Writer and translator Saudamini Deo is expanding the English-speaking world’s understanding of Hindi literature, working to translate forgotten works by avant-garde literary outsiders into English for the first time. Several years after she began this series of translations with a collection of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar, the second book in the project, Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary, is being published by Seagull Books as part of their India List series.
I first spoke to Deo about her translation project in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The writers she was interested in were almost totally unknown outside of India, and I was curious to know what it meant to have them recovered, translated, and presented to an English readership navigating life in the twenty-first century. We exchanged questions and answers while both of our countries were in strict lockdowns—her in India, me in Australia. In the fog of fear and uncertainty that had overcome us, I wondered if Deo’s project was a way of coping with the immediate reality of living through something lifted straight from a history book—would it last beyond those early days of COVID-19 or was it a mere distraction?
Three years later, the project has not only outlasted lockdowns, it has expanded and matured, taking on the shape that Deo had envisioned from the beginning: where Bhuwaneshwar’s stories are dreamy and deeply pessimistic, Chaudhary’s stories face the concrete absurdity and hardships of the everyday head on—their subjects span time and culture. As Deo states in her introduction: “Written more than 70 years ago, the stories sometimes read like they were written just this morning.”
Chaudhary wrote at a time when India was still a young nation, yet its promises of a future filled with hope and opportunity were slipping further and further beyond the horizon; as Deo puts it, it was a “world where there is no longer either god or morality, not even the desire for it.” Maybe, regardless of time and place, we always feel as though the riches we were promised never actually eventuate.
I asked Deo about the act of translation, the direction her translation project will take from here, Chaudhary the writer, and the parallels between his time and the present moment.
Tristan Foster (TF): Your English translation of Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due to be published by Seagull Books. What, in your view, makes Chaudhary significant to a modern English readership?
Saudamini Deo (SD): I think, in the last few decades, there has been some interest in Indian writing and Indian writers in the anglophone world. However, this interest or exposure is, to a large extent, limited to diaspora writers and writing. It’s about time that India is no longer seen or understood as a mere background to its diaspora. It’s not just a reference point or historical source, it’s a living and evolving country where people live fully human and complex lives, and is just as interesting or incomprehensible as anywhere else in the world. Rajkamal Chaudhary takes his readers through this maddening incomprehensibility of the modern Indian existence in the 1950s and 1960s. And India is not just about India much the same way as Europe is not just about Europe. It’s part of the entire world, it’s part of the reason why our present reality looks and feels the way it does. Chaudhary’s work would be significant to anyone interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of the human existence in these mad modern times.
TF: On the one hand, Chaudhary’s narratives are hallucinatory. In the first story in the collection, ‘Still Life,’ for example, the thoughts fold in on one another, skipping from the feel of the cement floor to the curiosity about a murderer in a newspaper report. ‘Elementary Knowledge of Geography’ depicts a teenage boy’s musings about his erotic encounters, like seeing the saree of his friend’s mother slip, revealing “the health and amber” of her thighs. ‘Warriors Don’t Worry About the Right Time’ details the intimate yet mind-bending visit by a student to a relative’s home to find a family in mourning: “Today, in the evening, Madhusudhan-babu saw a ghost near the big peepal tree. He has fallen ill. Keeps crying out. The big peepal is an abode of ghosts these days. Every night, witches from the entire village go there to worship.” But on the other hand, the stories take place in the concrete reality of the era in which Chaudhary was writing—villages, the streets of Delhi or Calcutta, in kitchens and courtyards. Do you think it’s fair to say that Chaudhary’s writing has a dual nature?
