An unfortunate reality is that every language has great writers who have faded from the collective memory; either they fell out of favour, or their writing spoke only to their time, or perhaps they practiced on the margins, and their work never made it beyond a small readership. Difficulties in categorising a writer’s work is especially likely to put them in peril—writing that doesn’t fit neatly into one particular genre or tradition is easier to overlook than to perpetually seek its niche. And when these writings are forgotten, a small miracle needs to occur for them to be rediscovered again.
For the first time, English language readers will have the opportunity to read forgotten Hindi writers thanks to a new and, arguably, miraculous series from Seagull Books, based in Kolkata. First to be published are short story collections by Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, names which may be unfamiliar to readers in their native India, let alone to readers beyond. Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar will be released in Fall 2020, and Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due for release in early 2021.
To understand what was lost and what has been gained with these new translations, I asked translator Saudamini Deo why we should refresh the collective memory by reviving the work of Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, and what it means for the English-speaking world to have access to their work for the first time.
—Tristan Foster, June 2020
Tristan Foster (TF): Your translations of short story collections by Bhuwaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary are forthcoming from Seagull Books, with translations of work by other forgotten Hindi writers to follow. How did the series come about?
Saudamini Deo (SD): Last year, I wrote a series of articles published by Scroll.in about forgotten Hindi writers. Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books read those articles, and graciously offered to publish some of these writers as a part of their Hindi series under their India list. Neither Bhuwaneshwar nor Rajkamal Chaudhary has ever been translated into English before, which is indicative of a larger pattern: Hindi literature rarely gets translated.
TF: I want to talk first of Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar. His narratives are rhythmic, dreamy, and brutally pessimistic. The story “Wolves” tells of a caravan being chased by a pack of wolves in the night; girls are thrown off to lighten the load and stop the attack. In “Sun worship,” he writes: “This is hell, doctor, hell! A colony of the dead. This bustling city is a colony of the dead . . . Imagine that rain dissolves this place like a load of cow dung. But it will not make any difference in the world.” This harshness is even occasionally acknowledged—in “Alas, Human Heart,” the narrator discusses the carefree life he lived with friends, playing card games and going on hikes, all of them optimistic because “no one had yet had a break to look life in the eye.” The Bhuwaneshwar story looks death square in the eye. What was your experience immersing yourself in his world?
SD: As with most experiences, it was both strange and not strange. It was the first time that I was translating him, but I have been reading him forever—I wrote a paper on him during my master’s degree. So, I knew what I was getting into—I already knew the brutal pessimism and the omnipresent death in his work. What was new to me were the moments of tender insight and human ambivalence. In the story “Wolves,” right before the father is about to jump off of the caravan amidst wolves, he takes off the new shoes he is wearing and instructs his son to sell them (dead men’s shoes are never worn). I thought about this little detail for a long time. A man about to kill himself thinking about his shoes. In the story “Freedom: A Letter,” a single mother describes her life in a hill station hospital (she is a doctor) and the story is not dramatic, nothing happens, and in the end she just writes, “What is this thing called freedom? Nothing can be known about it without acquiring and using it.” It is especially moving because of its simple truth. It also acquires a political meaning considering Bhuwaneshwar was writing in pre-independence India, and he seems ambivalent about the idea of freedom itself, not necessarily politically—the idea of freedom as the ultimate harbinger of hope. Freedom can change everything except human nature. We are witnessing this in India right now. In any case, I can’t think of anything more symbolic of our times than wolves constantly chasing us. I think I emerged out of my immersion in his work with the feeling that perhaps we are all already immersed in Bhuwaneshwar’s world.
TF: It is clear from his stories that Bhuwaneshwar was a watcher of others, with his stories seeking to break down social myths. Maybe this is what Premchand—one of the foremost writers of early twentieth century Hindi literature—meant when he wrote, “Bhuwaneshwar has brought to light our secrets, our perversions with such brutality that one is scared to look at them.” As if these secrets were too much to bear, Bhuwaneshwar went mad, becoming a vagabond and eventually disappearing off the face of the earth. Does his madness diminish his work and his truth-seeking, or simply reinforce it?
SD: Lawrence Durrell writes that witnessing someone’s madness also shakes one’s hold on one’s own grasp of reality—we realize how precariously we manage. So, madness is not something far off from everyday life or something strange, all of us are much closer to it than we would like to admit. Then, of course, thinking about Bhuwaneshwar particularly, there is a detail of his life I came across recently that I did not know before: after he ran out of money, he started living with a friend and his brother in Lucknow. The friend moved to Delhi due to a job but kept sending money back to both of them. Then one evening Bhuwaneshwar’s friend’s brother ran out of the house screaming, and when he was found a few days later, he had to be shifted to a mental asylum in Agra where he spent the rest of his life. Soon after, Bhuwaneshwar started living on the streets and went mad, too. Why did both of them go mad at almost the same time? There is no answer to this, but I wonder about it. I think people we call mad know secrets we do not know. In that, his madness reinforces his work, infusing it with another reality that we know exists but are unable to grasp.
