Within the Gujarati literary translation ecosystem, we have a handful of multilingual writers and translators who have worked for decades to bring marginalized literature into the mainstream. Sachin C. Ketkar is an English professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Vadodara, Gujarat. He is also a scholar of Gujarati and Marathi literature, particularly poetry. In addition to having multiple poetry collections published in both Marathi and English, he has published many critical works on literature from both of those languages. He also translates from Gujarati into English and from Marathi into English.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Ketkar discusses his literary journeys across languages and cultures while dealing with the challenges of subtractive bilingualism. We also dive deep into the current state of Gujarati literature, particularly in translation. And we explore how industry gatekeeping further marginalizes the already-marginalized Gujarati authors and their translators. Along the way, Dr. Ketkar generously references many contemporary and classic Gujarati and Marathi writers, who deserve to be way more well known and well read.
I particularly appreciated Dr. Ketkar’s point about how multilingual creative writers in India who take on literary translation work are working to overcome the predicament of subtractive bilingualism. In the process, they are expanding the archive of Indian writing in English in radical ways. As this insightful conversation shows, Dr. Ketkar has also been doing exactly that with his many contributions across genres, languages, and cultures.
Jenny Bhatt (JB): Hi, Sachin, welcome to the interview, and thank you so much for having this conversation with me.
Sachin Ketkar (SK): My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
JB: Let me start, just so that we can situate people: we’re going to be having a conversation around your journey as a bilingual translator, and then some of the technical and industry issues that you’ve seen and experienced along the way. So before we get going, could you maybe remind all of us—you translate from Gujarati and Marathi into English, and you also write in Marathi and English. Is that correct? Did I miss anything?
SK: Yeah, yeah. I occasionally translate into Marathi as well, from English.
JB: Okay, great. So I want to get to your early linguistic and literary influences that have made you this bilingual translator. But my first question before we get to that one is really about your origin story. Mark Polizzotti famously wrote in Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto how every translator’s origin story involves some measure of serendipity. So I just wondered, what was that, maybe, for you? What was that defining moment when you said, yep, I’m going to be a translator?
SK: Actually, I see translation as an extension of my creative writing. Primarily, I translate literary text. So it’s related to my creative writing. I cannot really separate them at times. So my origin story would begin when I started writing. I turned to writing poetry and literature in school, and that’s the place where I discovered literature and I felt like expressing myself. Most of the time it was pretty derivative and juvenile, but that was the moment when it all began. I’ve been brought up in Gujarat, and my parents are from Maharashtra, so Marathi is the language that we speak at home. Everywhere else it’s Gujarati, mostly, and Hindi—another language that is, I think, very important to our language ecology. And English, of course, being the medium of instruction, as they say. It is in this pedagogical and this personal history that I began writing poetry. And translation obviously came to me as something that was a natural extension of my creative writing.
In college, I remember I translated several passages from [Sri Aurobindo’s] Savitri. Now that I look back, I laugh at my own audacity. I’m no longer as courageous today as I was. But I remember translating those things. And when I was doing my master’s, I happened to show it to one of my professors, who seemed to like it, surprisingly, Professor Ganesh Devy. He is a noted scholar apart from a major activist. But he took interest in that, and it was his writings that made me turn to explore Marathi as the language of my creative expression. It is this journey from English to Hindi to Marathi—it’s a kind of search for your own self that is connected to the question of translation.
JB: I want to pick up on that because you’ve written about this in a couple of places. You’ve obviously mentioned your literary and linguistic influences with being Maharashtrian, as you said, growing up in Gujarat, going to an English-medium school. And, of course, Hindi then being all around us in Bollywood and as the national language. You’ve written in places about how, given all these diverse influences, translation was a way for you to relocate yourself in that topography, in that ecology, right—the linguistic ecology and the cultural ecology. There’s an essay of yours I read, which was, “Is There an Indian School of Translation Studies”? And you wrote, “translation becomes a strategy to give oneself one’s roots.” And I have some sense of this myself, because for me, language was my way of reconnecting with that sense of home when I was living away from home. But you are living in India—I know you’re in Gujarat. Tell us how exactly translation helps you relocate, or helps you get those roots?
SK: I think it has something to do with the disciplinary location, the place of English in the literary ecology in India. And being in English Studies as a student as well as a teacher and researcher tends to actually, in some way, come with a cost of maybe not investing as much as you would in the languages in which you live. Unlike you, I lived in Gujarati and Marathi, so relocating takes on a very different significance, because English seems to displace us internally as well. And that is what I have been thinking about when I use the term “subtractive bilingualism.” But as a writer as well, writing and the linguistic ecology are inseparable in India. A writer has a search for self—right, creative writing is a search for your own self—that becomes, I think a search for your own language. And by own language, I mean not just the natural languages, but a search for your own voice in some way.
JB: That’s interesting, what you just said, because do you find that you are able to express certain things in one language and are maybe not able to express certain things in one language? So for example, there are things you can’t express necessarily as clearly as you would like in English, and then you have to go to Marathi or Gujarati or vice versa?
SK: Yeah. I think when I turned to Marathi, I did not have any formal education at all in Marathi. All my education has been in English, and all around me it was Gujarati and Hindi. But because Marathi is the language that I have grown up listening to, and without any ulterior or direct agenda, we always use Marathi. It’s a default language in spite of the fact that we have been living outside Maharashtra for decades. I found that I really could unfetter my imagination in Marathi. I could write the same thing in a very different and freer manner in Marathi, so it was a language which in many ways liberated me. And it was a kind of surprise to see that there is a tradition of such bilingual creativity in Marathi, which goes back, I don’t know, a century or so. Most of the modern Marathi writers and Gujarati writers were bilingual, and they had turned to their own languages in some ways. I was not the first one to be doing such things. That also gives you a sense of belonging to a particular literary tradition as well.
