“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)
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Title: The Phantom’s Howl: Classic Tales of Ghosts and Hauntings from Bengal
Translator: Arundhati Nath
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Bengalis have always had a curious relationship with the supernatural and so stories of ghosts or bhoots are omnipresent in Bengali literature through generations. The Phantom’s Howl: Classic Tales of Ghosts and Hauntings from Bengal brings us a new collection to savour this genre once again. Written for adults and children by some of the best writers in the language, these stories have entertained generations of readers since they first appeared. Comprising eleven stories in all, from legendary authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Hemendra Kumar Roy (who contribute two stories each) to lesser-known writers like Jogeshchandra Bandyopadhyay, Niradchandra Majumdar and Amarendranath Munshi, the stories elucidate the supernatural elements in different forms. Manik Bandyopadhyay and Pramatha Chaudhuri, though well-known for writing in other genres, have also contributed their share in creating spooky tales.
Rabindranath Tagore’s immeasurable talent as a storyteller is well-known. In both Konkal (The Skeleton) where a vainglorious skeleton reminisces about her past beauty, and Kshudito Pasan (The Famished Stone), the supernatural element takes over in a slow burn and our understanding of the other-worldly is a cerebral exercise that is an interplay between emotion and intellect. Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s repertoire of ghost stories is well-known. Two of his short stories about hauntings included in this anthology are Bhoutik Palonko (The Spectral Bed) and Paitrik Bhita (Paternal Legacy), and both have an enticing and intangible everyday quality in them. In the first story we are told of a mysterious cursed bed of a Chinese man whose dissatisfied soul still lurks every night and disturbs anyone who sleeps on that bed. In the other story, the generations-owned massive homestead of Radhamohan is inhabited by the ghost of a young girl Lokkhi, who happened to be their youngest paternal aunt who died at the age of twelve and she slips in and out of his conscious memory.
Hemendra Kumar Roy is known for adapting many Western writings of his time and creating his own brand of short stories. In his Bari Buro Bhoot (The House, the Old Man, the Hunting Boots), the ghost has ‘sahebi’ chops and in Bhooter Raja (The King of Ghosts), Mr. J. Taylor is a typical British Raj prop who being posted as the Police Superintendent of Santhal Pargana, had access to encountering the bizarre after spending the night in a hunting lodge in the jungle.
Manik Bandyopadhyay’s horror stories explore the psychological underpinnings of supposed ghost sightings and examine what the mind can do to the perception of a lived experience – something that stands out in Pora Chhaya (The Singed Shadow). In a totally different vein, Pramatha Chaudhuri in First Class Bhoot (The First-Class Ghost) tells the story of a proud English ghost who creates trouble on a train from Kolkata to Kashi and it is steeped in humour.
As the translator mentions, she discovered the three lesser-known writers from the pages of the Bengali magazine Shuktara with its special collection of 101 ghost stories. In Bon Kolmir Bile (Inside the Water Spinach Forest Marsh), Amarendranath Munshi creates a ghostly ambience where the lonely spirit of a young girl forever rows its boat in the marshes. In Sanket (The Signal), we are told of two friends who land up in a remote corner of Aara district and take up residence in an old, rambling, dilapidated house and are narrowly saved after they come across an innocuous black cloth that spells danger for all who wave it. In Preter Kanna (The Phantom’s Howl), Jogeshchandra Bandyopadhyay tells us how the protagonist Debkumar was trapped motionless in a maze of indescribable fear and horror only to discover how the skeleton of a dead lady’s dissatisfied soul left her secret hideaway and then whatever happens is probably a re-enactment of reality.
Though most of the eleven stories that have been included in this collection are well-known to Bengali readers who grew up during the forties and fifties decades of the 20th century, The Phantom’s Howl is a quintessential representation of Bengal and its fascination with its many ghosts and stories of haunted houses. Basically, Arundhati Nath’s translations bring these household favourites to a new generation of readers. Most of the selected stories have undergone translation several times and even non-Bengali readers might already be familiar with some of them and therefore, for many readers they would seem like warmed up fare. In the translator’s note at the beginning of the text, Nath mentions her personal choices as she began listening to ghost and horror stories from her grandmother and reading some of them in Bangla from the books her parents bought for her as she grew up outside Bengal. So, the selection was ‘tinged with the wistfulness of memory.’ But unlike the stories of Dracula, we really do not find these stories ‘as thrilling and sometimes as spine-chilling’ as she claims them to be. At best they give us a lucid picture of the different kinds of ‘bhoots’ and some spooky tales prevalent in Bangla literature.
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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
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India is perhaps the one country where the Jews have maintained their identity without ever being exposed to antisemitism at the hands of their host. Although representing a microscopic segment of the Indian population, the Bene Israel is one of the largest and oldest of the three major Jewish communities of India, the other two being the Cochin Jews of the Malabar Coast and the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay and Calcutta. The Bene Israels arrived at the Konkan coast, shipwrecked, and have lived in India for more than 2,000 years and claim descent from the ten lost tribes of Israel. After they had settled down permanently in the Konkan villages of Western Maharashtra, the Bene Israels were called ‘Shaniwar Telis’ or Saturday oil pressers – a relatively low-caste designation – by the local population because they refrained from working on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Later, they also farmed their land, peddled produce, and took up petty jobs, with the majority working as clerks in government offices and private firms. With time, they adopted Hindu names similar to their Biblical names and took up Marathi surnames such as Rohekar, Penkar, Palkar, and Ashtamkar by adding the suffix ‘-kar’ to the villages and town they came from. They adopted Marathi, the local language, as their mother tongue, and to outsiders, became physically indistinguishable from the local population. But within the village society, the Bene Israels were clearly differentiated from others because they adhered to Judaism. Initially overtones of a caste system coloured the Bene Israelis but they changed with time. Intermarriages between other Jewish communities became common.
With the formation of the nation-state of Israel in 1948, the exodus of the Jews of India took place on a very large scale, and only a few hundred members were left in Gujarat. Initially the integration of the Bene Israels into Israeli society was not easy and many of them returned to India but re-emigrated to Israel later after 1964 when their religious status was finally accepted.
