“Contrary to common perceptions, Lhasa is not forbidden to outsiders” – M.A.Aldrich
Old Lhasa: A Biography, (a revised edition published in 2025 for the South Asian market of a book originally published in 2023), is a voluminous 615-page book that combines historical research, travel writing, religion, and culture to offer a comprehensive account of Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. The author, M. A. Aldrich, is a lawyer who has lived and worked in Asia since the 1990s and had earlier published books on cities like Peking and Ulaanbaatar. Written on the basis of his multiple trips to Lhasa and its surroundings (the last one as late as September 2024), he is happy to discover that Old Lhasa has stood the test of time and still accurately captures the sight, sounds, and feelings of the city and foreigners can wander about freely without a minder so long as their papers are in order. As this book slowly emerged, it grew into both a portrait of the history and culture of that city as well as a serviceable guidebook for readers who are able to go to Tibet when political and regulatory circumstances permit.
Aldrich paints an intricate portrait of Lhasa, a storied city and its history, by giving us the evolution of how the Tibetan script came to be, with inspiration from ancient India and at the same time livens up the narrative with humorous anecdotes, interesting legends and charming fables that makes this book blend many genres into one. Divided into 49 chapters and enriched with several maps and black and white photographs, the chronological narration rightfully begins with the first chapter titled ‘Prelude to Lhasa’ where we are told that with Lhasa as the geographical focal point of their faith, Tibetans believe the dharma[1] has always been connected to their country. He begins the journey in the seventh century during the final moments of the life of Buddha, mentions specific Buddhist virtues such as compassion, wisdom, and benevolent power, among other essential qualities for the path to awakening. For Tibetan followers of the dharma, the history of Tibet is the history of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, which is simultaneously woven into the story of Lhasa.
In the 1920s, when Tibet enjoyed its greatest freedom from outside interference in the modern era, Lhasa had a population of only around twenty-five thousand. It was divided into two districts: one that is now the Old Town, with its seventh-century Jokhang Temple (or, more simply, the “Jokhang,” meaning the “House of the Lord”) at its centre; and the other being Shol Village, which is at the foot of Marpo Ri (Red Mountain). These administrative districts were divided by a north-south boundary that ran through the Turquoise Bridge, another structure dating to the seventh century. The Old Town was not much larger than two- or three-square kilometers, while Shol was even tinier. The residents of Lhasa at that time took immense pride in the religious heritage of their city. Nearly every luminary in Tibetan history had come to Lhasa because of the importance of the Jokhang as the focal point from which Tibetan civilization evolved and expanded. No other city could rival it.
Lhasa grew organically outward in concentric circles. Around 1160, a monk built the Nangkhor, a pilgrim’s circuit (korlam) directly adjacent to the inner sanctum of the Jokhang, so that devotees could practice the religious ritual of circumambulation. It is from this kernel that the boundaries of Old Lhasa came into existence. By the 14th century, Lhasa was enclosed within the Barkhor, a kilometre-long korlam circling the temple and a monastery among other buildings. By the 1650s, Lhasa’s outer limits had been expanded to the Lingkhor, a ten-kilometre pilgrimage route. And so, the boundaries of the city remained until recently.
Lhasa’s significance also drew heavily upon the nearby presence of government buildings and monastic sects of learning. The Potala Palace, with its superb representation of Tibetan architecture, is a massive and dazzlingly beautiful fortress-like monastery that had been the residence of the Dalai Lama and the seat of the Tibetan government since 1648. Three monasteries outside the city were centres of the so-called Yellow Hat or Gelukpa School of Tibetan Buddhism, preserving a venerable tradition of scholasticism and monastic training that had been imported to Tibet from the universities at Nalanda, Odantapuri and Vikramshila in Northern India. Daily life in early 20th century Lhasa was mostly grounded in religion for both the laity as well as the clergy. The Lhasa calendar year revolved around a sequence of religious festivals that tracked the flow of one month into another in a never-ending cycle of faith and devotion. Though religion permeated society, Lhasa was not an “other-worldly” place. In 1951, when the People’s Liberation Army marched into Lhasa behind portraits of Chairman Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Liu Shaoqi, the days of the city with its self-administered culture were numbered. During the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, the Chinese Communist Party reacted to the civil unrest as if Tibet should be taught a lesson. The Party continues to do so despite brief intermittent periods of slightly relaxed policies. Though Chinese modernity has been imported wholesale into Lhasa, the author opines that Old Lhasa is still there in its people who maintain their centuries-old faith and customs. One just needs to know where and how to look.
In the Prologue, Aldrich had confessed that this is not a “serious book” about Lhasa as the term is understood within the narrow confines of modern academia, since its objective is only to share what he had learned about Lhasa with simpaticos. His audience is the general reader or armchair traveller with a basic understanding of the tenets of Buddhism and the broad outlines of Asian history. He does not go into great depth on religious theory, and he hopes his views might also be of interest to Tibetans who have come of age in the diaspora and are curious about what a non-Tibetan thinks of this fabled city. He attempts to avoid the excessive solemnity and despair that attends much writing about Tibet. It is not that he is ignorant of ongoing atrocities and the appallingly cruel policies of the Party, but he has no doubt Tibet will have a renaissance. He opines Tibetans will overcome the current dark cycle just as they have overcome other bleak phases in their history.
In conclusion, it can be said that even after reading it thoroughly and enjoying it, this book as the author rightly states, “will nudge readers to learn more about Tibet and Tibetan culture.” Also, as Dr. Lobsong Sangay, former head of the Tibetan Government in Exile, rightfully mentions in the ‘Foreword’
, “Though the story of Tibet is an ongoing tale of tragedy, it also is a tale of the human spirit and the resilience of the Tibetan people. …this book is a window for seeking genuine access that will help you make meaningful discoveries of your own, whether you are physically travelling through the streets of Lhasa or traveling through the pages of this book far away from Lhasa.”
After Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, the first novel to receive the International Man Booker Prize in 2022 for a work of fiction written in an Indian language and translated into English, history repeated itself once again when this year in 2025, Banu Mushtaq’s book of selected short stories Heart Lamp, written originally in Kannada and translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, was recipient of the same coveted prize. It proved that translating from Indian bhasha languages to compete worldwide with other canonical literatures has gained maturity to impress the jury who finally evaluate the prize.
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, published originally in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. As a journalist and lawyer, most of the stories are women-centric and in all of them she tirelessly champions women’s rights and protests all forms of caste and religious oppression. As a believer in the highly influential literary movement in Kannada during the 1970s and ‘80s – the Bandaya Sahitya tradition – that started as an act of protest against the hegemony of upper caste and mostly male-led writing that was then being published and celebrated, Banu Mushtaq’s literary career therefore gave importance to dissent, rebellion, protest, resistance to authority, revolution and its adjacent areas at par with the movement that urged women, Dalits and other social and religious minorities to tell stories from their own lived experiences.
The author goes on to highlight several harmful social practices that are still prevalent in the Muslim community and even supported by law, which impede girls including women of all ages, from having freedom to make positive choices, thus hampering them from realizing their full potential. In story after story, the deeply patriarchal structure of Muslim society is depicted in such a manner that it is not only applicable to the Muslims living in villages and town in south India but can be applicable elsewhere too. She shows how child marriage is still in practice and mentions the suffering and trauma women experience because of legally sanctioned polygamy which causes social and financial insecurity and hardship for women and their offspring. The curse of teen talaq[1]and the practice of issuing multiple fatwas[2] which are deliberately aimed at constricting women are urgently in need of being addressed legally.
In the very first story, ‘Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal’, we find Iftikar’s too much effusive declarations of love for his wife Shaista vanish into thin air immediately after her death and he soon marries a young girl leaving all his children to be looked after by his eldest daughter. The ‘Fire Rain’ has mutawalli[3] Usman Saheb heading the community and making hundreds of decisions for others, but when her sister comes begging he refuses to give her the legitimate share of his ancestral house. Whereas the ‘Black Cobras’ has the mutawalli saheb refuse to help a woman whose husband has deserted her for giving birth to three daughters and provide any support for her youngest sick daughter who dies without any treatment. The story ends with a focus on female revolt when his own wife decides to go and have an operation to stop childbirth. In an interesting story ‘A Decision of the Heart’ the author narrates the plight of a man called Yusuf who is unable to balance the love between his wife and his mother and finally decides to arrange a nikah for his mother Mehaboob Bi.
One story that delves deep into Muslim customs that we generally are not aware of, is entitled ‘Red Lungi’. It tells us about a mass circumcision programme at the mosque for the poor where a young boy Arif undergoes the procedure and is cured in due course. His plight is then contrasted with Samad, the son of a rich man who remains weak and unfit despite the elaborate festivities for his circumcision and the gifts.
The titular story ‘Heart Lamp’ centres around Mehrun who is left to fend for herself as her husband falls for another woman. When she goes to her parents’ house for support, her brothers send her back. Leaving the responsibility of her children upon her eldest daughter Salma, she attempts to burn herself to death. The scene where her daughter begs her to stop and so finally, she aborts her suicide attempt, is extremely moving. The depiction of rural Karnataka comes out very clearly in ‘Soft Whispers’. The story narrates in detail the childhood antics of an eight-year-old girl visting her grandparent’s house in Mabenahalli village. Her young playmate, Abid, who would join her to play tricks, turns into the supervisor of a dargah[4]. When he comes to invite her to join the festival, he keeps his head lowered and does not even meet her eye.
Despite mentioning serious social issues pertaining to the average middle and lower-middle class Muslim families, Mushtaq’s stories are laced with a sense of wry humour and pathos. For instance, in ‘High-Heeled Shoes’, Niaz Khan envies his sister-in-law who comes from Saudi Arabia wearing gorgeous high-heeleded shoes and, in the end, manages to buy a pair for his pregnant wife Arifa which does not fit her at all. The difficulty in walking with those shoes on, and the interaction she has with her unborn child in her womb takes this story to a different level altogether. ‘A Taste of Heaven’ has Bi Dadi, who turns into stone after her ja-namaz[5]is soiled, gaining solace by drinking Pepsi and thinking it to be aab-e-kausar, the nectar from heaven, and starts living in a delusory world of her own in the company of her long-lost husband. In ‘The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri’, the young Maulvi Hazrat’s penchant for eating “gobi manchuri[6]” is the comic fulcrum on which the story turns. Again, Shazia’s desperate attempts in ‘The Shroud’ to locally procure a kafan[7] and sprinkle it with the holy zamzam water from Mecca after having callously forgotten to bring one for poor Yaseen Bua from her Hajj pilgrimage, makes her grief and being conscience-stricken rather ludicrous.
In the 2025 International Booker Acceptance Speech Mushtaq said: “This book is my love letter to the idea that no story is ‘local’ – that a tale born under a banyan tree in my village can cast shadows as this stage tonight…. [It] was born from the belief that no story is ever ‘small’ – that in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole.”
Her observation power is indeed very strong. Muslim women have been victims of deprivation and discrimination in various matters owing to a dearth in education and awareness. To bring a change in the family, a change in mentality is very crucial. The last story of this collection, ‘Be A Woman Once, Oh Lord!’ is a typical tale of male chauvinism, where deprived a dowry, a man throws out his sick wife and children to get married again.
A woman must construct her own identity besides being someone’s daughter, somebody’s wife or someone’s mother. Only education and self-dependence can establish a woman as a human being beyond her religious and family identities. But as her translator rightly points out, it would be a disservice to reduce Mushtaq’s work to her religious identity, for stories transcend the confines of a faith and its cultural traditions. So, she should not be seen as writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community, that women everywhere face similar, if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues that she writes about.
Before concluding, a few words need to be written about the translator and the translation too. In the Translator’s Note, titled ‘Against Italics’, Deepa Bhashti reiterates that the “translation of a text is never merely an act of replacing words in one language with equivalent words in another: every language, with its idioms and speech conventions, brings with it a lot of cultural knowledge that often needs translating too.” She mentions that she was very deliberate in her choice to not use italics for the Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words that remain untranslated in English. She believes that italics serve to not only distract visually, but more importantly, they announce words as imported from another language, exoticizing them and keeping them alien to English. She also mentions that there are no footnotes used at all.
