A translation win is a win for Indian English

… which is great, except for essentialists who don’t rate us Englishwaalas

My Friend Daanish, one of the longer short stories from my 2018 collection, Diwali in Muzaffarnagar, was published on May 24 in a Hindi translation by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari. You can read the Hindi story on the Samalochan website here.¹

The online Hindi literary world engages with eager immediacy, and on websites like Samalochan, criticism and commentary follow publication rapidly, both in the comments section on the website and on Facebook shares by editor Arun Dev and others. I did, of course, read all the responses I could access. As happens with any writer, I reckon, my attention was drawn more acutely to critical comments. The major complaints with the Hindi story seemed to be about its length, the pace of detailing in that length, and the feeling of reading memoiristic writing. For the English story, the length was noted but never called a demerit, and reading comments that mentioned this as a negative for the Hindi story, my mind immediately went to how we read from interpretations of the formal traditions of our reading language(s)—our cultivated habits. If Hindi readerships are used to valuing certain rhythms in a short story, the distortion in those rhythms that a translation from another language poses may land either way for a given reader. I say this not as a negation of those criticisms but in a gesture of celebrating them, and as a way to celebrate the results of the act of translation itself.

The feels memoiristic commentary had me bemused, though. Firstly because, even though the story takes details from my own school life in Muzaffarnagar, none of its significant events have happened to me. I didn’t have a friend like Daanish. If the story appears so real that one is compelled to say ‘memoir’, I actually feel obliged to take that as a compliment. Secondly, so what if it feels like a memoir?

Anyway. The fact is: I’m delighted that the story exists in Hindi, and cannot thank Bharatbhooshan Tiwari enough, who did this work for no reward other than birthing something for the world. His is a painstaking gesture of friendship that is going to be impossible for me to repay.

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Just four days before the publication of my story was the day of one of those BIG wins for Indian literatures and translation: the Booker win for Heart Lamp. (I haven’t read the collection yet, a situation I aim to remedy soonest.) Such an event is always followed by a good amount of chatter in writing circles. Deepanjana Pal has written brilliantly about this chatter, its ‘did it deserve it?’ motif, and the experience of reading Heart Lamp here.

To repeat a point made earlier: our reading is informed by our specific understanding of the traditions of our reading languages(s). The peculiar shape we think English or Hindi or Kannada gives to, say, the short story form is the shape we expect when reading a short story in English or Hindi or Kannada. In each language there are those few risk-taking writers who prevent this expectation from ossifying into a demand. But one of the surest ways for a reader to prevent this ossification at their end is to read translations, where the rhythms and patterns of another language (transported through the genius of the translator), the focalisation of another tradition (or its subversion) in form, and the differences of landscapes and subject matter can leave an impression of experiencing something new.

The English reader has nothing to complain about here, English being the language world literatures are translated into the most. But crouched in this hegemony of the language is a vexing point that inevitably pops up after an event such as this Booker win. Amidst the general air of celebration (which I love), one begins to read on writerly WhatsApp groups some bemoaning of how it is only with ‘an English passport’ that many Indian literatures can hope to travel and/or be recognised widely. In such statements, apart from blah truism, I find myself more interested in the subtext, which I find imbricated with some other attitudes that I have often encountered among Indian writers and readers.

For those who see English as giving a passport, the applicable definition of ‘recognition’ is global, all-conquering recognition, of the Booker sort. That dozens of translated works are published every year by major publishers in India and see none of that ‘recognition’ somehow doesn’t seem of a piece with the sentiment. If ‘recognition’ was defined more conservatively, one would perhaps be able to note that there are decently sized readerships that do exist in several Indian languages, and that a work is often picked for translation because of what it has done to those readerships, in recent past or over a length of time. In fact, if one sized ‘recognition’ proportionately, one might also be able to note the paucity of translation from English. Perhaps the truth that Indian literature in English also needs translation for valuable recognition in the country would find some purchase.

