Prime Minister Narendra Modi was met by US President Joe Biden and the First Lady Jill Biden at the White House in Washington DC Wednesday (June 21) night – Thursday in India – where the first couple hosted him for a private dinner.
“[A] translation that would read as though the original had been written in common English”, Yeats wrote in the preface of the original.
What are the two categories of Hindu scriptures?
There are broadly two categories of Hindu sacred texts: shruti (loosely translated as “the revealed”) and smriti (“the remembered”). The first category is considered to be the most authoritative and consists of the four Vedas (Rig, Yajur, Sama and Atharva) and accompanying texts. These include Brahmanas (ritual texts), Aranyakas (“forest” or “wilderness” texts), and Upanishads (philosophical texts).
The second category of Hindu scriptures is less authoritative – in many ways they are considered to be derived from the first – but more popularly known. These include the great epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, Dharmashastras, Puranas and all other post-Vedic scriptures.
What are the Upanishads?
The Upanishads, also known as the Vedanta – as they signal the end of the total Veda – speculate about the ontological connection between humanity and the cosmos. They serve as foundational texts in many traditions of Hindu theology and have hence attracted far more attention than the Vedas themselves.
Dated to roughly 800-500 BC, the Upanishads discuss concepts such as transmigration, which have today become central to Hindu tradition.
As per the Chandogya Upanishad, “Those whose conduct here has been good will quickly attain a good birth [literally,’womb’], the birth of a brahman, the birth of a kshatriya, the birth of a vaishya. But those whose conduct here has been evil, will quickly attain an evil birth, the birth of a dog, the birth of a hog or the birth of a Chandala.” (translated by S Radhakrishnan).
The Upanishads were given particular importance in Hindu theology by eighth century Hindu scholar Adi Shankara, whose interpretations synthesised the Advaita Vedanta tradition. This is a non-dualistic philosophy that has in modern times, under philosophers such as Swami Vivekananda and S Radhakrishnan, become the most dominant force in Hindu intellectual thought.
This philosophy emphasises on the illusory nature of the transient phenomenal world around us, and puts forth the idea that the brahman is the only and ultimate real. Much of the Upanishads, in fact, are concerned with the relationship between the atman, or the distinct, unchanging self of an individual, and the brahman, the ultimate reality in the universe.
There are ten main (or principal) Upanishads:
- Esha
- Kena
- Katha
- Prashna
- Mundaka
- Mandukya
- Taittiriya
- Aitareya
- Chandogya
- Brihadaranyaka
Who was WB Yeats?
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the most influential figures in modern English literature.
“WB Yeats is among the foremost modern poets in English and the most globally recognisable Irish poet of the 20th century,” Dr Munish Tamang, Associate Professor of English at Motilal Nehru College, Delhi University, told The Indian Express.
Influenced by the likes of John Keats and William Wordsworth, Yeats’ work was spread across decades and covered a multitude of themes. While some of his poetry provided insightful political and social commentary, other poems were more esoteric.
He was central to what has been termed as the Irish Literary Revival and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”.
Why was WB Yeats interested in the Upanishads?
WB Yeats’ interest in the Upanishads predates The Ten Principal Upanishads by decades.
As a young adult, Yeats met Mohini Chatterjee, a prominent figure in Bengal’s burgeoning Theosophical circles, when the latter visited Dublin in 1885. After this meeting, Yeats wrote three poems (published in 1889) that refered to India: ‘The Indian to his Love’, ‘The Indian upon God’, and ‘Anushuya and Vijaya’.
However, WB Yeats’ connection to India is perhaps best seen in his friendship with Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore and Yeats met for the first time in 1912, at the home of photographer William Rothenstein. Rothenstein had previously sent Yeats the manuscripts of Tagore’s partial translation of Gitanjali – manuscripts which floored Yeats.
“These lyrics — which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention — display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes”, Yeats would write in his introduction to Tagore’s Nobel prize-winning collection of poems.
“His association with Rabindranath Tagore is well known and his introduction to Gitanjali was important in bringing the text to the notice of western audiences,” Dr Tamang said. “The Ten Principal Upanishads is a jointly translated work which Yeats took on due to his long-running interest in India” he added.
As Yeats himself writes in the book’s preface, “For some forty years my friend George Russell (A.E.) has quoted me passages from some Upanishad, and for those forty years I have said to myself — someday I will find out if he knows what he is talking about.”
In fact, Yeats even bought available translations (he only knew English), but was left underwhelmed by the quality of these translations. “Could latinised words, hyphenated words; could polyglot phrases, sedentary distortions of unnatural English … could muddles, muddied by ‘Lo! Verily’ and ‘Forsooth’, represent what grass farmers sang thousands of years ago, what their descendants sing today?” Yeats writes.
Thus, when he met scholar Shri Purohit Swami, who had travelled “the length and breadth of India” prior to journeying to Europe in 1930, Yeats pitched the idea to translate the Upanishads, not for learned polyglots and orientalists, but for lay people.
The Ten Principal Upanishads was first published by Faber and Faber of London in April 1937.
WB Yeats had a lifelong fascination with Indian philosophy and liteature, the culmination of which was his co-translation of the Upanishads. (Wikimedia Commons, ANI) 
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