It never rains but it pours. This travelogue by an indigent Maharashtrian brahmin describing his travels and travails in North India during the turbulent years 1857-60 and encompassing in particular the events in Jhansi, first published in Marathi in 1907, has now been translated into English three times within the last four years. In contrast, a book by Mahasweta Devi on a closely similar theme has been translated into English only once, The Queen of Jhansi, (2000) and a Hindi novel, Jhansi ki Rani (1946) by Vrindavan Lal Varma, which Prachi Deshpande in her ‘Introduction’ to this volume aptly calls ‘perhaps the most powerful and enduring’ representation of its subject, remains yet untranslated. This travelogue, which seems to be the current rage among translators into English, was of course translated into Hindi decades ago by Amritlal Nagar, himself a Hindi novelist of the front rank, under the title Ankhon Dekha Ghadar (Eyewitness to the Mutiny, 1948).
A Subaltern Brahmin Narrative
Harish Trivedi
ADVENTURES OF A BRAHMIN PRIEST: MY TRAVELS IN THE 1857 REBELLION: MAZHA PRAVAS by Vishnubhat Godse Oxford University Press, New Delhi,, 2015, 214 pp., 650
August 2015, volume 39, No 8