JCB Prize for Literature 2022-winning translator Baran Farooqi on growing up among languages and why literature in translation matters

As the younger daughter of Urdu novelist, poet and critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935-2020), a pioneer in modernist Urdu literature, Farooqi had inherited an enviable literary milieu, reading the poetry of Ghalib, Mir, Allama Iqbal, Munir Niazi, Nasir Kazmi and others alongside the mandatory Enid Blytons, Nancy Drews and Mills and Boons, that are a rite of passage in Indian childhoods. “…By IXth grade or so, I had read all my Jane Austens, Agatha Christies, Thomas Hardys, Charles Dickens and had been taught Shakespeare… We were also given lessons in Urdu prose and taught a fair amount of Persian,” she says.

There was also the company of her father’s contemporaries and friends — writers and poets experimenting with literary form and content. “I had grown up with men and women with a literary/poetic bent of mind, walking in and out of our house. Small literary gatherings at home or outside were regular activities for my sister and me. We were also taken along to performances or concerts of major singers or qawwals if they happened to be visiting India. Mushairas were familiar events and I remember that I had been fascinated as a kid with the word ‘Irshad’ and ‘mukarrar Irshad’, used all the time during mushairas. ‘Kya baat hai’, ‘subhanallah’, ‘phir padhiye, janab’ were uttered in gleeful voices by men (and a few women, too), most of them middle-aged or old and balding (I saw that even grownups had their games and were earnest about entertainment). My sister, cousins and I often played ‘mushaira–mushaira’ among ourselves and would go into splits saying ‘Irshad’ and ‘huzoor’, ‘janab, samaad farmaye’,” she recalls.

Her own interest in translation was piqued when she watched her sister work away at a translation of an article by a French writer for her father’s iconic Urdu literary magazine, Shabkhoon. “I must have been in IVth grade, my sister in Xth. She had translated ‘into’ Urdu, not ‘from’ it, and I remember my father sitting with the translation and pointing out the mistakes, or shall we say, less ideal choices of words that she may have made here and there… So, translation ‘into’ an Indian language seemed a natural, though difficult, task to me since childhood. As I grew older, I realised, to my relief, that one could translate from Urdu into English, too, and that that was a much simpler task. After my appointment (in Jamia Millia Islamia), I developed a deeper interest in translation and also discovered that I had an edge over many others since I knew both Urdu and English quite well and could attempt translations with comparative ease,” she says.

It’s a good time to be a translator, especially in India, given the reception and international acclaim that works in translation have received in recent times. All five shortlisted books at the 2022 JCB Prize were works in translation. Tomb of Sand, the English translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi, by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize last year.

Farooqi says she’s not surprised. “As a translator and academic, I find the coming-into-its-own of translation natural, even inevitable. The world has shrunk, there is a need for interconnection. However, equally present is the need for specialised information, uniqueness, exclusiveness. The reader is curious to know the deeper, subtler aspects of life as experienced in specific cultures, languages. There is no way forward without translation. In the beginning was the word, and then there was the translated word,” she says.

Over the last decade, the rise of right-wing identity politics has often led to Urdu being at the eye of the storm. In 2021, retail brand Fabindia had to withdraw their Diwali festive campaign, titled Jashn-e-Riwaaz, Urdu for “celebration of tradition”, after protests. In 2017, the RSS-affiliated Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas had sent a list of recommendations to the National Council of Educational Research and Training, asking for the removal of English, Urdu and Arabic words, among others. At the award ceremony in November, Farooqi had expressed her delight at the affirmation of the language at a time when its voice was getting dimmed. “We seem to have turned our eyes away from our own language, made it ‘a stranger in the city’. It may be that it needs the magical kiss of translation to reveal its truth to us once again. Open a new window into the immense treasures that literature in Urdu holds, draw attention to it,” she says.