Monday, Nov 26 2001
The Enquire Dictionary of Quotations. Compiled and edited by T J S George
- Anjana BasuAnjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Cosmopolitan. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few.
|
|
Book Name:The Enquire Dictionary of Quotations. Compiled and edited by T J S George
Publisher: Harper Collins India
Price: Rs. 295
|
A Brave New World of Quotations
One of the most painful things a writer or a copywriter has to do is find the right quote for the job. You’ve got a headline for a watch that needs to be churned out and you’re slightly short of inspiration, but isn’t there a handy quote on time to be found somewhere, even if it’s only, "Time and tide wait for no man?" For that matter, who was the author of that particular phrase? With a worried frown you head for the library and the first ahndy book of quotations you can lay your fingers on.
This is all very well if you happen to be looking for the usual suspects: Kennedy, Churchill, Goldsmith or Shakespeare. Most books of quotations are compiled and published abroad. However, if you wanted to find an Indian quotation you were forced to go back to the originals because there was no chance that you would find Indian quotations gathered together between one set of covers. You would be stuck with the even more usual, ‘Swaraj is my birthright and I will have it!’ or ‘We have a tryst with destiny...’ The Oxford dictionary of Quotations has 38 pages of quotations from the Bible and not one single quote from the Bhavagad Gita, a book that is widely known and admired abroad. For that matter Shakespeare has 75 pages devoted to him in the same book, while Kalidas is notoriously absent, which is why Shakespeare is more of a household name in Jhumritaliya than Kalidas is.
|
|
This isn’t because of any problem of racism, but simply because the diversity of Indian languages has proved a barrier to any compilation of Indian quotations. And because no one has actually kept records. Why and when did Sarojini Naidu call Mahatma Gandhi Mickey Mouse? No one really knows though everyone knows that she did. The other problem is the lack of any good source of translations. Transcreation rather than translation is a relatively new phenomenon in India - previously any available translations were pedantically literal and hardly euphonious.
|
Where Indian quotations are concerned, TJS George has provided an invaluable service. He has painstakingly gathered together a plethora of Indian quotations that cover literature, ancient wisdom and politics, spanning the Rig-Veda and Harish Trivedi. Harish Trivedi? He wrote a book review on Rushdie. You’ll even find a quote from Shah Rukh Khan in the book: ‘No political party will ask me to contest because they can’t afford me. I’m a very expensive hero.’ You might wonder whether Shah Rulkh Khan deserves to be there at all - for that matter there’s a quote from the owner of a flower boutique in Delhi who made a comment in Cosmopolitan - what’s the point of all that, are these quotes really worth remembering?
But then again you find quotes from Tirrukkal and other South Indian sources that no one unfamiliar with the languages would have been able to access and you find yourself flipping through the book when you want to find some Kalidasa for a high fashion catalogue in English or for a calendar on the elements and you begin to wonder how you could have done without a book like this for so long.
The quotes are arranged chronologically rather than alphabetically, which does not make the book easy to go through, but there are indexes provided both authorwise and contentwise.
There is a great deal that is imperfect in the compilation. Since it has been gathered by one man, the selection of people featured seems a little arbitrary, sometimes even trivial. George has acknowledged as much in his introduction when he writes, ‘A book like this can only be a beginning, a kind of memoranda of intent.’ However the book is invaluable in that it makes a great deal of Indian thought easily available. A book of this kind is what scholars and writers have been waiting for. Perhaps if it gains acceptance a more thorough compilation will be forthcoming.
 View and Post comment on this article
The contents of the article are Copyright © of the author and may not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the author.
|
