The complex unpredictability of the Indian writer’s habitat

Hearing and Overhearing

I cannot remember a time when I was not involved in one form of translation or another. Translation was an inevitable feature of growing up in a family that spoke many languages.

My mother might begin a sentence in Konkani and complete it in English; on any given day, her conversations would include a line from Ghalib in Urdu, a phrase from Basava in Kannada, a piece of worldly wisdom from the treasury of the Sanskrit subhashitas.

We belong to a community that had been Anglicised early in the colonial period; for centuries before this, we had thrived at the cusp between the Hindu, Islamic and Iberian Catholic universes.

English and Konkani were spoken as interchangeable first languages at home. It was not until I was six or seven that I realised that words I had thought to be Konkani, such as "dog, walk, first-rate, toaster", and "marmalade", were, apparently, English.

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Our diasporic history has left us multiple linguistic legacies: one language revered as ancestral but forgotten except for key traces (Kashmiri), another consecrated in prayer and taught in secular, modern life (Sanskrit), and a number that were of practical use in specialised professions or for communicating with neighbours, retainers, or people at large in some of the territories my people had inhabited (Kannada, Tulu, Tamil, Marathi, Urdu, and Persian).

Another layer of complexity was added to the linguistic experience of my childhood by my Delhi, Hyderabad and air force cousins: they spoke, alongside English, a fine Hindi as their natural language of expression. Close to its proper roots in Hindustani, this Hindi was not marred by the pseudo-Sanskrit spawned by the barbarous 20th century "reformers" of the language.

Indeed, as my mother always told the tale, my first recorded words in any language, thanks to the proximity of these cousins, were: "Darwaza kholo!" (Open the door!) And since I grew up, between the ages of two and seven, in a Goa that had only recently been absorbed into the Republic of India, I overheard a great deal of Portuguese. As an "overhearer", I learned early that the translator could act as trespasser, spy, double agent.

Language as Choice

I have always been acutely aware of the bridges that I cross between languages, and between the universes from which they spring. As a child, I felt no contradiction whatever in reading versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and also of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as Norse legends, Enid Blyton, the Akbar and Birbal stories (re-told by the poet Eunice de Souza, as I would discover in retrospect), and the Panchatantra.

I have always welcomed the act of shuttling among languages, cultures, times and places as an enriching experience: it has never threatened, but always expanded, my sense of self.

Accordingly, I have no sympathy with the pernicious doctrine of linguistic states, according to which the Republic of India has ill-advisedly chosen to divide itself. Even if one chooses to write in a single language, the only way to be a productive linguistic subjectivity, to me, is to be inter-lingual.

Significantly, as I learned from the distinguished Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini in the course of a recent conversation, a number of the foremost Kannada writers did, and do, not speak Kannada at home: among them Masti Venkatesh Iyengar, who spoke Tamil at home; Girish Karnad (and Kaikini himself), whose home language is Konkani; and DR Bendre, whose first language was Marathi.

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"Kannada-ness" was in no way an inexorable and structurally determined fact of their being; these writers exercised their agency to write in a particular language and chose to write in Kannada, from among the several languages at their disposal. And the impress of their home languages, Kaikini suggests, has informed their writing in Kannada in particular ways.

The Anglophone Indian writer has usually been singled out for contempt as being somehow alienated, deracinated, or a traitor to the imagined umbilical continuities of Indianness. By contrast, it is argued, Indian writers who work in the regional languages express some timeless identity enshrined in the words they use.

In truth, as Kaikini's observations demonstrate, such essentialist conceptions miss the complex processes by which regional languages have evolved their specific modernities; they miss, also, the acts of agency by which accomplished writers have made these languages their own, rather than functioning as mouthpieces for the chimera of identity. Altogether, they miss the complex unpredictability of the Indian writer's habitat, no matter which language she or he writes in.

Dictionaries

On my father's side of the family, we have spoken, read and written in English since the 1790s; a longer occupancy of the language than most Americans and many Australians could claim.

Strategists, the Hoskotes aligned themselves with the emergent ascendancy of the East India Company at Fort St George, Madras, soon after the defeat and death of their protector, Tipoo Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore. This decision brought them into the domain of Anglophone education and committed them to generations of fruitful complicity in the work of the Empire.

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A little more than a century after these events, my great-grandfather, Rao Saheb Ganpat Rau Hoskote, a member of the British colonial administration, gave his oldest daughter - and not his three sons - a book, and sage counsel to go with it.

"Master the dictionary," he told her, "and you will defeat the British."

My grandaunt, and many women in her family circle and extended kinship structure, received such advice - and took it, exerting themselves in fields ranging from women's education and women's rights to the resurrection of crafts traditions, family planning, and the nationalist struggle.

Among these women were Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya née Dhareshwar, Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau née Handoo, and Lady Radhabai Subbarayan née Kudmul. In each case, these energetic activists found themselves caught up in acts of translation: not only did they have to switch from one language to another as they addressed various audiences and constituencies, but they also had to shuttle between the systems of cultural assumption, the gender asymmetries, and the epistemologies that each of those languages encoded.

Often, in the course of their work, they had to create new dictionaries, lexicons, glossaries - no less real for being colloquial or dispersed across policy documents and manifestos, distributed across their conversations, or embedded in the institutions they created.

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This legacy of my foremothers, too, remains alive to me. As a translator, I am always aware that the surfaces of sentences can conceal the deep currents of social and cultural turbulence. And aware, also, that translation is not simply the production of texts on the dubious basis of equivalence, but rather, the transmission of impulses on the robust basis of affinities sought and crafted.

Laboratory

As a visiting writer on the celebrated International Writing Program, University of Iowa, in 1995, I was fortunate to receive the friendship and collegial warmth of Daniel Weissbort, one of the great and unsung contributors to the global history of translation in the 20th century.

With the poet and editor Ted Hughes, Danny set in motion and sustained the influential Penguin Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) series, and the journal, Modern Poetry in Translation.

The son of Polish Jews who had escaped the Third Reich in the 1930s and settled in London, Danny had grown up speaking English, hearing his parents speak French, and overhearing them speak Polish; he was, from an early age, interested in Russian and the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe.

MPT would introduce the global Anglophone readership - including the poets Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar in India - to such magisterial Eastern European presences as Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, and Vasko Popa.

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By the time I got to Iowa, I had already begun work on my translation of the poems composed by the 14th century Kashmir mystic Lal Ded, and by what I have called the "contributory lineage" that extended this poetic corpus under her signature.

Discussing this work with Danny, and with his colleagues at the translation workshop he convened - a laboratory electric with the exchange of ideas as well as the shaping of texts - was a profoundly invigorating and reassuring experience.

There, among fellow pilgrims on the path of translation, I recognised that I did not translate simply from the goodness of my heart, or only to bring to light cultural riches that would otherwise not be available to fellow readers in my own language, English.

Before it is a cultural or a political project, translation is for me a visceral experience, a pleasure of named and unnamed senses: a quickening of the pulse, a prickling of the skin, a speeded-up heartbeat, an announcement that the world has just changed course in some small yet decisive way.

(This essay was commissioned by the Goethe-Institut as part of its project "Poets Translating Poets" between Germany and Southasia.)