TF: In 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Eliot Weinberger writes: “In its way a spiritual exercise, translation is dependent on the dissolution of the translator’s ego: an absolute humility towards the text.” You too seem to share this idea: in your introduction to Wolves and Other Short Stories, you link the act of translation with séance, drawing similarities between communing with spirits and lifting a story from one language into another. Why is this the analogy that comes to mind for you?
SD: I think writing is a technology that lets us contact the dead. I find it incredible that I can access what went on inside someone’s mind thousands of years ago with the help of alphabets and signs. In a séance, which are sessions to call spirits, medium performs that role of contact point between two worlds. When I started translating, I felt like I was a medium in a séance—the original is the spirit that is communicating through me. A translator is that point of bodily contact between two languages, two worlds.
TF: Rajkamal Chaudhary is a different writer to Bhuwaneshwar altogether. Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories also looks at the everyday, but exchanges pessimism for a refined and sober realism. I want to put an idea to you: Chaudhary is a modern writer in that he turns the mundane into the epic, drawing attention to the minutiae of the everyday, the grain of detail or the flicker of a mood, which gives his narratives richness and a life entirely of their own. Does this match your feelings?
SD: Yes, he is very different from Bhuwaneshwar. Every time I read a Rajkamal Chaudhary story, I come away with the feeling of having watched a montage or a Godard film. It’s very nouvelle vague, which is interesting because Chaudhary and Godard were working in the same era. He is also writing in a different India, newly independent and more modern.
TF: In “A Man in Anger,” Chaudhary writes: “Our country has become progressive in every direction. Plans are made. New cities with factories and high-offices are made. Man is not like he was before. Clothes as well as the piece of flesh hidden inside have changed.” This quote seems useful in that the protagonist has this reflection, yet Chaudhary himself is interested in moments which are culturally loaded, everything from a house call to friends meeting to a brothel visit. It seems that he found drama in the tug of war between the old and the new, the cultural and the personal. How relevant are these stories to India in the twenty-first century, which has changed even further?
SD: What is the saying, “the more things change, the more they remain the same”? Chaudhary’s quintessential protagonist is an intelligent, educated young person (man or woman) disillusioned with society. Chaudhary’s characters’ reality swings between the privileged and the unprivileged India, and their bold as well as timid interactions with their surrounding society—interactions often complicated by financial and social concerns—bring them to the stark realization that there is no neat resolution to the meaninglessness they feel, and in order to survive, they must get used to the absurd horror of life. I think this perfectly encapsulates twenty-first century Indian existence. Indeed, I think it perfectly encapsulates twenty-first century earthly existence. Any work, I think, that deals with the essence of human existence will remain contemporary and modern forever. Greek tragedies were written thousands of years ago but sometimes they seem more relevant than a novel that was published last month.
TF: It is dangerous to couple Bhuwaneshwar and Chaudhary for any other reason than the fact they are the first two writers to be featured in Seagull’s new Hindi series. But both writers lived tumultuous lives, shirking norms and not consistently aligning themselves with the literary movements of their time. Is there a cultural element to their rejection or is there more to it than that?
SD: There is a gap of almost fifty years between Bhuwaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary. Bhuwaneshwar’s stories were written almost a century ago. But you are right, it is this state of being on the (literary) margins that unites them. Both died young as well. Their rejection—or hostility towards them—speaks volumes about the state of literature. Experimental writing or art, by its very nature, means going against what is popular or accepted. Any literary establishment stands opposed to experiment of any kind but it’s especially evident in the Hindi literary world: an animosity towards anything that does not bend to the popular taste, where writers are expected to act like public servants. But this rigid attitude is becoming more and more common in Anglophone publishing, too.
TF: I want to talk now generally about creativity. You write, you translate, you photograph, and you are also co-editor of RIC Journal—various parts of a whole. What does creativity mean for you and how do these different pieces fit together?
SD: I don’t think I know what creativity is. I don’t think I have ever thought about it. I think of all this as just . . . life. I do whatever interests me without worrying about whether it is creative or not, or whether it makes sense for me to do it. If tomorrow morning I wake up and feel like doing something completely different, that’s what I will do. I have no need to be perceived in a certain kind of way, which makes it somewhat easier for me to do seemingly disparate things simultaneously. I don’t have any fixed image of myself that I feel the need to adhere to.
Saudamini Deo is a writer, photographer, and translator based in Jaipur, India.
Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father and 926 Years, co-authored with Kyle Coma-Thompson.
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