Muslim teacher's Urdu version of 'Gita'

“So far I have been able to translate as many as 40 slokas of Gita into Urdu,” says Anwar Jalalpuri, who is a teacher in English at an inter-college in Ambedkar Nagar, about 190 km from here.

Jalalpuri attributes the slow pace of translation of the slokas of Gita to his efforts to make it lyrical. “The translated version of Gita will be in verse and not prose so that it could also be recited like a song,” he says.

Anwar said Gita, Upanishads and Quran were nothing less than “human heritage” and they must be preserved at all cost. On what prompted him to translate Gita, Jalalpuri says there is an urgent need to spread the message contained in Gita among the human beings, irrespective of their religion.

Jalalpuri got interested in Gita after he completed his PhD from Awadh University in Faizabad. “My topic for research was translation of Gita in Urdu shayari and its critical study,” he said.

Muslim clerics have hailed it saying that it will go a long way in promoting communal harmony.