Miss Samuel: A Jewish Indian Saga is written by Sheela Rohekar, a Bene Israel Jew, who is probably the sole-living Jewish Hindi author, and she managed to recreate the distinct identity of her own community. Bearing across life histories of her ancestors, she seeks answers to those questions that troubled her in the novel. Originally written in Hindi, it is aptly translated into English for the first time by Madhu Singh, a professor of English teaching at the University of Lucknow. The novel is narrated by Miss Seema Samuel, an almost 70-year-old Bene Israel living at an old age home called Parisar on the outskirts of Pune, and it portrays her unsuccessful struggle to fit into a majoritarian Hindu society along with the plight of being an unmarried woman in India. She tells the story of her community, of their trials and tribulations, love and loss, and their longing for ‘Aliyah’ — the return to the Promised Land of Israel. Shifting from the Konkani shores to the bustling streets of Ahmedabad (called Amdavad in the local parlance), and finally to the tranquility of an old-age home, each generation of Seema’s family grapples with the tension between their Jewish faith and Indian identity, struggling with their fear of persecution on the one hand and a yearning for acceptance on the other.
In the novel, apart from giving a macrocosmic view of the Bene Israel community which makes its members victims of isolation and alienation from mainstream Indians, and depicting their ancient history and present status, Sheela Rohekar also very deftly presents the microcosmic view of the extended family of her community along with the problems of cross-cultural liaisons and the problems each individual member of her family faces. She states: “But some images embed themselves in the mind, not in the eyes, and chase you – all your life. The role of time in fusing images is not much but the trick of a fading memory. They light up in a flash!”
Since her narration spans six generations and moves deftly backwards and forwards in time, in some places it becomes difficult for the readers to keep track of who’s who in the narrative and occasionally one must go back to the family tree chart at the beginning to place the characters in their proper perspective.
Miss Seema tells the story of Isaji Eloji, who, having married a Hindu woman named Narayani, is believed to have ‘blackened’ the Jewish name. Two generations later, burdened by his grandfather’s transgression, David Reuben stops at nothing to keep his Jewish identity pure, even poisoning his daughter Lily for loving a non-Jewish man.
Again, years later, his son Samuel David (Miss Seema’s father) finds that his Jewish identity makes him an outsider in his own country; and his grandson, Bobby, faces persecution of the worst kind – when he is murdered by a mob in Ahmedabad. It is through reading the loose notes and a long essay that Bobby had left behind that Seema manages to tell us the background history of their community. With his collection of yellow, crumbling newspaper cuttings about the Jews, old coins, badges, awards, certificates, degrees, and moth-eaten black and white photographs that were around 150 years old, Bobby tried to illuminate the path taken by the fellow members of his community – the Bene Israel, the pardesi, the foreigners – whom the people of Amdavad did not know in the twentieth century and believed to be Maharashtrians or converted Christians. The story of how his brother, David, and his Hindu wife. Jyotsna Prajapati, managed to throw Seema out of their apartment in Gitanjali Society also reminds us about such machinations that prevail in our Indian society in general. Through the different tales, the narrator remains a constant, and her memories commingling the past with the present are deftly handled by the novelist.
Further, Miss Samuel becomes a key novel to understand not only for its Indian-Jewish identity but also its multicultural Indian identity and its challenges in the present time. The old age home, Parisar, is not at all a closed space and it opens to new forms of solidarity among elderly abandoned women who, though belonging to different faiths and identities, abandon their frustration with the twists of patriarchal society to discover the meaning of friendship, love and solidarity.
Seema writes: “The campus where I live is surrounded by hills. There is silence, always. I can see residents of my age, some even older, shuffle from one room to another. Constructed at a distance of two hours from Pune, all stories seem to end up here, in this building.” Parisar is thus a model of a tolerant society that not only accepts differences but even respects, maintains and transcends them at the same time. The translation is lucid, and the translator labels her endeavour as ‘interpretive performance’ and a journey beyond imaginary borders. A good read indeed.
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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
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Translated from Original Bengali by Hiranmoy Lahiri
Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay (1894 – 1950) is one of the best-known Bengali writers of the twentieth century and therefore needs no introduction. Though most of his works are largely set in rural Bengal, he didn’t receive much critical attention until 1928. Author of famous novels like Pather Panchali (1929), Aparajito (both of which inspired the famous film director Satyajit Ray make his films based on them), Chander Pahar and Aryanak, he is the also the author of several short story collections like Meghmallar (1931), Jonmo O Mrityu (1937), Kinnardal (1938), Talnabami (1944), Upolkhondo (1945), Kshanavangur (1945), and Asadharon (1946). The multifaceted nature of his short stories has invited translators to explore the different facets of this genre and till date, we find several new translated volumes of his short stories see the light of the day quite frequently.
An interesting feature of the short story is that down the centuries the genre’s changing variety made it difficult to be classified under any fixed notion. Whatever may be the subject matter, structure, or style, a short story tells a ‘story’; otherwise, readers would not read it. Whether events in their stages of development or sequential movements and logical relationships are enough for it to be considered a story have been debated so often that it is not necessary to repeat them here. We just need to remember that as far as the short story is concerned, readers have opted for it because of the beauty that lies within its compact structure, a beauty that thrills the reader when the story ends.
Now to come to this collection of Bibhutibhusan’s short stories selected and translated by Hironmoy Lahiri, a young translator and a freelance writer. Apart from the semi-autobiographical piece “How I began writing,” with which it begins, there are fifteen stories ranging from the sentimental, bizarre, thrilling, meditating, and occult where different other kinds of emotions are also expressed. Except for a couple of already translated pieces by other hands, most of the stories selected here by the debut translator have not been translated earlier and all of them are unique for their theme, style and narrative method. The stories have not been chosen on the criterion of chronology of their appearance in print or a particular theme which is usually resorted to by other translators; instead, the focus has been on the diverse nature of the author’s creative world. The volume thus includes ‘slices of life’ stories, unusual stories such as those of smugglers and dacoits, fictions of remote places and unusual personalities, and even supernatural narratives. They really provide a comprehensive view of Bibhutibhusan’s genius, and the phrase ‘kaleidoscope of life’ mentioned in the title definitely justifies this collection.
