Date: 05 Aug 2000 14:07:52 EDT
Subject: Re: Indian vernacular/OV Vijayan


Hi all,

Having commented in an earlier post on the  Prasannarajan article's somewhat contradictory impulses to resist literary tourism as well as to translate novels in Indian languages for the "West" , I must say that it has been a great pleasure and boon in the past 10-15 years to be able to find more and more good translations coming out in English, and publishers bringing them out. Besides Penguin India, there is Katha, devoted to the project of translation, Rupa and Co., Disha Books--a series of novels in English translation from Orient Longman, Macmillan India's Modern Indian Novels in Translation series, not to mention the old Jaico Books and Orient Paperbacks, and of course the Sahitya Akademi, Indian's national literary body, that has been engaged in the project of translation ever since Independence and has started to bring out excellent new annotated English translations of 19th-century works. 

For those who would like to get some historical background on modern Indian literatures, I recommend two useful  volumes put out by the Sahitya Akademi, A History of Indian Literature by Sisir Kumar Das. One volume covers the period from 1800-1910, and the other 1911-1956. Also Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha's two-volume Women Writing in India, brought out in the U.S. by The Feminist Press. There are many easily available collections of short stories in English translation, for example, The Inner Courtyard: Stories by Indian Women edited by Lakshmi Holmstrom (Virago, Rupa), Another India edited by Nissim Ezekiel and Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories (eds Alter and Dissanayake), The Pengiun New Writing in India (eds Behl and Nichols). Kali for Women also puts out numerous translations of short stories. For those in the U.S., South Asia Books (Columbia, Missouri) is a great source of books from India. They have a website, they are efficient and helful, and they ship things very promptly.

For those (like me) who can only read modern Malayalam literature in English translation, there is fortunately a lot of it. I believe that the first novel in Malayalam was Indulekha,  published in 1889, with the English translation published only a year later, in 1890. (The novel, of course, is not an Indian genre, and emerged in India in the mid-19th century. Here Meenakshi Mukherjee's Realism and Reality, on the rise of the novel in India, is a very good introduction.)  In the contemporary period, besides Arundhati Roy, the poet Kamala Das is a  Malayalam as well as an English writer and writes her Malayalam short stories under the name Madhavikutty. Some of these are available in English translation, in at least one collection (Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories) and in several anthologies. Besides the novel Thomas mentioned, called The Legends of Khasak in translation, Penguin India has brought out O.V. Vijayan's The Saga of Dharmapuri and After the Hanging and Other Stories ("The Wart" is a very powerful story). Not to engage in meaningless comparisons, but it might interest people to know that O.V. Vijayan's Legends of Khasak was contemporary with Giarcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, and has also been described as magical realism. 

Just a few other important 20th-century fiction writers  in Malayalam (with work available in  English translation) are 

Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai  (Chemeen, Two Measures of Rice, Jaico)
Lalitambika Antarjanam ("Revenge Herself", "Praticaradevata")
P. Sachidanandan (The Death Certificate, Disha Books)
Matampu Kunjukuttan (Outcaste, Macmillan Modern Indian Novels in Translation)
Sara Joseph (stories "Prakasini's Children", "Asoka" , and "Vanadurga"  have been translated
M.T. Vasudevan Nair (Catching an Elephant and Other Stories, Rupa and Co.)

I am not equipped to discuss their merits, but perhaps Thomas and other Malayalam readers could comment. For those who are willing to working a little to find the books and get a feel for their historical/cultural contexts, it is immensely rewarding to read some of the modern Indian literatures, even in translation. But to get  more than a superficial acquaintance with a number of them would be a lifetime project (not to mention that the 20-odd major Indian languages have rich literary traditions, some dating back to the 11th century). That's why Indians were infuriated by Salman Rushdie's claim in 1997 that he had surveyed all the Indian writing since Independence and found that the writing in English was the best--he couldn't possibly have (even though he did have a lot of spare time while he was in hiding, poor fellow). 

Josna



     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---