Translating Rituparno Ghosh
It is now 12 years and counting바카라though sometimes one forgets. The morning telephone calls are a forgotten memory바카라any call at 7 am signals family emergencies, not a script crisis. Rituparno and I had been comrades and colleagues ever since we met over a potato chip campaign. Well, it was his campaign and my translation of it, a tongue-twisting rendition of the Bengali he had conjured.
I didn바카라t realise then that that was how the relationship was going to go바카라his Bengali and my English side by side. Rituparno was in Response at that time: star Bengali writer, Ram Ray바카라s favourite and monarch of all he surveyed from silver betel boxes to books. He wrote the Boroline pujo advertisements and after a while I started turning them into English, following him to Kumartuli since he felt that I needed to be inducted into Bengali culture.
Running parallel to this was my work for his feature film scripts바카라I would sit at a spare computer in Response translating from his scrawls with great difficulty since I did not read Bengali handwriting easily. It wasn바카라t subtitles then바카라those came later바카라it was script translations to be sent to Bombay producers.
The seasons changed faster than one could imagine바카라films followed films바카라Hirer Angti, Chokher Bali, Dahan, Dosar and suddenly, Rituparno was the 바카라maverick director바카라, a brand in his own right. And my phone rang twice, thrice or four times every morning as the scripts and the subtitles followed.
Subtitles, regardless of YouTube, remain a confusing issue to many people. 바카라Who writes them?바카라 someone asked. 바카라Do you?바카라
Ram Ray told me that subtitles were rather infra dig where I was concerned. However, minus articles, with Rituparno scolding me for my overly memsahib English that was certain to fox foreign film festival organisers, the subtitles I translated from his Bengali were fitted frame to frame and I would sit in the edit suite whenever it was necessary. From scrawls, the screenplays started reaching me in typed form, and I treated them casually thinking that there would be more to come.
The End Came Too Soon
Rituparno had got to the phase where he felt he needed a Marie Seton though he wasn바카라t exactly sure whether I would fit the bill. I had never been to a shoot after all, barring popping in for a single scene of Hirer Angti with Moon Moon Sen in it. I was threatened with Amitabh Bachchan at one point when The Last Lear was in progress, but crowds made the situation impossible and Bachchan was filmed at a spot the media termed an 바카라unknown location바카라, which I knew was somewhere behind Navina Cinema. I suggested putting together a book of all the translation work that I had been doing for him and he sniffed바카라바카라There바카라s more to my work than translation!바카라 Which was true but I felt that it needed to be out there, failing that definitive biography which someone would have to write and I would have to rewrite knowing the way things went.
In the end of course it was something else altogether. A phone call in the middle of a bout of viral fever sent me running to Rituparno바카라s home in Indrani Park, streaming sweat, to find him lying still and more peaceful than I had ever seen him. That he had been ill I knew바카라pancreatitis, bad film shoot food and the fallout of hormone tinkering바카라but this went beyond expectations. The scripts, the phone calls and the clash of ideas were all over and there was no one to answer any questions I might have on shoots to cobble together a biography.
Immortalised in Print
I collated the scripts and subtitles that I had, along with translations of poems and abandoned work like a screenplay for the Princely Imposter, and sent feverish proposals to the University presses abroad that I knew specialised in film studies. The only problem was that Rituparno had not given himself time to become Satyajit Ray and that was exactly the reply I received. However, the work needed to be preserved before the files were lost바카라Madhuchhanda Karlekar who had translated enough of his scripts for another volume바카라had her hard disc crash effectively, obliterating all her work. With that as a cautionary tale, I turned closer home to Jadavpur University Press바카라Jadavpur had been his alma mater after all. Translating for Rituparno, all 1.5 kilos of it, came out last year on his birthday in August, three years after I had sent it in.
As for my subtitles in actual form, I met them recently, watching Chokher Bali at a film club and found them almost unrecognisable. AI combined with the Hoichoi app had struck.
Anjana Basu is a Kolkata-based advertising consultant and author. Her recent works include the Jim Corbett children바카라s series and Translating for Rituparno
This article is part of Outlook Magazine's June 11, 2025 issue, 'Living on the Edge', which explores India바카라s fragile borderlands and the human cost of conflict. It appeared in print as 'Translators diary.'