The very first story in this collection titled Upekshita, ‘The Disregarded’, is significant because it happens to be Bibhutibhusan’s first published story that appeared in the leading Bengali magazine Prabasi in 1921 and narrates the writer’s special relationship that he had developed with a village lady who took on the responsibility of taking care of his meals and looking after him. Drawn upon his personal experiences, especially during his stint as a teacher at a suburban school in Harinavi, when the myopic residents of the area misrepresented the author’s innocent nature of the relationship with the lady as a scandalous incident, it led to such misunderstanding that Bibhutibhusan eventually resigned from his school and moved to Calcutta.
‘Archaeology’ talks about a statue that mysteriously comes to life and establishes Bibhutibhusan’s interest in ghosts, the mystic and occult that is revealed in several other stories as well. Some of them are simplistic, like the story ‘Motion Picture’ that narrates the vision of seeing a lady djinn swinging outside an old house, or the sighting of the ghost of an opium seller in ‘Gangadhar’s Peril’. But there are also much more complicated ones like the very popular long story of ‘Taranath, the Tantrik’ where the protagonist is a mystic figure and practitioner of occult. With a growing fascination for tantra and tantric practices and philosophy in real life, it is said that the author had interactions with a commanding female ascetic who was a devoted follower of the Hindu goddess Kali, and she offered him words of wisdom about tantra and afterlife. The popularity of this fictional character created by Bibhutibhusan was later continued by his son Taradas Bandyopadhyay and even graphic stories continue to be created on him.
Bibhutibhusan’s penchant for exotic locations in his fiction like Chander Pahar (The Mountain of the Moon, 1937) and Moroner Donka Baje (The Death Knell, 1921) comes out clearly in the story ‘Chyalaram’s Adventure’ where a driver is recruited to help the King and his family escape from Kabul by crossing inhospitable terrain and reach India. The narrative is packed with action and thrilling escapades and Bibhutibhusan portrays Chyalaram’s brave actions and unorthodox approach to life in a positive light. As in the novels mentioned above, it expresses the author’s impressive ability to vividly and accurately describe exotic places he had never visited but write about them imaginatively, totally resting upon ‘the wings of poesy.’
In several stories, we find a delicate twist at the end of the tale, be it ‘Grandpa’s Tale’ narrating how he was forced to marry a dacoit’s daughter with a subtle touch of humour seamlessly integrated into the narrative, or ‘Not a Story’ that focuses on the danger posed by dacoits in rural Bengal at that time, where a traveller narrates the tale about a person called Satish Bagdi; or the sweet romantic ending of ‘The Suitcase Wrap’ that was inspired by an actual event when the author’s sister-in-law’s suitcase was accidentally switched on a train. This story captured the attention of readers and was eventually made into a very popular Bengali feature film called Baksho Bodol. ‘Jawharlal and God’ is a satirical tale born out of the author’s anguish and sorrow caused by the Partition of India and the tumultuous aftermath of World War II. The story was written to depict the loss of human values and how man had lost compassion and wonder for the natural world and distanced himself from God. Each of the remaining stories in this collection is unique and once again the translator needs to be congratulated for such an eclectic selection.
Providing a suitable glossary at the end, Hironmoy Lahiri has tried to stick to the original as far as possible, as well as to keep inconsistencies at bay. He has also taken particular care to maintain the essential Bengali linguistic and cultural nuances in the stories. The book will provide non-Bengali readers a good example of the quintessential Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay, who is definitely a difficult writer to translate. The stories explore several universal themes that transcend cultural boundaries and will prove to be popular with readers from different cultural backgrounds.
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Somdatta Mandal is a critic and translator and a Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Several years ago, probably around the 1990s, the critic Nilanjana S Roy had defined the current crop of Indian Writing in English novelists as a ‘Doon School-St. Stephens’ conspiracy’. It was an interesting but true observation since the writers who were popular at that time were all products of these elite institutions and were quite adept at imitating western culture and simultaneously wrote in a style that was quite polished and urban. Upamanyu Chatterjee, belonging to this category, and at present a retired Indian civil servant, had shot into fame way back in 1988 by writing a definitive urban Indian coming-of-age story with his first novel, English August: An Indian Story. Several years later in 2000, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Mammaries of a Welfare State. His seventh novel Villany focused on a new class of post-liberalisation, westernised urban Indians who were hitherto ignored in the regional as well as the English fiction of India. This meticulously crafted literary thriller, a riveting story of crime and retribution, now stands at the other end of the spectrum when we read Chatterjee’s latest novel Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (2024). Narrating the life-story of an Italian Benedictine monk Lorenzo Senesi, who is on a spiritual quest to find the meaning in life, this meticulously detailed story is based on the life of Italian Fabrizio Senesi, an acquaintance of Chatterjee in Sri Lanka for the last few years, who turned out to be “a good friend” of his and who is now a European bureaucrat and a Development expert residing in Phnom Penh leading a successful professional as well as a blissful family life. As Chatterjee states in his foreword, “It is a true story, that is to say, like many true stories, it is a work of fiction.”
Divided into nine chapters, the locale of his story moves from Italy to London and then to Bangladesh. This is how things begin. One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motor-scooter into a Fiat and breaks his forearm. It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: where he has come from, where he is going, and how to find out more about where he ought to go. When he recovers, he enrolls for a course in physiotherapy. He also joins a prayer group, and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua. Detailing this part of his life we are told how this monastery will become his home for ten years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life. The first three chapters are full of quotes from the teachings of Saint Benedictine, the different vocations that Lorenzo follows, and give us details of monastic life as led in different Catholic institutions spread throughout Italy.
In the fourth chapter titled ‘The Visitor at the Abbey’, Lorenzo listens to a talk by one Luca Rossini, a Benedictine monk native of Bergamo, who since 1976 has been staying a little over seven thousand kilometers to the east in a place called Phulbari Para near the town of Khulna in Bangladesh where he runs an ashram as a dependent of the Praglia monastery. So, after eight long years of the introspective silence of a monastery, Lorenzo decides to go to Khulna. But before that he must spend eight months in England attending English-to-Speakers of-Other-Languages courses at an Academy there, till Luca would come to pick him up and take him to Bangladesh.
