Two enduring images define Renate Helga Brigitte Sarma (1941-2020) for people of Aligarh, one of a tall, white, European sari-clad woman, comfortably riding a bicycle in the entire length and breadth of the university campus and the other that of a stern, serious-looking teacher terribly busy with her classes, students and books, rarely indulging in any gossip or small talk. The ‘lady with her bicycle’ image defined her environmental concerns, her egalitarianism, and her vision of a university campus without the invasion of ugly and noisy automobile.
It was also her voice against the consumerist ethos in universities where everyone must of necessity own a car. Her husband, a professor of Sanskrit, an Indologist, a multilingual scholar, and a translator of difficult German texts was also often seen enjoying his walks, constitutional in his Joycean English, in a green campus, ‘the best University campus in the country’, as the university professor played by Manoj Bajpayee in the movie Aligarh describes it.
Renate Sarma herself contributed in a big way to make the campus lush, verdant and beautiful with flowers of rare varieties blossoming everywhere. As member-in-charge of Land, Gardens and Parks, her duty involved taking care of the shrubs, plants, trees and land on the campus. Her contribution was to build flower beds and grow rare flowers on both sides of the roads in the university. Undoubtedly, one can partake of a sense serenity and peace on the university roads but only if one is walking or cycling as she used to do. And she loved this campus so much that once back from a visit to a relatively big city in Uttar Pradesh, which she found very congested, she remarked, “Thank God! we live in Aligarh”.
Most of her students remember her total commitment to teaching German in the afternoon in the Faculty of Arts. In the later part of her career, she even took one year’s leave for academic pursuits in 1992-93 to work on her project of developing software for teaching German language. Not limited to teaching German language alone, she also taught iconic German novelist Thomas Mann to English Literature students and was a reliable source to offer a comparative perspective on the source German and English translations of classic texts of German literature. Her view was that Kafka in German is even more difficult than in English translations.
Born in Homberg, a small town in Germany, and having been educated at Homberg, Marburg, and Berlin, she also met her future husband Sreermula Rajeswara Sarma in her native country where he had come to pursue his doctorate. Renate Sarma worked for two years as Language Assistant at the College of Wooster, Ohio where earlier she had also been a Fulbright Scholar. She spent another two years as language trainee at Kassel before she found her moorings at Aligarh Muslim University both as a university teacher with varied interests and a family-oriented woman.
Both Renate and Sreermula Rajeswara joined Aligarh Muslim University in 1969, she as a lecturer in German in the Department of English and Modern European Languages and he as a lecturer in the Department of Sanskrit. She went on to become a senior lecturer and a reader before her retirement in July 2003. In between her engagement with teaching, she also nurtured the creative interests of students as president of Hobbies Workshop and helped the University with her work as the manager of university’s Abdullah Nursery and Primary School. A great lover of India and its literary traditions, she earned her PhD early in her career in 1972 on R.K Narayan from Marburg, Germany.
Her publications were on diverse subjects ranging from Indian English novelist R.K.Narayan to black American writer James Baldwin, from German novelists Thomas Mann’s magnum opus “Buddenbrooks” and Gunter Grass’s classic “The Tin Drum” to incisive reviews of books on medicine and science. She was a very fastidious editor and many error-free issues of “The Aligarh Journal of English Studies”’ owe their perfection to her work with the journal as a key member of its editorial board.
Her sincerity and hard work are also reflected in her remarkable work as a translator of voluminous works from German to English. She translated Horst Kruger’s “Indian Nationalists and the World Proletariat”. A tome of more than 500 pages, this work, as historian Ishrat Alam, formerly a Member Secretary of Indian Council of Historical Research which published this, informs was assigned to her by eminent historian Irfan Habib, incidentally another environmentally- conscious professor known for riding his bicycle in the campus. Such was Renate’s competence and seriousness that she translated this doorstopper in just three months. A family friend of Sarmas, Alam also informs how Renate’s father faced persecution at the hands of Hitler’s Nazi Party which partly explains her love for India’s liberal and tolerant traditions.
She remained active as a translator even after her retirement. Together with her husband Sreermula Rajeswara Sarma, she translated Fuat Sezgin’s five-volume “Science and Technology in Islam” (2010) which includes History of Arabic-Islamic Sciences and some other interesting titles.
‘Beware the ides of March’, cries the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. On the ides of March came the sad news of her death from oesophageal cancer. Survived by her husband and son, Renate Sarma’s death has left Aligarh Muslim University poorer.
(The writer teaches English in Aligarh Muslim University)
