A 'Tomb Of Sand' Moment: How Translation's Big Break Is Coming To India

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The history of translating into English goes as far back as the history of Indian English publishing (please read R Sivapriya바카라™s recent article), but one must take note of the recent developments in the industry. As someone who started her commissioning role in 2018 at HarperCollins India with two unusual books (centred around translation and poetry): Sampurna Chattarji바카라™s translation of Joy Goswami바카라™s prose poems and Aditi Angiras & Akhil Katyal바카라™s edited volume of queer poetry, what is most exciting for me to observe and contribute to is the surge that we바카라™re seeing in publishing contemporary books in translation. Most publishing houses are making space not just for the canonical, or for authors who have been conferred with lifetime achievement awards, but also for writers who are in the early stages of their careers. Take Jayasree Kalathil바카라™s translation of Moustache by S Hareesh, for example, which won the JCB Prize in 2020 and was the writer바카라™s first novel (though not his first book), or the forthcoming Valli by Sheela Tommy (also translated by Kalathil), the author바카라™s debut novel originally published as recently as 2019. The shift from publishing only classics to more contemporary books means that trailblazing writers like Perumal Murugan, K R Meera, Manoranjan Byapari, Vivek Shanbhag (to name a few) are not obscure figures anymore; they appear on the same shelf as Arundhati Roy or Amitav Ghosh when readers around the world imagine a 바카라˜contemporary Indian novel바카라™. 

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This is primarily thanks to translators who serve as curators and are eager to showcase the here-and-now of the languages they work in. As commissioning editors, we often ask them: who else are we missing out on? Notable also, the contribution of the literary agencies in India: agents equip translators with the practical know-how they need to navigate the cogs and wheels of trade publishing and are also increasingly starting to represent writers who don바카라™t write in English. This will hopefully, eventually, even out hierarchies of languages and regions. Even in the classics-in-translation publishing microcosm, it바카라™s reassuring to see the spotlight at times move over lesser represented languages and genres: we recently published a bilingual edition of Nanak Singh바카라™s Khooni Vaisakhi in Navdeep Suri바카라™s translation 바카라“ a protest poem in Punjabi from 1920 banned by the British Raj, and Harimohan Jha바카라™s 1938 Maithili novel Kanyadan in Lalit Kumar바카라™s translation is forthcoming from Harper Perennial India, the country바카라™s first imprint dedicated to translations. Colleagues elsewhere have admirably published gems like Manipuri writer Binodini바카라™s The Princess and the Political Agent and 13 Years, the 1970s prison diaries of Ramachandra Singh.

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Translation바카라™s big break in India possibly came fifteen years ago, with Shankar바카라™s Chowringhee translated by Arunava Sinha. In more recent times, we were lucky to witness another watershed moment with the unprecedented success of Vivek Shanbag바카라™s Ghachar Ghochar in Srinath Perur바카라™s translation. A few other recent milestones: in 2018, the DSC Prize went to Jayant Kaikini and Tejaswini Niranjana for No Presents Please, and the beautiful streak of translated novels that have won three out of the four JCB Prizes for Literature (personally, I바카라™m rooting for Malayalam books to follow the footsteps of translated Korean literature and have a worldwide wave very soon). But even then, the caveat must be added: awards such as the JCB or the DSC have not resulted in a lauded book becoming an overnight bestseller. Perhaps, as new copyeditors are advised, consistency and patience are key. 

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An interlude here to address the elephant in the room: it바카라™s 2022 and we바카라™re still waiting for Western validations to gauge our success! Here바카라™s my simple opinion as someone painfully aware of book sales numbers: while we are free to debate the colonial gaze ad infinitum, our books absolutely need awards and validations from wherever possible. In India, the English-language book market is very small, still evolving and still very volatile. Most literary books, therefore, have a very short life span (and you don바카라™t need me to tell you why we can바카라™t expect to see reading-to-think-or-gain-perspective to be anyone바카라™s priority in our country anytime soon). So, let it take a Booker for an author to become a household name, let it take any and all international honours because it simply means that more copies of the book will be printed somewhere; the story will have another chance to land up in a reader바카라™s hand who might not have known they needed it; maybe it will travel to unlikely places, to libraries, and be further translated (the challenges of selling rights of books that have originated in India is a story for another day), our books deserve to land up in places where reading books is not a privileged activity. And who can discount the prize money because as long as literary books are produced and expected to be consumed in the marketplace like straightforward commercial products, writers and translators will need multiple sources of income to sustain their creative practices. 

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At an editing-South-Asian-books-in-translation workshop organized by the Commonwealth Foundation in 2020, I had asked my UK counterpart how they signed up new translators. They answered that they often got in touch with the 바카라˜emerging바카라™ translators who had been awarded well-known national grants and fellowships, or they would scout new talent via the various university MA in Translation circuits. And I thought, wouldn바카라™t it be nice for translators in India to have as many spaces to cultivate their art in less lonely ways. Fast-forward to mid-2022, and the good news is that many opportunities are indeed opening up: the NIF Translation grant, Navayana바카라™s Dalit History Fellowship, Ahmedabad University바카라™s diploma under the aegis of Tejaswini Niranjana (with scholarships sponsored by JCB foundation), new translation centres at Ashoka and Azim Premji universities, Jadavpur University Press and their various initiatives into print cultures, translation workshops organized by Sangam House. Following these welcome initiatives, I hope we do our bit to give literary translations the gift of time: time to translate well, time to actually edit manuscripts, time to market these books well, time to engage with 바카라˜difficult바카라™ or long books, and also make space for them: space in the mysterious world of algorithms, prime space in bookstores and airports, space on the front covers for naming translators, space on glamourous lit-fest stages, space for real book reviews. In the language of the marketplace, the words 바카라˜time바카라™ and 바카라˜space바카라™ can be roughly translated as capital.

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Last Friday, when I congratulated my friend Saba Ahmed, editor at Tilted Axis Press (the UK publisher of Tomb of Sand) after the prize announcement, she messaged back a beautiful sentiment: 바카라˜I feel like we are sharing it with all of Indian publishing.바카라™ So, here바카라™s hoping that all of the Indian publishing (an ecosystem which includes our small clutch of readers) remembers this moment as possible to be repeated and not as something to be filed away under 바카라˜anomaly바카라™ after the news cycle. I sincerely hope we do not forget this moment in publishing history (even though lately we바카라™ve become a very forgetful nation) and the impact that books 바카라“ literary books in translation specifically 바카라“ can have on the world. 

(Sohini Basak is a writer and editor with HarperCollins. She is currently based out of Barrackpore.)