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KATHA PRIZE STORIES “... a unique and special moment in Indian publishing history ... What has emerged out of this conscious and well-planned exercise is a fascinatingly supple range of short fiction ... Sure to provide fresh impetus to readers for a deeper engagement with the rich plurality of our own regional literatures.” – The Economic Times “... an excellent collection ... the range of craftsmanship and technique is amazing, ranging as they do from surrealism to stream of consciousness and even a bit of magic realism ... makes one realise how much the educated Indian reader is missing by confining himself to the English language.” – The Hindu “... the readers will effortlessly float through these 185 pages without skipping any of them as the material contained in it is lively.” – Sunday Chronic “There is here an elegance of language ... and above all there is an intuition about English, an understanding of the charged effect it can produce by its conventions of the wry understatement.” – The Hindustan Times “... refreshing ... transcends but does not erase linguistic character ... one looks forward to forthcoming kathas from KATHA.” – The Economic Times “A project like KATHA is laudable. Indeed not enough can be said in favour of promoting good translations in India ... “ – Indian Express “ ... wonderfully lifelike characters ... a fine collection of short stories ... ”
– Indian Review of Books
KATHA P R I Z E STORIES The best short fiction published during 1987 - 1990 in ten Indian language, chosen by a panel of distinguished wirters and scholars.
E D I T E D B Y RIMLI BHATTACHARYA GEETA DHARMARAJAN
First published by Katha in 1991 Copyright © Katha, 1991 Copyright © for each individual story in its original language is held by the author. Copyright © for the English translations rests with KATHA.
KATHA A3, Sarvodaya Enclave Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi 110 017 Phone: (91-11) 4141 6600, 4141 6610 Fax: (91-11) 2651 4373 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.katha.org
KATHA is a registered nonprofit organization devoted to enhancing the joy of reading. KATHA VILASAM is its story research and resource centre. Cover design: Taposhi Ghoshal Colours: Arvinder Chawla Logo design: Crowquill Typeset in 9 on 13pt Bookman at Katha Printed at Repro India Limited, Mumbai Katha regularly plants trees to replace the wood used in the making of its books. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-81-85586-00-7 First Reprint 2012, Second Reprint 2016
CONTENTS
The Nominating Editors Acknowledgement Preface Translating Differences
MAYA MRIGA by Purna Chandra Tejasvi translated by K. Raghavendra Rao
17
CROWS, CROWS AND CROWS by Bhupendranrayan Bhattacharyya translated By Ranjita Biswas
29
THE FUNERAL FEAST by Swami translated by Vakati Panduranga Rao
39
THE FULL MOON IN WINTER by Dipip Purushottam Chitre translated by Suha Gole
52
KASHI by Ashok Srinivasan
84
THE ROOM BY THE TUBEWELL by Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay translated by Enakshi Chatterjee
92
PRAKASINI’S CHILDREN by Sara Joseph translated by Ayyappa Paniker
104
DREAM IMAGES by Surendra Prakash translated by M. Asaduddin
112
THE CURSE by Madhurantakam Rajaram translated by R.S.Sudrashanam
121
HANDS by Rekha translated by Ruth Vanita
132
NOMBU by Fakir Muhammed Katpadi translated by K. Raghavendra Rao
138
THE WHEEL OF FIRE by T. Padmanabhan translated by Chandrika Balan
157
NAGADDHUYYA by Arun Mhatre translated by P.A. Kolharkar
164
FEFLOWERING by Sundara Ramaswamy translated by S.Krishnan
173
The Contributors Select list of regionals
THE NOMINATING EDITORS
Assamese Bangla English Hindi Kannada Malayalam Marathi Tamil Telugu Urdu
INDIRA GOSHWAMI ENAKSHI CHATTERJEE VIJAYALAKSHMI QUERESHI RAJENDRA YADAV RAGHAVENDRA RAO AYYAPPA PANIKER VILLAS SARANG S KRISHNAN VAKATI PANDURANGA RAO ANISUR RAHMAN
Publication of this collection has been made possible with the assistance of India Tourism Development Corporation, Ltd.
PREFACE Katha Prize Stories was originally seen as a literary magazine which would bring together through translation excellent stories (kathas), both from our country’s rich oral tradition and from regional publications. The idea evoked interest but I could find no sponsors. It finally took shape as an annual anthology of stories, of which this is the first - a selection of new and noteworthy stories from the various Indian languages. The English translation you hold in your hands; a Tamil version we anticipate. When I approached a few like-minded people, to start Katha, a registered, nonprofit organization devoted to creative communication, the idea was to encourage, foster and applaud creative writing in the various Indian languages, both for children and for adults. Using the existing publication-networks in these languages we wanted to support an active translation programme, without taking recourse to English or Hindi as a link language and without compromising on quality. Our interest in the short story was not fuelled by some kind of misplaced sympathy to try and save a genre which has been an intrinsic part of a storyteller’s repertoire in our country for many years. We knew that in many regional languages people were writing excellent stories. Only, these were not reaching beyond the four comers of their language. Out of this conviction was born Katha Vilasam, a short story research and resource centre and, this series. When ITDC came forward with a generous grant, the Katha Awards were born. We hope that each year the Katha Awards would honour the best writing published in the regional presses, and the translators who have taken on the daunting job of making a story read as well in translation as it did in the original language. Almost as soon as I started work on this project, I came upon my first hurdle. How does one, sitting in Delhi, survey the short story scene in various regions? How does one choose stories from languages which one could not even read? The questions vexed me till I finally hit upon a two-step process.
