Hindi and understanding Bengali. However, I would feel more respect for someone knowing Hindi but trying to learn my mother tongue. You see, the languages I’m referring to are different. No one can give me the right to say that yes, I know all about Ukraine, not even if I were to live a hundred years here, knowing only Russian. You cannot learn everything there is to know about a country and its people without knowing their language as an element of their culture. Even trying to do so would be absurd. No one can be considered a sinologist without knowing Chinese. Likewise, no one can be regarded as an expert of Ukraine without having an adequate command of Ukrainian.

How many languages do you know?

That’s a different subject. I know what I consider my native tongues, also English and French — although I don’t speak French as fluently as I do English.

Meaning that you know Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, English, French, Ukrainian, Russian...

I can understand Urdu, but I can’t read in that language, I don’t know the Arabic alphabet. I know some Bulgarian, I can understand most of what they say. Ditto Polish. I know a bit of Slovak, but on a considerably lower level. One must treat a language not as a subject taught during classes but as an element of life. For example, if they tell you to use chopsticks the way they do in Japan, it’s just attributes. I am thrilled to hear the music of any language.

How did you study Ukrainian? We know that you read Lesia Ukrainka’s Song of the Forest...

I didn’t have to study the alphabet and I felt as though I were blindfolded and told to step into a room and tell what I felt, if I could sense the presence of any objects there. That’s the kind of rendezvous I’ve been having with the Ukrainian language. I didn’t have an adequate dictionary, so I had to go by ear, by context. Unprofessional from a philological point of view, but the process was extremely interesting. A definite touch of intrigue. I would ask people to help me translate some words, then I would think for several days of possible equivalents in other languages. It’s a process when you communicate with a language all on your own. On such occasions I wouldn’t need a dictionary. I had to grasp the meaning myself. I would make assumptions first and ask people if I were right afterwards. They would tell me I might have a point there. Then, of course, I would consult dictionaries and see the technical aspect. But there is certainly intuition to be added to technical translation.

Are you fond of solving puzzles?

Yes, I am. Besides, languages are mysterious phenomena. Tracing the roots of [Ukrainian] words, I discovered a lot of similarities with Sanskrit. I was overjoyed every time I did. For example, the Latin pater and mater , the English father and

mother , and their French equivalents address matri in Sanskrit. Or take tato , the Ukrainian for daddy: it’s the same in Sanskrit! Likewise, the Ukrainian. ochi and the Sanskrit okshi [eyes], nis and nahsah [nose], and lots of others. There are researchers specializing in the field.

Making such comparisons is very interesting...

Precisely. There are literary works. I know that Stepan Nalyvaiko had a good command of Hindi and did some translating [into Ukrainian]. I believe that some Ukrainians will finally master Sanskrit and further such comparative analysis.

Your concept of Ukrainian should be very interesting. The first Ukrainian book you read was about Oleksandr Dovzhenko, then you read Lesia Ukrayinka. How do you feel about her Song of the Forest? Was it anything like you’d read before?

Yes, the first lines I read: “No freedom have I, my good fortune has flown, / A lone hope is left, the one thing that I own.” [The opening lines of Lesia Ukrayinka’s Hope , translated by Gladys Evans, Dnipro Publishers, Kyiv, 1975] Their melody and rhythm were perfect, so much so I immediately began to translate that poem into my mother tongue, even though I wasn’t sure I understood every word. It was a literary translation, but later I thought I was doing well and praised my poetic talent — but I wouldn’t show anyone what I’d written. Every day I would select poems to read and if I liked them I would translate them. Too bad I can’t translate poetry if commissioned, for I reject the notion of something that has to be done in return for money.

Meaning that you can only do it if you feel like it?

Precisely. I can only translate a poem if I really like it. You see, languages communicate with each other; if I can sing Ukrainian words in Bengali, then yes, I can translate. Otherwise I can’t. It is a magic of words. A poet writes verse the way a magician works miracles. A very interesting subject, isn’t it?

I saw books of verse by Lina Kostenko, Ihor Rymaruk, and Vasyl Herasymiuk in your home library. Did you buy them?

Yes, I spotted them on street bookstands. I started reading Ukrainian poetry sometime in 1992. I asked my friends about Ukrainian authors and their life stories. Well, I just read them. I don’t mean to make them new literary discoveries.

Ms. Mridula, what would you say to all those Ukrainians living in Ukraine and not knowing the language — worse so, showing no desire to study Ukrainian?

I’d rather say nothing and leave them alone at this stage. You cannot impose a language on people; if you do, the result will be the exact opposite. I think that their children will certainly speak Ukrainian; it’s important for the people in this country to develop a desire to use that language — not to have certain advantages, but simply because using Ukrainian is convenient and enjoyable. People speak the kind of language they find useful and enjoyable at the same time. Cultivating a language is like tending flowers. A language can be used to insult others, even to wage a war, but it can also be used to make peace. In other words, a language is used to build a culture — or to destroy it. It’s an implement that can be used either way.

You know many languages. We believe that Ukrainian is a melodious, poetic language. What do you think?

Every language has a melody of its own. Ukrainian is a soft and melodious language, indeed. Given proper articulation, it pleases one’s ear. I would say that Ukrainian is very melodious, compared to other European languages. It’s a fact recognized the world over.