Don Quixote in Kashmiri
Don Quijote en Cachemiri
In 1935, the wealthy American businessman and book collector Carl Tilden Keller – whose bookshelves already contained Japanese, Mongolian and Icelandic translations of Cervantes’ masterpiece – embarked on a quest to translate part of the book into an Indian language. To do so, he enlisted the help of his friend, Mr Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew India well.
The collector knew that the scholar Stein would know the right men for the job – and indeed he did.
On Keller’s behalf, he commissioned his friend, the Kashmiri pandit – or scholar in Sanskrit – Nityanand Shastri, to undertake the translation. Despite being paralysed by a stroke, Shastri agreed and recruited another pandit, Jagaddhar Zadoo, to be his co-translator. Since they knew no Spanish, the two scholars worked from an 18th-century English translation of Don Quixote by the Irish painter and translator Charles Jarvis.
Almost exactly two years after Keller first expressed his childhood wish, the pandits' works were complete and Keller had partial translations of different chapters of Don Quixote into Kashmiri and Sanskrit.
However, for more than six decades the Kashmiri text remained completely forgotten until, at the beginning of the third millennium, Surinder Nath Pandita, grandson of Pandit Nityanand Shastri, fortunately rediscovered the fascinating heritage of his scholarly predecessors. After attracting the attention of Western scholars, Professor Dragomir Dimitrov of the University of Marburg (Germany) took the initiative to publish the present facsimile edition of this magnificent translation of Don Quixote in Kashmiri. The original manuscript is written in the neat handwriting of Pandit Jagaddhar Zadoo, the co-translator, along with Pandit Nityanand Shashtri, in an easily legible Devanagari script.
Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi presents this fascinating work and recounts the journey of this wonderful translation in a conference in the august presence of Professor Dragomir Dimitrov, Professor Surinder Nath Pandita and Professor Mahesh Deokar.