Upon arriving in Dhaka, the cacophony and different aspects of an alien culture that Lorenzo faces is described very beautifully by Chatterjee in great details. He starts wearing a lungi, eating with the fingers of his right hand, washing his clothes in a public tank along with female strangers, studying Bengali in the library with Luca, and tries to acclimatise with the place, the weather, and the people as quickly as possible. Apart from praying seven times a day, he also spends a lot of time decorating the walls of the chapel with different tempura paintings.
After some time, he visits another ashram called Rishilpi run by Enzo and Laura, an Italian missionary couple in Satkhira, some sixty kilometers away. Seeing the multifarious social upliftment activities that are being undertaken at their place, Lorenzo is intrigued by the idea of worming one’s way into a community and working for its betterment from within. Though remaining a Benedictine at heart, he decides to quit the Order and continue his search for some purpose to his life.
At Rishilpi he joins as Deputy Director, Health Services, and opens a sorely needed physiotherapy clinic that would attempt to instill a little meaning in the lives of the disabled and would educate the rest in matters of hygiene, sanitation, medical care and physical well-being. After surviving quite comfortably without money for the past eleven years and living a strict, disciplined monastic life, Lorenzo gradually undergoes a change when he starts interacting with people from all strata of society. Concealing his religion within his heart, he goes on working with a missionary zeal and after some time realises that even working with women felt marvellous.
In due course, he even falls in love and proposes to Dipti, the Headmistress of the same institution, and thus an ex-priest goes on to marry an ex-nun, both remaining devout Catholics forever. They spend the six happiest years of their lives at Rishilpi, till Lorenzo realises it is also life that is holding him back. With children, his responsibilities increase, he cannot go his own way. He needs money to survive and is called upon more and more often to lecture trainees in Dhaka at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed. In this manner, he slowly broadens his acquaintance with the developing world, and becomes the ideal person to build a bridge between the first world donors and third world recipients.
In the brief concluding chapter of the book, Chatterjee tells us that if one ended Lorenzo’s story here, it is because, even though twenty-nine years have passed since his marriage and he and Dipti are alive and well in Phnom-Penh, he has not in essential changed and he is still in spirit, Benedictine. But what is most interesting is the fact that “he still continues, though, to live his life anti-clockwise, as it were, for (as we have seen) after passing his youth in search of direction for his spirit, he turned outward to the community – and to the joys and responsibilities of the domestic life – only in his mid-thirties; and it was not till his early forties that he properly set about addressing the matter of money. It is – broadly – the trajectory of the typical human life but lived in reverse.”
Chatterjee’s tour-de-force is his storytelling and imaginative prose combined with his trademark wit and attention to detail. In the acknowledgement section he thanks his friend Fabrizio Senesi for providing him innumerable clarifications about life in Italy and in Bangladesh. The long list of books that Chatterjee read and mentioned in the end provides ample proof that he undertook his research rather seriously and this is clearly reflected in the intricate details that he provides of places and people throughout the novel. The book is not a page-turner, and one must read it rather seriously to savour the meticulous effort that Chatterjee made to provide us a fascinating tale about an ordinary human being who finds that a life of service to God is enough, and that it is not enough.
Title: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Random House
More than thirty years ago, a fatwa had been declared by Ayatollah Khomeini on the famous writer Salman Rushdie. The charge of blasphemy was labelled after the publication of The Satanic Verses, and since then the author has been living in asylum at different places because he was not safe in his own country. When it was assumed that the incident had died its natural death, the simmering vendetta and violence upsurged suddenly on 12th of August 2022, when Rushdie had gone to participate in a week of events at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York titled “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home”, and an unidentified man attempted to murder him on stage with a knife.
This horrific act of violence shook the entire world. No one hoped that they would ever be able to read a single line written by the author once again. He was a totally lost case. Now, one-and-a-half years after the incident, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie writes this first-person memoir Knife where he relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery. His healing was made possible by the love and support of his present African American wife Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his readers worldwide.
Dedicating the book to the men and women who saved his life, the text is neatly divided into two parts, each containing four sections. The first half of the book titled “The Angel of Death” primarily revolves around ‘despair’, whereas the second part, “The Angel of Life,” narrates a vision of ‘hope’ and optimism and Rushdie’s attempt to return to normalcy once again with his indomitable spirit to fight on against all odds.
The opening chapter called ‘Knife’ begins with the description of a beautiful August morning in detail and how the apparent tranquility was shattered when suddenly violence appeared in the form of an unidentified man who rushed at him on the open stage and stabbed him indiscriminately. Totally flabbergasted, Rushdie obviously didn’t know what to do. So, he narrates the rest of the incidents in the form of a collage, with bits of memory pieced together with other eyewitness and news reports and tells us how that morning he “experienced both the worst and the best of human nature, almost simultaneously.” Though the incident of his attempted murder dragged “that” novel back into the narrative of scandal, Rushdie declares that till date he still felt proud of having written The Satanic Verses.
Apart from the day-by-day narration of how things shaped up after the stabbing incident, three things stand out very clearly in this memoir. First is of course the detailed description of his entire eighteen-day long stay initially at the extreme-trauma ward of the hospital and later at the rehab centre titled ‘Hamot’. Though in extreme pain we are told how doing a few simple everyday things for himself lifted his spirits greatly. So, apart from the rehab of the body, there was also the rehab of the mind and spirit. Spending more than six weeks in two hospitals, he could return to the world and so slowly he started feeling optimistic again.
The chapter called ‘Homecoming’ begins with his leaving the hospital at 3 A.M. as quietly as possible and going back home at that unearthly hour to evade any watching eyes.
Emotionally moved, even though he had lost one eye permanently, he felt “100 percent better and healthier immediately. I was home.”
The incident of homecoming is once again closely related to the second important issue during his convalescence –the love, care and bonding with his present wife Eliza. Dedicating a total chapter titled “Eliza”, Rushdie gives us details of how he met the African American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths entirely unknown to him, through the eminent American writer, Norman Mailer, and how his friendship grew stronger day by day, leading to a secret marriage based on the realisation that it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. They showed that even in this attention-addicted time, it was still possible for two people to lead, pretty openly, a happily private life till the knife incident changed everything. He tells us how the poetical sensibilities of his wife lent extra support to him in such trying times.
