As women writers show their prowess

Even though I am tempted to add my two-penny bits to that storm in a teacup — the inauguration of the new Parliament House by the PM and the Opposition’s boycott of it — I will refrain from giving in. For one, I keep away from political comments as a principle and two, because enough is enough. So let me go to a topic that is really close to my heart: translations and the rise of women writers in our literary firmament. Like most Indians, I can read and write fluently in two languages, yet despite a speaking acquaintance with other Indian languages, sadly I can’t read them. This is why I never forego an occasion to serve on the jury of any prize that gives me an opportunity to read good English translations of works from the languages I don’t know. I am currently reading 10 such works in languages as varied as Malayalam, Tamil, Konkani, Assamese and Maithili. Each one has its own social universe and offers a glimpse of the India that lies beyond my Hindi-English one. Even more interestingly, several authors are women and their perspective adds another dimension to this unfamiliar but fascinating territory.

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Fortunately, over the last few years, publishers have located some very competent translators within our own land and the quality of translations is improving so rapidly that I look back with horror at those early clunky, babu English ones that failed to get the nuances and music of the original works. Of course, where they were translated into other Indian languages (such as Sharatchandra from Bangla into Hindi), they birthed a cultural understanding of another part of India that many of us had never visited. Then, there were writers (such as Premchand, Manto and Ismat Chughtai) who attracted some fine translators to bring them out of Urdu into mainstream Hindustani. However, it has been a slow process to find the right text, a sensitive translator and marry the two together. Beyond this, one has to find a good editor who can shape the meandering original work into a sharper, pointed story that retains the flavour of the original but manages to drop the fat from the huge tomes that many earlier novelists preferred. The other problem, of course, was the sounds and smells of an unfamiliar world to be conveyed in a language that may not have the appropriate vocabulary and voice registers.

As readers and translators became sensitive to these problems, they also devised ways of creatively transforming these handicaps (if they can be called that) into a new and exciting journey of discovery. Over the years, I have been acquainted with lands that lie very far away from my Hindi one with kinship patterns and religious rituals that are fascinating even if unfamiliar. The result is a widening of my own horizons and also of a better understanding of the anger and suspicion with which several states (particularly those that lie in the south and the north-east) view the alarming flattening of individual cultures under the determined bid to make us one nation with a common language. Our political parties would do well to be mindful of the damage they do to their own acceptance in such areas if they appear to threaten the native cadences and rhythms that have proudly celebrated and encouraged diversity in language, religion and ethnicity. It is a shame that several less-spoken languages (like Maithili and Marwari in north India) are slowly dying out as literary languages. Each such loss has erased a universe of memories that may never again flower.

I used to always wonder why there were hardly any novels written by women until a few decades ago. The reason was so simple that I am amazed it did not strike me earlier. Girls were seldom allowed by their patriarchal families to go out to study. They were well versed in managing families but not many had progressive parents who educated them before they were married off to be smothered by domesticity and motherhood. The sudden outburst of women writers is largely a post-Independence phenomenon and the stories they have to tell are gut-wrenching. Women’s stories told by women are so different from their stories told by male narrators that the rising worth of women authors is now recognised by most prize committees.

Ashoka University in Sonepat runs a special programme on translations. Currently, it is encouraging a series called ‘Women translating women’. Among its promoters are well-known translators Rita Kothari (translator of Sindhi and Gujarati works and a widely respected academic of bhasha literature and popular culture), Arunava Sinha (a prolific translator of Bengali works), Neeta Gupta and Urvashi Butalia (both publishers who have worked closely with translations and women writers). This is a thrilling new direction that translators can look forward to. Neglected and suppressed for decades, women are telling their stories to an audience that has ignored them for too long. Watch this space.