JB: It’s interesting you say that, because I remember reading this about Govardhanram Tripathi, which was not unique to him—it was a lot of his contemporaries also. Though he wrote his novel in Gujarati, his scrapbooks, or his journals, he wrote [them] in English, right?
SK: Yes.
JB: It’s interesting, what you’ve just said about feeling freer in our own language or in one language versus another . . .
SK: Even in Marathi you’ll find writers who wrote their books in Marathi, but their prefaces would be in English. It’s a common thing.
JB: Yes. I recently looked up Sasuvahuni Ladhai by Nilkanth, and he’s written this amazing foreword for the novel, and it’s all in English. It’s beautifully written. So I hear you. But it’s interesting what you say about feeling freer in one language versus another. And that brings me to—and you just referred to it—the term that you used, subtractive and additive bilingualism. And so just briefly, maybe, could you explain that to people who may not know the terms, even though they’ve likely experienced them as I have? I hadn’t heard those terms, but then as soon as we talked earlier and you explained it, I was like, oh, yeah, that’s what it means. But if you could explain it to the rest of us.
SK: So the term comes from sociolinguistics, and one of the leading figures in sociolinguistics is Wallace Lambert, who explored these multilingual/bilingual situations in the seventies. He initiated one of the important discussions on bilingualism in social linguistics. And he was exploring Latin American children in America and in Britain, where the immersive context—being immersed in another culture—would very often come with the cost of losing one’s accessibility to your first languages. Or in some situations, being bilingual would help. Your knowledge of Gujarati would help you to understand Marathi better, for example, in my case. In fact, they are very close, and that creates confusion. At the same time they are very different languages. It becomes a very confusing situation. So as somebody who was born in Gujarat and is a Marathi speaker, I’m in an immersive situation where my Marathi gets more and more influenced by Gujarati.
And there are many [Marathi] speakers who have been living in Gujarat for even centuries at times. They speak a very Gujarati-inflected Marathi. There’s a lot of Gujarati lexis, and even some intonation patterns are Gujarati. A subtractive kind of bilingualism is something where one language actually takes away—the acquisition of one language results in some sort of loss of resources in another language, something which Lambert called “subtractive bilingualism,” as against additive bilingualism, where your knowledge of one language helps you to acquire another, or plays a kind of supporting role in the acquisition of another language. And you can think of, say for example, Japanese or a Chinese situation, where largely English as a foreign language does not really result in damage to your first language as it has done in India because of postcolonial history, and [because of] the power, the politics of the English language in India for more than one hundred years.
So subtractive bilingualism in India, in the case of what I have termed Anglo-Bhasha bilingualism, is of a very different kind than say, for example, Marathi and Gujarati bilingualism. Anglo-Bhasha bilingualism has this baggage of colonialism and globalization and the power equation between languages. I feel that it’s a very different kind of cultural situation because of its history. There have been accusations against bilingual writing from certain nationalist and nativist quarters in Marathi largely, and less so in Gujarati. But very aggressively in Marathi, especially in the writings of Bhalchandra Nemade, for example, who would see bilingualism as a disease. I’ve heard him say this. So there is a kind of nativism and nationalism—which is of extreme kind—which have attacked bilingual creativity.
Where again, I evoke Lambert to say that this creativity—say, for example, of Dilip Chitre—would be where you would translate extensively from world literature into Marathi, and extensively from Marathi to English. This kind of bilingual situation is not that of loss, but actually a gain in traditions. It expands the horizons of two cultures: Indian literature in English as well as in Marathi. So it adds to the richness and horizons of two languages and cultures. I’ve argued that this is not a disease, but something that is a very positive cultural phenomenon on the lines of additive bilingualism rather than as a subtractive kind, which is largely experienced because of its political history in India. That’s what I mean when I use it. And I can see it even with my students and myself—the more my students are exposed to English through English world cultures, there is a tendency to get displaced from your languages and cultures. And this displacement is something that I have often tried to make my students aware of, and try to address it in the smaller ways that I can.
JB: I do want to come back to the Anglo-Bhasha writer point that you mentioned, I do want to talk a little bit more about that. You talked about the personal impact just now, you briefly touched on it—the personal impact that subtractive bilingualism had on you as a person, an academic, a writer, and a translator. And you’ve written elsewhere about how one of the ways it manifests is your reluctance—even though you translate from Gujarati and Marathi into English and from English into Marathi heavily—to translate between Gujarati and Marathi. Tell us a little bit about that.
SK: Well, I have not really figured that out myself, but I find myself . . . probably one of the reasons why I translate is to share things. And when I can read Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Arun Kolatkar in the original, I don’t feel a need to take Kolatkar into Gujarati or to take Sheikh into Marathi because I can read them in their originals. There is no personal need for me to translate between these two languages. Which is actually, in a broader sense, not a very good thing to happen, because there is a great deal of requirement for Marathi speakers to read Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s terrific poetry, or Ravji Patel or Manilal Desai. All these great poets, I think, have to go to Marathi. But because I personally don’t have that need as a reader . . .
JB: You’re not compelled to.
SK: There’s nothing to compel me to do that. That’s a very strange situation that I personally find myself in. I prefer to translate, say for example, Ted Hughes into Marathi, for example. I didn’t feel like translating Sheikh into Marathi, which is, I think, a shame because I’m so comfortable with both the languages. There is no need, which says that oh, I must.
JB: It’s interesting you say that because I know, for example, another translator and academic, Hemang Desai. He’s translated Kolatkar’s Sarpa Satra, from Marathi into Gujarati, right?
SK: Yeah.
JB: And he’s not Marathi himself, so he comes from a different . . . Sorry?
SK: He has used English translations of Sarpa Satra.
JB: Oh, I see. He used the English and brought it into Gujarati, I see. Ah, okay. And that happens too, because English and Hindi are the two link languages, or filter languages. Fair enough. Okay.