The third most significant aspect of this memoir is the way Rushdie devotes an entire chapter addressed to his assassin –“The A”. And it is really at its imaginative best. In it he has recorded a detailed conversation that never actually occurred between himself and “a man I met for only twenty-seven seconds of my life”. After bringing in several intertextual references about other writers and situations, about other murders being committed in the lives of different personalities, in the fourth and final session of his imaginative conversation, Rushdie states, “You don’t know me. You’ll never know me.” After the imagined conversation is over, he no longer has the energy to imagine the assassin, just as he never had the ability to imagine him. He feels that the purgation is complete, and this chapter of his life is closed once and for all.
Interestingly after half a year of nothingness, Rushdie realises that his writing juices had indeed started to flow again. During his sleepless nights at the rehab, he often thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. Talking about different occasions and purposes when the knife is used, he realized that the knife is basically a tool and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral, and it is the misuse of knives that is immoral. Then he states that language too was a knife for him, and he would use it to fight back. Here he made a resolution that instead of remaining as a mere victim, he would answer violence with art – “Hello, world, we were saying. We’re back, and after our encounter with hatred, we’re celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life.” But it was hard for him to write about post-traumatic stress disorder at any time especially when his hand felt like it was “inside a glove” and “the eye… is an absence with an immensely powerful presence.” Returning to New York after a ten-day visit to London, he therefore decided to spend the second chance of his life on just love and work. Since several Muslim entities were still celebrating his pitiable condition, he thought to make it clear to his readers that his worldview about God had not changed a bit and so he declares — “My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.”
In the final section ‘Closure?’ Rushdie writes that his own anger faded, and it felt trivial when set beside the anger of the planet. He understood that three things had happened that had helped him on his journey towards coming to terms with what had happened – namely — the passage of time, the therapy, and ultimately the writing of this book. Moving along with time, he felt he was no longer certain that he wanted, or needed, to confront and address his assassin in open court and that the “Samuel Beckett moment” no longer seemed significant at all. This is where art and love overcame all barriers. He has successfully moved on and there was no need to look backwards once again.
Written a few years ago, Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir narrated the story of how he was living a disturbed life under the pseudonym of Joseph Anton. But that memoir did not create much impact upon the readers, whereas Knife has brought back the powerful and erudite Rushdie as he has risen phoenix-like from the ashes and revealed his erudition without being parochial. Ordinary readers often shy away from his work as it is full of intertextuality and cross-references. But even those who find his writing to be too high-brow will have no problem in understanding the ‘free-associative way’ in which the mind of this writer works even today. The book is a page-turner no doubt and has brought back the popularity of Salman Rushdie once again. The simplistic yet very appealing cover of the book is an added attraction too.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The Bengali poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), is widely remembered as the fiery iconoclast who fought against the structures of oppression and orthodoxy. The iconic bidrohi or ‘rebel poet’ of Bengal, Nazrul continues to be loved for his songs and poetry that were aimed at arousing the rebellious spirit of both Hindus and Muslims alike. But what of his prose, his journalism, and his politics? Selected Essays reveals to us the extraordinary versatility of Nazrul as a writer, thinker, and activist. Addressing subjects as diverse as social reform, politics, communal harmony, environmental concerns, education, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy, this rich collection showcases Nazrul’s dynamic vision and unique use of language as an instrument of change. The essays chart his evolving consciousness as a thinker, writer, and activist, offering vivid glimpses of the ethos of his times, his relationships with leading figures such as Tagore and Gandhi, and his active engagement with social, political, and cultural processes.
Of the forty-one essays selected here, (three undated), the first thirteen are all written in different places all in the year 1920. That was the year Nazrul returned to Bengal after serving in Karachi during World War I as a member of the Bengal regiment of the colonial British army. Reacting to the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre he writes, “May the Dyer monument never allow us to forget Dyer’s memory” because on that occasion Hindus and Muslims embraced each other and wept together as brothers. They shared the same agony as children of the same womb. In ‘Strike’, he praises the social awareness that has swept among the ranks of the labouring class and believes that the “protest is not just a rebellion, but the death-bite of the suffering, moribund class”. When some migrants were fired upon after a clash with the armed police at a place called Kanchagarhi, he asked in ‘Who is Responsible for the Killing of Migrants?’, whether anyone can ever tolerate such injustice towards humanity, conscience, self-respect and independence and states that they are no longer going to passively accept such assaults. ‘Awakening Our Neglected Power’ contends that democracy or people’s power cannot be established in our country because of the oppression inflicted by the Bhadra[1] community.
There are several essays in which Nazrul speaks about the state of National Education, he envisages ‘A National University’, and in a very powerful piece that he wrote from Presidency Jail in Kolkata on 7 January 1923, titled ‘Deposition of a Political Prisoner’ he reveals his self-confidence:
“If anything has struck me as unjust, I have described it as injustice, described oppression as oppression, named falsehoods as falsehood. …For that endless mockery, insults, humiliation and assaults have been rained on me, from within my home and beyond. But nothing whatsoever has intimidated me into dishonouring my own truth or my own Lord. No temptation has overpowered me enough to compromise my integrity or to diminish the immense self-satisfaction gleaned through my own endeavours…. I repeat, I have no fear, no sorrow. I am the child of the elixir of immortality.”
Nazrul grew up in a traditional religious environment, yet in his writings he drew upon both Hindu and Islamic sources, and expressed a faith that transcended the limits of any single religion. In several essays, he harps on the problems of Hindu-Muslim amity and enmity and warns us about “this hideous business of purity of touch and untouchability”. He wants only humans to live in India as brothers and wants everyone to be wary of the terrible deceptions created by both the religions.