We would have a Nominating Editor for each language, someone who not only knew his or her language and literature well, but who would actively support such a scheme. They would select three stories each from those that had been published by a quality-conscious editor in the preceding two years. The diverse tastes of editors of diverse magazines and journals (ranging from a popular commercial weekly that sells in the lakhs, to a quiet small magazine with a dedicated band of readers) could only add to the richness of the collection. We did not even try to represent all the Indian languages. This was determined by the writers and scholars who accepted to be our Nominating Editors. Our Nominating Editors very readily took on the taxing job of reading as many stories as they could to finally make their three nominations. They were given a free hand to choose the stories; .:hey, by and large, decided on the translators also. In English our Nominating Editor was requested to also look at unpublished stories. For this our first book, they have nominated some of the best stories written in the last four years, which we hope you will enjoy. By the time the stories started coming in, I was lucky to have Rimli Bhattacharya with me, not only to coedit this collection but as director of Katha Vilasam. And, while working on this collection, we have asked ourselves many questions. Are many languages living on their past glories? Are short story writers being lured into quick money and fame by writing the serialised novel for pulp magazine’s? Are they being overwhelmed by ‘true’ stories appearing in regional newspapers which, through clever use of language, fantasise the real with ‘support’ from ‘relevant’ photography? Have publishers shied away from publishing short fiction because there aren’t enough good stories? The first of the Katha Award nominations brought hope with it. Many of our Editors told us that surveying the scene for this collection made them aware of the extent of excellent short stories in their respective languages. A case for celebration, that.
But the need is still there for quality translations. The picture has not changed much since the time we started Katha. Recently, when I was in Thrissur, the headquarters of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, I was surprised to hear that they know of no one who can go from Malayalam to Telugu (or vice versa)! And these are neighbouring languages. We need not even mention the problem of translating from, say, Manipuri or Assamese to Tamil. We feel that the need for translations is more acute today when the politics of language is putting up many narrowing walls in democratic India. This has been a new experience for us. We have been naive. We have made mistakes. We would have been unable to bring out this book without the very sincere support given by many. This includes Shri R.K. Lakshman of ITDC who trusted us enough to agree to fund this project; our Nominating Editors who took on this labour of love, willingly; Dr. Harish Trivedi who started off as our Nominating Editor for Hindi; Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty who was our Nominating Editor for Oriya but had to leave for the United States of America on a Fulbright Scholarship. We would also like to thank Vijayalakshmi Quereshi, Meenakkshi and Sujit Mukherjee, O.V. Vijayan, Urvashi Butalia, David Davidar, G.P. Deshpande, Arvind Dixit and Venkatachala Hegde for their cooperation in our project; and Swati Mitra who helped with the editing. Not included by name here are others who have willing spent time and energy but didn’t want their names mentioned. Our thanks to them is as heartfelt. July 1991
Geeta Dharmarajan
TRANSLATING DIFFERENCES The linguistic map of India is exciting territory in which many areas refuse to be contained within lines and with many other areas where the lines overlap, intersect and even shift. Linguistic repreesentation alone (or more specifically, linguistic representation based on the States or all the officially recognised languages in India) is not the chief objective of this collection. The idea is to translate the richness of languages, the varying registers and the tones of the speakers and the many beliefs and desires they encode. There ha’s been an attempt in Katha Prize Stories to present the heterogeneous character of contemporary India not only through representation of different languages but by making the process of selection as many-sided as possible. However, there has always been the threat of displacement of this interesting and uneven representation by the ‘homogenising’ force of a single, dominant master language, English. Between the two poles lies the almost invisible criss-cross of translation. It is ironic that the more successsful the crossing over, the less visible the bridges, those precarious webs of translation. Katha Prize Stories is really a project aimed at translating differences. The stories in the anthology are not only from different parts of the country but are often specific to a city (Calcutta in ‘The Room by the Tubewell’), a district (Rayalaseema in ‘The Funeral Feast’), and even a community (the Moplah Muslims in ‘Nombu’). At the risk of some confusion, we have tried to keep the original word wherever possible so that regional variations are not replaced by an ‘Indian’ word. For example, Kumkum would appear in a story whose source language belongs to the Indo-Aryan group, while stories translated from a Dravidian language would have kummkumam or kumkwna. By the same token, no regional language word has been substituted where the author has chosen to use the English –– vermilion, as in ‘Kashi. There is besides the inevitable question of dialect, always more challenging than the translation of standard speech. The staccatto