SK: And the Kala Ghoda poems as well as Sarpa Satra are in English. So he has translated [them] from English to Gujarati.
JB: Got it.
SK: The Marathi poems [that] he has translated into Gujarati are from my translations into English. And some other English ones.
JB: Oh, I did not know that. Okay. Well, that’s good cross-pollination, though.
SK: He’s a good friend, and he’s a very good translator and he’s a very good creative writer himself.
JB: Staying a bit longer with the subtractive bilingualism and additive bilingualism point—you’ve argued that pedagogical institutions in India practice subtractive bilingualism, while, as you’ve just said, the bilingualism of the Anglo-Bhasha writers tends to be additive in nature. Could you expand on those points? Tell us, and maybe give an example or two, of why you see that happening.
SK: Again, this is in the context of accusations and allegations made against Anglo-Bhasha bilinguals, writers, creative writers. When I’m speaking of pedagogical institutions, I’m talking of everybody who studies in English-medium schools and who will often be compelled by the staff to speak only in English. To speak in Hindi would result in a fine, actually. That’s what I’ve heard. I’ve never been fined myself, but I’ve heard that if you speak in Gujarati, you will be charged five rupees or so. That’s an extreme situation, but that is the allegation made even against bilingual writers—that they’re catering to international audiences. You’re betraying your own language and you are derivative. A classic essay by Nemade on Kolatkar says that Kolatkar’s real poetry is Marathi, his English poetry is not as good as his Marathi, and he shouldn’t be doing both. So, those allegations—I’m intervening in that debate by saying that the creative writers like Chitre or Kolatkar or Vilas Sarang, most significantly, or Kiran Nagarkar, all these major modernist Marathi writers who are also bilingual writers are not practicing subtractive bilingualism in a literary context.
Here, I’m talking of the literary context as against the everyday context of subtractive bilingualism. They are trying to overcome this cultural predicament through translations, through negotiations between the two or three languages that they work with. When Chitre translates Tukaram into English, he’s adding to Indian writing in an English archive and expanding the horizons of Indian writing in English. And when he’s translating, say for example, Baudelaire and Hopkins into Marathi, he’s actually making substantial changes and intervening in Marathi poetics and readership. He’s trying to create a new world literary reader in Marathi of a very different kind. He’s adding to both the languages and cultures. That was my line of defense. You can say it’s a kind of apology for Anglo-Bhasha creativity as against the Anglo-Bhasha predicament that we see around us, which is of a subtractive variety. That’s what I meant when I said that.
JB: As we said earlier, you’ve translated from Gujarati and Marathi, and you’ve translated a lot of poetry. You’ve translated contemporary and classic poetry into English from Gujarati and Marathi. There are not a lot of people I know who do both. Some people will focus primarily on the contemporary, some will focus primarily on the classic. And so my question to you is, what are some of the main differences that you see between the contemporary and the classic registers in either language, or both? And I’m assuming your English translations are obviously . . . I’m assuming, I haven’t read them, so I apologize—but they are in the contemporary register, right?
SK: Yeah. See, the so-called classical, right, is again a category which is very difficult to understand in an Indian context because we never had it. But my interest in Narsinh Mehta, for example, is given by modern and contemporary concerns. It’s not a kind of classical versus contemporary, because my desire to access Narsinh Mehta is a modern, contemporary, cultural need that I felt as a person, as somebody who is contemporary. So the reading of Narsinh Mehta became very important for me, because one of the things that we grapple with as creative writers in modern times, modernist times as well, is the question of tradition and modernity. It sounds very cliché when we put it that way, but on a concrete basis, you are looking for where are you placed as a Marathi writer or a Gujarati writer. Where in the entire oeuvre or the archive of both literatures, which is probably tremendous. And I have not come across anything like it anywhere, probably [not] even in world literature—the whole Bhakti tradition of poetry.
So the classical register is a classical heritage, you need to relate to it as a writer as well. As I said, translation is an extension of my preoccupations as a creative writer. So the need to access contemporary times is a contemporary need. I translated Narsinh Mehta not in the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century register of English, obviously. It would sound very awkward to translate Narsinh Mehta in a Chaucerian idiom. But it’s for myself—I translate for myself and my generation. So it becomes a contemporary take on it.
The difference between the modern and the whole heritage of Bhakti is a problem, in the sense that the worldview and the philosophy that Bhakti proposes is such a complex thing. And we who are exposed to all sorts of philosophical theory and ideas—what do we make of it today? How do we read it in contemporary times as poets, as well as contemporary people interested in culture? It remains a problem that I keep on grappling with, where translation becomes one of the modes of this engagement.
But coming back to your specific question, what is the difference in language? I think that with Bhakti, there is even some distance in terms of sensibility. For example, my own sensibility is shaped more by contemporary poetry, the modernist poetry of Eliot, for example. Bhakti has a very different kind of sensibility. The difference remains in the worldviews. Even if there is—and very often there has been—a modernist tendency to interpret Bhakti as a kind of social protest, kind of protesting movement. And this protestantism itself is for me very troubling notion. The idea of emancipation in Bhakti is not of social justice primarily, but more of what is called paramarth, or in the spiritual domain where egos cannot have any place—whether it’s art or gender or what have you, whatever egos that you can think of. They cannot have any place in that scheme of things. Which is not the same as saying that we should have social justice in the secular political domain. So when Bhakti poets protest against Brahmanism in Bhakti, it’s not about the transformation of the secular structures that we expect along the lines of the French Revolution or whatnot. We have to always be careful of reading Bhakti as a kind of protesting movement where we are using Eurocentric categories. I started out on those lines, reading Bhakti as a kind of social protest movement in Narsinh Mehta, but now I’m growing more and more skeptical about the whole idea of Bhakti as being “inherently emancipating,” as modernists tend to say. For example, Chitre would read Tukaram in a particular way as social protest, as social revolution. But now I’m growing increasingly skeptical that we are imposing many categories on it which do not belong to that history.