In the essay ‘Temple and Mosque‘, he states that both parties have the same leader, and his real name is Shaitan, the Devil. Written in response to the communal riots that broke out in Kolkata on 2 April 1926, he feels that those very same places of worship that ought to have been bridges between heaven and earth are instead causing harm to humanity today, and so those temples and mosques should be broken down. In another essay titled ‘Hindu-Muslim’, penned the same year, Nazrul talks about the question of an internal tail in human beings. He says, “There’s no telling what animal excitement lured the human mind to discover a substitute for tails in the beard or tiki[2]!” He further elaborates:
“Both Hindu and Muslim ways of life can be tolerated, but their faith in tikitwa and daritwa, the orthodox ways of tiki and beard, is not to be borne, for both instigate violence and killing. Tikitwa is not Hindutwa, it is perhaps punditwa, the way of the pundit! Likewise, the beard, too, is not Islamic, it is mullatwa, the way of the mullah. These two types of hair tufts, marked with religious dogma, are precisely the reason for all the conflict and hair-splitting we witness today!”
Though it is not possible to discuss all the different editorials, book reviews, and political pieces that are included in this collection, one must mention at least two essays that speak about literary issues as well. In 1932, Nazrul wrote for Patrika (subsequently reprinted in Bulbul the following year), an interesting piece titled ‘World Literature Today’. In it he states that there are two kinds of writers present in the world today and their different tendencies have assumed immense proportions.
“Ranged on both sides are great war heroes, champion charioteers of the battlefield. On one side are the dreamers, such as Noguchi, Yeats and Rabindranath, and on the other, Gorky, Johan Bojer, Bernard Shaw, Benavente and their ilk.”
But Nazrul’s ire in being ostracized comes out clearly in ‘A Great Man’s Love Is a Sandbank’ (1927), where he criticises the high-handedness of Rabindranath Tagore. He begins by telling us how he was a prisoner of state at the Alipore Central Jail when he was informed by the assistant jailor that Tagore had recognised Nazrul’s talent and dedicated his play Basanta to him. The other political prisoners present there had laughed at him not in joy but in incredulity. For him, the blessing turned into a curse. His very close friends and state prisoners also turned away from him. He realised what massive internal damage this outward gain had caused him. Busy with his political agenda, he didn’t have the time to sit and meditate as advised several times by Tagore. So Nazrul writes, “I find that the brighter my countenance shines in this glory, the darker some other famous poets’ faces seem to appear.” He mentions that he had grown accustomed to police torture but when literary personages begin to torment one, their brutality knows no bounds. “Alas, O youthful new literature!” His crime was that young people celebrated his work. He laments further,
“That Kabiguru[3], revered by both parties like the grandsire Bhisma, should assent to this plot of killing Abhimanyu, is the greatest sorrow of our times. …As for me, I have discarded that topi–pyjama—sherwani–beard look[4], only out of fear of being mocked as a ‘Mia Saheb’. But still there is no respite for me…. Now we get the feeling that the Rabindranath of today is not the same Rabindranath we have always known.”
That the trajectories and beliefs of Tagore and Nazrul went in the opposite direction is well- known. In the essay, Nazrul then further continues his complaints against Tagore. He questions whether they have been considered as his enemies, simply because they didn’t go to him frequently. Also, since the goddess of wealth blessed him, Kabiguru did not know what dire poverty the new writers had to struggle against, languishing in conditions of starvation or semi-starvation. So, he humbly requests Kabiguru not to sprinkle salt on their wounds by mocking the impoverishment that is their singular affliction, for that is one form of heartlessness that they cannot tolerate.
Of the last three essays written in 1960, namely, ‘The Science of Life’(where men “are surrounded by all sorts of travails and sufferings, and many of them cannot be alleviated”), ‘A Point to Ponder’(where the nation faces an immense problem regarding the dispute about the instructions and procedure for the worship of the mother, the Bharatmata, our Mother India) and in ‘What We Need Today’, Nazrul speaks of the necessity of a “vast tumult in India”. Making his readers aware of the vast duplicity and trickery in the name of religion, he warns that unless one avoids the baseness of being subjugated by an external power, there is no prospect of heaven for us, only the grotesqueness of hell. He wants the kalboishakhi, the wild summer storm, to “approach in all its fury, rearing his head like a hooded serpent swimming in the unchecked torrents of an ocean of blood” and sweep everything away.
Before concluding one should also make a few comments on the translation. As a veteran translator, Radha Chakravarty, has successfully managed to transcreate some very difficult Bengali idioms, cultural nuances and analogies that Nazrul used in some of his essays. As she admitted in the Introduction, “[T]ranslating Nazrul’s prose proved to be a challenge, as demanding as it was exhilarating. …The endeavour demanded experiment and creativity rather than mechanical lexical ability and involved some difficult choices…Literal translation has been avoided, with greater focus on the sense, emotion, intellectual import, rhetorical features and stylistic particularities of the Bengali source texts.” She further adds that the present translations stemmed from a desire to bring Nazrul’s essays to a contemporary audience in South Asia and the rest of the world, to draw attention to his literary achievement as well as his significance as a writer, thinker, activist, and visionary. Though a lot of research and translation projects on Nazrul has been going on in Bangladesh for quite some time (where he holds the status of National Poet), in India, especially in West Bengal, the response is still rather lukewarm. Hence this volume is strongly recommended as a collector’s item.
[1] Literally decent but here indicates the bourgeoisie.
In conversation with Radha Chakravarty about her debut poetry collection, Subliminal, published by Hawakal Publishers
Radha Chakravarty
Words cross porous walls In the house of translation— Leaf cells breathe new air.
We all know of her as a translator par excellence. But did you know that Radha Chakravarty has another aspect to her creative self? She writes poetry. Chakravarty’s poetry delves into the minute, the small objects of life and integrates them into a larger whole for she writes introspectively. She writes of the kantha — a coverlet made for a baby out of soft old sarees, of her grandmother’s saree, a box to store betel leaves… Her poetry translates the culture with which she grew up to weave in the smaller things into the larger framework of life:
Fleet fingers, fashioning silent fables, designed to swaddle innocent infant dreams, shielding silk-soft folds of newborn skin from reality’s needle-pricks, abrasive touch of life in the raw.
--'Designs in Kantha’
She has poignant poems about what she observes her in daily life:
At the traffic light she appears holding jasmine garlands selling at your car window for the price of bare survival, the promise of a love she never had, her eyes emptied of the fragrance of a spring that, for her, never came.
