Buddha Statue, Middle of Hussain Sagar Lake, Hyderabad
Reprinted from the article posted to my Facebook timeline on 16th, Feb., 2010.
The only source now I have is a biography of Surai Sasai, 佐々井秀嶺, a Japan-born Buddhist monk who devoted himself for the propagation of Buddhism in India and the welfare reform for his fellow Indian Buddhists. Pity to say is that this book is not at all reliable, as the author, Motoo Yamagiwa, an amateur researcher of contemporary Indian affairs, wrote this with predictions, and any accounts unfavorable to Sasai are carefully excluded.
Yamagiwa's account on this affair, written in pages 391-4, can be summarized thus:
A Hyderabad University Professor called himself P. Rao visited Sasai to Nagpur in 1990.
Rao asked Sasai's help to salvage a gigantic Buddha statue now sinking at the bottom of Hussain Sagar, a huge man-made reservoir dividing twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad.
The statue itself was chiseled out in 1987 by the order of N. T. Rama Rao, then the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. NTR planned to rename Hussain Sagar to Buddha Purnima Sagar, Lord Buddha's Full Moon Lake.
The statue sank in the water when the boat carrying it to an island in the lake wrecked. Eleven engineers drowned with this accident.
The Congress CM after NTR, hostile to Buddhist expansion, attempted to settle the statue of Ganesha in place of Lord Buddha.
Here, no explanation is shown of NTR's initial motivation except that his sympathy with Buddhism stemed from his low caste origin, although he himself was a Hindu.
Several of the information presented by Yamagiwa are hardly believable at a single glance. The informants Yamagiwa relied on, to which Sasai himself was certainly included, no doubt announced the matters approving themselves alone, and Yamagiwa swallowed them all without examinations.
Hence scientific filtering should be adapted strictly to these accounts, nonetheless, in Hyderabad we can find several memorials reminding us of Buddhist origin such as Lumbini Park, and the high probability that these were settled under the NTR's grand scheme cannot be ignored. One fact necessary to be added to this is that the Buddha Purnima Project went on, at least by 2004, on purpose to "the development of Hussain Sagar Lake and its environs covering an are of 902 hectors," and this was held "under the provisions of the A.P. Urban Areas (Development) Act 1975."
Karan Johar’s Student of the Year is now on screen in several cinema halls in Japan under the title of Student of the Year, Heading for No. 1. Lots of Japanese Bollywood fans are excited as they can share the relatively-recent Indian movie with their fellow Indian audiences, and the screening it with Japanese subtitles is the greatest reason of their excitement. This phenomenon, enthusiastically welcoming of an Indian movie when screened with the subtitles written in the language they can understand, seems to represent the peculiar way of Japanese reception of Indian movies. To let it known to foreign, especially Indian, readers, I’m noting down here what I can observe in this affair.
Firstly, I should make it clear that I haven’t yet watched this screening in Japan; all the information came from eyewitness of my online friends, tweets and other SNS reports. All were issued by genuine Japanese fans in Japanese. Hence I will mention to the contents of the movie as little as possible, and concentrate to the features distinctively perceptible in this craze for Japanese subtitles.
What surprised me most is that a stunning error was possibly taken place in making the subtitles. The Japanese subtitles seem to take the whole story as the incidents in high school days! Even considering that Indian education system is hugely different from Japanese one and therefore hard to understand for the translator or subtitle maker, having mistaken a “college” with a “high school" is too fatal to understand the movie itself. Although no direct mentions of koko or kokosei (a high school or high school students in Japanese) were found and the college was always referred ambigiously as "school" or "campus" in the subtitles, many of Japanese audience must have simply interpreted the story occurred in an Indian higher education institute and only a few sensitive or those who experienced in watching Indian movies felt it uneasy when seeing Indian high school students on the screen were drinking, smoking and driving a car freely.
If an audience mistakes this, although knowing the cinematic magnification, with something possible to occur in the extension of Indian high school life, he or she fails to catch the sense of liberation in which the characters in the movie are fully enjoying. The movie's bright and exuberant fantasy is possible to flourish only because Indians can experience this kind of merrymaking exclusively in several years of college life, the days of moratorium before they enter the hard life of real world.
What concerns us most here is the doubt that the ignorance of the subtitle maker alone might not induce this silly mistake. It is highly suspicious that someone(s) standing behind it in charge of the promotion itself introduced an intentional confusion and thus tempted the audience to identify the movie with something compatible with a California Dreams-like American teen-oriented sitcom, the program Japanese audience was familiar with to some extent.
This was presumably a tactics commercially motivated. Certainly it’s not a good idea to throw Japanese audience all of sudden in front of the primary setting of the movie, basically including numerous Indian indigenous customs and behavioral patterns, and consequently to make feel them aback. A cunning device was necessary to make them easier in accepting the fictional world and immersing themselves soon into it before they start to sense something alien or dubious there.
This kind of shrewd trick, if existed, should be blamed on the ground that whoever short of matured knowledge of Hindi nor a chance of reading the English translated screenplay cannot be aware of it, and it is likely to lead general audience to the harmful misconception of current Indian society. But striking enough is that an ordinary Bollywood fan still loves to watch an Indian movie with Japanese subtitles no matter how translation errors are included there. This strange preference cannot be understood without knowing his/her standard of English literacy.