In her separate International Booker Prize Acceptance Speech, Bhasthi also tells us how through the work they could bring out what would otherwise be unread, uncelebrated texts to a new and very different sets of readers. She stated how the story of the world was really a history of erasures. It was “characterized by the effacement of women’s triumphs and the furtive rubbing away from collective memory of how women and those on the many margins of this world live and love.” Therefore, the stories in this collection are recommended for reading not by reducing Mushtaq’s work to her religious identity, but by transcending the confines of a faith and its cultural traditions.
[1] It’s an Islamic practice in which a Muslim man could divorce his wife by uttering the word “talaq” (divorce) three times.
Translators are bridge builders across cultures, time and place. We have interviewed five of them from South Asia. While the translators we have interviewed are academics, they have all ventured further than the bounds of academia towards evolving a larger literary persona.
The doyen of translation and the queen of historical fiction, Aruna Chakravarti, and poet, critic and translator, Radha Chakravarty , feel their experience at bridging cultures has impacted their creative writing aswell. Somdatta Mandal, is prolific with a huge barrage of translations ranging from Tagore, to women to travellers, despite being an essayist and reviewer, claims she does not do creative writing and views translations as her passion. Whereas eminent professor and essayist from Bangladesh, Fakrul Alam tells us that translating helped him as a teacher too. Fazal Baloch, translator and columnist from Balochistan, tells us that translation is immersive, creative and an art into itself. We started the conversation with the most basic question – how do they choose the text they want to translate…
How do you choose which texts to translate?
Aruna Chakravarti
Aruna Chakravarti: A translation is an attempt at communication on behalf of a culture, a tradition and a literature. Choosing an author and, more importantly, the most significant areas of his or her work are the first steps towards this communication, because it is only through translation that masterpieces from a small provincial culture become universal ones. Since I come from Bengal, I have always chosen the best of its literature for translation. My first translation was of Rabindranath Tagore’s lyrics. Rabindranath once said that even if all his other work fades to oblivion, his songs would remain. Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, a leading writer of 19th and early 20th century Bengal, considered Srikanta the best of his novels and the most suited to be conveyed to a global readership. I translated Srikanta. Sunil Gangopadhyay is hailed as the most eminent writer of present-day Bengal. My translations of his novels and short stories are extraordinarily well received by non-Bengali readers, to this day.
Radha Chakravarty
Radha Chakravarty: Every occasion is different. Sometimes a text chooses itself because I feel compelled to translate it. Sometimes I select texts to translate, in response to suggestions or requests from editors, readers and friends who read. Several of my books in translation evolved alongside my research interests as a scholar and academic. For instance, VermillionClouds, my anthology of stories by Bengali women, developed from my general interest in feminist literature and my desire to bring texts from our own culture to the English-speaking world. My translations of Mahasweta Devi’s writings, especially the stories on motherhood in the collection titled In the Name of the Mother, happened when I was working on a chapter about Mahasweta for my PhD thesis. Our Santiniketan, my translation of her childhood memoir, emerged from my interest in her writings, as well as my admiration for Rabindranath Tagore. The translations of Chokher Bali1, Farewell Song (Shesher Kabita) and FourChapters reflect my special fascination with Tagore’s woman-centred novels, for this was also the subject of my post-doctoral work. Later, I developed this research into my book Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts. For my edited anthology Shades ofDifference, a compilation of Tagore’s works on the theme of universality in heterogeneity, the selection involved a great deal of thinking and research. And translating Kazi Nazrul Islam’s essays turned out to be an incredible learning experience.
Somdatta Mandal
Somdatta Mandal: I have been translating different kinds of texts over the last couple of decades, and I have no fixed agenda of what I choose to translate. Usually, I am assigned some particular text by the author or a publisher, but sometimes I pick up texts which I like to do on my own. Since I have been working and researching on travel writing for a long time, I have chosen and translated several travel texts from Bengali to English written by women during the colonial times. I have also translated a lot of Rabindranath Tagore’s essays, letters and memoirs of different women related to him. Recently I translated a seminal Bengali travel text of a sadhu’s sojourn in the Himalayas in the late nineteenth century. I have a huge bucket list of texts that I would love to translate provided I find some publisher willing to undertake it. Since copyright permissions have become quite rigid and complicated nowadays, I have learnt from my own experience that it is always advisable to seek permission from the respective authorities before venturing into translating anything. Earlier I was naïve to translate stories which I liked without seeking necessary permission from the copyright holder and those projects ultimately did not see the light of day.
Fakrul Alam
Fakrul Alam: I have no fixed policy on this issue. Sometimes the texts choose me, so to speak. For instance, I began translating poems from Bengali when I first read Jibanananda Das’s “Banalata Sen”. The poem got hold of me and would not let go. I felt at one point an intense desire to translate it and read more of Jibanananda’s poems. Translating the poem elated me and having the end product in my hand in a printed page was joyous. The more poems I read by Jibanananda afterwards, the more I felt like rendering them into English, as if to share my delight and excitement at coming across such wonderful poems with readers who would not have read them in Bengali. That led to my first book of translations, Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems (Dhaka, UPL, 1999). As I ended my work on Jibanananda I thought: why not translate some poems by Rabindranath too? I had climbed one very high mountain satisfactorily and so why not venture forth and climb the topmost peak of Bengali literature? And so, I began translating Rabindranath’s poems as well as his songs. I had grown up with them, but till now had never imagined I could render them into English. Kumkum Bhattacharya, a dear friend who at that time was in charge of Viswa-Bharati’s publishing wing, Granthana Vibhaga, had seen samples of my work and told me to think of an anthology of his translated works to be published in Tagore’s sesquicentenary year for them. This led me to the poems, prose pieces and songs by him that I translated for The Essential Tagore (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard UP, 2011 and Kolkata: Viswa Bharati, 2011), a book that I had co-edited (with Radha Chakravarty). My last book of translations, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore (Dhaka: Journeyman Books, 2023) alsocame out of this same compulsion of translating works in Bengali. This particular work is a book of translations of nearly 300 songs that I love to listen to again and again—songs that made me feel every now and then that I had to translate them, especially when I heard them sung by a favourite Tagore singer. My translations of a few Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poems and some of his songs are also the result of such compulsive feelings.
However, I also translated some works because I was requested to do so by people who knew about my Jibanananda Das and Tagore translations and who felt that I would be a competent translator of works they felt were worth presenting to readers in English versions of Bengali books very dear to them. My three translations of works by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, The Unfinished Memoirs (Dhaka: UPL Books, 2012), The Prison Dairies (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2017), and New China 1952 (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2021) were all outcomes of requests made to me to translate them. Translating Ocean of Sorrow, the epic 1891 novel by Mir Mosharraf Hossain, has been the most challenging translating work I have had to undertake till now (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2016). I would not have dared take on the task of translating such a long and demanding prose work if Shamsuzzaman Khan, the Director of the Bangla Academy of that period, had not kept requesting me to translate this classic of Bengali Literature.
I will end my response to this question by saying that every now and then I translate poems and prose pieces by leading writers who are my contemporaries and who keep requesting me to translate them. Occasionally, I will also translate poems by major poets of our country of the last century—poets like Shamsur Rahman and Al Mahmud—because a poem or two by them had gripped me and made me feel like venturing forth into the realm of translation.
Fazal Baloch
Fazal Baloch: Translating poetry and prose are two very different endeavors. Poetry often makes an immediate impact. Sometimes just a few lines strike me powerfully on the first reading, creating an atmosphere that sets the translation process in motion. In other words, I tend to translate the verses that stir something in me or resonate deeply.
Prose translation, by contrast, works differently. It usually unfolds after a longer process and often requires multiple readings of the text. At times, it even calls for a more deliberate, conscious effort.
Does translating impact your own writing?
Aruna Chakravarti: Yes, it does. While translating the great masters of Bengali literature I have learned much that has impacted my own writing. From Rabindranath I learned that prose need not necessarily be dry and matter of fact. It could be imbued with lyricism without appearing sentimental and over emotional. Saratchandra taught me the importance of brevity and precision. Search all his novels and you will not find one superfluous word. I try to follow his example and shun over-writing. From Sunil Gangopadhyay, I learned the art of dialogue. His direct, no-nonsense style and use of colloquialisms work best in dialogue.
Radha Chakravarty: Yes indeed. As I have just indicated in my answer to your previous question, my translations often take a course parallel to my research, and the two strands of my work sometimes become inseparably interrelated. In my critical works on Indian literature, I remain conscious of bringing these writings to an audience beyond India. Hence an element of cultural translation infuses my analysis of texts by Indian writers. In my own English poetry, when I write about Bengali settings and themes, bilingual overtones often seep in.
Somdatta Mandal: No, not at all. I am not a creative writer per se, so there is no way that translation can influence my own writing.
Fakrul Alam: I will start answering the question by saying that apart from translating and writing nonfiction essays in the creative mode, I have not authored literary works. I am first and foremost an academic. Inevitably, translating Rabindranath’s works have impacted on me academically. By now I have at least one collection of essays on various aspects of Rabindranath’s life and enough essays on him that can lead to another such book. No doubt coming to know Rabindranath so intimately through the kind of close reading that is essential for translation work has made me more sensitive to him as a thinker, educator and visionary, as well as a poet and writer of prose and fictional works. Reading literary creations by him, his letters and lectures that I came across because of my involvement with his work has also lead me to editing; the work I did as co-editor of The Essential Tagore is surely proof of that.
Let me add that my translations have also impacted on my teaching. I am now able to draw on comparisons with Bangladeshi writers and Bengali literature for comparison and contrast in the classroom when I teach texts written in English to my students. Reading up on the authors I have translated has also equipped me to be more aware of Bangladesh’s roots and national identity formation. This has led me to essays on these subjects.
Fazal Baloch: Translation is not separate from the process of creativity. Through it, we enter a new world of meaning and explore the experiences of others through a creative lens. As a writer, I find translation essential for nurturing and enriching the mind. It is also worth noting that translation is not partial or fragmentary but a complete and holistic act. When I translate, I move with its current just as I do when I write. Both processes unfold in their own rhythm without obstructing one another. In fact, it is through translation that I have come to recognize and understand great works of creativity in a deeper way.
What is the most challenging part of translation? Do you need to research when you translate?
Aruna Chakravarti: Yes, since a major part of my translation work was set in 19th century Bengal, I needed to understand and imbibe the ethos and ambience of the times. Being a Probasi Bangali who has lived outside Bengal all her life, this was important. Consequently, a fair amount of research was involved. This has stood me in good stead in my own writing.
Speaking about challenges there are many. The more divergent the two literary traditions the greater the dilemma of the translator. But the test of a good translation is the absence of uncertainty, hesitation and strain. Since translation undertakes to build bridges across cultures it is important that it reads like a creative work. The language must be flowing and spontaneous; one that readers from other languages and cultures don’t feel alienated from. One that they are willing, even eager to read. One they can sail through with effortless ease.
On the other hand, readability or beauty of language cannot be the sole test of a good translation. If the translator becomes obsessed with sounding right in the target language, he/she could run the risk of diluting and distorting the original text which would be a disservice to the author. The reader should hear the author’s voice and be conscious of the source language and culture, down to the finest nuance, if the translation is a truly good one. A good translator is constantly trying to keep a balance between Beauty and Fidelity. No translation is perfect but the finer the balance…the better the translation.
Radha Chakravarty: When translating from Bengali into a culturally distant language like English, the greatest challenge is to bring the spirit of the original alive in the target language, for readers who may not be familiar with the local context. Literal translation does not work.
