MY journey into translations began with my mother’s work, almost 15 years ago. My mother Shivani, Diddi to us children, was a well known Hindi writer with a huge fan following. I always assumed, naively perhaps, that she was as well loved and widely read beyond the Hindi heartland. However, I soon discovered that hardly anyone, except those who came from the ‘cow belt’, had even heard of her.

Sobering as this discovery was in Punjab, where we spent a large part of our early life, I began to see how languages have it in them to unite and divide us from each other. After all, I had never read or even heard of Nanak Singh, Surjit Pattar or Shiv Batalvi before I came to Punjab. This was understandable in Punjab where Urdu and Gurmukhi were the official and state languages, and Hindi was indifferently spoken. In fact, very often the ‘Hindi’ that reached my ears sounded like nothing that I had grown up hearing in my earlier life. The harsher accents apart, this Hindi did not have the grace and refinement of the Lucknowi and Allahabadi tongues, yet it also brought me into contact with a whole new range of vigorous and earthy sounds.

Like French, Hindi addresses audiences in three registers – tu, tum and aap. In the egalitarian tussi of Punjab, the old feudal tones of the Hindi to which I was accustomed, vanished. Gone too, was the elaborate clearing of the throat or preamble before coming to the main topic in a conversation. However, as compensation, I found that my Punjabi friends were friendlier, more direct and far less diffident about peppering their conversations with colourful expletives. Slowly, over the 20-odd years I spent there, I absorbed some of these into my own Hindi and my children – born and brought up in the city they still affectionately call Chandighar – happily said mere ko, tere ko instead of mujhe and tumhain, much to my mother’s distress.

It was only when I came to Delhi that I realized that in the English-speaking circles we moved, this Hindi was the accepted version of much of India’s so-called Hindi speakers. Expectedly, scarcely any person had read anything in Hindi after school. In fact, friends were quite surprised to learn that Hindi newspapers in our house were actually read by us, not just our staff. Gradually, we became more an English-speaking than a Hindi-speaking family. And as for our native pahari tongue, Kumaoni, I still spoke it to my parents-in-law, my own siblings and various aunts but whenever my husband and children tried to join in, they found themselves lapsing into Punjabi instead.

Pahari, then, became a secret language between those of us who spoke it and often I gave the children and my husband instructions in it when I did not want visitors to understand what I was saying. Slipping in and out of languages became such a habit that I can still speak all three in the same conversation, turning to the language that best expresses what I want to say.

 

This elaborate introduction is to preface what I would like to explore here: the role of language in the construction of a translator’s identity. When I look back at my own life, I realize that most Indians have at least two languages inside them. In our childhood, we had three: Kumaoni, Hindi and English. So we spoke Kumaoni at home, Hindi with our neighbours and English at school. As we moved from one city to another, similar-sounding dialects were added on. So Avadhi entered my life in Lucknow and Purabiya in Allahabad. Somewhere there was a smattering of Bundelkhandi I must have picked up from my grandmother’s old maid and Bangla from Bengali school friends in Allahabad, which was teeming with a host of pravasi Bengalis in the sixties and seventies.

In Punjab, I could get by in pindu Punjabi (the rustic version spoken in villages), the refined and sweet Punjabi from the Doaba area around Patiala (hello-ji, haanji) and the delightfully earthy gaalis that my children picked up from their school friends. So just as my gotra changed when I entered another family and clan, my language skills were constantly modified by the new words and worlds I encountered.

This is the linguistic baggage that I carry within me and it represents roughly all the aspects of my personality. For, just as migrants carry their memories in bundles stored in tin trunks and sepia photos of long-dead ancestors in disintegrating family albums, I have carefully preserved these linguistic fragments because they contain my lived experience and are a store of the memories of my life from childhood to now. I am certain that they provided me with the vocabulary when I would learn to tackle translation later, much later, in life.

Since many readers may be unfamiliar with Kumaoni, it is important that I place before you the wordscape of this minor dialect, spoken by less and less paharis, even those who still live in Kumaon. It is written in the Nagri script but its vocabulary comes from a host of other tongues. Among them are Nepali (until 1816, Kumaon was a part of the Gorkha kingdom of Nepal), Tibetan and Bhotia brought by traders of the Johar Valley, Gujarati and Marathi brought by the Brahmins who came here to settle as royal advisers, vaids and pujaris.

 

It is easy enough to follow if you are familiar with any one of these languages but, as elsewhere, sense words that are unique to our Himalayan topography and everyday life entered it over time. Principal among these is the range of smells, so evocative that I must list some of them. These include the sharp uric stink of unclean loos (churain); the smell of stale sweat (tauntain), the pong of wet towels (syaudhain), the vomit-inducing stench of filthy mops (sumrain), the acrid smell of burning hair (hantarain) and so on. Like Eskimos who have several words for listing various kinds of snow, odours and stinks have a dictionary of malodorous and undocumented tatsams only in Kumaoni. In addition to these are ways of describing states of being, certain abstract nouns: narai (sudden yearning for someone or something dear that is so much more emotive than mere nostalgia), phansain (biliousness brought on after over-eating), and so on.

