Opinion The success of translations has bridged the gap between writing in Indian regional languages and Indian writing in English

The books cited above are far from being single swallows. Over the last decade or two, novels from Indian languages translated into English have come to occupy a larger space in our literary polysystem than they had before. Indeed, there are lesser-known languages which are now winning acclaim for the very first novels ever translated from them, thereby announcing their presence on the bustling pan-Indian literary stage. The Bhojpuri novel Phoolsunghi by Pandey Kapil, translated by Gautam Choubey under the same title (2020) made waves, and the Maithili novel Kanyadaan by Harimohan Jha, translated by Lalit Kumar as The Bride (2022) has been called “A Suitable Boy in Maithili” (Amitava Kumar), with the user-friendly advantage that it is much shorter.

By translating these “regional” or “vernacular” novels into English, we are not digging deep into our backyard to come up with antique or primitive objects for display before Anglophone readers in India or abroad as arresting exotica. All these novels were written in the twentieth or the twenty-first century in a recognisably Western-realist mode, and they all deal with modern social-historical themes. Phoolsunghi depicts indigo cultivation and the coming of the railways in Bihar. The Bride is about incompatible marriages between a college-educated bridegroom and an illiterate wife. And The Paradise of Food offers an unsettling meditation on food as cooked and eaten over half a century in a Muslim household. In this novel, the hero and his college friends debate Hindu and Muslim notions of food and they cite not only Marx but also Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, an irreverent account of these hallowed figures by Paul Johnson (2007).

The fact is that ever since Bankim (1834-94), the founder of the Indian novel, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73), the founder of modern Indian poetry, a great majority of writers in all Indian languages have read voraciously in English and through English, other European literatures, while preferring to write in their own languages. They included Premchand, Buddhadev Bose, U R Ananthamurthy, Ayyappa Paniker and Arun Kolatkar, among numerous others.

The difference between the “vernacular” writers and Indians writing in English has, therefore, not been so much of sensibility or quality as of linguistic affiliation and often social class. But now one can no longer look down one’s long English nose at literature in the “vernaculars”, for it has emerged as fully an equal of Indian writing in English and enjoys, besides, a substantial demographic dividend. Our most widely-watched TV channels and our most widely-read newspapers have for long been in languages other than English. Now, high-brow award-winning literature seems to have caught up as well.

To return to Geetanjali Shree, she went to a convent school, wrote a PhD on Premchand in English, and could well have written her fiction in English too. In fact, Daisy Rockwell said in her “Translator’s note” in Tomb of Sand that she had retained many Hindi words in her translation just as Geetanjali had retained many English words in her Hindi original. Rockwell went further to claim that “the original novel is artificially Hindi-centric, just as the translation is artificially English-centric”! Nor is Geetanjali the first Hindi writer to incorporate, overtly or covertly, distinctly English collocations or even chunks of English in her works, for many writers including Agyeya and Nirmal Verma, both Jnanpith winners, had already been there and done that.

As it happens, both Agyeya and Verma had important books published on them in 2022 — and they were written in English by Akshaya Mukul and Vineet Gill respectively. The deep bilingualism that has always coexisted between English and Indian languages at a literary level seems now to be breaching linguistic borders. But what does such increasing linguistic convergence augur?

While the “vernaculars” gain higher visibility and status from such transactions, will they yet prove to be the eventual losers? For why should anyone write in a “vernacular” and then wait to be translated when they could write in English in the first place, if not in Rushdie’s or Arundhati Roy’s ludic self-indulgent English, then certainly in R K Narayan’s or Raja Rao’s more flavoured and locally “authentic” English? Will more and more Indian novels in the future be born translated?

Trivedi taught English Literature in Delhi University and Indian Literature at the University of Chicago