The need for research can vary, depending on the nature of the text being translated, the purpose of the translation, and the target readership. Some texts travel easily across cultural and linguistic borders, while others need to be interpreted in relation to the time, place and milieu to which they belong. The latter demand more research on the part of the translator, who must act as the cultural mediator or interpreter. When translating Tagore’s writings for my anthology The Land of Cards: Stories, Poems and Playsfor Children, I found that these works speak to all children without requiring too much explanation or contextualization; very often the context becomes clear from the writing itself. But Boyhood Days, my translation of Tagore’s childhood memories in Chhelebela, required greater contextualization, for present day readers to grasp unfamiliar details of life in old-world Kolkata.
Somdatta Mandal: The most challenging part of translation is to maintain the readability of the text which I consider to be of foremost importance for any text to communicate with its readers. However, this readability should not be achieved at the cost of omission or suppression of portions of the original. Instead of rigidly following one particular criterion, usually my focus has been to choose what best communicates the nuances of the Source Language [SL]. Sometimes of course when it is best to do a literal translation of cultural material rather than obfuscate it by transforming it into an alien idiom taken from the target language resulting thus in a significant loss of the culture reflected in the original text.
As for doing research when I translate, the answer depends on what kind of text I am working on. If it is a serious academic piece, then occasionally I must consult the dictionary or the thesaurus for the most suitable word. Sometimes contextual or historical references need special attention and background research but such instances are occasional. What really attracts me towards translation is the inherent joy of creativity – of being free to frame the writer’s thoughts in your own words.
Fakrul Alam: The most challenging part of translation is getting it right, that is to say, conveying the words and feel of the original as accurately as possible. But “getting it right” also means being able to convey the form and tone of the original as well as is possible. In every way the translator must carry on his translating shoulder the burden of accuracy whenever and whatever he or she is into translating. In this respect a translator like me is different from creative people who take on the task of translating ready to take liberties to render the original in distinctive ways that will bear their signatures. They do not feel constrained like translators of my kind who never dare to move away more than a little distance from the original in order to convey the tone and the meaning as imaginatively and creatively as is possible for them.
I have a simple method when it comes to translating. My first draft is the result of no aid other than printed and/or online dictionaries. If there are allusions I come across when readying the first draft, I Google. Lately, AI has been very helpful in this regard—it even gives me the English equivalence for quite a few Bengali words when, for instance, I type the title in English of a Bengali song-lyric by Rabindranath. Then I compare my translation with that of other translations available online to see if my version is deviating to much from the ones I see.
Occasionally, I will need to do research on the work I am translating. In translating Mir Mosharraf Hossein’s epic novel, for example, I kept searching on the net to know more about the characters and situations of history he had rendered into his narrative than I knew from his writing. I will also do a lot of research if and when I feel a poem or prose work needs to be contextualized and footnotes or end notes needed by readers to understand what is being depicted fully. Thus, for Jibanananda Das’s “Banalata Sen” alone I had to Google a number of times to understand fully the imaginative geography of the piece and get a feel of the real-life equivalents of the places and characters mentioned. In particular, for the first stanza of the poem I had to look for glossaries I intended to provide on words like Vimbisar, Vidarbha, Sravasti and Natore for overseas readers.
Fazal Baloch: Translation is not simply the process of transferring of text from one language to another; it is more like a conversation between cultures, a process through which they come closer and begin to understand one another.
For me, the most challenging part of translation is working with idiomatic and metaphorical expressions. Every language has its own unique idioms and linguistic frameworks, and these are often difficult to carry over into another language. To meet this challenge, I often need to conduct research and explore the etymological roots of words.
What is more important in a translation? Capturing the essence of the work or accuracy?
Aruna Chakravarti: Capturing the essence of the work is certainly more important than accuracy. Translators shouldn’t translate words. They should convey the spirit, the intent of the work. There are some authors so obsessed with their own use of language… they want translators to find the exact equivalent for each word they have written. This is a bad idea. Firstly, it is simply not possible to find exact equivalents. At least, not in languages as diverse as Bengali and English. Secondly, the job of the translator is not to satisfy the author’s ego. It is to transfer a literary gem from a small readership to a larger, more inclusive one. If one is unable to do so, the author revered in his own country will fail to speak meaningfully across the language barrier and the onus of the failure will fall on the translator.
Radha Chakravarty: A literary text is a living reality, not a corpus of printed words on the page. It is this living spirit that needs to animate the translated text, rather than precise verbal equivalence. The popular emphasis on fidelity in translation is misplaced. For literary translation cannot be a mechanical exercise. It is, in its own right, a creative process, which depends, not on rigid verbal ‘accuracy’, but on the translator’s ability to recreate, in another language, the very soul of the original. Perhaps ‘transcreation’ is a good word to describe this.
Somdatta Mandal: Regarding translation, it must be kept in mind that though something is always lost in translation, one must always attempt to strike the right balance between oversimplification and over-explanation. Translation is also creative and the challenges it poses are significant. The intricate navigation between the source language and the translated language shows that there are two major meanings of translation in South Asia – bhashantar, altering the language, and anuvad, retelling the story. Without going into major theoretical analyses that crowd translation studies per se, I feel one should have an equal grasp over the SL and the TL [Translated Language] to make a translated piece readable. I translate between two languages – Bengali and English. Sometimes of course, cultural fidelity must be prioritised over linguistic fidelity.
Translating has caught up in a big way over the past five or six years. Now big publishing houses are venturing into publishing from regional bhasha [Language] literatures into English and so the possibilities are endless. Now every other day we come across new titles which are translations of regional novels or short stories. Translating should have as its prime motive current readability and not always rigidly adhering to being very particular about remaining close to each individual line of the source text. The target readership should also be kept in mind and so the choice of words used, and glossary should be eliminated or kept to a minimum. The meaning of a foreign word should as far as possible be embedded within the text itself. All these issues would make translating an enjoyable experience. Way back in 1995, Lawrence Venuti popularised the term ‘foreignized’ so that readers can get access to the source culture as well. He used the term to explain the kind of translation that ‘signifies the difference of the foreign text by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language.’ Thus, the idea of translation is not to just communicate the plot but also to make readers familiar with the traditions, rituals, and world views of the other.
Fakrul Alam: To me the most important goal is to come as close to the original in every possible way. This means aiming for accuracy, but surely it also means coming as near as possible to the essence of the original. In other words, as far as I am concerned, accuracy will lead to essence. But as I indicate above, most creative writers doing translation will go for the essence and forego accuracy. But knowing something will be lost in translation I will try to minimize the loss by sticking close to the original in every possible way—word meaning, the rhythm of speech, sound elements and imagery. Of course, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp but what else is going to bring the translator close to cloud nine?
Fazal Baloch: Both essence and accuracy matter, but in poetry translation, the limited space to maneuver often makes essence the priority. As I mentioned earlier, the goal of translation is not only to carry over the meaning of the words but also the rhythm, tone, emotion, and cultural context that bring the original to life.
In practice, this means the translator has to balance several tasks at once: preserving cadence and rhythm, maintaining poetic flow, and ensuring semantic clarity. Yet above all, the translator must not lose the spirit of the original when choosing between essence and accuracy.
Prose, on the other hand, offers more freedom. Because it allows greater room to preserve meaning, accuracy tends to matter more, though essence still plays a role.
In short, poetry often gives more weight to essence, while prose allows essence and accuracy to work together more harmoniously.
Best friend from Childhood, literally Sand from the Eye ↩︎
Bios of Featured Translators:
Aruna Chakravarti has been the principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator. Her novels, Jorasanko, Daughters of Jorasanko, The Inheritors, Suralakshmi Villa and The Mendicant Prince have sold widely and received rave reviews. She has two collections of short stories and many translations, the latest being Rising from the Dust. She has also received awards such as the Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar for her translations.
Radha Chakravarty is a poet, critic and translator based in Delhi, India. She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Kazi Nazrul Islam, anthologies of South Asian writing, and several critical monographs. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and Visva-Bharati), named Book of the Year 2011 by Martha Nussbaum. She was Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi.
Somdatta Mandalis the Former Professor of English and Chairperson at the Department of English & Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Somdatta has a keen interest in translation and travel writing.
Fazal Baloch is a writer and translator. So far, he has published seven English anthologies and one Urdu collection of his translations. His. works include “God and the Blind Man: Selected short stories by Munir Ahmed Badini (Balochistan Academy of Science and Research, 2020), The Broken Verses: Aphorism and Epigrams by Sayad Hashumi (Balochi Academy Quetta 2021), Rising Stars: English Translations of Selected Balochi Literature by the Writers under the Age of Fifty (Pakistan Academy of Letters Islamabad 2022), Muntakhib Balochi Kahaniyan (Pakistan Academy of Letters Islamabad 2022), Adam’s Remorse and Other Poems by Akbar Barakzai (Balochi Academy Quetta 2023), “Why Does the Moon Look So Beautiful?: Selected short stories by Naguman” (Balochistan Academy Turbat, revised edition 2024) and “Every Verse for You”: Selected Poetry by Mubarak Qazi (Balochistan Academy Turbat, revised edition 2025). His translations have also been included in different anthologies such as ‘Silence between the Note’ (Dhauli Books India, 2019), Unheard Voices: Twenty-One Short Stories in Balochi with English translations (Uppsala University Sweden, 2022) and ‘Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World (Om Books International, 2022). He also contributes literary columns to various newspapers and magazines. He lives in Turbat Balochistan where he serves as an Assistant Professor at Atta Shad Degree College Turbat.
(The interviews were conducted via email by Mitali Chakravarty)
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A review of Jaladhar Sen’s The Travels of a Sadhu in the Himalayas, translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal, published by Speaking Tiger Books, and a conversation with the translator.
Jaladhar Sen (1860–1939) travelled to the Himalayas on foot with two sadhus[1] in quest of something intangible. His memoir makes us wonder if it was resilience, for after all he lost his daughter, wife and mother — all within a few months. He moved to Dehradun from Bengal for a change of scene after his tragic losses before journeying into the hills.
Written in Bengali and first published as a serial in the Tagore family journal, Bharati, in 1893, the book was brought out in 1900 as Himalay. It has been brought to Anglophone readers by Somdatta Mandal, an eminent translator who has extensively translated much of Tagore’s essays and journals. She is a critic and scholar, a former professor of Santiniketan, an excellent translator to bring Jaladhar Sen’s diary to light. Mandal has given a lucid and informative introduction to Sen, his book and her translation — very readable and without the use of scholastic language or words which would confuse readers. Her commentary adds value to the text by contextualising the people, the times and the circumstances.
Her translation is evocative of the journey, creating vivid visual impact with the play of words. Sen is a Bengali who has picked up Hindi during his brief stay in Dehradun. That he uses multiple vernaculars to move around with two more Bengali migrants who have turned to a religious life and meets locals and pilgrims from a variety of places is well-expressed with a smattering of expressions from various languages and dialects. Mandal has integrated the meanings of these words into the text, making it easy for readers unfamiliar with these phrases to read and enjoy the narrative without breaking the continuity.
Sen is secular and educated — not ritualistic but pragmatic. You can see his attitudes illustrated in an incident at the start of the book: “We quickened our pace, but when we caught up to the two sanyasis, I felt a mix of amusement and irritation. One of them turned out to be my former servant, whom I had dismissed twenty or twenty-five days earlier for theft. His transformation was remarkable—dressed in the elaborate robes of a sanyasi, with tangled hair and constant chants of ‘Har Har Bom Bom’, he was barely recognisable as the thief he once was. It was sheer bad luck on his part that our paths crossed that day.”
At the end of the journey too, Sen concludes from his various amusing and a few alarming experiences: “Many imposters masquerading as holy sanyasis brought disgrace to the very essence of renunciation. Most of these so-called sanyasis were addicted to ganja[2], begged for sustenance, and carried the weight of their sins from one pilgrimage site to another.”
