THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Me Grandad ‘ad an Elephant! That's how Asher chose to translate Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s brilliant short novel Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu, taking the ‘Sultan of Beypore’ across the seas.
Prof Ronald E Asher, who passed away late last month in Edinburgh, Scotland, aged 96, was a Britisher by birth. His association with Kerala started in 1964, when he travelled to meet Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai. He returned the very next year to interact with Basheer. As a linguist who specialised in Dravidian languages, he had deep-seated love for Malayalam literature and culture.
Prof Asher’s intense admiration for Basheer’s works was well known. Whenever he visited Kerala, he made it a point to visit Beypore and Thakazhi to meet the family members of his favourite authors. In an earlier interview with this reporter in London, Asher recounted his first meeting with Basheer.
“I shared biryani with Basheer and it was really fun. We had some very relaxed conversations, which were also very informal. He was a good conversationalist. It was like reading a story, sharing his anecdotes in a very interesting way. I conversed with him in English, but I could understand Malayalam,” he had recalled. Prof Asher never missed an opportunity to visit Kerala.
When the Basheer Trust informed him about his winning the Basheer Award in 2010, he beamed like a child. “I couldn’t quite believe it when they sent me the email. I looked up at the Basheer Trust’s website for the previous award winners. I just couldn’t believe that I belong to that great group of artists, writers and sculptors,” he had quipped.
“[Thakazhi] was a different personality altogether, who gave quite a different introduction to the literary world with his writings. It was a really good experience meeting these two writers. I got very close to both of them. It somehow makes the stories more real,” he had said in the 2010 interview.
Asher’s initial involvement with Malayalam was almost by chance. The spur was perhaps an interest in comparative linguistics, and therefore a feeling that, having embarked on the study of Tamil, he ought to know something about other Dravidian languages.
Asher a character in Omana Gangadharan’s Malayalam novel
“My first contact with Malayalam was following a course in phonetics of the language. My first real initiation was when a friend taught me the Malayalam script by going through some primary school readers with me... I’d say that getting to grips with the language was indeed tough, given that it is typologically very different from English or any other European language,” he had recalled.
He translated two other Basheer books — Balyakalasakhi (Childhood Friend) and Pathummayude Aadu (Pathumma’s Goat). He also translated Thakazhi’s Thottiyude Makan (Scavenger’s Son).
In 2002, he rendered K P Ramanunni’s Sufi Paranja Katha (What the Sufi Said) with N Gopalakrishnan.
Recently, Prof Asher was featured as a full-fledged character in a Malayalam novel penned by his close friend Omana Gangadharan, writer and former Labour Party councillor from East Ham.
Speaking to TNIE on Wednesday, she recalled that Asher’s curriculum vitae comprised 36 pages, three-fourth of which was on Malayalam literature.
‘MY FATHER PASSED AWAY AFTER CHRISTMAS’
On Wednesday P Sreekumar, associate professor at CUK, received an unexpected mail. “I hope I am sending this to the correct email address — I found your email in a list that my father had. I am sorry to bring you the sad news that my father passed away after Christmas, at the age of 96,” said the mail from Asher David, son of Prof Asher.