Vishes Kothari is the translator of The Timeless Tales of Marwar and A Garden of Tales by Vijaydan Detha, one of India’s most prominent Rajasthani writers. Kothari has always viewed the act of translation as activism and has spoken publicly about the lack of Rajasthani language usage in urban spaces. In an interview with Scroll, he stated, “Young people who otherwise come from Rajasthani-speaking homes—seem completely brainwashed into using Hindi, as if Rajasthani isn’t a language worthy of being spoken by educated, urbane young people.” In bringing the orality of Detha’s stories from Rajasthani into English, Kothari has not only introduced a literary giant to an international anglophone audience but has also taken a step toward the preservation of a language that many are choosing to no longer speak.

Rajasthani is the umbrella term used for all the dialects and languages spoken in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan. Politically, Rajasthan has been one of the most prominent states of the so-called “Hindi belt” of North India, despite most of its rural population being unable to speak the Hindi language. Rajasthani is not recognized as an official language in the Indian Constitution, and thus all administrative work is done in Hindi. The census often conflates Rajasthani with Hindi, so there are no real reports on the number of native speakers of Rajasthani. There is also no mother-tongue education available for those hoping to connect with the language.

Younger speakers from the Rajasthan Yuva Samiti have been protesting for the inclusion of Rajasthani under the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which would grant it official status. However, while national recognition still has a ways to go, Vishes Kothari has been working toward preserving and propagating the language through the Rajasthani Bhasha Academy, an online Rajasthani course he developed with Professor Ganesh Devy and Professor Dalpat Rajpurohit.

In this interview, conducted over Zoom and email, Kothari tells us about his efforts to revitalize Rajasthani through his language academy and through literary translation.

Suhasini Patni (SP): What made you enter the field of translation and language revitalization, considering that your academic background is in mathematics and financial consultancy?

Vishes Kothari (VK): Rajasthani is my mother tongue, so it was a rather natural choice.

I was also fortunate to be in an environment where there was already some consciousness about the literary richness of Rajasthani, the fact that the language does not get its due, the importance of learning and speaking it . . . so I absorbed that and wanted to work with the language.   

SP: Timeless Tales of Marwar, a collection of Rajasthani stories by Padma Shri winner Vijaydan Detha, was published in your translation in 2020. The collection has seventeen stories, but Detha has written over eight hundred. How did you pick the stories that made the Timeless Tales of Marwar?

VK: Many of the classic stories identify themselves at once. Some are so popular that they are not hard to choose. You go through the volumes one by one, and you make note of the stories you like. I shared my notes with my editor, and we decided on a long list first, and then a short list. It was the usual back-and-forth. My impulses tend to be very anthropological. I want a story of each type: what is a bedtime story, which are origin myths, which are religious or didactic? Are there stories told by someone from a certain caste, are there archival footnotes available? I always felt that I did this translation more as an act of activism rather than of pure literary impulse.

SP: Timeless Tales of Marwar was released under the Puffin imprint of Penguin, which publishes children’s books. A Garden of Tales, however, was meant for adult readers. Did your process of selection or translation change based on the audience?

VK: I moved the second book to a different publisher for this reason: there were a lot of stories I wanted to work with that I couldn’t with the Puffin imprint. But there is also a realization that what we regard as suitable for children today is perhaps, in many ways, more conservative than it was when these stories were released between 1960 and 1975, especially when you consider that many of them were based on much older oral folktales. The idea of childhood is also very different; because many children were going to be married by the time they turned thirteen, there had to be a way of passing on sex education to them. There are many explicit stories that a children’s imprint would not risk publishing today because their readership is made up of schoolchildren. I pitched my second book to HarperCollins because I wanted to work with themes that needed adult readers. Moreover, Rahul Soni, the editor there, is based in Jodhpur and is himself a translator. My book could not have been in better hands.

SP: Can you talk about how Rajasthani was used in your house? What variety did you grow up speaking?

VK: We are from the Bikaner division; my own village is in the Churu district. We call our language Marwari. That is what we’ve always called it, including in Calcutta, where I grew up. Though sometimes people will say we are from Shekhawati, which is technically incorrect. Some people will also call it Bagdi. Marwari is the language I speak at home with both my immediate and my extended family. Detha’s language was slightly different from what I was used to, but once you’re through the first few pages, it starts to get easier. In the beginning, I struggled slightly. But the Rajasthani-Hindi Sabadkos dictionary was very helpful— it is now available in a digitized and searchable form online.    

SP: Can you tell me about the Rajasthani Bhasha Academy? What inspired you to create it?