Yet, there is compassion in his heart as the trio, of which Sen was a part, help a sick young youth and others in need. He makes observations which touch ones heart as he journeys on the difficult hilly terrain, often victimised by merciless thunderstorms, heavy downpours and slippery ice. He writes very simply on devotion of another: “I felt happy observing how deep faith and belief illuminated his face.” And also observes with regret: “We have lost that simple faith, and with it, we have also lost peace of mind.” He uses tongue-in-cheek humour to make observations on beliefs that seem illogical. “In such matters, credit must be given to the authors of the Puranas. For instance, Hanuman had to be portrayed as colossal, so the sun was described as being subservient to him. However, with the advancement of science, the estimated size of the sun grew larger, and instead of diminishing Hanuman’s glory, his stature had to be exaggerated even further. Similarly, Kumbhakarna’s nostrils had to be depicted as enormous, so that with each breath, twenty to twenty-five demon monkeys could enter his stomach and exit again.”
Mandal has translated beautiful descriptions of the Himalayas from his narrative with lucid simplicity and elegance. When Sen chances to see the first snow peaks, the wonder of it, is captured with skill: “We were amazed to see a huge mountain of snow, its four large peaks encircling us. The sun was already quite high in the sky, and its bright rays fell upon those mountain peaks, radiating hues that cannot simply be described in words. Even the best painter in the world could not replicate the scene with his brush.” And: “Yet the scenery that unfolded before my eyes was simply magical. Standing in front of this pristine beauty, man’s power and pride were humbled. He could recognise his own triviality and weakness very clearly and, to a certain extent, grasp the greatness of the creator within his heart.”
And of course, there is the typical Bengali witty, sardonic banter creeping in to the narrative: “On certain days, when I felt inclined to indulge in minor luxuries, I would purchase a few pedas. However, such bravado was rarely worth the effort, as one might have needed the assistance of archaeological experts to determine the sweets’ actual date of origin—no one could tell how many generations of worms had made their home inside them!”
The translation has retained the simplicity of the narrative which Sen tells us was essentially his style. He had no intention of publishing what he wrote. He had started out in company of a sadhu with a staff, a blanket and a stock of Baul Kangal Harinath’s songs. He writes at the end: “I didn’t intend to write a diary. I had a songbook with me, and when that book was being bound, I had added a few blank pages with the idea of writing down new songs if I came across them.” He scribbled his notes in those blank pages.
The journey makes a wonderful read with its humorous descriptions of errant sadhus, frightening storms, descriptions of geographies and travel arrangements more than a hundred years ago, where the pilgrims live in shop houses and eat meagre meals, the perseverance, the wonder, the love and friendship one meets along the way. Though there is greed, theft and embarrassment too! Some of his narrative brings to my mind Nazes Afroz’s translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’sIn a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan.
Mandal tells us: “A prolific writer, Sen authored about forty-two books, including novels, travelogues, works with social messages, children’s literature, and biographies.” In real life, she describes Sen as “a writer, poet, editor, philanthropist, traveller, social worker, educationist and littérateur.” That’s a long list to wear. There’s more from Mandal about what the book offers and why she translated this unique travelogue in this exclusive interview.
Traveller-translator Somdatta Mandal
How did you chance upon this book and why did you decide to translate it? How long did the whole process take?
I have been writing and researching on Indian Travel Writing for almost over two decades now and so was familiar with the sub-genre of travel writing about the Himalayas. In Bangla, there exists a great number of books on travel to holy places as part of a pilgrimage from the mid-19th century onwards. But this book was unique because it was written by a secular person who did not go to the Himalayas as part of a pilgrimage but nevertheless got influenced by the other pilgrims with whom he went along. It was in the summer of 1890 when he actually travelled, and later in 1893, his perilous experience was published serially in the Bengali periodical Bharati which was then edited by Rabindranath Tagore’s niece, Sarala Devi Choudhurani.
During that period, with the proliferation of travel narratives being regularly published in several contemporary Bengali periodicals, Jadadhar Sen’s narration became very popular and after 1900 when it was published in book form, it took the Bengali readers of the time by storm. Its popularity led to it being included as part of the syllabus at Calcutta University. Feeling that pan-Indian readers who could not read the original text in Bangla should get to read this interesting text in English, I was inspired to translate this travelogue for a long time and Speaking Tiger Books readily accepted my proposal a couple of years ago.
The places visited by Sen might not seem unique in the present context, but the period during which he undertook the travel and the culture-specificity of it needed special attention. I was busy editing two volumes of travel narratives to Britain then, and after I finished my project, I took up translating this text in full earnest. It took me about three months to complete the translation, and I send the manuscript to the publishers in January this year. After several editorial interventions, it ultimately saw the light of day in July 2025.
Did you need to input much research while doing the translation? How tough was it to translate the text, especially given that it has multiple language and cultural nuances?
I did have to do some biographical research on Jaladhar Sen as his narrative is absolutely silent about why he moved from Bengal to Dehradun and the actual reason for his setting out on this particular journey. Interestingly, I was also researching about Swami Ramananda Bharati, who was the first Bengali traveller to Tibet and Manas Sarovar, and who wrote the famous book Himaranya (The Forest of Snow) whom Sen knew earlier and with whom he actually undertook the journey. With several cross references I could fill in a lot of biographical gaps in the narrative.
Regarding translation, it must be kept in mind that though something is always lost in translation, one must always attempt to strike the right balance between oversimplification and over-explanation. Translation is also a sort of creativity and the challenges it poses are significant. The intricate navigation between the source language and the translated language shows that there are two major meanings of translation in South Asia – bhashantar, altering the language, and anuvad, retelling the story. Without going into major theoretical analyses that crowd translation studies per se, I feel one should have an equal grasp over both translated and source languages to make a translated piece readable.
What are the tools you have used to retain the flavour of the original narrative? Please elaborate.
Readability of this old text Himalay in the present context is of paramount importance and though it is very difficult to replicate the grandiose writing style of late nineteenth-century Bangla, I have attempted to retain as much of the original flavour of the text as possible. Without using glossary or footnotes, the meaning of certain words becomes evident through paraphrasing the text. Thus, in keeping with Jaladhar Sen’s original work, the names of some words have been retained as they are. For example, the words dharamshala and chati—resting places on the pilgrim’s path—are so culture-specific that they are retained in their original forms. Sen also uses other culture-specific words such as panda (the Brahmin middleman who acts as the intermediary for worshipping the deity), the kamandalu (the water jug carried by sanyasis), lota-kambal (the jug and blanket that emphasise one’s identity as a sadhu), the jhola (the typical cloth bag that hangs from the shoulders), and the mahanta, or the head priest of the temple. Again, different terms such as sadhu, sanyasi, and yogi are used at different points to define ascetics and are often employed interchangeably. The term math, denoting seats of authority and doctrinal learning, has also been retained in its original form. As a Bengali gentleman settled in western India— Dehradun—the author often refers to Bengal as his desh, which literally means ‘country’, but in his parlance refers to the region of Bengal, which is as much a part of India as Dehradun. This definition should not create any confusion in the reader’s mind.
You, like the author, never clearly tell us why Sen starts out on such a perilous journey. Why do you think he went to this journey?
From evidential sources we get to know that like any other domestic person Jaladhar Sen began his career as a teacher in a High School in 1883 in Faridpur in Bengal. He got married in 1885 but however, a few years later he endured a great personal tragedy, losing his family members in quick succession. In 1887, his newborn daughter died on the twelfth day after her birth, and his wife passed away another twelve days later. Within three months, his mother also died. Overwhelmed by grief and seeking solace, he moved to Dehradun at the foothills of the Himalayas, where he worked as a teacher.
It is known that Sen did not venture into the Himalayas out of wanderlust. Dejected with domestic life, he apparently went to Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, where he chanced upon Swami Ramananda Bharati, an elderly Bengali sadhu whom he had known previously. He decided to accompany him on a trek all the way to Badrinath on foot. This was the background to his Himalayan travels and how he became a paribrajak sadhu or a traveller saint. The year was 1890.
Even though the memoir spans only a month, the author underwent many changes. Would you regard this book as a bildungsroman of sorts, especially as there is a self-realisation that comes to Sen at the end? Please elaborate.
In his travel account Sen documents his experiences of journeying to various places of religious significance, namely Devaprayag, Rudraprayag, Karnaprayag, Vishnuprayag and Joshimath before reaching the temple town of Badrinath in the upper Himalayas. He undertook this journey as a secular sojourner. But the travel impacted his soul in such a way that at the end of his narrative he admits that he had ventured in the Himalayas with a funeral pyre burning within his heart; and he merely embraced the cool breeze of the mountains with his hands and pressed the hard snow against his chest. He is doubtful whether he had the time or the state of mind to witness the eternal glory of the Lord revealed in the heavenly scenes around him. Could he lift his head and look towards heaven? That sense of wonder was absent within him. But some sort of change had already appeared within him. In this context, I feel the last two sentences of his narrative to be very significant when he states: “If anyone feels inspired to visit the Himalayas after reading this simple travel narrative of mine, then all my writing will have been worthwhile. And if anyone journeys towards the feet of the god of the Himalayas, my life would have been fulfilled.”
What was your favourite part of the book. Did you enjoy translating some things over others? Please elaborate.
There are several sections in the book which I really enjoyed translating. Most of them relate to specific incidents that Sen encountered during his travels and how human nature was the same everywhere. The first one was when they were on their way to Devaprayag and in his diary entry on 11th May, he tells us about the incident when his money pouch along with the Swamiji’s tiger skin was stolen on the way and how with the help of a panda he managed to retrieve it after a lot of effort. Though they were not very much spiritually inclined, they realized that there were crooks on the way to the pilgrimage sites who also dressed up as sadhus and everyone could not be trusted in good faith.
The second memorable incident is when trekking during extremely inclement weather — rain and thunderstorm– and when stones rushed down from the mountain slopes nearly killed them, how Achyutananda or Vaidantik who was accompanying them managed to protect him by shielding from the natural calamities with his own body as a mother hen does to protect her chicks.
The third interesting incident that Sen narrates is dated 3rd June when they got stranded at a chati in Pipul Kuthi. The head constable or jamadar sahib arrived there to enquire about a theft and Sen tells us how even in that remote mountainous region, the police had the reputation for rudeness and stern behaviour as the Bengal police had. He writes, “These officers, tasked with restraining wrongdoers and protecting civil society, displayed the same demeanour no matter where they were stationed. It seemed that the police were the same everywhere.”
Another memorable section is when they chance upon a young boy who probably ran away from his house and was trekking with them for some part of the way. The way in which the sick lad was ultimately deposited under the care of a doctor in the local hospital is extremely moving. Several other sections can also be mentioned here but it will turn my reply excessively long.
Why did you feel the need to bring this book to a wider readership? Are you translating more of his books?
I have already mentioned the importance of Sen’s travelogue in charting the long tradition and rich repertoire of Bengali travel narratives on the Himalayas that focus on travel as pilgrimage. As early as 1853, Jadunath Sarbadhikari embarked on a journey from a small village in Bengal to visit the sacred shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath. Returning in 1857, he chronicled his travels in Tirtha Bhraman (1865). Two lesser-known pilgrimages to the Himalayas were undertaken by monks of the Ramkrishna Mission order – Swami Akhandananda and Swami Apurvananda—in 1887 and 1939, respectively. Their travelogues were published many years later by Udbodhan Karyalaya, the official mouthpiece of the Mission. In both narratives, we find vivid details of the hardships of travelling during that period, marked by limited financial resources and minimal material comforts.
Jaladhar Sen’s narrative also holds a significant position in this chronological trend of writing about travelling in the Himalayas. From the 1960s onwards we find a proliferation of Himalayan travel writing in Bangla by writers such as Prabodh Kumar Sanyal, Shonku Maharaj, Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay and others, and many of these texts need to be translated provided one finds a responsive publisher for them. I am not translating Jaladhar Sen anymore, though as a prolific writer Sen authored about forty-two books, including novels, travelogues, works with social messages, children’s literature, and biographies.