lines in the opening section of ‘The Funeral Feast’ are as much the story as are the events in the story. We have found that the rhythms of colloquial speech are easier to translate from one regional lannguage to another than to English. The first person narrator of ‘The Full Moon in Winter,’ the loquacious one of ‘Crows, Crows and Crows’ and the sparring young men in ‘Maya Mriga’ all have different stories to telt but in each case the translators faced the same problem of conveying the immediacy and the fluency of spoken Marathi, Assamese and Kannada respectively. We have always been struck by the ease with which writers in the regional languages switch to and fro between the past tense and the present tense. This is characteristic even of those stories which have sections of dialogue interspersed with sections of reported speech or internal monologue as in ‘Hands,’ ‘The Room by the Tubewell’ or ‘Nagaddhuyya.’ We have tried as far as posssible to retain the rhythm of the shifting tenses because they constitute some of the differences that translation aims not to erase but to make the reader aware of. We have thought, parochially perhaps, of the Indian reader or even the subcontinental reader who is familiar or at least half familiar with many of the almost untranslatable codes, beliefs and acts of our daily lives. Therefore there is no glossary. The various words from the original language we have chosen to retain in the translation seem capable of standing on their own. A few words have been glossed and the meaning or relevant information provided in a footnote in the belief that this information would bring alive the context of the story. For example, the meanings of kunde1u, udumu, and erralaka in ‘The Funeral Feast’ have been given in a footnote, because it is important that the old man’s fantasizing about various kinds of meat be made concrete for the reader, but inserting hare, monitor lizard, and wild rat, within the text, might draw undue attention and even defamiliarise the reader from the situation. Primary kinship terms, like those denoting father and mother, have been retained as far as possible in their various original versions, such as Amma, Ma, Appa, Nayana, AccJuln, Abba, and
Babuji, since they are clearly recognisable. So too with terms expressing a secondary set of relationships where the context clarifies the meanning. Thus the little boy in ‘N ombu,’calls his friend’s sister Jameelakka rather than Jameela sister (which sounds contrived) or only Jameela, which would be contrary to the cultural code. Some words, like Mutthassi the Malayalam word for grandmother, in ‘Prakasini’s Children,’ have been explicated the first time the word is used. Another problem area is the region-specific use of an otherwise general word. In ‘The Room by the Tubewell,’ Hanuman Prasad, the vegetable-seller-tumed-benefactor, is referred to as a Hindusstani. Used by a Bengali in Calcutta to refer to a whole section of the migrant labour force, the word suggests both the home State of the migrants and their distinct kind of Hindi. It does not mean ‘one who is from Hind ustan’ or more simply’ an Indian.’ Both class consciousness and regionalism are embedded in this contexttspecific use of the word. We wanted above all, the movement from one language to another, sometimes from one context to another to be smooth but not seamless. The seams should show, even be felt, but they should not jar and leave the reader in limbo land. To this end we have tried wherever possible to keep the rhythm of the original language, the tone and class background of the speaker and in some cases, even the district regionalisms. This is most evident in a story like ‘Nombu’ which is set in the coastal region of Kamataka. Although the characters are Safi Moplah Muslims, they use Kannada terms instead of the Arabic or Urdu words for their prayers and in their daily speech. In ‘Nombu’ the Kannada word meaning fasting has been used and retained from the original title, instead of translating the word as Roza or The Ramzan Fast. The Kannada word (interestingly the same word is used by the Hindus also, as in Varalakshmi Nombu) conveys both the ritual observance of the Ramzan Fast as well as the simple fact of not having eaten, because there is no food. ‘Nagadddhuyya,’ the original Marathi title has been chosen over ‘The Naked’ which does not have the same element of ludicrousness suggested by the Marathi word.
There has been a conscious attempt to avoid using Indian words as ‘local colour’ but to use them frequently and unobtrusively, as they actually are used by most of us. Thus we have deliberately chosen not to italicise Indian words since we believe these belong and should belong to the English language as spoken and used in different parts of India. Words like bairagi, brahmin, chami, have been capitalised only when they denote a character in a story. Thus a bairagi is mentioned by the narrator of ‘The Curse,’ but later he is the Bairagi who becomes a character in the story. Similarly with the brahmin priest in ‘The Funeral Feast’ who becomes the Brahmin or the Chami, the village sorcerer in ‘Prakasini’s Children.’ However, honorifics such as babu, babuji, saab or forms of address as mister are not capitalised The translated story is double faced; even after a story has settled down in its new language, it compels us to turn and return to its land of origin. This is more than a nostalgic ‘looking back’ but may actually work as a historical marker. For example, the imposed and now ingrown otherness of the Partition is quite simply brought out in the pair of demonstrative pronouns of yahan and walum. The invisible adjectives prefacing the pair are often hamare yahan and unke wahan which do not work in their clumsy literal English rendering of our here and their there. But a story such as ‘Dream Images’ plays constantly on the slippage between the two worlds of yahan and wahan and the unsettling movement of the adult who has ostensibly settled down in his yahan. As the first tentative step of what we would like to be a long narrative, it seems premature and even presumptuous to speak of the territory covered. We could speak of areas that we have not been able to go into, of our inabilities and our own areas of dark· ness. The above points are only markers suggesting the direction we wish to take in our translation projects. We see this collection as an invitation for opening up of dialogues with others engaged in similar projects concerned with the issues around translation. July 1991
Rimli Bhattachraya