--‘Flower Seller’
Some of her strongest poems focus on women from Indian mythology. She invokes the persona of Sita and Ahalya — and even the ancient legendary Bengali woman astrologer and poet, Khona. It is a collection which while exploring the poet’s own inner being, the subliminal mind, takes us into a traditional Bengali household to create a feeling of Bengaliness in English. At no point should one assume this Bengaliness is provincial — it is the same flavour that explores Bosphorus and Mount Everest from a universal perspective and comments independently on the riots that reft Delhi in 2020… where she concludes on the aftermath— “after love left us and hate filled the air.”
The poems talk to each other to create a loose structure that gives a glimpse into the mind of the poetic persona — all the thoughts that populate the unseen crevices of her being.
In Subliminal, her debut poetry book, Radha Chakravarty has brought to us glimpses of her times and travels from her own perspective where the deep set tones of heritage weave a nostalgic beam of poetic cadences. Chakravarty’s poems also appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Mahasweta Devi 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.
In this conversation, Radha Chakravarty delves deeper into her poetry and her debut poetry book, Subliminal.
Your titular poem ‘Subliminal’ is around advertisements on TV. Tell us why you opted to name your collection after this poem.
Most of the poems in Subliminal are independent compositions, not planned for a pre-conceived anthology. But when I drew them together for this book, the title of the poem about TV advertisements appeared just right for the whole collection, because my poetry actually delves beneath surfaces to tease out the hidden stories and submerged realities that drive our lives. And very often, those concealed truths are startlingly different from outward appearances. I think much of my poetry derives its energy from the tensions between our illusory outer lives and the realities that lurk within. In ‘Memories of Loss’, for example, I speak of beautiful things that conceal painful stories:
In a seashell held to the ear the murmur of a distant ocean
In the veins of a fallen leaf the hint of a lost green spring
In the hiss of logs in the fire, the sighing of wind in vanished trees
In the butterfly’s bold, bright wings, The trace of silken cocoon dreams
So, when and why did you start writing poetry?
I can’t remember when I started. I think I was always scribbling lines and fragments of verse, without taking them seriously. Poetry for me was the mode for saying the unsayable, expressing what one was not officially expected to put down in words. In a way, I was talking to myself, or to an invisible audience. Years later, going public with my poems demanded an act of courage. The confidence to actually publish my poems came at the urging of friends who were poets. Somehow, they assumed, or seemed to know from reading my published work in other forms, that I wrote poetry too.
Did being a translator of great writers have an impact on your poetry? How?
Yes, definitely. In particular, translating Tagore’s Shesher Kabita(as Farewell Song), his verses for children, the lush, lyrical prose of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Kapalkundala) and the stylistic experiments of contemporary Bengali writers from India and Bangladesh (in my books Crossings: Stories from India and Bangladesh, Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices, Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices and Vermillion Clouds) sensitised me to the way poetic language works, and how the idiom, rhythm and resonances change when you translate from one language to another. Translating poetry has its challenges, but it also refined my own work as a poet. Let me share a few lines of poetry from Farewell Song, my translation of Tagore’s novel Shesher Kabita:
Sometime, when you are at ease, When from the shores of the past, The night-wind sighs, in the spring breeze, The sky steeped in tears of fallen bakul flowers, Seek me then, in the corners of your heart, For traces left behind. In the twilight of forgetting, Perhaps a glimmer of light will be seen, The nameless image of a dream. And yet it is no dream, For my love, to me, is the truest thing …
What writers, artists or musicians have impacted your poetry?
For me, writing is closely associated with the love for reading. Intimacy with beloved texts, and interactions with poets from diverse cultures during my extensive travels, has proved inspirational.
Poetry is also about the art of listening. As a child I loved the sound, rhythm and vivacity of Bengali children’s rhymes in the voice of my great-grandmother Renuka Chakrabarti. She has always been a figure of inspiration for me, a literary foremother who dared to aspire to the world of words at a time when women of her circle were not allowed to read and write. A child bride married into a family of erudite men, and consumed by curiosity about the forbidden act of reading, she took to hiding under her father-in-law’s four-poster bed and trying to decipher the alphabet from newspapers. One day he caught her in the act. Terrified, she crept out from her hiding place, and confessed to the ‘crime’ of trying to read. Things could have gone badly for her, but her father-in-law was an enlightened individual. He understood her craving to learn, and promised that he would teach her to read and write. Under his tutelage, and through her own passion for learning, she became an erudite woman, equally proficient in English and Bengali, an accomplished but unpublished poet whose legacy I feel I have inherited. Subliminal is dedicated to her.
As a child I absorbed both Bengali and English poetry through my pores because in our home, poetry, and music were all around me. I was inspired by Tagore and Nazrul, but also by modern Bengali poets such as Jibanananda Das, Sankho Ghosh and Shamsur Rahman. In my college days, as a student of English Literature, I loved the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Romantics.
Later, I discovered the power of women’s poetry: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, to name a few. I am fascinated by the figure of Chandrabati, the medieval Bengali woman poet who composed her own powerful version of the Ramayana. Art and music provide a wellspring of inspiration too, for poetry can have strong visual and aural dimensions.
You translate from Bengali into English. How is the process of writing poetry different from the process of translation, especially as some of your poetry is steeped in Bengaliness, almost as if you are translating your experiences for all of us?
Translation involves interpreting and communicating another author’s words for readers in another language. Writing poetry is about communicating my own thoughts, emotions and intuitions in my own words. Translation requires adherence to a pre-existing source text. When writing poetry, there is no prior text to respond to, only the text that emerges from one’s own act of imagination. That brings greater freedom, but also a different kind of challenge. Both literary translation and the composition of poetry are creative processes, though. Mere linguistic proficiency is not enough to bring a literary work or a translated text to life.
English is not our mother tongue. And yet you write in it. Can you explain why?
Having grown up outside Bengal, I have no formal training in Bengali. I was taught advanced Bengali at home by my grandfather and acquired my deep love for the language through my wide exposure to books, music, and performances in Bengali, from a very early age. I was educated in an English medium school. At University too, I studied English Literature. Hence, like many others who have grown up in Indian cities, I am habituated to writing in English. I translate from Bengali, but write and publish in English, the language of my education and professional experience. Bengali belongs more to my personal, more intimate domain, less to my field of public interactions.
