Spain honors four Indian Hispanists who are pioneers of Spanish in India

New Delhi, March 2 Spain decorated four Indian Hispanists on Wednesday for their pioneering work over the last half century in introducing Spanish to India, where the basis for the academic teaching of this language was then almost nil. The winners, in an act at the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi, were the Hispanist Vibha Maurya, who received the Official Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic; and fellow Hispanists Shyama Prasad Ganguly, Aparajit Chattopadhyay and Anil Dhingra, who received the Cross of the Order of Civil Merit. “It is (…) an act of celebration, of celebration for the good health of the Spanish language, which is growing and spreading throughout India more and more (…) and you have really been the pioneers of this implantation of the Spanish in India”, stated the director of the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi, Oscar Pujol, at the beginning of the event. Pujol, the first director of this headquarters inaugurated in 2009 (now serving the second stage in his command), also stressed that “it is an act of justice for Indian Hispanism, which has been active for more than 60 years.” FIRST QUIXOTE AL HINDI The decoration received by Maurya is intended to “reward those extraordinary behaviors of a civil nature.” The Hispanist, who is also the only corresponding academic of the Royal Spanish Academy in India, is the author of the first translation of Don Quixote from Spanish to Hindi. It is an “almost quixotic trajectory to develop Hispanic studies in India,” she acknowledged in her Maurya recognition speech, which she said dedicate this distinction to the “hundreds of students” who have occupied her classrooms over the past 40 years. “I’m in seventh heaven,” the Hispanist assured Efe shortly before the event, explaining that her passion for Spanish was born from her parents and her interest in understanding international events such as the Spanish Civil War or the “changes” in Latin America. . The daughter of a journalist and politician, Maurya was in Moscow when she almost impulsively signed up to study the Cervantes language, and there she had “the privilege of having Spanish teachers who were exiled at that time in the Soviet Union.” Another of the great decisions of his life was translating Don Quixote into Hindi: “We had been studying Hispanics in India for almost 30 years, (and) not having a direct translation from Spanish into Hindi almost embarrassed me, until one day I took the decision to do so.” INDIAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE ARRIVAL OF SPANISH Another of the winners, Ganguly, stressed that this award is an “additional stimulus” at 76 years of age to continue his dedication to Hispanism, because although he has retired as a university professor, he continues to investigate and has plans for new books. “Only with this award do I now feel part of this integral Hispanism. I have received several awards from Latin America and now it comes from Spain, that places me in Hispanism on both sides of the Atlantic,” Ganguly told Efe before the ceremony. As in so many other cases, the relationship between this Hispanist and the Spaniard also arose by chance: with a master’s degree in Economics, he wanted to do a comparative study between India and four Latin American countries on the problem of underdevelopment. But “I didn’t know Spanish, it was 1966, and one of my teachers, the great professor and Nobel Prize winner (for Economics), Amartya Sen (…) suggested that I also read something in Spanish,” explains Ganguly, who says that they gave him four months to begin to understand the language, with which he began a relationship that has lasted half a century. The Hispanist assured, however, that the beginnings of Spanish in India were not easy, because during the British colonization it was not interesting for Spain to exert influence in the country, so it was necessary to wait for independence in the second half of the 20th century for the impulses of the Indian and Spanish governments arrived. “But a greater stimulus is needed and Spain has to think about how to integrate into countries like ours,” he remarked, since, for example, he said that despite dedicating “more than 50 years to the Hispanic,” they have only been granted two scholarships to travel to Spain. The Spanish ambassador in New Delhi, José María Ridao, also referred to this new drive in India during his closing speech. After highlighting the “profound admiration and recognition” for the winners, he remarked that “the commitment of this embassy will pay more attention to them in the future. Ridao revealed that the Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, had planned to attend this ceremony, but the outbreak of the war in Ukraine forced him to cancel the trip. “In some way, his absence today and the fact that we have held this act, makes it an act of peace, an act of defense of conversation, of dialogue, of the peaceful resolution of controversies,” the ambassador stressed. In addition, “we are precisely honoring people who, being originally from outside the Hispanic sphere, have had the curiosity, the perseverance to try to understand a culture and a language like the Spanish. They put us in debt to you, in debt to India, because it also we will have to demonstrate an equivalent curiosity towards what happens in this immense country”, he concluded. EFE mt/pddp (photo)