<div>Bram Stoker's Dracula - in Punjabi
A Book Review by RUPINDERPAL "Roop" SINGH DHILLON
Dracula is a very famous 1897 novel, which has inspired countless films in the last century, and come to define the blood sucking demon with all its characteristics. It is also apt that it has been chosen amongst the few western novels translated into our mother tongue.
Punjabi is a beautiful language, which has at the root of its soul spiritualism seen in Sufi literature, old Vedic works, and most recently, many passages and pearls of wisdom in the Guru Granth Sahib. It was a language that never shied away from critizing the state, its own society and the foibles of fundamentalism.
This is strongly seen in the verses of Guru Nanak and Baba Farid, for example.
Yet over the last few decades, we have placed this language as second to English or Urdu or Hindi. Much literature that has been produced has been pendu navel gazing, which does not excite the modern youth of India or Pakistan. In India, at least, Punjabi literature has carried on being produced, whereas as in the greater Punjab in Pakistan, it is almost extinct.
Almost exclusively, the best books are now only produced in Gurmukhi script, which while clearly associated with Sikhs, does not render the language exclusive to all other Punjabis. In fact most of the literature in the Guru Granth is not Punjabi. It just happens to be in Gurmukhi. Of course this means that in theory Punjabi should be very important to the lives of the Sikhs.
In the modern era, youth is either drifting away completely from literature in their mother tongue, because nothing of interest has been produced in the same, or they are focusing on the outer aspects of their religious heritage, unable now to decipher for themselves the pearls of wisdom and philosophy in the Guru Granth Sahib, which is if one thinks about it, told through the enriching medium of literature.
Whereas the Semitic God is some bloke with a white beard floating on a cloud, trying to touch Adam
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A Book Review by RUPINDERPAL "Roop" SINGH DHILLON
Dracula is a very famous 1897 novel, which has inspired countless films in the last century, and come to define the blood sucking demon with all its characteristics. It is also apt that it has been chosen amongst the few western novels translated into our mother tongue.
Punjabi is a beautiful language, which has at the root of its soul spiritualism seen in Sufi literature, old Vedic works, and most recently, many passages and pearls of wisdom in the Guru Granth Sahib. It was a language that never shied away from critizing the state, its own society and the foibles of fundamentalism.
This is strongly seen in the verses of Guru Nanak and Baba Farid, for example.
Yet over the last few decades, we have placed this language as second to English or Urdu or Hindi. Much literature that has been produced has been pendu navel gazing, which does not excite the modern youth of India or Pakistan. In India, at least, Punjabi literature has carried on being produced, whereas as in the greater Punjab in Pakistan, it is almost extinct.
Almost exclusively, the best books are now only produced in Gurmukhi script, which while clearly associated with Sikhs, does not render the language exclusive to all other Punjabis. In fact most of the literature in the Guru Granth is not Punjabi. It just happens to be in Gurmukhi. Of course this means that in theory Punjabi should be very important to the lives of the Sikhs.
In the modern era, youth is either drifting away completely from literature in their mother tongue, because nothing of interest has been produced in the same, or they are focusing on the outer aspects of their religious heritage, unable now to decipher for themselves the pearls of wisdom and philosophy in the Guru Granth Sahib, which is if one thinks about it, told through the enriching medium of literature.
Whereas the Semitic God is some bloke with a white beard floating on a cloud, trying to touch Adam
More...