But no, we will continue to only register global recognition as recognition. And Indian literature in English can anyway be all too readily conflated with the mechanics of global English hegemony. Somehow, I feel, that the Englishwaalas in India are seen as already standing in some hallowed spot where the Hindiwaalas or Kannadawaalas have to reach after translation. If this is true, it is true for a very, very, very small number of Englishwaalas. And most Hindiwaalas or Kannadawaalas don’t, I reckon, keep reaching that spot as a goal.

This appallingly widespread perception—of the English writer’s significantly better material situation in the arena of literature—is often underwritten by another equally widespread attitude: that non-English Indian literatures are somehow more essentially Indian, are somehow better by definition, and deal with truer truths in truer expression. I have heard even Indian English writers say this in private (one time at JLF, no less). I reject this wholeheartedly, including—and especially—the part that invites me to accept some sort of aesthetical defeat. Every time I countenance this attitude (more frequently than I wish to), I find myself shaking my head and throwing reading recommendations at the counterparty. Anyway, what this means is that the moaning about needing ‘an English passport’ is all too readily leads to the notion that the travel limitations of non-English literatures are somehow excruciatingly tragic, for it is as if India—true India—isn’t travelling. The simple fact that Indian literature in English doesn’t travel all that frequently, internally or externally, has no allowance here. A passport is considered enough; there is no thought given to visas and inner line permits.

There are, by my conservative estimate, at least 100 English novels published every year by major (and/or internationally affiliated) publishers in India. That only 2-3 make any kind of an international splash is as true as the sky is (mostly) blue. Here is a top-of-mind list of Indian English writers who have either never been published outside India or have never had the kind of ‘recognition’ that their ‘English passport’ should have given them: Amitabha Bagchi, Anees Salim, Annie Zaidi, Anjum Hasan… It would be tough to convince me, or any good segment of their readers, that their novels are less Indian and less truly true than those by an ace writer in Hindi or Kannada or Tamil.

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It’s just competition, silly. A language’s hegemony doesn’t mean all its wielders get to play king.

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In September 2019, the prize ceremony for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar was held in Dibrugarh, and writers with work in twenty-three languages, myself one of them, were put up in a hotel for two (or three, I forget) nights. On the evening before the day of the ceremony, a bunch of us awardees got together for introductions and chit chat. At one point, after a degree of familiarity was established, I found myself saying that instead of the ceremony and the prize money, the Akademi should perhaps offer prize-winning works just one simple thing: translation into the other languages that the prize rewarded work in. The assignments could be given to writers within the group, for which payment could be done at generous rates that exceeded the prize money. Or there could be open tenders.

This suggestion came from an obvious-as-daylight lack: I wanted to read my peers’ works from Punjabi, Tamil, Dogri, Kannada, Kashmiri, and so on, and it just wasn’t possible. The suggestion had, I admit, its obvious logistical—even feasibility—hurdles. But seeing such diversity of literary achievement in a single space, my thinking had acquired a certain idealism. Translation, I thought, ought to be the academy’s single biggest objective.

The practicalities that ought to temper the above idealism (who would read Diwali in Muzaffarnagar in Manipuri?) are, I think, of a piece with the larger processes that are behind English hegemony. More translations into Indian English, while doing a world of good for literature in the original language for a brief period, ultimately have greater dividends for Indian English. Conversely, fewer and fewer translations into any other Indian language, from English or elsewhere, can’t be a good thing. Work—a lot of work—is actually needed elsewhere.

Every translation win, so long as that translation is into English, is a win for Indian English too. The English novelist/poet/essayist, also facing modest visibility, also facing little to no hope of global recognition, welcomes these wins. Rather than using these events to re-ignite sideways claims about Indian English writing as inadequately Indian (what does this even mean?), or seeing the Indian English writer as a privileged, pretentious, Westward-ho specimen (not true for an overwhelming majority of us), energies would be better spent in investigating just what it would take to enrich Indian languages with frequent translations in all directions. Let’s wish for adaan-pradaan to be done to excess. And, yes, let’s just celebrate right now.

1. The same story was published in English with a different title—I Had a Muslim Friend Once—on the Catapult website back in 2018, and even though the litmag is no longer active, the archive is still open to read, and the English story may still be read here.