JB: I’ve always seen Bhakti poetry as more about sublimation of the ego, because it’s all about the poet wanting to become one with the divine. I’ve always seen it as if they are sublimating the self. It’s not protesting against something. But I haven’t read enough of it, so I don’t know.
SK: For example, when Narsinh Mehta would go to the untouchable communities and sing, he would get ostracized for that. And he makes it a point to talk about what he calls sam-drishti in his famous song, “Sam-drishti ne trishna tyaagi” in “Vaishnava Jana To.” So he defines Vaishnava as somebody who has this egalitarian outlook. We tend to confuse it with modern egalitarianism in the political domain, while that is not exactly the domain to which it belongs. That’s my take today on it. I’ve changed my perception of Bhakti over a period of years. But modernist literature is closer to me in terms of sensibility, so I could relate to Sheikh or Ravji Patel or Manilal Desai as my contemporaries. [They’re] far closer to me than Narsinh, who is in a very different domain.
JB: That’s a very important point you make, which is that when we’re talking contemporary versus classic, it’s a whole different culture even. The language may be recognizable as a language we know, and we might speak it in some form or fashion, but culturally it’s different from how we approach our world today.
SK: Not just that—also in Gujarati for example, the fifteenth-century Gujarati of Narsinh Mehta would be very different from the Narsinh Mehta that we find today because it’s a kind of oral tradition whose language has also evolved as the language evolved. So fifteenth-century Narsinh Mehta is inaccessible to us. We have a more contemporary Narsinh Mehta because of orality.
JB: It’s passed down and yeah, I see what you’re saying. So if we had the original fifteenth-century Narsinh Mehta we probably would struggle with that. But it’s because of the orality that it’s already been translated a few times and been passed down to us.
SK: Exactly.
JB: I hear you. You talked about Gujarati literature right there and I want to pick up on that. You’ve written [about it] elsewhere—I loved that one essay I found of yours, which was the history of Indian translation. It wasn’t just Gujarati, but I want to focus obviously on Gujarati because this issue is all about that. And there are some very important points you’ve made about Gujarati literature, which is that when it comes to fiction, you translate mostly the postmodern era writers like Nasir Mansuri and Mona Patrawala. And you’ve written about how most of these writers that you’ve been translating are marginalized in Gujarati literature because A. they belong to minority groups. And B. their writing is radically different. So I’d like to understand from you—tell us a bit more about them and how their work is different from the mainstream Gujarati writers’ work. And given those differences, what are some of the technical challenges while translating their works? We’ll get to the industry challenges in a bit, but how are they different from the mainstream and then what are the technical challenges?
SK: This is a very important question, because very often when editors start editing Indian writing in English, they are not really aware of the historical moments to which these texts belong. These texts that I translated belong to what can be approximately called postmodern, in the sense of coming in the aftermath of modernism in Gujarati. And the modernist movement was largely urban and influenced by existentialism, phenomenology, and with Suresh Joshi being the spearhead of that movement intellectually and creatively. This whole movement was largely based in major cities in Gujarat like Ahmedabad or Vadodara or even Bombay as a Gujarati city is something that I like to think. And this urban existentialist modernism was in some way . . . people were dissatisfied later on with this whole movement. Especially after the seventies, when education spread to larger interior places and the readership changed. And we find that people are dissatisfied with these urban and even obscure poetics of modernism, whose language was primarily the so-called standard Gujarati, because it’s urban Gujarati.
There was a movement to supersede or go beyond the limitations of this movement. Not rejecting it entirely, but in some way going beyond its limited scope. So modernism went to places where it did not go before. This means it went to the interior parts of Gujarat. And you find dialects entering in a big way. And there was also a move toward going back to comprehension, meaning we should understand what is written. For example, Suresh Joshi’s story would not make clear sense, so there was a need for communication to happen. All this resulted in various movements which are labeled in various ways by scholars. Like Ajit Thakor would talk of Parishkruti. And journals like Gadyaparva and Sahacharya, as it exists today, and Vee, a periodical from Vidyanagar. They championed this postmodern movement. So you find a new Gujarati literature, which is modernist, but at the same time it looks toward indigenous linguistic and cultural forms.
And in some ways, it seeks to use these cultural forms. Say, for example, even tribal literature or Dalit literature, or everything that is excluded from the urban, standard-language modernism started entering Gujarati. And most of the fiction that I have translated like Nasir Mansuri, Mona Patrawala, even Mangal Rathod’s poetry or Bhupen Khakkar’s story that I translated belong to this period. So very often you can say it’s a regional turn that has taken place in Gujarat after the sixties and seventies, which is very different from Pannalal Patel’s variety of regionalism. There is a new regionalism that you find in Gujarati from the 1980s onwards.
JB: Is it more colloquial? Is the storytelling different?
SK: Yes. The storytelling is—you have a wide range of models—but very often Nasir Mansuri’s stories would draw upon a craft of fiction that is not really indigenous. But most of the materials and the language that he uses, and the local and cultural settings of his stories, were very, very specific—on the fringe of Gujarati mainstream culture in representational terms. Nasir Mansuri’s stories would talk about the fishermen community in Diu, which has a history of Portuguese colonialism as against British, which we are all obviously familiar with. He talks about the lives of people, and the dialogues would be written in the dialects, while the narration would be colloquial, but still closer to standard language. While translating, the practical difficulty that I would face was how to mark this difference in English. Because my English would not have access to that range of registers that Nasir has access to.
