From October, the Shillong Chamber Choir (SCC) has been on a virtual hunt of sorts. The attempt to record a hymn in ancient Aramaic — the now-dead language believed to have been spoken by Christ himself — took India’s best-known choir from Shillong to Switzerland. The result — a version of ‘Go Tell It On The Mountain’ with lyrics in English and ancient Aramaic, which dropped on December 18 — has been viewed 3.5 million times on YouTube and has furthered the choir’s reputation of multi-linguality.
Not just Aramaic, ‘Come Home Christmas’, the eight-track album the hymn belongs to, incorporates Hebrew, Persian and Urdu, besides Khasi. This, the choir explained stemmed from a desire to bring back the Mediterranean in the story of Christmas and gently remind audiences that Christ was, after all, west Asian.
“We started looking for someone who could translate the hymns in ancient Aramaic, which is almost nigh to impossible to find. But we made contact in just two phone calls. Similar episodes happened over the entire making of the album, which was made in a short span of time,” choir founder-conductor and Padma Shri winner Neil Nongkynrih said.
Vocalist William Richmond Basaiawmoit explained that they took the help of Melke Tekin, an elderly gentleman in Switzerland who spoke ancient Aramaic for ‘Go Tell It On The Mountain’. Tekin not only translated the hymn, he sent the choir a recording of him singing it for better understanding of the metre, Basaiawmoit said.
Ancient Aramaic is spoken by very few people today, although communities exist in present-day Iraq and Syria that speak versions of the language. The Semitic language emerged among the Aramaeans in the 11th century BC, and by the 6th and 5th centuries BC, it had become one of the most widely spoken languages in west Asia.
“Christ was well-versed in Aramaic and Hebrew. While Greek was the language of the (Roman) empire at the time, Hebrew was the language of the scriptures and Aramaic was that of the common man,” explained Amlan Dasgupta, the country’s foremost scholar of Classical and Biblical studies. Aramaic is one of the languages used in the 2004, Mel Gibson-directed ‘The Passion of the Christ’.
The choir’s version of ‘We The Kings’ uses Farsi, Urdu and English in deference to the fact that the Magi were Zoroastrians. The English-to-Farsi translation was done by Fariba Iran. For its video, the choir collaborated with noted Israeli sand artist Ilana Yahav. “We worked on the languages with people from London, Turkey, Mumbai, Israel and Belgium,” said Nongkynrih.
From working on the pronunciation to getting the tonal quality and instrumentation of the songs right, the process of incorporating Aramaic and the other languages in the hymns has been a tough one. “We also used ancient Aramaic in ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’, which has a fast tempo. During the rehearsals, we would slow down the tempo by almost 80 per cent, add in the Aramaic words to get the pronunciation just right, and then speed up the song,” said Basaiawmoit.
“This is our second-ever Christmas album and we wanted to do something truly different. We are bringing the spirit of Christmas closer to Christ’s home, and to ours. The choir is known for singing in about 25 languages; from Russian to Mandarin to Malayalam, we have done it all,” he added.