How do you choose which text to translate? You always seem focussed on writers who lived a couple of centuries ago. Why do you not translate modern writers?
There is no hard and fast rule for selecting which text I want to translate. I have already translated several travel texts by Bengali women beginning from Krishnabhabini Das’s A Bengali Lady in England, 1876, to later ones. But I have not translated any travelogue about the Himalayas before. Here I must be candid about two issues. I pick upon writers usually whose texts are free of copyright as that does not entail a lot of extra work securing permissions etc. The second more practical reason is that I still have a long bucket list of translations I would like to do provided I find an agreeing publisher. But that is very difficult because several of my proposals have been rejected by publishing houses because they feel it will not be marketable in the current scenario.
As for the query about translating modern writers let me narrate a particular incident. As a woman writer and as someone interested in translating travel narratives of all kinds, I had approached Nabanita Dev Sen through a willing publisher to translate her visit to the Kumbh Mela that she wrote about in her book titled Koruna Tomar Kone Poth Diye[3]. After seeking necessary permission and meeting her personally on several occasions to discuss several chapters, I gradually got frustrated because even after three sets of corrections, the translation did not satisfy her.
She consulted several other people, including her own daughter, and ultimately told me that she couldn’t accept my translation because she ‘didn’t find herself in it.’ The colloquial Bangla humour in some places were not sufficiently translated. As far as I got to know from the publisher, she changed editors thrice, and in the end the translated book was published with one of the editors named as the ‘translator’. When I chanced to meet her at my university on a different occasion, Nabaneetadi told me that she had mentioned my name in the acknowledgement section of the book, which of course I didn’t bother to buy or check. From such a bitter experience, I feel staying with writers dead long ago is a safer bet for me.
You are working on a new translation. Will you tell us a bit about your forthcoming book?
As I have already mentioned, I found Swami Ramananda Bharati’s Himaranya (The Forest of Snow) to be a companion piece for translation. Not only is this significant because it was the same Swamiji with whom Jaladhar Sen travelled to the Himalayas, and though his name is not mentioned anywhere by Sen, we get to know a lot about him already through his narrative. As a monk, Bharati travelled to Mount Kailash and Manas Sarovar in Tibet during 1898, the first Bengali to do so. These travels form the basis of Himaranya. It was not entirely ‘spiritual’ or ‘theological’ but rather depended on the traveller’s own temperament. There are presentations of secular interests and considerations, and modern readers can relate to them easily, especially because the route to Kailash and Manas Sarovar has now been opened for Indian pilgrims once again and several groups are going there every other day. The manuscript is already with the publisher and hopefully the book should see the light of day by the end of this year if everything goes well.
You have translated so many voyages by Tagore, by Sen, do you now want to bring out your own travelogues or memoirs?
I have been translating travel narratives of different kinds for a long time now. I still plan to do a few more if I get a proper publisher for the same. I am an avid traveller myself and have actually trekked to Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri twice. I have also trekked for fourteen days to visit Muktinath in Nepal way back in the early 1980s, and during the pandemic days when I was confined at home, I managed to key in that experience in Bangla from the diary I kept at that time. That narrative was published in the online journal Parabaas which is published from the United States. But I have never taken writing about my own travelogues or memoirs seriously. Of course, last year and also forthcoming this year, a special Puja Festive number of a Bengali magazine has been publishing my travel articles. But there is nothing serious or academic about it.
Do you have any advice for fledging writers or translators?
Translating has caught up in a big way over the past five or six years. Now big publishing houses are venturing into publishing from regional bhasha literatures into English and so the possibilities are endless. Now every other day we come across new titles which are translations of regional novels or short stories. My only advice for young writers or translators is that since copyright permissions have become quite rigid and complicated nowadays, it is always advisable to seek permission from the respective authorities before venturing into translating anything. I was quite young and naïve earlier and just translated things I liked without seeking prior approval and as usual those works never saw the light of day. Also, as time went by, I learnt that translating should have as its prime motive current readability and not always rigidly adhering to being very particular about remaining close to each individual line of the source text. The target readership should also be kept in mind and so the choice of words used and glossary should be eliminated or kept to a minimum. The meaning of a foreign word should as far as possible be embedded within the text itself. All these issues would definitely make translating an enjoyable experience.
Thanks for the wonderful translation and your time.
[1] Mendicants. Sadhu and swami also have the same meaning
[3] Translates from Bengali to The Path to Compassion, published in 1978. The translation was published by Supernova Publishers in 2012 as The Holy Trail: A Pilgrims Plight. Soma Das is mentioned as the translator.
(This review and online interview is by Mitali Chakravarty)
I had arranged to leave at half past four in the morning; my friends arrived even earlier to bid me farewell. It was a moonlit night, and the entire world lay silent and still. Could this small change in my life affect the grand workings of the earth? I was leaving everyone behind; friends and relatives accompanied me for quite some distance. It was evidently difficult for them to sever the affectionate ties they had nurtured with me for so long. I requested that they not proceed further; in the end, they reluctantly turned back. I, too, glanced back several times to take one last look at them. I couldn’t help but wonder—if this separation from friends was so painful, how much more difficult would it be to part from one’s own family?
A few days ago, I had read Pilgrim’s Progress*, and one scene from the book kept recurring in my mind. As we walked, my thoughts wandered to such reflections. Soon, the sun rose. We began moving towards Hrishikesh. This was an unfamiliar route—rarely travelled by others. After crossing several mountains and forests, we arrived at a small village called ‘Khanu’† around 11 a.m. This peaceful village with only five to seven houses nestled beneath a canopy of trees, resembled a tiny bird’s nest. A small stream meandered near the village. We went and took shelter under a tree by the stream, and, parched and famished, we gratefully drank its water to our hearts’ content. After eating our meal there, we resumed our journey around 5 p.m.
After leaving the village, we noticed two monks walking ahead of us. Since it was just the two of us travelling, I thought, why not join these holy men? At least the four of us could travel together for a while. We quickened our pace, but when we caught up to the two sanyasis, I felt a mix of amusement and irritation. One of them turned out to be my former servant, whom I had dismissed twenty or twenty-five days earlier for theft. His transformation was remarkable—dressed in the elaborate robes of a sanyasi, with tangled hair and constant chants of ‘Har Har Bom Bom’, he was barely recognisable as the thief he once was. It was sheer bad luck on his part that our paths crossed that day.
I recounted the whole story to Swamiji, who commented, ‘Perhaps his companion has some money in his jhola, and he has disguised himself in this manner to swindle it.’
Indeed, there seemed to be no limit to the number of people who cloaked themselves in saffron robes, with matted hair and a kamandalu, only to engage in theft, deceive innocent people, or even commit heinous crimes when the opportunity arose. Readers will encounter many such so-called sadhus in my travel narrative.
At first, my servant seemed confident I wouldn’t recognise him in his new guise. He appeared smug, believing that his ‘western intelligence’ would outwit my ‘Bengali intellect’. Seeing us, he began chanting ‘Bom Bom’ even louder, as if to reinforce his act. Unable to tolerate his pretence any longer, I burst out laughing and said, ‘Aare lounde, kabse chori chhod ke sadhu ban giya?——Oh, you scoundrel, since when did you give up thievery to become a monk?’
He was utterly stunned and rendered speechless by my words. I then explained everything to his companion, a naïve and well-meaning man. This stout young fellow had accepted my servant as his disciple, feeding him well in exchange for a few religious sermons. I said, ‘Sadhu, you may keep him and feed him—I have no objection. But if you have any money in your jhola, guard it carefully. If a man can become a sadhu in ten or twelve days, there’s nothing stopping him from becoming a murderous dacoit in a few hours.’
Later, I heard that the sadhu heeded my unsolicited advice.
By evening, we reached Bhogpur. This village was home to many people, and the presence of small brick houses suggested that some wealthy residents lived there. Close to the homes of these affluent villagers stood a dharamshala, built and maintained by the villagers themselves. Travellers and sadhus from afar could find shelter here, with food and amenities provided by the locals. However, if a traveller carried money or the village had a shop, they need not rely on these dharamshalas.
There is a great deficiency of dharamshalas in Bengal. In many respects, we are far more developed and civilised than people from other parts of India; however, we are so preoccupied that we do not have the leisure to spare time for travellers or sick people who might perish on their journeys. Of course, it must be acknowledged that there are still a few among us who are exceptions to this. Nevertheless, I feel that the uneducated Garhwali farmers, who help others, offer shelter to the distressed, and wholeheartedly care for guests, are far more sincere than the educated people of Bengal.
We spent the night at the dharamshala in Bhogpur. Exhausted from the rigours of travelling, we had no need for food and instead went straight to sleep.
7th May, Thursday
We resumed our journey early in the morning and entered the forest of Hrishikesh, which we had traversed before. Although the forest was familiar, the path was entirely unknown; we could not determine whether we were following the same route we had previously taken. We reached Hrishikesh at 1 p.m. and rested beneath a tree, still without any food. Once the afternoon sun’s glare had lessened, we resumed our journey and reached Lakshman Jhula by evening.
The few shops overlooking the Ganga at Lakshman Jhula were bustling with travellers. A group of Udasi sanyasis had arrived that very day. They were Sikhs.
(Excerpted from The Travels of a Sadhu in the Himalayas by Jaladhar Sen, translated by Somdatta Mandal. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2025.)
THE BOOK
In the summer of 1890, Jaladhar Sen left behind a life of domesticity and embarked on an adventure across some of India’s most sacred landscapes, from Hrishikesh, all the way to Badrinath. Armed with little more than a blanket, a staff, and a book of songs by the renowned Bengali poet and Baul singer Kangal Harinath, he journeyed through perilous mountain passes, snowbound valleys, and remote pilgrim towns—seeking not the divine, but solace for a life fractured by loss.
Sen’s deeply personal travelogue chronicles the breathtaking beauty of the Himalayas—the roaring Alakananda, the towering peaks of Nara and Narayan, the spiritual might of Shankaracharya’s Joshimath, the bustling markets of Srinagar, and the ethereal stillness of Badrinath—along with a vivid cast of characters—from stoic sadhus, cunning pandas and officious police personnel to ailing young boys, large-hearted villagers and even fellow Bengali pilgrims. In the shadow of the Himalayas, Sen reflects on the complexities of faith, the hypocrisies of ascetic life, and the profound tenderness of human connection.
Blending diary observations and literary flourish, Himalay—first published in 1900—had once captured the imagination of a generation of Bengalis, inspiring them to travel far beyond their homeland. This English translation reintroduces Sen’s compelling account to a new audience, highlighting its historical importance and enduring charm as one of the earliest modern Bengali narratives of the Himalayan experience.
THE AUTHOR
Jaladhar Sen (1860–1939) was a Bengali writer, poet, editor and a philanthropist, traveller, social worker, educationist, and littérateur. He was awarded the title of ‘Ray Bahadur’ by the British Government. In 1887 he suffered the greatest loss in his life when his mother, wife and daughter died in quick succession. Overwhelmed by grief and seeking solace, Jaladhar moved to Dehradun at the foothills of the Himalayas, where he worked as a teacher. It was during this time, in 1890, that he travelled to the Garhwal Himalaya. This journey inspired his travelogue Himalay.
THE TRANSLATOR
Somdatta Mandal is the Former Professor of English and Chairperson at the Department of English & Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Somdatta has a keen interest in translation and travel writing.
Aruna Chakravarti writes of the Bauls (wandering minstrels) of Bengal and the impact their syncretic thought, music and life had on Tagore
Bauls by Jamini RoyBaul Singer by Jamini Roy Paintings by Jamini Roy (1887-1972). From Public Domain
Religious movements such as Bhakti and Sufi have spanned time and territory and entered Bengal, in successive waves, creating a syncretic culture in which music and poetry are amalgamated. One of the forms in which these movements find creative expression is Baul Gaan —the singing of itinerant minstrels.