I try to make the dialogues as colloquial as possible, and this is one of the big headaches that all translators I think break their heads against in India—how to bring in dialects and how to mark their differences. But it went beyond that in the sense that, even with the life and what I call the “regional semiotics” that he talks about. For example, if a wife of a fisherman cooks a particular variety of fish, it means that she’s very happy with her husband and wants to make love to him, while if she cooks another variety of fish, it means something else. So for all those things to be brought into translation is, I think, extremely difficult. And I had to work closely with the authors to decode them myself.
JB: That’s a very interesting and important point you made, because I’ve always also said that a language isn’t just a language, right, it carries a whole way of being. And so when we are translating, we are trying to carry across that way of being for that character or that story itself. And what you’re describing there is that Nasir Mansuri has created a character—this fisherwoman’s way of being in the world—and we are trying to bring it across. You are trying to bring that across in the English, which may not allow for that kind of diversity because the English language isn’t built for that. Or at least the way we speak it now.
It reminds me of Raymond Queneau’s book [Exercises in] Style, where he took a single scene—it’s a great book—he took a single scene of a man on a bus and he wrote it in ninety-nine plus different ways. And that was kind of this constraint that he put on himself, that he was going to write the same scene, but he was going to write it in different ways, in different styles. And the lady [Barbara Wright] who translated it from his French into English, she struggled, because she was like, he has written this in so many styles. The story itself is simple, I can tell anyone the story in half a minute. But to translate the styles . . . so then, as his translator, with his permission, she began to make some changes. For example, she said, in one of the samples he had a French guy talking to a German guy [to highlight] the differences between French and German. And she said, well, in English, I didn’t feel like we could do that. Instead, in English, she had the two men talking and she picked out this sort of Indo-Caribbean [patois]. She threw that in just to show the differences in conversation. But obviously we can’t do that here. You are trying to stay very close to this fisherwoman’s world. So how do you get around that?
SK: Dilip Chitre has made a very interesting experiment when he translated this novel called Indhan by Hamid Dalwai into English. It has plenty of dialects. He used Afro-American language to translate dialects. Now, I would never, ever think of doing that. I would prefer standard varieties, because it has a very different cultural history, location, and flavor to it, which would take it in an entirely different direction. So I would prefer to keep it as colloquial and slangy as I could make it in English to mark the difference between the narrator’s language and the dialogues, which are in dialect. So these are the strategies. Plus, Nasir Mansuri’s Gujarati itself requires a glossary. They write short stories with glossaries. You can imagine that even Gujarati readers would find it very difficult to access those spaces and those idioms. He would give a long glossary in Gujarati. You need para-textual supporting translational material in the so-called original language.
JB: You know what that reminds me of? What you just said about Nasir Mansuri? It’s a different time and a different writer, but the poet Narmad’s poetry—he wrote in a highly Sanskritized manner. It wasn’t colloquial, obviously, but he had to provide—because children at school complained that his poetry was complicated and they couldn’t understand it—glossaries in Gujarati. And he wrote the whole [groundbreaking dictionary], Narmakosh.
SK: Right.
JB: It’s like Nasir Mansuri should have a whole lexicon, the Mansuri-kosh.
SK: Yeah, that’s a good suggestion. I will pass it on to him.
JB: I’m joking. And you said with the technical challenges, you were lucky enough to have the writers.
SK: That can be also demanding, in the sense that very often, the translators would take liberties which are inadvertent. There is a mention of a stingray whip in his stories. This means that there would be whips used by people which are made from stingrays’ tails. Now there’s a term for it in Gujarati, which I’m not able to recall, but the translators who translated it without his assistance could not understand what it means. And they did something else entirely different. So this created a lot of conflict between the editors and the authors, where I was caught between them. I was sandwiched between the editor and the author, who says that this is a very important part of my text and you cannot mistranslate it and replace it with a howler.
People don’t know that such things exist, like a stingray tail whip, for example. And other translators also could not understand many of the Gujarati terms like the lamps that are hanging below the bullock carts. He talked about very rural village lives in the sixties, and there are terms that even a Gujarati speaker would find difficult to access today. So the translators, coming from a subtractive bilingual position, would not have access to these resources, which even a Gujarati person would struggle with. So taking the support of the author is the best option, as long as the author is alive and is your friend. But that’s not a luxury that everybody can have.
JB: I agree with you. For example, I’m translating Saurashtra ni Rasdhar right now—[Jhaverchand] Meghani—and there are parts of the Kathiawadi dialect he has in there, which . . . I mean my mother was Kathiawadi, but we don’t talk that way, because it’s a different time. And so I have to go hunting—I have to go ask people, what does this word mean?
SK: And you’ll find that they are no longer in current use, even in Gujarat maybe. That’s what you may come across.
JB: Yeah, they’re not in current use. But the good thing is that there are some good people who have created these little lexicons. At least so far, I’ve been able to muddle my way through some of those harder words. I’m not done yet, so we’ll see.
You touched on, as you were talking about these technical challenges—and that was a great example—but you mentioned publishing and editors. So let’s talk about that. I do want to understand about the industry gatekeeping challenges. We’ve talked about how some publishing folks want translators to conform to what they believe is a “standard English” to appeal to a wider readership.
But most of us translators know—there’s no such thing as a standard English in India or anywhere, for that matter. You go to the UK, you’re going to see all those dialects. That’s where I studied. Obviously, as a translator, I want that stratification of English in a way, because we want a translation to read like it is from another language. It wasn’t written in original English. I think this is a constant source of friction between translators in India and gatekeepers or the publishing industry folks. So tell us, maybe give us couple of examples of how you might have handled it, or how do you get around it? What do you do?
SK: Yeah, so the example that I’m talking about is again, Nasir Mansuri, who rejected some of the awards . . . and Mona Patrawala. And both these writers write about a very specific location in Gujarat. And that location is very marginal to Gujarat. The mainstream representation of Gujarat is still kind of upper caste—Brahmin, Baniya—while the semiotic realities in Gujarat are at odds very often. So meat eating itself becomes an issue for many mainstream readers in Gujarat, and these people are talking about Adivasi life, Parsi life, and the fishermen community.