SD: I am not sure that Chaudhary’s reality can be understood through a Cartesian idea of duality. Indeed, I believe that it shatters the very idea of that duality. This is what I find most interesting about his work: nothing is what it seems. There is a man waiting in a coffee shop for his girlfriend in Connaught Place. It’s simple concrete reality on the face of it. And yet we don’t know—we can never know—the vortex that is taking place within the man. The black hole in which someone is falling might not be visible. There is a village and there is an old tree in it. It might be possessed, there might also be secret witches in the village that seems quite calm from the outside. We tend to think of reality as something that exists concretely, solidly. But is it really so? In Chaudhary’s world, reality is constantly shapeshifting. The idea of a duality rests on the idea of a boundary while Chaudhary, at least to me, is writing about the boundless nature of reality. We can never be sure of what is happening. This, to me, is also life.
TF: Chaudhary regularly pokes at culture and tradition—for example, the story, ‘A Champa Bud: A Venomous Snake,’ in which a family plots to take a man’s property by marrying their daughter off to him. ‘Sisters-In-Law’ is about the plight of two widowed women who are prostitutes. ‘Like A Wall of Glass’ is framed against a cynical, ironic view of the art world. In your view, was interrogating convention part of the intent behind his writing? In other words, is there value in a reader searching for deeper meaning within the texts?
SD: I am not sure how intentional interrogating convention was to his writing and how much of it was just part of who he was as a person. His writing as well his life was quite unconventional and it rested largely on questioning—intentionally or organically—the surrounding culture and tradition. But there are no solutions or resolutions here; Chaudhary’s characters come from diverse backgrounds with diverse fates and yet there is one unifying characteristic: they are all disappointed with life. So, while Chaudhary questions culture and tradition, I am not sure if its alternatives seem satisfying to him either. I am reminded of Beckett who said, “You are on Earth. There is no cure for that.” It’s a bit like that. Is there deeper meaning within meaninglessness? Perhaps, but the reader has to decide for herself.
TF: A technique that Chaudhary employs regularly but effectively is repetition. I’m thinking of the scene in the story, ‘Some People in a Burning House’ where the situation grows increasingly frenzied as the protagonist hides with a group of people in the basement of a brothel while police search the rooms upstairs. Another example is the story ‘Veni Sanhar’, a harrowing tale about Sita, who has gone mad from typhoid. Again and again, the fact of Sita’s illness is repeated: “Sita wants to catch the cat. She is intoxicated. She is mad. The sick Sita wants to kill the cat. What is this drama?” Talk to me about the tension in the stories, the way that repetition, for example, can create loaded, unsettling scenes.
SD: I think the repetition is used to insist on the circular nature of reality and to create an increasing tempo building up to a climax that is never reached. It’s quite poetic in the way it creates a rhythm to always come back to. In ‘Some People in a Burning House,’ there is a frenzy and a constantly escalating feeling that no one cares about the other. I particularly remember the engineer who refuses to light his last match to help a wounded man in the dark room, in case he might want to light his cigarette later. In ‘Veni Sanhar,’ the fact of Sita’s illness is oft repeated. The black cat appears again and again, in unexpected places, as if the cat is being hallucinated. Chaudhary also uses the same beginning and end in some of his stories. Repetition does two things: it simultaneously intensifies and diminishes. It makes a thing more meaningful and more meaningless. It has a marvellous effect on the narrative. The reader is always unsure and tense. Does it mean more or less?
TF: Let’s spend a moment on Rajkamal Chaudhary himself. You write: “It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Chaudhary was the first rebel or avant-garde writer of Hindi literature, someone uncomfortably uncategorizable, writing outside the given dicta of moralistic Hindi literary movements.” What has attracted you to his work? How did you feel at the end of the translation process having spent countless waking—and, possibly, sleeping—hours immersed in his words?
SD: It was a revelation to me when I read his short stories for the first time. I didn’t know that stories like these had been written in Hindi. I felt the same way I did when I first looked at a Matisse or a print of Man Ray: exhilarated. I loved the way it felt almost documentary like, very modern. There was no message, no teaching. I first started translating his stories in Calcutta right at the beginning of 2020. Of course, I didn’t know what awaited us, but I remember being holed up in this small room in a Calcutta apartment and translating the stories, line after line. And I had finished the first draft by March 2020, right when the first lockdown was declared. The entire translation as well as the editing process happened during the pandemic, sometimes with significant delays. The world seemed like a Rajkamal Chaudhary story. At the end of it, I felt like my writing had transformed by my continued immersion in Chaudhary’s world. I think the way he uses language affected me deeply. I don’t remember how I wrote before translating Chaudhary.