Universally recognised as foremost among the oralities of Bengal, the Baul Sampradai is a community for whom singing is synonymous with worship. The Baul expounds a philosophy of humanism which rejects religious orthodoxies and stresses human equality irrespective of caste, class, religion and gender. The Baul sets himself on a spiritual journey, lasting a lifetime, towards discovering his moner manush (man within the heart) thereby alienating the notion of seeking the Divine in external forms such as mosques, temples, images and sculptures. Since God is believed to reside within man, the human body is viewed as the site of the ultimate truth –that which encompasses the entire universe. This tenet of Baul philosophy is known as deha tatwabad—the belief that the soul being pure the body that houses it, together with all its functions, is pure and holy.
Concentrated mostly in Kushthia, Shilaidaha and Sajadpur in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and Murshidabad and Birbhum in West Bengal, the Baul tradition, though drawing elements from Tantra, Shakta and Sahajiya[1], stems from two main sources — Muslim Sufi and Hindu Vaishnav. Hence the simultaneous presence of Hindu and Muslim bauls in the villages of Bengal and great composers from both streams—Lalon Fakir, Duddu Shah, Madan Baul, Gagan Harkara and Fakirchand. Rejecting religious codes such as Shariat and Shastras, caste differences, social conventions and taboos, which they see as barriers to a true union with God, they sing of harmony between man and man. “Temples and mosques obstruct my path,” the Baul sings, “and I can’t hear your voice when teachers and priests crowd around me.”
Refusing to conform to the conventions of religion and caste ridden Bengali society, Bauls (the word is sourced from the middle eastern bawal meaning mad or possessed) are wandering minstrels who sing and dance on their way to an inner vision. Essentially nomadic in nature walking, for them, is a way of life. “No baul should live under the same tree for more than three days” — the saying seems to stem from the Sufi doctrine of walking an endless path (manzil) in quest of the land where the Beloved (the Divine) might be glimpsed. Bauls live on alms which people give readily. In return the Baul sings strumming his ektara[2] with dancing movements. The songs are rich with symbolism, on the one hand, and full of ready wit and rustic humour on the other. The Baul rails against the hypocrisy of religion and caste and takes sharp digs at the clergy but totally without rancour.
Many of the composite forms found in an older culture of Bengal have become sadly obscured in the present scenario of identity politics. But the one that has not only survived but is gaining in recognition day by day, is the Baul tradition. This is, in no small measure, owing to the intervention and interest taken by Rabindranath Tagore. In his Religion of Man Rabindranath tells us that, being the son of the founder of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, he had followed a monotheistic ideal from childhood but, on gaining maturity, had sensed within himself a disconnect from the organised belief he had inherited. Gradually the feeling that he was using a mask to hide the fact that he had mentally severed his connection with the Brahmo Samaj began tormenting him. And while in this frame of mind, travelling through the family estates in rural Bengal, he heard a Baul sing. The singer was a postal runner by the name of Gagan Harkara and the song was “Ami kothai paabo tare/ amaar moner manush je re[3].”
“What struck me in this simple song,” Rabindranath goes on to say, “was a religious expression that was neither grossly concrete, full of crude details, nor metaphysical in its rarefied transcendentalism… Since then, I’ve often tried to meet these people and sought to understand them through their songs which are their only form of worship.” In his Preface to Haramoni[4], Rabindranath makes another reference to this song. Quoting some lines from the Upanishads— Know him whom you need to know/ else suffer the pangs of death— he goes on to say, “What I heard from the mouth of a peasant in rustic language and a primary tune was the same. I heard, in his voice, the loss and bewilderment of a child separated from its mother. The Upanishads speak of the one who dwells deep within the heart antartama hridayatma[5]and the Baul sings of the moner manush. They seem to me to be one and the same and the thought fills me with wonder.”
A Portrait of Lalon Fakir sketched by Jyotindranath Tagore(1849-1925)
Lalon Fakir’s commune was located in the village of Chheurhia which fell within Rabindranath’s father’s estates. Though there is no authentic record of a meeting between the two, it is a fact that the poet was the first to recognise Lalon’s merit which had the quality of a rough diamond. His inspiration was powerful and spontaneous but, lacking in clarity of expression, lay buried in obscurity till Rabindranath brought it out into the open. Publishing some of the songs in some of the major journals of the time, Rabindranath took them to the doors of the educated elite. Not only that. They gained in popularity from the fact that he, himself, often used Baul thought and melody in his own work. “In some songs,” he tells us in his Manush er Dharma[6], “the primary tunes got mixed up with other raags – raaginis which prove that the Baul idiom entered my sub conscious fairly early in life. The man of my heart, moner manush, is the true Devata[7]. To the extent that I’m honest and true to my knowledge, action and thought — to that extent will I find the man of my heart. When there is distortion within, I lose sight of him. Man’s tendency is to look two ways — within and without. When we seek him without — in wealth, fame and self- gratification — we lose him within.”
But it wasn’t only in his compositions that Rabindranath disseminated Baul ideology. It went deeper than that. The primitive simplicity and freedom of Baul thought and living charmed him so completely that he started imbibing them in his own lifestyle. He grew his hair long, kept a flowing beard and wore loose robes. He created Baul like characters in his plays and dance dramas and enacted the roles himself. And, as he grew older, a restlessness; an inability to stay in one place took hold of him. Leaving the ancestral mansion of Jorasanko he relocated to Santiniketan but even there he could not stay in the same house for more than two months. In the last two and half decades of his life, a tremendous wanderlust seized him. He travelled extensively both within the country and without, earning for himself the sobriquet of ‘roving ambassador for India’.
Perhaps, the most powerful testimony of the evolution of Rabindranath from a princely scion of the Tagores of Jorasanko to the man he finally became is found in Abanindranath’s portrait of his uncle. It depicts an old man with flowing white locks and beard, wearing a loose robe and holding an ektara high above his head. The limbs are fluid in an ecstatic dance movement. It is a significant fact that the painting is titled Robi Baul.
Robi Baul (1916): Painting by Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951). From Public Domain
[1] Different schools of philosophy and religion. The Sahajiya is a philosophy that embrace nature and the natural way of life.
[3] Translates from Bengali to: “Where will I find Him — He who dwells within my heart”
[4] The Haramoni (Lost Jewels) is 13-volume collection of Baul songs compiled by Mansooruddin to which Tagore wrote the preface for the first volume published in 1931
[5] Translates to ‘innermost part of the heart and soul’
[6] Collection of Lectures by Tagore in Bengali, published in 1932
Aruna Chakravarti has been the principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator. Her novels, Jorasanko, Daughters of Jorasanko, The Inheritors, Suralakshmi Villa and The Mendicant Prince have sold widely and received rave reviews. She has two collections of short stories and many translations, the latest being Rising from the Dust. She has also received awards such as the Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar for her translations.
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Title: Rising From the Dust: Dalit Stories from Bengal
Selected and Translated by Aruna Charavarti
Publisher: Om Books International
Though Bengali Dalit writing is comparatively newer compared to Dalit writing in Marathi and other Dravidian languages, nevertheless it has already carved a niche for itself in a significant way. The main difference between the Dalit writing emanating from other regions of India and that of Bengal is that whereas the thrust area elsewhere is primarily on the untouchables, the downtrodden and the way the Dalits have been marginalised in society for a long time, in Bengal the problem is further complicated by caste and class issues which is not so significant elsewhere. This collection of twelve Dalit short stories from Bengal, carefully selected and translated by Aruna Chakravarti, spans a long period and what distinguishes it is the gendered lens that explores the Dalit woman’s cause and holds it up to the light.
There is a difference in the style of narrating the Dalit experience from writer to writer and accordingly it can be divided into two groups. In the first category are writers who themselves belong to the Dalit community and their writing stem out of experiential feelings. The second group of writers belong to the upper castes, and their writing stems from a feeling of empathy for the marginalized and the downtrodden. Spanning a long period of almost a century, Aruna Chakravarti has decided to blend both these categories and has meticulously translated the dozen stories from well-known writers to those a little lesser known. While literary stalwarts like Mahasweta Devi, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay and Prafulla Roy share their profound understanding of the Dalit woman’s fears and traumas, hopes, dreams and aspirations, contemporary voices from the Dalit community itself like Manoranjan Byapari, Bimalendu Haldar, Manohar Mouli Biswas, Kalyani Thakur Charal, Anil Ghorai and Nakul Mallik explore aspects of survival and social ostracisation with both sensitivity and angst. On the one hand we have centuries of oppression being still carried upon these subaltern people, and even within that restricted space, we also often find protest and upheaval that the doubly marginalized womenfolk attempt to revolt against.
In the opening story titled “Fortress” by Manoranjan Byapari, we find Nakul’s widow Sarama, unwillingly forced to sell her body to oppressive menfolk everyday finds her unique way of protest by deliberately copulating with her ex-husband Ratan who is inflicted with venereal disease, thereby driving out all her fear and henceforth would ‘welcome every touch’ and ‘would wait outside her door in delicious anticipation.’ In Bimalendu Haldar’s “Salt” we are shown how a fisherman Madhai who works for his employer Nishay Ghosh, goes missing and his wife Chintay, collecting three other suffering women registers their protest in a unique way. In “Shonkhomala” Manohar Mouli Biswas tells us a relatively contemporary and true story relating to the grabbing of agricultural land in the fertile Singur area by the government for setting up of the Tata Motor Factory. It tells us of how Shonkhomala Dom, a Dalit woman, changes her name to Tapashi Malik and is gangraped and murdered because she was unwilling to give up her land and organized a protest march instead. Incidentally, till date, the court case for identifying the murderer and the rapists of Tapashi Malik is unresolved.
Another very touching story “Illegal Immigrant” by Nakul Mallick brings in the plight of refugees from erstwhile East Bengal coming to India after the partition. It tells us of the plight of an extremely poor jhalmuri seller called Madhav who, along with his wife Shefali, lives in a slum beside the train track and somehow manages to eke out a decent living. When Madhav is picked up as an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant and thrown out of the country, his wife’s life goes haywire as she goes to the Petrapole border looking for her husband in vain. Kalyani Thakur Charal deliberately adds the word ‘Charal’ meaning ‘Chandal’ or ‘untouchable’ to her name in order to take pride of her Dalit identity. In “Motho’s Daughter” she tells the story of one Nishikanta who wants to get his children educated first and foremost and is frustrated in the end because his stray son gets married to a woman who doesn’t encourage education. Anil Ghorai, another powerful Dalit writer, tells an interesting story about Larani, belonging to the tanner caste, her relationship with Hola Burho, a dhol[1] repairer and his son Pabna. The main thrust of the story “The Insect Festival” is of course the attack of locusts in the village and how the majority of the illiterate villagers take resort to superstitious rituals in order to ward off the menace instead of confronting the situation in a scientific manner.
As mentioned earlier, each story by the four empathetic writers goes on emphasizing the pressures of caste and class upon the lower classes of people in different situations. In “The True Life Story of Uli-Buli’s Mother” Mahasweta Devi tells us the story of a helpless woman who becomes a destitute after being thrown away for having four daughters. She lives under the delusion that someone has stolen her young twins Uli and Buli. Again in “Nalini’s Story” she draws a beautiful pen picture of Nalini, who after being abandoned by her husband, lives with her grandson and ekes out her living by working as a maid. Years later, her estranged son along with his wife and her landlord Gobindo all desire to take possession of her house by arranging an elaborate shraddha ceremony for her estranged husband. Nalini understands their ploy and, in the end, she puts her foot down, unwilling to be in eternal debt for the extravagant rituals proposed by them.