VK: There was no way to learn Rajasthani other than as a mother tongue. My collaborators and I had been wanting to create a structured Rajasthani language-learning program that would allow scholars, researchers, and members of the diaspora to learn the language if they wished. So, we started work on this during Covid and were able to put together a great team. It took us a few months before we finally launched to a very encouraging start! And our work continues to this day.

SP: Rajasthani is used as an umbrella term for all the dialects that are spoken in the state of Rajasthan. But whenever I meet someone from the state, they use the name of their dialect rather than “Rajasthani.” And even the Rajasthani Bhasha Academy’s “About” page states that the lessons teach Marwari. Some modules point out lexical differences between the various dialects, but the lessons are rooted in Marwari. I was wondering if you believe this complicates the question of giving the language some kind of official status. What would it mean to make an umbrella term an official language? And if we conflate Rajasthani with Marwari, are we not bound to offend people?

VK: There is no doubt that Rajasthani is a construct. The modern state of Rajasthan itself is a construct. But if you delve deeper, the dialects themselves are as much of a construct as this umbrella term is. Even within dialects, which tend to be named for the princely state they come from, you have hyperlocal variations, you have caste variations. And these names derived from the princely states are more popularly used than “Rajasthani” because the princely states were around for a much longer than the modern state of Rajasthan that now includes them. That is my theory. I don’t know how many people who live in Shekhawati actually say they speak the Shekhawati dialect. People say they speak Marwai, Mewari, Dhundhari, or Harouti because these are names of regions that have become synonymous with dialects. The point I’m making is this: yes, Rajasthani is a construct that has been conceived of for political reasons because the original demarcation of states in India was done on a linguistic basis. Therefore, we avoid using the word Marwari in a pan-Rajasthan sense, because we don’t want to impose any language or version of it. So, a word like Rajasthani began to be used by writers and activists as an umbrella term that encompasses all dialects. That said, there is no denying that Marwari has been the dominant literary register for many years. It has been used for a long time in courts across Rajasthan as a literary register, even outside Marwar. This is not unique. Braj Bhasha, for example, is also used outside of the Braj area and is still called Braj Bhasha. When a language becomes a literary register, it is used outside its place of association and is still referred to as that language only.

There is a historical asymmetry in this situation, and it is not in anyone’s power to rectify that. This is the situation of all languages that have been subject to standardization, which begins from concentrations of power, such as a royal court or a gathering of elites, who have the power to decide what institutions will teach, what the standard grammar, spelling, and orthography will be, and so on. These power variants in Rajasthan are nothing new or unique. They happen across the board, with Marathi in Maharashtra, in Bengal in the nineteenth century. Except that Rajasthani is still grappling with a lot of diversity, whereas Bengali has become standardized. But that has happened over two hundred years of the printing press, newspapers, journals, etc. These processes have evaded Rajasthani thus far.

In short, my answer to whether Rajasthani is or is not a language depends on the context. If I meet a layperson or my answer has to be political, I say yes, Rajasthani is a language and should not be confused as a dialect of Hindi. If I’m talking to a linguist, I’m willing to argue that Rajasthani is a construct—but then what are precisely its constituent languages? Enumeration or demarcation is always going to be a problematic exercise. But then again, what really differentiates a language from a dialect? However, to be clear, this is all with respect to the internal demarcations of dialects and languages in Rajasthan. In no circumstance would I say that Rajasthani is a dialect of Hindi.

SP: What were the goals of your online Rajasthani course? One of the things you touched upon was how standardization of the language might help in its proliferation, including by giving it an official status.

VK: No, I’m not in favor of standardization, actually. That is why I hasten to clarify that we teach the dialects that we speak. Our curriculum tends to be Marwari-centric because of the asymmetries I have already explained earlier—because that’s where most of the available teaching material comes from. We are trying to do the best we can; we know it is not ideal. But we didn’t want to wait for it to be ideal before starting. While I understand that standardization becomes a demand of institutions—universities, schools, publishers, and so on—I also think that a lot of that hold on production and knowledge today has been broken by the advent of social media. There are so many kinds of media that one doesn’t have to standardize. But since Marwari represented to us, the founders of the academy, the easiest path for starting this training program, it was important to tread that path. And if you do tread any one path, then accessing other dialects also becomes very easy, as most dialects are mutually intelligible. I feel that because of hyperdiversity in Rajasthani, we cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater and neglect the language in totality. It is a strength, not a weakness.

SP: While you’re trying to argue for Rajasthani as a separate language rather than a dialect of Hindi, it is impossible to create modules that do not involve Hindi, because most students approach Rajasthani learning through Hindi skills. Therefore, a lot of the modules focus on differentiating Rajasthani from Hindi, rather than just focusing on the language itself.

