‘Good translation? For whom’: Vivek Shanbhag on India’s loudest literary story

“We all know there is a lot of translation happening,” Kothari said. “This is exciting and dizzying, but there is something chaotic about the whole landscape.” The chaos, she said, lies in the tyranny of visibility — everything must become prize-ready and tangible. Reflection and conceptual depth are casualties of the rush.

Abundance without a narrative

For Vivek Shanbhag, the problem lies in incoherence. “There is an enormous amount of effort being put into bringing Indian-language literature into English,” he said. “But what is lacking is a narrative around which one can hang these translations.” Without such a narrative, translations arrive as isolated achievements rather than a shared literary field.

This unease animated ‘Hyphenated Worlds’, one of the festival’s headline sessions, where critic and translator Rita Kothari was joined by Vivek Shanbhag—acclaimed Kannada writer of Ghachar Ghochar and Sakina’s Kiss —and Arunava Sinha, one of India’s most prolific translators. (Credit: Special Arrangement)

Harkening to Europe, Shanbhag said, multiple languages coexist within shared theoretical and critical frameworks. Translation there functions as a conversation between traditions. “In India,” he said, “there is no conversation happening – or has ever happened –between languages through their translations into English.”

Writers may respond to one another personally, but institutionally the dots remain unconnected. The absence of cross-linguistic dialogue is a structural flaw.

Translation: The reader’s dilemma

The consequences of this incoherence are most visible at the level of readership. Ask a reader what ‘Indian literature’ means, and Shanbhag said, the question collapses. This has less to do with India’s diversity, and more to do with translations arriving without editorial or curatorial work that allows readers to move laterally across regions, histories, and sensibilities.

Too often, he argued, publishers privilege recognition over all else. “Publishers go by the name rather than an in-depth engagement with the literature,” he said. In practice, this means translators frequently function as de facto curators. “Most of the time, it is the choice of the translator. If a translator likes a work, they pick it up. There is no publisher strategy for this.”

When market takes over editorial judgement

On why such strategies rarely exist, Arunava Sinha said, “Big publishers are driven by their P&Ls (profit and loss). The question is not whether a language or a writer needs sustained representation, but how many copies the last translation sold.”

Translators hear this calculus all the time, he said. For instance, ‘your last book sold seven hundred copies. We are not publishing this writer again.’ The result is a redundancy. The same author appears in translation from multiple publishers, while vast literary terrains remain untouched.

“Each publisher feels there are readers out there,” Sinha said, “and I should be the one whose translation it is.” No one, however, commits to building a writer, or a language, over time.

The cost of speed

Shanbhag theorised the damage was compounded by haste. “A translated book is very different from a book originally written in English,” he said. “There is a writer, a translator, and an editor. All three have to be in continuous conversation.”

Yet in large publishing houses, editors may spend only weeks on a translated manuscript. “It is not enough,” he said, suggesting that translation is a negotiated act.

Kothari asked what translations actually did to the understanding of a region, an archive, or a literary tradition? she asked. Has the boom created intimacy between linguistic communities? She recalled a time when Gujarati and Marathi were spoken of as bhagini bhashas—sister languages—without institutional scaffolding. That intimacy, she said, has been replaced by competitive visibility and award-driven aspiration.

“There’s a neoliberalness to the whole enterprise,” she said. “Something is a little off.”

Hyphen as counter-proposal

It is against this backdrop that Shanbhag co-founded Hyphen, which includes a biannual, print-led literary magazine devoted exclusively to translations from Indian languages; a publishing house focused only on translation; and a digital platform for workshops, conversations, and shared resources.

The initiatives advisory council brings together Namita Gokhale, co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival; Geetanjali Shree, whose work Tomb of Sand won international acclaim; Tamil writer Perumal Murugan, Malayalam writer KR Meera, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, known for writing from tribal and marginalised perspectives; Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa; and Sudhir Sitapati, among others.

“These writers have already been discovered and read in their own languages,” Shanbhag said. “To say I have discovered them would be arrogant. What we are trying to do is discover them afresh in English.”

That act of rediscovery requires time, sometimes 18 months for a single book, and institutional patience rarely available in the current ecosystem.

Underlying the discussion was an unresolved question about English itself. Once, the anxiety was whether English could carry the affective density of Indian languages. Now, Shanbhag suggested, the risk is different: that English becomes both bridge and border, shaping literature toward external expectations.

“When you say ‘good translation,’” he asked, “good for whom?”