It has been said that it was AK Ramanujan’s translation of UR Ananthamurthy’s novel, Samskara (1976)1, that led to the Kannada writer being widely read. A good translation catches the strengths and layers of a literary work, and it could lead to a stronger appreciation of the original work, especially when it is translated into English. In the Indian postcolonial context, where the dynamic between Indian writing in English1 and literary work in the various Indian languages has been extensively discussed, it was more common to find many more translations from Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and other regional Indian languages into English than from these languages to each other.2 In 1996, the publishing house Macmillan, backed financially by the M.R.A.R. Educational Trust, launched a programme to translate scores of books from eleven Indian languages into English. More recently, however, there is an effort to capture, through translation, meaning in other Indian languages, not just in English. The Ashoka Centre for Translation, for instance, ‘aims to translate material from many Indian languages into many other Indian languages, including English’ (translation.ashoka.edu.in/about/). The book under review here, Darkness and Other Stories, has been translated under the aegis of the ‘Women Translating Women’ programme of this Centre, in collaboration with the Susham Bedi Memorial Fund and Zubaan publishers.
Saba Mahmood Bashir’s translation has made this collection of eleven short stories available to those of us who read and write primarily in English. These stories, in each of which either the narrator or the protagonist is a woman, allow us to access both working class and middle-class life worlds. What is fascinating is how the translator, a poet herself, has captured the writer’s strategy of using everyday material objects—a shawl, a small pouch of Lahori salt, a money order, a photograph, a small green case—to convey the emotional heft of the stories. It is not that dialogue is unimportant in these stories, but it is these objects that capture the heart of the stories. It is through these material objects that the life world of the protagonists opens up for us.
These stories were written probably in the 1960s and 1970s, by a Muslim woman who worked as a teacher to raise her children while her husband, a political activist and a member of the Communist Party of India, was away from home for many years. The stories reflect her life, and also the lives of working-class women, such as a domestic worker/fruit seller, or the daughter of a sweeper, whom the writer encounters. A positive spirit pervades most of the stories, with the characters facing and overcoming their difficulties with the help of others. Even when there are notes of bitterness and fear, for instance, in the first story about the fear left behind as the legacy of the Partition, or in another story, a courtesan’s anger at the double standards employed by the bourgeois world, the climax of the stories is usually positive with a message of hope. Therefore, it is a bit of a surprise to read the last story in the collection, which is about the harsh reality of the life of a woman who does not know her place—she wants to be educated and tries to educate herself—but the story ends with her husband destroying her books and with her pouring kerosene over herself and burning herself to death. Again, it is through the description of the objects—a mango seed turned into a whistle, flesh turned into a black lump—that we grasp the meaning of the story. I think it is a successful translation: in the last story, when the fire breaks out and neighbours rush to douse it, the narrator’s father, as he is rushing out, calls out to his wife, ‘Arrey, why are you going? What is it to you?’ (p. 113). This captures the author’s use of the literary tool of foretelling—women being put in their place—in an effective manner.
When we think of women translating women in English, many names come to mind: Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi, Mahasweta Devi and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell. When women’s stories are written by women, which are then translated by other women into English, women’s voices get amplified, a necessary intervention in the usual covering up of women’s concerns as not political. Darkness and Other Stories is certainly a valuable addition to this genre. The only quibble I had was about the translated word ‘courtesan’; having read the story, in this one case, I did feel that perhaps the meaning had not carried over from one language to the other.
1Simon & St-Pierre, 2002, p. 240.
2Ibid., p. 237.
Reference:
Sherry Simon & Paul St-Pierre, eds., Changing the Terms–Translating in the Postcolonial Era, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002.
Shefali Jha is Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.