Prafulla Kumar Roy’s “Snake Maiden” gives us an inside story of the gypsies or nomads who are known as ‘bedyes’ and who deal with snakes and charms. Here Shankhini is the mistress of a band of bedeys who come and settle in Sonai Bibir Bil for the season and accidentally meets her ex-lover Raja saheb. She is in a quandary because he wants her to renounce the bedeni’s life and settle down in one place and turn into a farmer’s wife. The tug between domesticity and the age-old tradition of this nomadic gypsy tribe’s rituals and customs is elaborated through the rest of this interesting story. The powerful storyteller Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay gives us two stories with totally different locales and characters. In “The Witch” he elaborates upon the idea of a woman who is defined as a witch and is ostracised by society because she is said to cast an evil eye upon everything she sees. She dies an agonising death in the end as her dark and unholy blood oozes out from her veins. Incidentally, even to this day the idea of identifying certain low caste woman as witches and even burning them to death persists in several villages in rural Bengal and such superstitions are not overcome at all.
In the second story “Raikamal”, Tarashankar gives us an in-depth picture of a Vaishnav community, their rituals and their manner of living. The protagonist Kamalini had to abandon her crush on Ranjan because he belongs to another caste, weds Rasik who consumes poison in the end out of jealousy and ultimately Kamalini has to live all alone. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s eponymous story “Abhagi’s Heaven” is once again a depiction of Bengali society strictly divided according to caste lines. In this story, Kangali’s mother Abhagi, an untouchable, a ‘duley’ by caste, watches the funeral pyre of a Brahmin lady and imagines her going to heaven in a golden chariot. She nourishes the desire to be cremated in a similar fashion when she dies, but after her actual death she is denied the privilege of being burnt and has to be buried near the riverside as per societal norms.
The stories in this collection capture the essence of a way of life marked by the enduring defiant spirit of the dispossessed and the marginalised. This is a must-read not only for literary enthusiasts, but also for students and scholars of Dalit and caste studies, development studies, Indian literature in translation and gender studies. In her foreword, Meena Kandasamy categorically states that “every short story in this collection holds together a precious, precarious universe – the old order continues with its oppression, the new is struggling to be born; everyday life is a struggle and yet, struggle itself is the terrain, where life, liveliness, and being alive come into their full glory.” This translated volume is therefore strongly recommended for non-Bengali readers who are not aware of the nuances of Bengali Dalit writing at all and it will dispel the notion that all kinds of Dalit writing cannot be brought together under a single umbrella. Kudos to Aruna Chakravarti for her excellent selection and meticulous translation of these one dozen stories.
[1] Musical instrument akin to a drum but hung from the neck
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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Let me be honest enough. When I received this book for review penned by a Sri Lankan author, I expected it to be a debut novel written by a person who is one of the many new voices that keep on emerging in sub-continental English fiction every other day. But the unusual name of the author made me enquire a little further to find out that he was half Tibetan and half English, educated at Eton and Durham in England, and has been managing an international school in Sri Lanka for thirty years. All these issues account for and contribute to the background of the novel’s setting. More surprise was in store when I found that Chhimi Tenduf-La has been writing fiction for the past ten years and his first novel, The Amazing Racist, was published way back in 2015. Since then, he has penned two more books and now his fourth book, A Hiding to Nothing, is what he himself defines as his “first domestic thriller.”
Such background information therefore definitely helps the reader to understand the nature of this present novel, which is set in Colombo’s manicured gardens owned by rich, elite and sometimes dicey people, and simultaneously moves to the activities set in England in Durham’s cobblestone streets.
The central issue of the story revolves around the miscarriage of Neja Pinto after she marries Ramesh in England and her subsequent inability to conceive which results in taking recourse to surrogacy. Believing in the stigma of South Asian sensibilities when a woman is looked down upon if she cannot give birth to her own off-spring, they want to keep the entire matter as secretive as possible so that they can come back from England to Sri Lanka and claim the child, Devin, as their own biologically born offspring till a point when the child is kidnapped by unknown people. From this point begins a lot of questions like who would dare take Devin – and why? As the incidents of the story march forward at electronic speed, creating the right atmosphere of a well-devised whodunit, the novel is crowded with innumerable characters, some unique, others quite stereotypical, but none out of suspicion. Is it the swimming coach Neja gets too close to? Could it be the ghosts of their past – the ruthless creditors Ramesh deceived in a Ponzi scheme, now back for blood? Or is it the enigmatic Dr Haksar who helped them have a child? And what of the mysterious woman from the British High Commission, whose probing questions hint at knowledge she shouldn’t possess? As the whispers grow louder, one name resurfaces with terrifying weight: Satya Basu, who actually bears the child in lieu of money. Is she back to settle an old score?
As mentioned earlier, at the centre of the story are the protagonists Neja and Ramesh Pinto, who are now husband and wife, but are also portrayed in their pre-marital days in England. Then there is Ramesh’s mother Loku Madam who is a stern and powerful woman with complete control over her son, which results in a sort of mother fixation. Loku Madam is planning a fourth marriage with a rich tea garden owner.
There is a swimming pool trainer called Johnny Dias with whom Neja has a fling resulting in several complications in the plot; the child Devin who disappears after he is kidnapped and from where many more eventful activities take place in the story; then there is Mercy Mbangwa who works at the British High Commission but also takes too much of an interest in the affairs of Neja and Ramesh Pinto. The Pintos take on names as Nita and Ravi Ponniah when they live in Durham because they want to remain incognito and take possession of a surrogate child in the making by another character called Satya Basu ( I am surprised because though ending with an ‘a’, in Bengali Satya is usually a male name and not a female one), Dr. Haksar and several other characters, all of whom are illegal immigrants in England. There are bartenders, hustlers and many other minor characters that crowd the scene too.
Chhimi Tenduf-La unravels a suspenseful tale where the truth is elusive – and the cost of uncovering it may be too high to bear. He brings in all possible locations and situations with very intense visual details which makes us feel it to be the right ambience for a Netflix movie. The novel is architecturally very carefully set through fifty-six chapters (some as short as one and a half pages) to others slightly longer, and the chapters are very carefully juxtaposed by alternating between Sri Lanka, 2024 and London/England 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. In fact, the last chapter brings us to the present Sri Lanka in 2025 where finally all the mysteries are unravelled and the author hints at a positive and optimistic note where all the sound and fury is resolved to a quiet ending.
The racy speed at which the author takes the readers through this 310 page-turner mystery at times makes one confused and it seems that since he is attempting a new sub-genre of what he calls a first attempt at a ‘domestic thriller’, he has attempted to put in as many things as possible. Some of that could probably have been avoided. But his innovative style and deft handling of the English language needs special mention, and this reviewer strongly recommends everyone to read and appreciate the novel.
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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A review of Anuradha Kumar’s Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India (Speaking Tiger Books) and an interview with the author
Migrants and wanderers — what could be the differences between them? Perhaps, we can try to comprehend the nuances. Seemingly, wanderers flit from place to place — sometimes, assimilating bits of each of these cultures into their blood — often returning to their own point of origin. Migrants move countries and set up home in the country they opt to call home as did the family the famous Indian actor, Tom Alter (1950-2017).
Anuradha Kumar’s Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India captures the lives and adventures of thirty such individuals or families — including the Alter family — that opted to explore the country from which the author herself wandered into Singapore and US. Born in India, Kumar now lives in New Jersey and writes. Awarded twice by the Commonwealth Foundation for her writing, she has eight novels to her credit. Why would she do a whole range of essays on wanderers and migrants from US to India? Is this book her attempt to build bridges between diverse cultures and seemingly diverse histories?
As Kumar contends in her succinct introduction, America and India in the 1700s were similar adventures for colonisers. In the Empire Podcast, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand do point out that the British East India company was impacted in the stance it had to colonisers in the Sub-continent after their experience of the American Revolution. And America and India were both British colonies. They also were favourites of colonisers from other European cultures. Just as India was the melting pot of diverse communities from many parts of the world — even mentioned by Marco Polo (1254-1324) in The Kingdom of India — America in the post-Christopher Columbus era (1451-1546) provided a similar experience for those who looked for a future different from what they had inherited. The first one Kumar listed is Nathaniel Higginson (1652-1708), a second-generation migrant from United Kingdom, who wandered in around the same time as British administrator Job Charnock (1630-1693) who dreamt Calcutta after landing near Sutanuti[1].
Kumar has bunched a number of biographies together in each chapter, highlighting the commonality of dates and ventures. The earliest ones, including Higginson, fall under ‘Fortune Seekers From New England’. The most interesting of these is Fedrick Tudor (1783-1864), the ice trader. Kumar writes: “In Calcutta, Dwarkanath Tagore, merchant and patron of the arts (Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather), expressed an interest to involve himself in ice shipping, but Tudor’s monopoly stayed for some decades more. Tagore was part of the committee in Calcutta along with Kurbulai Mohammad, scion of a well-established landed family in Bengal, to regulate ice supply.”
Also associated with the Tagore family, was later immigrant Gertrude Emerson Sen (1890-1982, married to Boshi Sen). She tells us, “Tagore wrote Foreword to Gertrude Emerson’s Voiceless India, set in a remote Indian village and published in 1930. Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore called Emerson’s efforts, ‘authentic’.” She has moved on to quote Tagore: “The author did not choose the comfortable method of picking up information from behind lavish bureaucratic hospitality, under a revolving electric fan, and in an atmosphere of ready-made social opinions…She boldly took in on herself unaided to enter a region of our life, all but unexplored by Western tourists, which had one great advantage, in spite of its difficulties, that it offered no other path to the writer, but that of sharing the life of the people.’” Kumar writes of an Afro-American scholar, called Merze Tate who came about 1950-51 and was also fascinated by Santiniketan as were some others.
Another name that stuck out was Sam Higginbottom, who she described as “the Farmer Missionary” for he was exactly that and started an agricultural university in Allahabad. Around the same time as Tagore started Sriniketan (1922), Higginbottom was working on agricultural reforms in a different part of India. In fact, Uma Dasgupta mentions in A History of Sriniketan: Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering work in Rural Reconstruction that Lord Elimhurst, who helped set up the project, informed Tagore that “another Englishman” was doing work along similar lines. Though as Kumar has pointed out, Higginbottom was a British immigrant to US — an early American — and returned to Florida in 1944.
There is always the grey area where it’s difficult to tie down immigrants or wanderers to geographies. One such interesting case Kumar dwells on would be that of Nilla Cram Cook, who embraced Hinduism, becoming in-the process, ‘Nilla Nagini Devi’, as soon as she reached Kashmir with her young son, Sirius. She shuttled between Greece, America and India and embraced the arts, lived in Gandhi’s Wardha ashram and corresponding with him, went on protests and lived like a local. Her life mapped in India almost a hundred years ago, reads like that of a free spirit. At a point she was deported living in an abject state and without slippers. Kumar tells us: “Her work according to Sandra Mackey combined ‘remarkable cross-cultural experimentation’ and ‘dazzling entrepreneurship.’”
The author has written of artists, writers, salesmen, traders (there’s a founder/buyer of Tiffany’s), actors, Theosophists, linguists fascinated with Sanskrit, cyclists — one loved the Grand Trunk Road, yet another couple hated it — even a photographer and an indentured Afro-American labourer. Some are missionaries. Under ‘The Medical Missionaries: The Women’s Condition’, she has written of the founders of Vellore Hospital and the first Asian hospital for women and children. Some of them lived through the Revolt of 1857; some through India’s Independence Movement and with varied responses to the historical events they met with.
Kumar has dedicated the book to, “…all the wanderers in my family who left in search of new homes and forgot to write their stories…” Is this an attempt to record the lives of people as yet unrecorded or less recorded? For missing from her essays are famous names like Louis Fischer, Webb Miller — who were better known journalists associated with Gandhi and spent time with him. But there are names like Satyanand Stokes and Earl and Achsah Brewster, who also met Gandhi. Let’s ask the author to tell us more about her book.
Anuradha Kumar
What made you think of doing this book? How much time did you devote to it?
These initially began as essays for Scroll; short pieces about 1500-1600 words long. And the beginnings were very organic. I wrote about Edwin Lord Weeks sometime in 2015. But the later pieces, most of them, were part of a series.
I guess I am intrigued by people who cross borders, make new lives for themselves in different lands, and my editors—at Scroll and Speaking Tiger Books—were really very encouraging.