In a few years after the super-hit of Rajnikanth’s Muthu (The Dancing Maharaja in Japanese title) in Japan in 1998, numerous Japanese websites chiefly dealing with Hindi and Tamil movies were founded by the hands of Japanese manias, and some pages of them specialized to add Japanese subtitles to Indian movie DVDs issued by Indian or American companies. All of them no longer exist now, but I still remember they instructed thus:
Find out the file containing English subtitles and extract it by a special PC application.
Convert it to a text file format.
Pass the English dialogues to Google translation service in order to change them into Japanese.
Change the Japanese texts to graphic format data.
Superimpose them on the screen in a synchronized form and save them all.
Remarkable is that the reason they recommended to use Google translation service was not for convenience's sake. The authors of the pages were unable to understand accurately what the English subtitles meant and had no way but to relay on poorly-functioning online machine translation. As a result, what they got from the service was full of the passages meaningless in Japanese, and ought to be revised with the supplement of the subtile makers’ uncertain, often mistaken, imagination. Thus, in many cases, their attempt of making an Indian movie with Japanese subtitles ended up with an entire failure of transmitting original Hindi or Tamil meaning to the language they could understand.
In Japanese society English literacy is not as important as in India. This is especially true in the years before the waves of rapid globalization overwhelmed us, and the ranking in profession and social status were gradually assorted with one’s own English ability. This was also the days when ordinary Japanese, with their wealth doubled by the rapid economic growth later called sarcastically “the bubble economy age,” turned their eyes from Western cultural products to the third world ones. The craze for Indian, or more accurately, Rajnikanth’s, movies taken place in late 90s was a typical phenomenon of this shift in cultural preference.
Unfortunately but inevitably, this was not accompanied with proper appreciation of Indian cultures. In T. Tezuka' words quoted in SV Srinivas’ "Rajnikant in Japan: Indian “Superstardom” and Low Value Markets” (2013), it was only consumption of “otherness” in the comfort of “culturally safe” spaces. Also important here is to point out that those who welcomed Muthu, the nuclear of them being a customary goer to the “mini-theatres” where a wide range of international films were screened, loved the Indian movie as it represented something unknown before, and the preference in Indian movies satisfied their personal pride of being aware of something different from “authority-establised” American cultural products, and at the same time it healed secretly their sense of inferior complex born in the deepest place of their hearts from their lack of matured English ability .
Nothing has changed since then. With the development of online communication, it is now exceedingly easy to obtain appropriate information about Indian movies from the online reports written in English, but a limited number of Japanese proceed to make use of them. The majority of Indian movie fans, whose number is far less than a common Indian estimates, still heavily relay on the news casually issued by Japanese professional film critiques and advanced bloggers. Due to the shortage of sources, their knowledge of current fashion in Indian movies is poor and often distortedly biassed. This makes my readers understand why they look forward to an Indian movie screening with Japanese subtitles. It’s a rare occasion for them to understand entirely (but not so always as seen in the present case) what a Indian movie means.
In writing this blog, one of my online friends offered me precious suggestions. One is the possibility that the error in the Japanese subtitles was intentionally committed in order to make the audience associate The Student of the Year with Boys Over Flowers (Hana Yori Danshi in the original Japanese title), a Japanese comic for girls and later turned to a TV serials boasting of huge popularity when on air from 2005 to 2007. The primary setting of this romantic comedy is similar to the Indian movie in terms of dealing with a prestigious school whose students are consisted of the children of incredibly wealthy tycoons.
My friend’s information also enabled me to know the name of the subtitle maker Rie Andoh. I’ve never heard of her but it is now evident that she belongs to a company in Tokyo named Medalion Media whose chief business is “acquisition and distribution of media contents.” It is still uncertain whether Hindi or English screenplay was used in the translation process, but a simple error such as mistaking a college with a high school is hardly imaginable in consideration that a leading professional Hindi movie translator aka subtitle maker Tamaki Matsuoka supervised this project.
Nithya's new movie will be announced in a press conference of 25th, March
Our beloved Nithya Menen will launch her new Telugu movie from 25th, March, 2014. A press conference to announce it is going to be held on 25th in Hyderabad. The director is Onamalu fame Kranti Madhav. The title is still unfixed. Another excitement for us is that Sharwanand is paired with Nithya again! They have performed together in Yemito Ee Maya, a Cheran's Tamil/Telugu bilingual movie which will be released before long. As Nithya pays great respect to Sharwa's acting skill, we can expect beautiful chemistry these talented young actors make in both works.
Director Gunna Sekar's ambitious 3D period film Rudramadevi, featuring Anushka as a leading heroine, is now in its third phase of shooting. An unexpected but pleasant news has just came in: Nithya Menen is involved to this venture and her role is a princess who is to be the wife to Anushka. Sounds ridiculous? No. In this movie, Anushka as Rudramadevi pretends to be a man in order to rule the empire she inherited. Nithya has just finished her first 3 days shooting for a song and we look for her further acting as a cute princess. Rudramadevi includes Rana Daggubati, Prakash Raj, and Mahesh Babu as a guest appearance. That national-award winning Thota Tharani is doing art direction is our another expectation.
