N G Kalelkar, It was Marriage at Cana, not The Last Supper

I like essays of N G Kalelkar 1909-1989 (ना गो कालेलकर) whose Marathi book 'Bhasha: Itihas ani Bhoogol' (भाषा: इतिहास आणि भूगोल) won Sahitya Akademi award in 1967.

Year 2009-10 is the 100th birth anniversary year of Kalelkar. The June 2010 issue of Lalit (ललित) has an essay on him by Prof. Vidyagauri Tilak (विद्यागौरी टिळक) to mark the occasion.

It is said that the main character- played memorably by Satish Dubhashi (सतीश दुभाषी)- of P L Deshpande's (पु ल देशपांडे) popular play 'Ti Fulrani' (ती फुलराणी) was inspired by Kalelkar.

Sunita Deshpande (सुनीता देशपांडे), P L Deshpande's wife, has written an unusually frank- for inbred Marathi literary culture of second half of 20th century- essay on Kalelkar, throwing light on many aspects of his personal life. (After reading the essay, Kalelkar became more interesting for me.)

In one of the most impressive passages from Kalelkar's book '"bhasha ani sanskriti" (भाषा आणि संस्कृती) he says:

When a class containing Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) was asked to write an essay on the subject of the Last Supper, Byron wrote just one line- 'The water saw its Lord and blushed'...Water in Latin is feminine...etc. etc. (page 47, edition December 1982)

This moved me so much when I first read it almost 25 years ago that I memorised it and kept quoting it in my conversations.

There are a couple of problems with this.

First, it was not the Last Supper but Marriage at Cana.

And second it was not Lord Byron- then a third grade boy- who first said this.

In fact it was Richard Crashaw (c.1613-1649) who wrote:

'The conscious water saw its God, and blushed' (original in Latin: Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit)

Read an earlier related post here

I feel Kalelkar should have attributed this to Crashaw. But did he know that it was Crashaw who first wrote it?

A lot of stuff written in Marathi has gone unchallenged.


Artist: Paolo Veronese, c 1562-63