Translating the King’s Secret Missives

This is part four of a dialogue about the book Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language between the author, Katherine Russell Rich, and Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Hi Chris,

Wow! You had a whole semester of incomprehensible Gaelic? Sounds divine, and I mean that somewhat literally. What is it that makes language you can’t understand seem powerpacked with transcendence, or at least, profound meaning? The Catholic Church was hip to this for years, as you allude to. I completely understand your father’s wistfulness for Latin, having grown up Episcopalian with the King James Bible and its beautiful, often impenetrable Elizabethan verse. “And the Word was made flesh”—who knew what that meant, but I wanted to see it.

In India, I discovered lots of variations on this principle. When I was there, from 2001 to 2002, a right-wing Hindu extremist party had come into power. The first thing they did when they got up and running was to jettison Persian words from their vocabulary, because they were reminders of the Muslims, and replace them with Sanskrit. They did this so densely that people sometimes had a hard time understanding what they were saying. Which, of course, was the point. By making themselves unintelligible, the Hindu party members’ message came through loud and clear: They were elevated, wise, speaking with the force of God. (Sanskrit is the language of the Vedic texts.)

One more example of the power of cloaked language: Three months into my stay, I was invited to spend Christmas Eve at the palace in Udaipur. It was me, some nervous-looking aides de camp, and the Maharana, the king, who, though 5’3” with A.V. crew glasses, could make anyone quail just by glancing at them. Periodically throughout the evening, barefoot retainers appeared at his side bearing envelopes on silver trays. The Maharana would hold up a finger, silence would fall on the room, then he’d open the envelope, nod, and toss it back. I’d been there long enough to have heard the scuttlebutt that he had a network of spies throughout the land who reported on what all citizens were doing at all times. I was wide-eyed, convinced I was seeing his mechanism of power—secret missives from the spies. Six months later, when I was invited to dinner a second time, my Hindi was firing and I got a better idea of the kind of private communiqués that were actually being exchanged. Servants scurried in with cell phones on trays, and he’d pick them up. “Just add more ghee,” the Maharana was saying. “Yes, more ghee. It will make it much better.”

Speaking of beautiful verse, I love your line “Maybe worshipping a language from afar allows us to dally with the ineffable?” And what do you think about this idea—perhaps when speech is unintelligible, it revives our infant state, when the gods of the nursery, our parents, stood above us and spoke in mystifying, cooing tones. “Ohwiddlebaabeeishungry” could have meant anything: “I am the invincible God of all gods, possessor of white liquid in a cylinder.”