The first point to note about this work, a fact that the ‘translator’ records in her Note, is that it is no straightforward translation of the original Tamil novel, which was first published in serial form over two years ago. For one thing, the present work is about a third shorter but also ‘has entire sections that one will not find in the original’. Nandini Krishnan is not happy calling it a transcreation either. It is rather a ‘collaborative exercise’ in creation, ‘in defiance of all genre’, though, of course, it bears an organic relationship to the original. Whatever the process, the product is highly readable and eminently successful in capturing the genius of Charu Nivedita as a postmodernist writer of auto-/transgressive/magic realist/dark realist fiction.
Aurangzeb and Other Spirits
T. Sriraman
CONVERSATIONS WITH AURANGZEB: A NOVEL by By Charu Nivedita. Translated from the original Tamil by Nandini Krishnan HarperCollins, 2023, 333 pp., INR 599.00
March 2024, volume 48, No 3