The politics of marginality within the language is also something that is interesting for me. But how do I handle the question of translation? Very often the editors would edit, copyedit, texts for grammatical mistakes, typos, some stylistic modifications, and all that, some clichés that creep into your language. Up to that [point], I don’t have an issue. But if you want to replace the term for stingray whip, then you are taking liberties with the world of the original, whose difference has to be retained. You have to mark it in some way through a glossary or a footnote to maintain its difference, maybe literally.
I found it very interesting—why do you need such kinds of whips to beat people? Because they heard they’re electrically charged. So that is something that has to be retained. And there would be many places where editors would render things to make it readable, but at the same time introduce howlers, because you are not aware of the regional semiotics. So, how to negotiate that between two worlds? I think for a translator it becomes a big issue. Especially when the authors are pretty firm on their texts. If they don’t want you to translate it any other way. They want these things to be retained in translation. Unlike say, for example, one of the reasons I often feel Latin American literature is so popular is because the authors gave a lot of freedom to translators to do whatever they want, very often.
But there are people who would insist because say, for example, this whip has a symbolic value in the story, so they would insist on retaining it. And that resulted in friction between editors and authors where the translators were caught between fires coming from sides. And Mona Patrawala rejected a very prestigious award. There were certain journals which rejected those translations. And certain journals were upbeat and selected them. I have come to a conclusion that if some editor does not like a text, it doesn’t mean that it’s a bad translation. There are other people who praise it. So I’m clueless about which is a better version of the book. It tends to be subjective, or I’ve not figured it out for myself. But there is a certain version as a translator which I relate to, and I bring it out. Now that does not resonate with some people, some editors, and some like it, so I don’t know.
But this negotiation keeps on happening, and the editors who very often are gatekeepers to this Indian literature in English translation archive are looking at certain international varieties of English. And I was looking at this essay by Vinay Dharwadker who talked about if Indian literature should be translated into international idioms like Borges or Kafka or Márquez, or what have you. But then I said, is there any international version? Because if you look at British literature then it would have so much variation, linguistic variations within it. So whether there is any single British idiom itself is a question.
JB: Correct, there isn’t.
SK: So how can we talk about an international idiom? To say that is very easy, but whether those things actually exist in reality is something that we have to figure out for ourselves. And that friction, I think, is part of this subtractive bilingualism, where very often some editors are very well known, but they are not aware of the historical moments to which those texts belong. Or, at the same time, the regional semiotics within which it works. And so there is this kind of gap. They have their eyes on readers rather than on the cultural histories to which those texts belong.
JB: Right. Well, to some extent, it can be a healthy tension, but I agree with you—it gets to be too much after a while. Because already, as a translator, we’re almost like the literary agents for our authors. We’re championing, we’re curating, we’re bringing their work to the English-reading public. So we’re already doing more work than a normal writer would, in that sense. I feel like I am the literary agent for my authors, whether they’re alive or not. On top of it, then, you have this tussle, this tension that you describe, that adds to it, and that’s a lot of work.
SK: Nasir and Mona rejected earlier translations which won awards and asked me to retranslate the whole thing. And they’ve republished it, so there are publishers who are willing to publish it, but it’s very true, what you said.
JB: Well, and so, to your point, I want to take that up a little bit more. You mentioned how there are what we would call maybe those writers from the minorities, or they are marginalized, and yet they’re writing. But I think just overall, as we look at pan-India and we look at literatures from other Bhashas, from the other languages, Gujarati literature overall—and you’ve mentioned this, Tridip Suhrud has mentioned this—we are an underrepresented language. Gujarati is an underrepresented language, and marginalized in that sense, in the translation pyramid, or the South Asian language pyramid.
Tridip Suhrud would say that—and I’ve heard him say it a few times now—he says Gujarati literati are very good at bringing in the cultural wealth and literary wealth from other languages and literatures. But we’re not so good at sharing our own. And you’ve said how, okay, this is partly because of subtractive bilingualism, and partly it’s because of industry gatekeeping. We’ve discussed both of those. So what do you see as the potential path to get past this marginalization of Gujarati literature? What do you think needs to happen within the Gujarati translation community or the larger literary ecosystem?
SK: Apart from the reasons that you mentioned, which are very valid, I also feel that there is something like a stereotype about Gujaratis and Gujarati writers and literature, which very often even the writers themselves perpetuate. Especially mainstream ones. And so you have to look beyond the stereotype of what is Gujarati? What do you mean by Gujarati? And you have Bhupen Khakkar, you have Nasir Mansuri, you have many writers who come from the regions which are not part of the mainstream representations of Gujarati culture, in Gujarat as well as outside. I think there is the need to look beyond the stereotypes by Gujarati authors and the translators themselves. That is one way, so that the representation of Gujarati literature outside Gujarat is not affected by those stereotypes. Because that image exists in the mind of others outside Gujarat. For example, I’ve heard people say that Gujarati writers’ surnames are all those of brokers and dalals. You have to look beyond this stereotyping that has happened, which many writers themselves seem to perpetuate.
One way of doing this is to introduce various Gujarats that exist outside the mainstream hegemonic, I would say—the representation of Gujarat to the outside world as well. For that, the Gujarati literary culture should first recognize the value of this for itself.
JB: Yeah. So you mean, like, the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad and some of those organizations need to recognize that there are other literatures beyond what is considered mainstream today.
SK: Yeah. And even the English studies community in Gujarat, as well as in Maharashtra. But relative to Marathi, you have many important bilingual writers in Marathi whose English would be better than many of the native speakers of English. You may think of Arun Kolatkar, for example, or Dilip Chitre. But that kind of bilingualism, I think—creative bilingualism—is missing in Gujarati. It may have existed at the time of Govardhanram Tripathi, where he could write in two languages. But somewhere down the line, it has disappeared.
