Language No Bar

A Telugu classic that is so much fun,a Malayalam novel that took 10 years to publish and Premchands Pandeypur. A look at translations.

Gurajada Apparaos Kanyasulkam 1909 is a rare classic. It not just sits secure in the canon of Telugu literature,its characters and dialogue live on in the everyday life and conversations of Telugu-speakers. To read Velcheru Narayana Raos translation,Girls for Sale Penguin,Rs 350,is to understand why. For a play apparently written to espouse the cause of social reform of Andhra society at the turn of the 20th century,Girls for Sale has far too much fun. Like its character Girisam,three-timing lover and English-speaking dandy,who could be at home on a stage full of Restoration rakes,and who dreams of remarrying a widow to get himself in newspaper headlines. Or,Madhura-vani,the beautiful and intelligent courtesan with a healthy scepticism of men and their morals,who gets the better of the morally righteous anti-nautch lawyer Saujanya Rao.

The plot hinges on the plan of Agni-hotra Avadhanlu the fiery Brahmin to marry off his child Subbu to the 50-year-old Lubdha Avadhanlu the miserly Brahmin for a hefty bride price. Agni-hotras wife Venkamma is bitterly opposed to the match as her elder daughter is also a young widow. Apparao lived at a time when the reform movement was gaining ground in Bengal and the rest of India the idea of widow remarriage and the anti-nautch sentiment had divided the upper castes. However,the energy of his play does not derive from didacticism,but from its cheerfully amoral characters scheming Brahmins,corrupt police officers and pliant pundits who,even as they negotiate new ideas of modernity and a new language English,never quite stop laughing at all positions of moral righteousness.

Modernity is a far more fraught concern in Kocharethi translated by Catherine Thankamma,OUP,Rs 450,the first Malayalam novel written by a tribal about his community,the Mala Arayar tribe that lives on the hills of the Western Ghats,and which won the author,Narayan,the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award. The novel is set in pre-independence India and through the lives of a Mala Arayar couple tells the story of this animistic community and its progressive disempowerment as the outside world breaks into its isolation. In an interview,Narayan says he wrote to correct the caricature of his tribe in popular culture; and how it remained unpublished 10 years after he had written it because he was not confident of its literary worth. Kocharethi does not have the unity of structure and theme of a novel,but in its descriptions of love and loss in a Mala Arayar village,it throbs with a quiet life.

There is nothing quiet about Premchands epic novel Rangbhoomi translated by Manju Jain,Penguin,Rs 550,which rings with a sense of gathering doom from the opening pages. The novel is set in Pandeypur,a settlement on the margins of Benaras,where Soordas,a blind beggar lives with his nephew Mitthu. The wheels of the plot are set in motion when industrialist John Sevak wants to set up a tobacco factory on a plot of land that Soordas owns. Soordas refuses,as the land is used as commons by the villagers who live nearby,and throws his might against the takeover. Rangbhoomi 1925 is clearly inspired by its time the non-cooperation movement and the freedom struggle.

One could now question Premchands denunciation of industry and the city,but still cannot fail to be hit by the emotional force of this work and its uncanny relevance.