Both Bengali and English are integral to my consciousness, and I guess this bilingual sensibility often surfaces in my poetry. In many poems, such as ‘The Casket of Secret Stories,’ ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘In Search of Shantiniketan’, Bengali words come in naturally because of the cultural matrix in which such poems are embedded. ‘The Casket of Secret Stories’ is inspired by vivid childhood memories of my great-grandmother’s daily ritual of rolling paan, betel leaves stuffed with fragrant spices, and arranging them in the metal box, her paaner bata[1]. When she took her afternoon nap, my cousins and I would steal and eat the forbidden paan from the box, and pretend innocence when she woke up and found all her paan gone. Of course, from our red-stained teeth and lips, she understood very well who the culprits were. But she never let on that she knew. It was only later, after I grew up, that I realised what the paan ritual signified for the housebound women of her time:
In the delicious telling, bright red juice trickling from the mouth, staining tongue and teeth, savouring the covert knowledge of what life felt like in dark corners of the home’s secluded inner quarters, what the world on the outside looked like from behind veils, screens, barred windows and closed courtyards where women’s days began and ended, leaving for posterity this precious closed kaansha* casket, redolent with the aroma of lost stories
*Bronze
But I don’t agree that all my poetry is steeped in Bengali. In fact, in most of my poems, Bengali expressions don’t feature at all, because the subjects have a much wider range of reference. As a globe trotter, I have written about different places and journeys between places.
Take ‘Still’, which is about Mount Everest seen from Nagarkot in Nepal. Or ‘Continental Drift’, about the Bosphorus ferry that connects Asia with Europe. Such poems reflect a global sensibility. My poems on the Pandemic are not coloured by specific Bengali experiences. They have a universal resonance. I contributed to Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem (Muse Pie Press, USA), a collaborative effort to which poets from many different countries contributed their lines. It was a unique composition that connected my personal experience of the Pandemic with the diverse experiences of poets from other parts of the world. The poem was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I guess my poems explore the tensions between rootedness and a global consciousness.
What are the themes and issues that move you?
I tend to write about things that carry a strong personal charge, but also connect with general human experience. My poems are driven by basic human emotions, memory, desire, associations, relationships, and also by social themes and issues. Specific events, private or public, often trigger poems that widen out to ask bigger questions arising from the immediate situation.
Sometimes, poetry can also become for me what T. S. Eliot calls an “escape from personality,” where one adopts a voice that is not one’s own and assume a different identity. ‘The Wishing Tree’ and the sequence titled ‘Seductions’ work as “mask” poems, using voices other than my own. This offers immense creative potential, similar to creating imaginary characters in works of fiction.
There are a lot of women-centred poems in Subliminal. Consider, for example, ‘Designs in Kantha’, ‘Alien’, ‘River/Woman’, ‘That Girl’, ‘The Severed Tongue’ and ‘Walking Through the Flames’. These poems deal with questions of voice and freedom, the body and desire, and the legacy of our foremothers. Some of them are drawn from myth and legend, highlighting the way women tend to be represented in patriarchal discourses.
The natural world and our endangered planet form another thematic strand. I am fascinated by the hidden layers of the psyche, and the unexpected things we discover when we probe beneath the surface veneer of our exterior selves. My poems are also driven by a longing for greater connectivity across the borders that separate us, distress at the growing hatred and violence in our world, and an awareness of the powerful role that words can play in the way we relate to the universe. ‘Peace Process’, ‘After the Riot’ and ‘Borderlines’ express this angst.
How do you use the craft of poetry to address these themes?
Poetry is the art of compression, of saying a lot in very few words. Central to poetry is the image. A single image can carry a welter of associations and resonances, creating layers of meaning that would require many words of explanation in prose. Poems are not about elaborations and explanations. They compel the reader to participate actively in the process of constructing meaning. Reading poetry can become a creative activity too. Poems are also about sound, rhythm and form. I often write “in form” because the challenge of working within the contours of a poetic genre or form actually stretches one’s creative resources. In Subliminal, I have experimented with some difficult short forms, such as the Fibonacci poem, the Skinny, and the sonnet. Take, for instance, the Skinny poem called ‘Jasmine’:
Remember the scent of jasmine in the breeze? Awakening tender memories bittersweet, awakening buried dormant desires, awakening, in the breeze, the forgotten promise of first love. Remember?
The last two lines of the poem use the same words as the beginning, but to tell a different story. The form demands great economy.
I pay attention to the sound, and even when writing free verse, I care about the rhythm. Endings are important. Many of my poems carry a twist in the final lines. I mix languages. Bengali words keep cropping up in my English poems.
Are your poems spontaneous or pre-meditated?
The first attempt is usually spontaneous, but then comes the process of rewriting and polishing, which can be very demanding. Some poems come fully formed and require no revision, but generally, I tend to let the first draft hibernate for some time, before looking at it afresh with a critical eye. Often, the final product is unrecognisable.
Which is your favourite poem in this collection and why? Tell us the story around it.
It is hard to choose just one poem. But let us consider ‘Designs in Kantha’, one of my favourites. Maybe the poem is important to me because of the old, old associations of the embroidered kantha with childhood memories of the affection of all the motherly women who enveloped us with their loving care and tenderness. Then came the gradual realisation, as I grew into a woman, of all the intense emotions, the hidden lives that lay concealed between those seemingly innocent layers of fabric. The kantha is a traditional cultural object, but it can also be considered a fabrication, a product of the creative imagination, a story that hides the real, untold story of women’s lives in those times. Behind the dainty stitches lie the secret tales of these women from a bygone era. My poem tries to bring those buried emotions to life.
As a critic, how would you rate your own work?
I think I must be my own harshest critic. Given my academic training, it is very hard to silence that little voice in your head that is constantly analysing your creative work even as you write. To publish one’s poetry is an act of courage. For once your words enter the public domain, they are out of your hands. The final verdict rests with the readers.
Are you planning to bring out more books of poems/ translations? What can we expect from you next?
More poems, I guess. And more translations. Perhaps some poems in translation. My journey has taken so many unpredictable twists and turns, I can never be quite sure of what lies ahead. That is the fascinating thing about writing.
Borderless 