TF: I feel it would be remiss of me to not mention your introduction to the translation. It does an exceptional job of evoking the era in which Chaudhary was writing: “There is an eerie feeling that the present does not quite resemble the once-promised future.” Also, in your telling, Chaudhary the man but also the world around him was fragmented, chaotic, suffering from a certain ennui. Why do you think this would result in a timeless literature?
SD: I think it’s an uncomfortable idea to accept that there is something intrinsic to life that does not change, even though its forms may change innumerable times. All timeless literature speaks of that elemental thing. I think even after a hundred or even a thousand years, we would still be going mad, we would still be diseased, we would still be looking for something that cannot be found. There will still be chaos, suffering, and ennui. The circumstances of the world that Chaudhary describes might change but its essence will not change. This is why we are able to read Sappho or Euripides even today. This is why Werner Herzog made a film on the Chauvet Cave. We are, essentially, as close to 600 BC as we are to tomorrow.
TF: I am curious about your view on the act of translation and the prominence given to translators. Until quite recently, it was a rare occasion that a translator was even named, as if the text had switched languages by magic. As your body of translated work continues to grow, I’d like to know what you think about the role of the translator in modern literature.
SD: It’s great that translators are now being given equal prominence as writers as it is almost impossible to imagine language without translation. Language is not something static and the languages that we use today are the way they are because of countless unnamed translators, within and without literature. The role of the modern translator, I believe, is to expand language. The way I use English changes because of the way I translate English. When I am translating, I like when something sounds strange and wrong in English. Sometimes I keep it that way. Then I find myself writing that way. In these times, when there are apps for automated translation, the role of the translator is not just to render an acceptable meaning. The role of the translator is to madden a language, drive it insane, do unimaginable things with it. That’s also the role of the writer.
TF: You have a number of other translation projects underway, including The World is Made Every Day by Alok Dhanwa, Plays by Bhuwaneshwar and Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu by Acharya Chatursen Shastri, each of which are in various stages. Can you share a little about what’s next for you?
SD: The next book that I am translating is a book of poems by the Bihari Hindi poet, Alok Dhanwa. It will also be published by Seagull Books. He is a bit of a cult figure and I believe that he has only one published book, but his impact on Hindi poetry has been immense. Then, of course, I want to translate Bhuwaneshwar’s one-act plays. I have already translated his short stories but he was primarily a playwright and I would love to be able to translate that as well. Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu, written by Acharya Chatursen Shastri, is a miraculous semi-historical novel about the courtesan Amrapali who enjoys immense prosperity and power but renounces all of it and becomes a monk after her fateful meeting with the Buddha. It is incomparable in its depiction of the medieval Indian polity and its encounter with spirituality. But it is a big novel, and it will take me some time to properly work on it. Apart from translations, I have also just finished writing a book on my travels to various Kali temples in and around India.
Saudamini Deo is a writer, photographer, and translator from Jaipur, India. Her translation of the Hindi writer Bhuwaneshwar’s short stories, Wolves, was published by Seagull Books in 2021. Her translation of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s short stories, Traces of Boots on Tongue, is forthcoming from Seagull Books. Her words and images have been published in Scroll.in, Outlook India, Words Without Borders, 3:AM Magazine, Bastille Magazine, Sangam House Reader, Sultan’s Seal, MAP Magazine, Documentum, etc. She co-edits the literary magazine RIC Journal and can be found on Twitter as @thesapphirebook.
Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. He is the author of two books, the short story collection Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father and 926 Years with Kyle Coma-Thompson. Midnight Grotesques, with Michelle Lynn Dyrness, is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions.
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