JB: Yes, and I was going to come to that.
SK: There’s a Gandhian kind of nativism that seems to have been rooted—at least until the seventies in Gujarat—that would see English as an outsider’s language. I think the tradition of bilingualism—the creative bilingualism I’m talking about—is missing in Gujarati. It’s not as prominent as it is in Marathi, for example.
JB: Right. You’re absolutely right. The universe of Gujarati-to-English translators is already very small. And I think, within that, I only know of an even smaller subset—there is you, I think there’s Pratishtha Pandya—who have that creative bilingualism, in terms of writing in both Gujarati and English.
SK: Hemang Desai is another person. And of course Rita Kothari and Tridip Suhrud are very excellent translators.
JB: Oh yeah, Rita and Tridip, yes. So again, there’s literally five. I translate from Gujarati to English and I have written some in Gujarati, but I would not even dare let anyone read it, because I don’t feel I’m strong enough yet. But I totally agree with you on two counts. One is that we need more of that creative bilingualism, because I think there’s a cross-pollination that can happen because of it. Like it happened in the time of Dhumketu and Govardhanram Tripathi and all of them. And I think the other thing that it does is—well, in addition to the cross-pollination—it allows the additive nature. It brings in the additive nature of that bilingualism. So I think it’s the cross-pollination of the ideas and the literary traditions, but also it gives you the additive bilingualism.
SK: There are people who have these great bilingual or multilingual competencies. Suresh Joshi was a phenomenal reader of world literature and world philosophy. But he would never, ever think of translating something from Gujarati to English. From English to Gujarati, Tridip was rightly saying, there is a lot of world literature that goes into Gujarati, but the literature that goes out of Gujarat is much less in comparison.
JB: Right. Well yeah, that’s exactly what Tridip Suhrud was saying. We bring in—whether it’s Bangla or English—we bring in a lot of texts into Gujarati, but we don’t take our texts to other languages.
But you’re right, Rita and Tridip—but they have so many other things as well that they’re doing. I wish we could have a whole generation of younger folks because I think you’re right, we don’t see that creative bilingualism as much in Gujarati literature as in some other languages. We see it in Bangla for example. We see it in Tamil, we see it in Marathi, like you said, but not so much in Gujarati.
So talking of that—just now you talked about the history. We talked about the history of translation from Tripathi’s time to now. And Devy, your former professor, he divided the history of translating Indian literature—sometime around 1993 as you’ve written in one of your essays—he divided that translation of Indian literature into English into four phases. So you had the colonial phase, which was from the late-eighteenth century. You had the revivalist phase, which was kind of late-nineteenth century and then going into early twentieth century. And then the nationalist phase, was the early twentieth century. And then the formalist phase he said started around 1912. And then at the time of his writing, he said it was still going on. But I look at from 1993 to now, I think a lot has changed in the translation of Indian literature into English. So do you think we’re still in this formalist phase that he said? Or do you think we’re in some new phase now? It feels different. So what do you think it feels like now?
SK: I would say this is a new phase, and there are several reasons for that. The whole literary cultures of these languages have changed. There was a shift away from formalism that I’ve been talking about in the postmodern Gujarati sense, where formalism is treated as a limiting factor. There is a postformalist phase in Gujarati literature, as well as in Marathi literature, and a turn toward identity politics of Dalit, Adivasi, feminist writing. There is a shift in the literary culture of these languages. And translation, obviously, is affected by the cultural politics of contemporary times. So you see that representation happening now. The other thing that has changed is globalization. After the nineties, there is a greater integration of global markets, so there is a kind of larger traffic of texts because of commercial reasons between English and non-English languages, which is of course asymmetrical. This means there’s a greater flow from English to regional languages than the other way around.
This traffic has increased because of globalization due to commercial reasons. And globalization has also aggravated subtractive bilingualism in many ways. Because of which there is a greater demand for people to read Gujaratis, to read Gujarati literature in English translation. Now this is something that is very interesting that I’ve noticed. And that’s even in Marathi. I’m currently working on the critical history of Marathi literature—a volume that I have finished—where I noticed that in 1912 or so, the historian is writing his history in English of Marathi literature. And he says this is meant for Marathi students in university who cannot read Marathi originals. And that was the situation almost 120 years ago. I feel that there is a greater need for these cultures to explore themselves through translation. There will be many Gujarati speakers who would love to read Gujarati literature in English translation [rather] than actually read Pannalal Patel in Gujarati, because that would be quite a challenge for many students.
JB: Yes. So I think, two points: one is, based on what you just said, I think we can safely say that this fifth phase could be the “globalist phase”—let’s call it globalist. So you go from colonial, revivalist, nationalist, formalist, and now we’re in the globalist. And then to your point about Gujarati people, Gujarati speakers wanting to read in translation, I encountered a lot of that with my translation. Because obviously, I’m sitting here in the western world and Gujarati is the third most-spoken language in the US South Asian diaspora. It’s the third most spoken language after Hindi and Urdu.
SK: More than that I would also speak of Gujaratis living in Gujarat who would like to read something like The Greatest Gujarati Stories Ever Told.
JB: They would rather read that than try to learn the language and read the language. I hope that eventually they will, by reading in translation, they will want to go and read the original.
SK: That’s a hope.
JB: Let’s hope, yes. Which brings me to, you mentioned just now about the critical history of Marathi literature. Is that your main project right now? What are you working on right now?
SK: So I have recently completed it, and it’s in the editorial phase. And I have also edited a volume for the “Writer in Context” series, along with my co-editor Keerti Ramachandra, who is very well known.
JB: I know Keerti.
