JLF 2023: Regional Storytelling, New Voices In Translation Take Foreground At Jaipur Literature Festival

“Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.”
—    George Steiner

Translation is a curious craft. You must capture the voice of an author writing in one language and bear it into another, yet leave faint trace that the transfer ever took place.

Translator Charlotte Mandell called the art of translation as “something else but still the same”. Like the ghost-writer, the translator must slip on a second skin.

Daisy Rockwell, the translator of the Booker Prize-winning Hindi novel Ret Samadhi ponders upon her love for Hindi and how it became her life partner. 

The craft of translations, the many challenges it brings, and it taking centre-stage in the Indian literary tradition has dominated literary festivals across India, including the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF). 

The JLF 2023 featured an ensemble of over 200 speakers with sessions spread across five days giving the readers an opportunity to catch hold of their favourite authors and catch up with them one on one. 

An ode to Indian languages, regional narratives 

In a first, Hindi writer and novelist Geetanjalee Shree’s Tomb of Sand, originally published as Ret Samadhi and translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, became the first Hindi novel to be awarded the International Booker Prize last year. 

The book and its translation’s victory were given an invigorating welcome at the Jaipur Literature Festival both by readers and authors alike. The book finding international recognition has given writers renewed hope to continue their push for alternative storytelling that comes from within the very heart of regional narratives across the country. 

Radha Chakravarty, the translator of Rabindranath Tagore’s last novel Chaar Adhyay (Four Chapters) says that translation was given a secondary place in the imagination of readers earlier but has now emerged as a central theme in this festival. She said that now “there is a worldwide recognition that we live in a heterogeneous multilingual world and we need to understand each other across languages and without translation that is not possible”.

On one end of the spectrum where one sees a score of Indian languages at the threat of extinction, Chakravarty pointed out the need to foreground the role of languages and translation. Citing her own work on the last written novel of Tagore set in the context of pre-Independence India, Chakravarty sets an example with the use of native Bangla terms. 
Across sessions with Daisy Rockwell and Geetanjalee Shree, the creation of space for translation to gain ground were discussed. 

In the list of works that are translated and have caught interest across spectrums is the work of poet, writer, and activist Meena Kandasamy’s. She has translated Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar’s Kamattu-p-pal, which is the third part of the Tirukkural — one of the most important texts in Tamil literature dating back to almost 2,000 years ago. 

Describing her work, Kandasamy stated that Thirukkural is the beating heart of Tamil culture in a way it is a secular and feminist text and also that it is an anti-caste text.

"So the politics of this text is very important. Over the last 2,000 years, there has been an effort by hegemonic and far-right Hindutva groups to appropriate this text. It is a book that remains relevant and that speaks into this moment. This moment is crucial as translations are being seen in a new light and women translators gaining new ground," says Kandasamy.

Discussing her journey of triumphs and challenges, Kandasamy said, “I started out as a translator. There is something about Indian writing in English. There is an elitism to it. Even if it is not elitist, even if it is very grassroot, it somehow supplants and erases the regional discourse. For me, translations are very key to the interruption and disruption of the popular discourse which takes place in English. Translation makes things truly inclusive.” 

Writing as a means of resistance 

The session on Affairs of the Caste highlighted the way in which the anti-caste movement is now becoming intertwined with the literary world in a bid to highlight the emancipatory nature of writing and storytelling. 

Several young voices across the spectrum are coming to the fore, among those is a prominent voice of Yogesh Maitreya, a young translator, author, and publisher who founded Panther Paw Publications — a publishing house dedicated to publishing of Dalits’ work. 

Speaking of his journey into the literary world, Yogesh explained his fascination with the power stories yielded in our lives. “I was nowhere,” says Yogesh as he describes reading English literature. “The language you read, you are never in that language.”

Yogesh expressed his unsettling desire to write and assert existence through literature. He goes on to explain, “We are people who are products of the movements for justice and for our equality. We want to create a legacy of stories, our histories, and our imagination for our generation. We are shattered and reconstructed by the power of words. And the power of asserting your mind on the people. When the society that you exist in is in a denial mode about your existence, writing becomes emancipatory.”

Author and anti-caste rapper Sumeet Samos is one of the new voices discussing caste through personal experience and academic understanding. Samos’s autobiography Affairs of Caste discusses his life in Odisha, the everyday experiences of casteism, and exploring a pathway for the creation of an alternative history. 

Another crucial piece of work that catches one’s attention is Katy Hessel’s Story of Art Without Men. 

“How many women artists can you think of?” she asks as she talks about finding her answers through what started off as an Instagram page. “This book came out of an Instagram post on the great women artists. I realised that out of the 1000s of artworks that are famous across the world, how many belong to women?” 

The aim of Hessel’s work has since primarily been to retell the story of art from a female perspective.

Alongside breaking barriers of language through translation, challenging caste, and gender divisions across the board, JLF this year was also a space for vivid imagination with several discussions on the new world as we know it. From author Anirudh’s Suri’s Great Tech Game to researcher Toby Walsh’s writing on Artificial Intelligence, JLF like previous years continued to stir discussions. 

Children’s author Katherine Rundell described her current work and children’s publishing as something that requires vividness through the process. She explained how new anxieties and new panics, new senses of being watched, and surveilled and to curate one’s life alongside new dissatisfaction with one’s own bodies are shaping up. So when we write, the goal is to meet some of those anxieties and give children an opportunity to step into another world, said Rundell.