Mashani Sahara Dilli is an important book for many reasons, one of which is its sheering honesty. This Odia novel tells us stories that are marginal to the aspirational India we are supposed to inhabit these days. These are narrated from the vantage point of Anurag, a Government of Odisha officer who is now posted in Delhi for work.
Hiren Gohain is easily one of India’s tallest public intellectuals. He was professor of English at Gauhati University until his retirement in 1999. Whether in his core academic corpus—Tradition and Paradise Lost: A Heretical View (1976), a book based on his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge and Asamīyā Jātīya Jīvanat Mahāpuruṣiyā Paramparā (1987), his much-acclaimed work on Śaṅkaradeva among others—or his political interventions, Gohain directs our glance at ideological structures that insidiously dominate our language and cultures.
Publishing in India has grown tremendously in the seventy-five years since Independence. Although accurate figures are hard to come by, it’s estimated that the Indian book market is the 6th largest in the world by value, and growing. Textbook publishing for schools accounts for the largest number of titles that are sold in the country, followed by the higher education segment, with the most visible part of the industry, trade publishing or books for general readers, coming third. English-language books constitute the largest segment of the book trade in India.
The Taj Falaknuma, a 5-star hotel occupying the former palace of the Nizam of Hyderabad, advertises itself as a ‘jewel amongst the clouds’. Every day, groups of hotel guests and tourists are shepherded through the suites, banquet hall, ballroom and grand staircases which were once the property of the richest man in the world, built during an era when the sun shone brightly on the British Empire. The treasures are displayed by guides as relics of a gilded age, made solemn by the same passage through time which has deposited layers of historicity on the opulently ordinary sofas, beds, study desks and shower cabinets.
Over the last two decades, Indian Writing in English translation has emerged as a flourishing field that has seen a steady rise in the translation of fiction and other forms of creative writing in almost all Indian languages. While there is much to cheer about, what is missing is the study of critical discourses and literary traditions in regional languages in translation. Additionally, with translated works from different Indian languages included in universities’ curricula and a favoured area of research in literary studies, the scarcity of critical material in translation is urgently felt.
Several years ago, Nilanjana S Roy had defined the current crop of Indian Writing in English novelists as a ‘Doon School-St. Stephens’ conspiracy’. It was an interesting but true observation since the writers who were popular at that time were all products of these elite institutions and were quite adept at imitating western culture and simultaneously wrote in a style that was quite polished and urban.