VK: We have to use a bridge language to teach any language. Hindi is the bridge language we use to teach Rajasthani. We use the model of how Hindi is taught as a foreign language in American universities to teach Rajasthani as a second language to people who know Hindi. It is an assumption that students will know Hindi.

SP: What kind of students have signed up for the courses so far? Are they more likely to be from the diaspora or people from Rajasthan itself?

VK: Mostly, we’ve had a lot of researchers and PhD scholars. We have historians, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists—basically people who need it for academic reasons. When we’re able to be more proactive with our outreach to schools, we also get students from the Rajasthani diaspora.      

SP: Did you develop all the content of the modules yourself? For the longer course, I know you have some tutors—are they ever involved in planning the modules?

VK: Professor Dalpat Rajpurohit of UT Austin is one of our cofounders and is one of the foremost experts in Rajasthani today. He helped us lay out the basic skeleton of the program. Then we had various other team members join in—Neha Maloo, Giriraj Bohra, Lakshita Chahar—who worked to further refine the content of each lecture and also conduct tutorials and contact sessions for the students.    

SP: Did your previous work in translation help in setting up the modules?

VK: My general knowledge of the language increased as a result of translation, because once you read a language for a literary purpose, you interact with it in a very different way. Earlier, I was only used to speaking it, and it took me some time to get used to reading the language. There are a lot of things you don’t read about because you’re not in that context. My knowledge grew because Detha’s work is so expansive and vast. So, yes, translation helps, absolutely.

SP: You’ve started doing in-person classes. Have the modules or teaching style changed because of that? What kind of challenges do you face in this style of teaching, if any?

VK: We organized our first Rajasthani summer school in July 2023. There was a demand from researchers and academics to organize an in-person intensive program in Rajasthani literature and archival documents.

The idea is that we had equipped some people with a basic background for Rajasthani via the online course. Thereafter, my thinking is that the best possible training is immersive, where you’re in the context and are exposed to a sufficient amount of the target language. So, we believed it was important to have people in Rajasthan for a summer school to focus on their areas of interest, whether it is archival records or prose or folk songs. What we haven’t been able to do yet is use Rajasthani purely as the medium of instruction, but we’re definitely using a lot of it in class. We looked at a wide variety of material—Bikaner Bahis, Mewari miniature paintings, khyats from Jodhpur, short stories collected by Jain monks, songs to folk deities. The feedback we received was really positive, and we want to repeat the summer school and have a different focus area for each year. The idea is to take a broad look at continuities from oral tradition to written tradition to archival records and to visual arts while grounding yourself in the language.

SP: Besides the summer schools, do you have any other plans for the academy?

VK: We do have plans to hold online lectures, particularly by younger scholars who can share their work. The goal is to create a community of people who are working on Rajasthani studies. We have even run reading groups in Rajasthani literature, looking at Rajasthani texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We want to be a platform for Rajasthani. If people have suggestions about how use that platform, to introduce courses or lectures, we are very happy to work with them.

SP: The Sahitya Akademi is the largest academy of letters in India, and every year it confers an award to an outstanding literary work in each of the 22 official languages of India, listed under the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. In 1974, the Akademi took an important step in recognizing Rajasthani when it gave it its own category in these annual awards, making it one of just a few nonofficial languages included; the first-ever prize was given to Vijaydan Detha. How have things changed since then, and how is the contemporary Rajasthani literary scene looking to you? Are there authors other than Vijaydan Detha you want to translate or see translated?

VK: I don’t think there is anyone who has achieved the kind of national fame Detha has. I have some limitations in that I’m not really reading as much Rajasthani literature as I ought to, so I’m not fully abreast of what is happening in the literary community.

What I do know is that the situation is very dire. There is a small circuit of writers, a small clique who is just giving each other awards. There is hardly any reader base or content development for Rajasthani. Reading is on the decline everywhere, but there are other mediums literature finds its way into. These have not yet developed in Rajasthani. There are two struggles: how to get freshness into the circuit, and then how to get people to connect to it. I have no easy answers to this.

Vishes Kothari, a financial consultant by profession, completed his master’s in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, prior to which he studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and King’s College, London. He then taught mathematics at Ashoka University before turning to financial consulting. He is a native of Sadulpur in Rajasthan and has a keen interest in the oral and musical traditions of his state. He has been associated with UNESCO-Sahapedia on projects focused on the musical traditions of women in Rajasthan and worked as a language expert with the Jaipur Virasat Foundation.