GOOGLE Translate has become among the handiest apps for a good reason. It discards the cliché about the meaning getting lost in translation and helps strangers to connect in a naturally multilingual world.
Many Indians who love Urdu poetry can do so because it was translated into English or reset in the Devanagari script. Same with Persian and Latin classics, not to speak of Russian literary treasures. The way some Indians talk knowledgeably about Helen of Troy often sounds as though she was kidnapped by an island king in the neighbourhood.
I asked Graham Earnshaw, my news agency’s Asia editor in the 1990s, to let me cover the raging Islamist insurgency in Tajikistan, but he tossed me a disarming question. “Do you speak Russian or Tajik?” As I could speak neither of the amazing languages, how was I hoping to report, say, an assault on the women of a minority community in a remote Tajik village?
There’s always another way of seeing the problem, though. Most foreign journalists assigned to South Asia, for example, speak little or no local language. Graham’s question, therefore, was a non-sequitur. Besides, there was a larger point at stake. The editor seemed surprised when he learnt that I used translators anyway, even to cover a story in Delhi’s neighbourhoods — not the stories journalists pick up along the highways, where dhabas and paanwallahs deal with assorted clients via a handy mishmash of connecting phrases and languages.
One could argue that an exceptionally erudite scholar of Hindi would perhaps feel challenged traversing India’s sprawling ‘Hindi heartland’, also called the ‘cow belt’. Try to connect conversations from, say, the areas bordering Pakistan in western Rajasthan to the eastern flank of Maithili-speaking Bihar, both notionally Hindi-speaking states, and come back with a cogent narrative.
Prof Higgins would struggle. It’s difficult to imagine a ‘Hindi heartland’ in which a Brij-speaker from a Mathura village in UP can communicate her story to an Awadhi-speaking village belle in Ayodhya, also in UP. It’s a tricky proposition at the very least.
Women writers in South Asia are legion. They write in myriad languages but are read in many more.
And this is what makes the award of the Booker Prize last week to Banu Mushtaq so important. Her collection of short stories was written in Kannada, a South Indian language with a dazzling cultural pedigree. It was crucial that the 12 stories selected from a corpus stretching over three decades of writing were published as Heart Lamp in English, the translation done by a scholar of Kannada and English.
Deepa Bhasti, too, thus became a worthy co-recipient of the Booker. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree, a Hindi writer from Mainpuri in UP, won the prize for her novel on Partition after Daisy Rockwell translated it into English as Tomb of Sand. Geetanjali has authored three novels and several story collections, and her work has been translated into French, German, Serbian and Korean.
Arundhati Roy joined the surge of award-winning women writers from South Asia and underscored the need for translation when her Booker-winning God of Small Things was published in several Indian languages, including Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Urdu, and Punjabi.
Her other works have also been translated for domestic and foreign readers. Pakistan-born Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride was translated into Urdu as Zaitoon , and made it to the prestigious Rekhta collection of Urdu prose and poetry. Mahashweta Devi, the ardent feminist from the left, won the Magsaysay Award for her work in Bengali and celebrated in different languages. Women writers in South Asia are legion. They write in myriad languages but are read in many more. Rakhshanda Jalil has become a literary bridge between India and Pakistan with her translations of Urdu writings from both countries.
According to early reviews of Mushtaq’s 12 short stories selected from her vast collection, they traverse religion, patriarchy, oppression, gender inequality and violence, and vividly capture the everyday trials and tribulations of Muslim women in Karnataka.
I liked the review in The Hindu. In the story about Mehrun, the mother of three decides to end her life after her husband takes a second wife. But her daughter Salma rushes to her mother with her baby sister and begs her not to make them orphans.
As a lawyer and social activist as well as a writer, Mushtaq has been publishing stories since 1981. “Can stories change things, the way a legal case can?” The Guardian asked her. “Of course, because people will not know what rights they have got, and how silent suffering is not the solution. They can fight back. That insight is given through my stories.” In the story ‘Black Cobras’, a woman is informed that Islam does allow women to be educated and to work, but the message is “twisted” by scholars for their own benefit. “Do not beg,” she is told. “Demand justice.”
She told The Guardian : “Human beings and their basic nature are the same everywhere. That is the intention of my writing. The theme is woman; the theme is marginalised people; the theme is to be a voice to the voiceless community.”
Heart Lamp, according to several excellent reviews, represents powerful accounts of the lives of Muslim women in Karnataka, portraying terrible experiences — domestic violence, deaths of children. In the final story, quoted by a reviewer, a woman is glad she gave birth to a boy instead of another girl. “At least we had not created another helpless prisoner of life like me.”
Do these stories reflect how things still are for women in the region? “Yes,” says Mushtaq. “Even today. It starts from the home itself.”
There’s something instructive about Mushtaq’s work. She is writing in a rare southern Indian state where the patriarchal and socially regressive BJP has made inroads, occasionally pretending to be saviours of Muslim women. The translated stories of Mushtaq affirm that patriarchy is a universal malaise, cutting across religions. And women, she says, have enough wherewithal to defeat it.
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Jawed Naqvi, a veteran Indian journalist, is Dawn’s correspondent in India. c. Dawn
