Nita Kumar’s translation of Ajay Navaria’s first novel is a valuable addition to the growing body of research on this well-established Dalit writer, known more for his remarkable short stories. Navaria has been particularly fortunate in his translators, with Laura Brueck’s landmark collection Unclaimed Terrain (2013) catapulting the author to international fame. Following its publication, Navaria was hailed as the ‘New Premchand’. Originally published in Hindi as Udhar ke Log (2008) and although written before the short stories, the novel carries the characteristic imprint of Navaria’s style, and Kumar’s translation does well to capture its meditative, self-reflexive and self-deprecatory tone. The first-person narration flows almost like a stream of consciousness through the entire novel touching upon themes and concerns that relate to the urban Dalit middle-class experience in general and the protagonist’s desperate attempts to hold his life together following the estrangement with his wife in particular. The protagonist-narrator constantly comments, questions and observes his own actions and the workings of his mind, regarding himself often as the other, turning a critical gaze upon himself, displaying a split self.
Unlike the original, the translation divides the novel into chapters with give-away headings, purportedly to provide a more accessible reading experience in English. Moreover, the translation does not engage with the ambiguity of the original title, which is mystifying, to say the least. One wonders who the author refers to as ‘Udhar ke log’, those ‘others’? The novel has predominantly Dalit characters and often the protagonist uses the collective pronoun ‘we’ when referring to Dalits in general. Therefore, the Hindi title gives rise to the speculation whether it is a case of the internalization of the savarna gaze. However, it serves better to follow Lawrence’s dictum of trusting the tale and not the teller, since the theme of internal dissensions among the Dalits is a persistent strain in the novel. The novel highlights a recurrent trope in Navaria’s oeuvre, the othering impulse that remains innate to the caste system, percolating down to the Dalits themselves. The narrator’s close circle of friends is broken along caste lines, with one of them declaring, ‘Yes… we are one but also not one.’
The novel is structured around his relationships with women and the protagonist-narrator, a professor like Navaria himself, constantly probes his own intentions and lays bare his thought processes with regard to them. The novel begins with his encounter with a sex worker, Ayesha, and ends with the birth of his girl child, Maya. The presence of the sex worker becomes the catalyst for the protagonist to deliberate upon his relationships with other women: his earlier affair with an older married woman, his failed relationship with his first wife who eventually commits suicide, and the strained relations with his present wife, which lying about his past precipitates. Interestingly, the protagonist resists the charms of Ayesha throughout the novel, only to exchange a kiss towards the end. The novel falls silent about the night he spends with her as a form of protective ambiguity that is inbuilt into a first-person narrative account. The protagonist, whose real name is never known, journeys through the maze of his life and relationships with a sense of wonder and concludes, ‘Can we look at life…with mere surprise…. Can we actually do nothing more than that?’
Although the protagonist is quick to call out the prejudices of his friends and acquaintances, he is not above his own sexist presumptions, often exposing his masculinist predilections. One would imagine that the translator, especially as a woman, would be faced with the unenviable task of translating male talk that would make her cringe. On the other hand, Nita Kumar in her Foreword expresses feeling envious of this homosociality and ‘male bonding’ which she also concedes may have a dark side. It is significant that she chooses to not translate the cruder remark by the narrator’s friend.
The novel as well as the translation scores most in its meditation on the power dynamics at work between individuals, communities and nations. As Nita Kumar insightfully points out in her Foreword, ‘The novel is a dissertation on hierarchy.’ Moving between the ‘strategic essentializing’ of Dalit identity and universalizing the Dalit predicament, Navaria brings the lens of caste to examine various forms of inequalities, be it between men and women, Dalits and savarnas or rich and poor nations. For Nita Kumar, this is a redefinition of Dalit consciousness, where ‘older hierarchies of caste are replaced by highly politicised sub-caste identities, both grosser and more fine-tuned than earlier divisions. Within these identities new battles have emerged, including alliances and cross alliances, conflicts that seem stark and unresolvable, often using the language of religion and always class divisions.’
Navaria is primarily a writer of the city and as I have said elsewhere, the village rarely figures and exists only as a memory in his short stories. However, in this novel, he draws attention to the changing face of the capital and how it houses many villages within it. In both cultural and socio-economic terms, the narrator observes that the market has changed the very nature of human relationships and redefined our ‘needs’. The rise of consumerism and the taking over of Punjabi folk culture are interpreted by the narrator as the signs of a capitalist society and the weakening of Brahminical rule respectively. It is in these portions that the translation falters the most. At a crucial passage in the novel, the translation changes the geometric image of a huge circle accommodating smaller circles within it that the narrator employs to describe the metropolis in the original, to that of a natural one, of a ‘banyan tree that permitted many trees to flourish under it’. Not only is the change from an urban image to a pastoral one factually incorrect but is also proverbially so. It is generally held that not even a blade of grass can grow under a banyan tree.
Reading smoothly for the better part, the translation lapses also occasionally into literalism and clunky formulations. For instance, the protagonist refers to the institution of marriage as a ‘common minimum program’, given the politics of contestation for power between man and woman but it gets translated as ‘conditional event for these two forces’ at one place (p. 61); or, for that matter, the use of an Americanism like ‘buddy’ to address a friend also strikes the ear as somewhat awkward. Although the translation provides a fair rendering of the wedding songs, the colloquial speech ends up sounding clumsy. ‘Banwarilal will eat meat with force!’ Perhaps it is in the long format of the novel that the consistency of the quality of translation is really tested. The translation appends a helpful glossary on caste terms and their relationships at the end; despite its lazy moments, conveys the sense of the original quite faithfully on the whole.
Deeba Zafir teaches in the Department of English at Lakshmibai College, University of Delhi, Delhi. She has co-translated with Tapan Basu the autobiography of the well-known Hindi Dalit writer, Sheoraj Singh Bechain’s My Childhood on My Shoulders (OUP, 2018). Her most recent publication is Caste and the City: Urban Aspirations and Sensibility in Hindi Dalit Short Fiction (Routledge, 2024).