SK: Yeah. A very well-known translator. We are working on the final stages of this manuscript on Vyankatesh Madgulkar, a very famous Marathi writer who was not formally educated but lived life as a hunter. But one of the reputed names associated with Nava-katha, or modernist short stories, in Marathi. And also probably a precursor to what is called Grameen literature in Marathi. So in that series we are bringing out this volume on Vyankatesh Madgulkar.
And interestingly, both these series are critical history series. Of course, the Marathi volume I just finished. And the “Writer in Context” series is a Marathi volume I, again, have worked on. There is no Gujarati writer in either volume. [That’s] something that I feel that I can do, but then that would be too much for my platter. It would be taking on too many things. We were talking of lack of representation of Gujarati in the current English studies, comparative studies, as well as the translational archive of Indian writing in English. So I think these current projects of mine work with Marathi, but I can feel the absence of Gujarati in both these projects.
JB: Yeah, I think Gujarati literature and translation—it’s such a vast field that still has to be tackled, really. There’s so much. So, talking about Gujarati literature, again, we’ve come back full circle. My last question to everybody that I interview is, what are some of your favorite works of Gujarati literature? Whether they’ve been translated or not, but what would be ones that you would recommend to people to read?
SK: There are too many to name. But I think there is nothing like Bhakti literature in Gujarati. That needs to be read widely. I’m a great admirer of Narsinh Mehta and Akho, for example, or Dasi Jivan. But then you also have very interesting modernist writers like Jayant Khatri, Chunilal Madia. I think of poets like Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and even the literary criticism of Suresh Joshi is something very important. And Ravji Patel, Manilal Desai, all these are great poets. Sitanshu Yashaschandra. I think they have to be extensively represented. But these all are my favorite authors and they have influenced me as a writer as well. Not just as a translator, but my own outlooks on poetry and translation are affected by these seminal writers.
JB: You mentioned criticism, and something I remember looking at one time, I was just looking on Wikipedia at the Sahitya Akademi winners for the Gujarati language. And there was a period in time when a lot of awards were being given by the Sahitya Akademi. This is the National Sahitya Akademi, obviously, not the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad. But they were giving a lot of awards in the [literature in] Gujarati language [category] to literary criticism works. So apparently, at one time, literary criticism in Gujarati literature was a very robust practice.
SK: Suresh Joshi is a kind of giant. I feel that not all languages are fortunate to have a Suresh Joshi.
JB: He’s obviously well known. Because I was translating Dhumketu before this, I read both his memoirs. Within those, he writes about this—because he was very much into literary criticism as well. I don’t believe his publisher or his family collected his literary criticism into book form. So he used to write for the magazines, most of which are out of print now. And so somebody will have to take on that project at some point: go hunting through magazines to collect those works.
SK: One of my students and friends, Dr. Kanti Desai, she has unearthed around eighty little magazines in Gujarati after the sixties.
JB: There was a lot. Yeah, yeah. There was a lot.
SK: It’s a huge database that she has come up with and it contains plenty of translations of world literature. A lot of critical writing, lot of writings on art and culture.
JB: Yeah. Again, when I was researching the Gujarati short story because I was trying to write the introduction for my Dhumketu book, I wanted to show why the short story suddenly blossomed so much around that time. It was because of what you just said, which is a lot of Tolstoy, Maupassant, Chekhov, Gorky, all of these, Kipling even, all of these were being translated from English into Gujarati. Even Divetia was doing it.
And so what happened was because of that, suddenly we had the blossoming of the modern Gujarati short story, and you had—I forget the name of the other guy who wrote the first one—but then you had Dhumketu, and then others came and suddenly the short story [just blossomed]. I translated his own preface or his own introduction to Tankha and put it in along with the introduction to my book because he talks about the craft of the short story. And that was something people didn’t even know. And he was so well read. He read [Thomas] Hardy and he read all the British greats. He read everybody. And I’m guessing he read them all in Gujarati. I think his English was good too, but he read them all in Gujarati.
SK: The English translations [of the European works] were already available, which means the translations were [also] available in Gujarati.
JB: Yes. And they were being published in all those magazines. In his memoirs, he calls the people who used to run these magazines “the unsung heroes” because they were the ones who motivated these writers. He was trying to get his short stories published. That’s how he became a writer, through short stories. And then he moved to the historical works.
SK: As somebody who’s interested in the literary historiography of modern Indian languages, I believe that the best way to access a period is through periodicals. Periodicals will remain a primary tool through which you can access [it], instead of going through the existing histories or even the anthologies or the collections. It’s through periodicals that you can read the period, and the tension in that period.
JB: Yeah, because you get a sense for what was the main cultural preoccupation, because that’s in the periodicals.
SK: Yeah. All kinds of tensions that existed.
JB: That’s a great point. I’m glad to hear that your student has unearthed these eighty-some magazines. I hope they’ll create some formal archive so people can go and refer to them. But that’s great.
Thank you so much, Sachin. This was a terrific conversation and we could probably talk forever, but I really do appreciate it.
SK: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Sachin C. Ketkar is a bilingual poet, translator, and academic. He has written several poetry collection in English and Marathi, and some of his Marathi poems have been translated into Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. His translations of poetry and fiction from Marathi and Gujarati into English have appeared in various journals and anthologies. He has translated and edited an anthology of contemporary Marathi poetry titled Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry (2005). He won the Indian Literature Poetry Translation Prize awarded by the Indian Literature Journal and Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi for his translation of modern Gujarati poetry in 2000.
He has published over seventy research papers, critical articles, and reviews in English and Marathi, and published critical writing on contemporary Marathi poetry, globalization, and translation. His forthcoming books are A Critical History of Marathi Literature and Vyankatesh Madgulkar: A Villageful of Stories and a Forestful of Tales, co-edited with Keerti Ramachandra. He works as professor of English at the Faculty of Arts of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara.
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