After I’d finished a series of pieces on early South Asians in America, I wanted to look at those who had made the journey in reverse, i.e., early Americans in India, and so the series came about, formally, from December 2021 onward. I began with Thomas Stevens, the adventuring cyclist and moved onto Gertrude Emerson Sen, and then the others. So, for about two years I read and looked up accounts, old newspapers, writings, everything I possibly could; I guess that must mean a considerable amount of research work. Which is always the best thing about a project like this, if I might put it that way.
What kind of research work? Did you read all the books these wanderers had written?
Yes, in effect I did. The books are really old, by which I mean, for example, Bartolomew Burges’ account of his travels in ‘Indostan’ written in the 1780s have been digitized and relatively easy to access. I found several books on Internet Archive, or via the interlibrary loan system that connects libraries in the US (public and university). I looked up old newspapers, old magazine articles – loc.gov, archive.org, newspapers.com, newspaperarchive.com, hathitrust.org and various other sites that preserve such old writings.
You do have a fiction on Mark Twain in India. But in this book, you do not have very well-known names like that of Twain. Why?
Not Twain, but I guess some of the others were well-known, many in their own lifetime. Satyanand Stokes’ name is an easily recognisable still especially in India, and equally familiar is Ida Scudder of the Vellore Medical College, and maybe a few others like Gertrude Sen, and Clara Swain too. I made a deliberate choice of selecting those who had spent a reasonable amount of time in India, at least a year (as in the case of Francis Marion Crawford, the writer, or a few months like the actor, Daniel Bandmann), and not those who were just visiting like Mark Twain or passing through. This made the whole endeavour very interesting. When one has spent some years in a foreign land, like our early Americans in India, one arguably comes to have a different, totally unique perspective. These early Americans who stayed on for a bit were more ‘accommodating’ and more perceptive about a few things, rather than supercilious and cursory.
And it helped that they left behind some written record. John Parker Boyd, the soldier who served the Nizam as well as Holkar in Indore in the early 1800s, left behind a couple of letters of complaint (when he didn’t get his promised reward from the East India Company) and even this sufficed to try and build a complete life.
How do these people thematically link up with each other? Do their lives run into each other at any point?
Yes, I placed them in categories thanks to an invaluable suggestion by Dr Ramachandra Guha, the historian. I’d emailed him and this advice helped give some shape to the book, else there would have been just chapters following each other. And their lives did overlap; several of them, especially from the 1860s onward, did work in the same field, though apart from the medical missionaries, I don’t think they ever met each other – distances were far harder to traverse then, I guess.
What is the purpose of your book? Would it have been a response to some book or event?
I was, and am, interested in people who leave the comforts of home to seek a new life elsewhere, even if only for some years. Travelling, some decades ago, was fraught with risk and uncertainty. I admire all those who did it, whether it was for the love of adventure, or a sense of mission. I wanted to get into their shoes and see how they felt and saw the world then.
Is this because you are a migrant yourself? How do you explain the dedication in your book?
I thought of my father, and his cousins, all of whom grew up in what was once undivided Bengal. Then it became East Pakistan one day and then Bangladesh. Suddenly, borders became lines they could never cross, and they found new borders everywhere, new divisions, and new homes to settle down in. They were forced to learn anew, to always look ahead, and understand the world differently.
When I read these accounts by early travellers, I sort of understood the sense of dislocation, desperation, and sheer determination my father, his cousins felt; maybe all those who leave their homes behind, unsure and uncertain, feel the same way.
You have done a number of non-fiction for children. And also, historical fiction as Aditi Kay. This is a non-fiction for adults or all age groups? Do you feel there is a difference between writing for kids and adults?
I’d think this is a book for someone who has a sense of history, of historical movements, and change, and time periods. A reader with this understanding will, I hope, appreciate this book.
About the latter half of your question, yes of course there is a difference. But a good reader enters the world the writer is creating, freely and fearlessly, and I am not sure if age decides that.
You have written both fiction and non-fiction. Which genre is more to your taste? Elaborate.
I love anything to do with history. Anything that involves research, digging into things, finding out about lives unfairly and unnecessarily forgotten. The past still speaks to us in many ways, and I like finding out these lost voices.
What is your next project? Do you have an upcoming book? Do give us a bit of a brief curtain raiser.
The second in the Maya Barton-Henry Baker series. In this one, Maya has more of a lead role than Henry. It’s set in Bombay in the winter of 1897, and the plague is making things scary and dangerous. In this time bicycles begin mysteriously vanishing… and this is only half the mystery!
Title: Epidemic Narratives: The Cultural Construction of Infectious Disease Outbreaks in India
Author: Dilip K. Das
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
After the major outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there has been a plethora of studies about epidemic narratives in different kinds of literary and visual forms. Not that the issue had not been dealt with earlier, but somehow it increased manifold times and contends with a reality that is now increasingly becoming our way of life as new infectious diseases break out and older ones resurface almost every year. Drawing from the humanities, medicine and social sciences, and using the approach of interdisciplinary studies, this non-fiction examines stories of epidemic outbreaks in India, from the late-nineteenth century to the present, in the form of fiction, film, memoir, blogs, media reports and epidemiological accounts, to show how epidemics have been represented in social understanding.
Epidemics signify a crisis in society on multiple levels. The author, who specialises in medical humanities and has been meticulously studying and teaching courses in this area for several years, realised that very little is readily available in the nature of theoretical and analytical scholarship of epidemic narratives in general and on Indian narratives in particular and so he decided to write this book.
Divided into ten chapters, the study attempts a close textual analysis and focuses on the subjective experience of people affected by the outbreak. This ranges from the emotional impact of the suffering it causes to socio-political conflicts that it brings to the fore as a collective crisis. It poses two questions: what kind of plot do they employ, and what significances do they attribute to outbreaks as complex human events?
In the first chapter, the author discusses the social understanding of epidemics using a theoretical framework drawing on Charles Rosenberg and several other theorists to show how this understanding both derives from and adds to the biomedical view of disease. It examines how, in pluralistic societies, epidemic reality is constructed through both biomedical and cosmological paradigms, leading to contrary ways of responding to it. Thus, worshipping goddesses like Sitala Mata or Corona Devi and ritualising the event in shows of solidarity exists along with scientific perspectives.
The second chapter is about the impact of pandemic on the nation as a community that imagines itself as healthy yet is vulnerable to the threat posed by pathogens and pathogenic outsiders. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the future of public health in a rapidly globalizing context depends on how nationalism and internationalism balance mutual interests. Chapters three to ten deal with specific outbreaks. The third chapter discusses two intertextual narratives of the plague outbreak Pune in 1897 which culminated in the assassination of the Plague Commissioner Walter Charles Rand. The first is the autobiography of Damodar Hari Chapekar, who was convicted and hanged for the assassination. It shows how the outbreak was constructed and framed as a political event, marking the emergence of militant nationalism and anticipating the freedom struggle. The second narrative is 22 July 1897, a film made on the same incident by Nachiket and Jayoo Patwardhan.
U. R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Samskara1is usually studied as a text that deals with the themes of caste and religious orthodoxy, the role of tradition in a modernising society, and the tension between allegory and realism. In the next chapter, Das argues that plague not only provides the inspiration for the novel and its point of departure but also serves the function of a focaliser. Samskara is about the question of social order, how a particular code of conduct becomes rigid. In this context the plague outbreak serves as a metaphor for larger social and ethical crises.
Chapter five is about Spanish flu, which broke out in Bombay in June 1918 and was rapidly carried to the rest of the country by soldiers returning from the First World War. It begins with two official reports on the flu by the assistant health officer of Bombay municipality and the sanitary commissioner of India. The author examines newspaper accounts of the outbreak and two literary narratives to show how the outbreak was variously framed as a lapse of colonial public health, a personal tragedy and a cosmological crisis. The final section of the chapter discusses the memory of the Spanish flu a hundred years later with the outbreak of COVID-19.
Chapter six deals with an outbreak of viral hepatitis, a disease that is largely endemic but has occurred intermittently in epidemic form in India in the last hundred years. The author analyses Satyajit Ray’s 1990 film Ganashatru, an adaptation of Henrick Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which is about an outbreak of infectious hepatitis in a pilgrimage town in West Bengal. Taking the main theme of asserting commitment to ethics as against manipulation of truth for personal gain, Ray changes the plot, characterisation and context of Ibsen’s story to criticise religious dogma which contradicts rationality and places at risk the health of people.
The next chapter analyses narratives of the HIV/AIDS epidemic which broke out in India in 1986. It examines a range of media articles, literary and cinematic texts and an AIDS awareness video to track changes in the social understanding of the disease and those affected by it. From the stigmatising accounts of risk groups and HIV-positive individuals that was characteristic of the early decades of the epidemic in India, the focus shifted at the turn of the century to empathy for them. The author discusses in details the first commercially released Hindi film on AIDS, Naya Zaher (New Poison,1991) directed by Jyoti Sarup, mentions two human interest stories like Ritu Sarin’s ‘The Outcast’ (1990) and Subhash Mishra’s ‘Damned to Death’ (2000), analyzes a film like Ek Alag Mausam ( A Different Season, 2003) directed by K. P. Sasi, Negar Akhavi’s anthology AIDS Sutra (2008), and Kalpana Jain’s Positive Lives (2002) where the author journeys more than 15,000 kilometers in four months in order to get an idea of the epidemic’ s scale. He also analyses movies like Phir Milenge ( We’ll meet again, 2004) directed by Revathy and Onir’s My Brother…Nikhil(2005) and examines the dialectical relation between social understanding and narrative in bringing about this change.
Aashique Abu’s Malayalam film, Virus, is a fictional reconstruction of the outbreak of the Nipah virus disease in Kerala in the summer of 2018 and deals with biomedical explanations as well as accounts of personal suffering. The eighth chapter therefore shows how the film constructs the event as the disintegration and renewal of community and as a sign of the vulnerability of human life. It also shows how the ending denies any assurance that the crisis is over and will not recur.
The recent outbreak of COVID-19 in India that resulted in a nationwide lockdown in 2020 forms the subject of the next chapter. It discusses stories of the pandemic and the lockdown in terms of the suffering they caused, the loneliness, disruption of everyday life, time-space disorientation, loss of life and livelihood, the lack of institutional support, and the precariousness that resulted from all of these. It focuses on two kinds of stories, those of personal suffering like the video Infected 2030 and the Times of India blog ‘My Covid Story’, and those of collective suffering like Vinod Kapri’s documentary 1232 KMS and the book that followed from it, 1232 km: The Long Journey Home. The lockdown following the COVID outbreak in India disproportionately affected migrant workers who lost livelihoods and were prevented by the police and the local administration from returning to the safety of their villages. The author clearly analyses how the governments were unable to deal effectively with so complex a crisis.
The last chapter attempts to explain why narrative is the genre best suited to represent the experience of epidemic, and why epidemic in turn calls forth narrative as its most suitable mode of representation. We make sense of an outbreak in two ways, as an objective event and as subjective human experience. Narratives bring out both these dimensions, by emphasising emotional responses to disease, death and suffering as well as making cognitive sense of it. The book also contains an interesting epilogue by S. Mukundan who examines a narrative poem Plague Sindhu (1924) by Anthony Pillai recording the outbreak of plague in his home district of Theni in Madras Presidency. The poem is an apt example of how an outbreak of infectious disease comes to be socially constructed in terms of both modern scientific ideas of disease-causation and traditional ideas of disease as divine punishment for wrongdoing.
As mentioned earlier Epidemic Narratives takes as its main theme Charles Rosenberg’s argument that the social reality of disease is constituted in the frames of explanation provided by biomedical, political, cultural and social ideals and practices. Das mentions that the book is about “human suffering and compassion” and it will be of interest to researchers and students of literature, cultural studies, the history of medicine and public health policy.
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Translates to ‘A Rite for a Dead Man’, a Kannada novel written in 1965 ↩︎
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan.
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