It is in this sense that I wish to explore translation because although words and languages lie at the centre of this genre, it is equally an act of self-transformation, a process of self-reflection and an indication of social preferences and political choices made along the way. I cling to the sounds of various tongues because they give me a sense of self, an identity that is constantly changing: daughter and sister to wife, daughter-in-law, mother and now a grandmother.

 

While translating, it is often difficult to find exact equivalents in another language. And if one is translating into English, the entire cultural matrix of the original text is threatened with disintegration. Relationships and kinship patterns present as difficult a problem as do modes of address. So a tai, chachi, mausi, bua, mami – so delicately poised in the Indic hierarchy of relationships – have no other fate but to become ‘aunt’ in English. Grandparents and their individual homesteads are sternly divided into mother’s side (nanihal) and father’s side (dadihal), each with its own universe and mythology. For instance, all the loving references are largely to the mother’s side of the family (Chanda Mama), while our folksongs reflect the unstated feelings against a mother-in-law or sister-in-law (saas, nanad are regularly cursed in songs). And while master and servant alike may speak Hindi, doing justice to the tonal variations involved in these voices in translation is almost like trying to do bharat natyam on a tightrope.

Containing and transferring social relations and cultural differences in another language are among the most interesting challenges translations pose. My Hindi world is so deeply embedded in my subconscious that I realized only fairly recently that I seldom dream in any other language but Hindi or pahari. In fact, when my ‘English’ world appears in my dreams it is transformed into another reality. Queen Elizabeth appeared in a dream to my older sister (a champion dreamer and retainer of dreams) to tell her that she was feeling cold and would my sister please share her quilt? Of course, the conversation they had was not in the Queen’s English but in pahari. We rolled on the floor when she related it at the sheer absurdity of such a dream and still recall it at family reunions.

The truth is that the deep roots of one’s mother tongue in one’s life is an undeniable fact and has given rise to the various versions of English that we Indians speak in our daily life. So it is no wonder that while my illiterate maid can use terms and common conditions in English, her understanding of them is her own. ‘Ab kya hai na Didi,’ she confided in me once, ‘hum bahut jaldi narbhasaye jaate hain. Bekar ka tainsun hamara dimag phail kar deta hai.’

 

Nouns and verbs when married across languages release an energy that makes languages grow in all manner of ways. The expressive use of chalu English or Hindi is an indicator of how worlds that were severely separated by purists are now colliding constantly to make sense across sound barriers. Someone I know once referred to the perils of ‘opening a Pandara box’, completely unaware of Pandora or her mythological role. To him, the feelings conveyed in that box came across in his unique understanding of it. Accents, emphases, lilts and local references are the stuff our worlds are made up of and although separated by equivalent words in another language, they provide an unexplored wealth of feelings.

Another problematic area for me has been how to contain the vivacious world of natural sounds into English. Our narrative tradition has evolved largely from the oral katha tradition where sense experiences form not just the background music of our stories but were a vital mnemonic device in painting word pictures. While translating Manohar Shyam Joshi’s T’ta Professor, I was somehow able to tackle these problems but I have never been able to muster up the courage to translate my favourite Joshi novel (Kasap) because it is so firmly located in the Kumaoni idiom and sensorium of Almora that to replicate its exuberance in the flat registers of English defeats me each time I try.

 

The title, Kasap, is Kumaoni for something that is roughly approximate to ‘God knows’ (accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders), so how do I create that shrug in English? The story that deals with the romance between the hero (a poor orphan now a film maker) and Baby (the spoilt and rather dumb but pretty daughter of a Sanskrit scholar) is a tragic-comic post-modern novel that merrily marries the refined language of the Sanskritic father, the hero’s humble but elegant Hindi, the rough, earthy conversational tones of the pahari relatives, a smattering of comradely banter in Bareilly-Hindi spoken by the hero’s friend Babban and the hilarious pahari-hindi mishmash of which Joshi has created Baby. I can’t think of any novel I have read where tonal variations of language are actually used to create characters.

For me, one of the great challenges translation poses is how to negotiate the words that separate and join the author and translator in narrating a story. Beyond that, is the success with which this intimate exchange is conveyed to a reader who may not be familiar with the delicate skeins that knit the original work and its translation. It is for this reason that I prefer non-fiction – memoirs, biographies, travelogues – to fiction that poses enormous problems, principal being the spoken voice and direct speech. This is also why I used my knowledge of my mother’s work to try my hand at my first major attempt, Diddi: My Mother’s Voice. To my mind, being able to find the author’s voice and presenting it faithfully to a reader is a translator’s true calling. In doing so, one has to become a sort of medium.

It is because we do not always succeed in locating the right pitch of voice or the mot juste in another language that we create our own version of the original word and often distort its true meaning. Secularism, now officially accepted as dharma nirpekshta in Hindi, is not the exact equivalent of a concept that was coined in the wake of Enlightenment in Europe several centuries ago. Tossed between the left and right politics of India and between liberals and bigots, it has become today a pejorative term for some and an utterly meaningless concept for others since it has never been able to faithfully convey the spirit behind religious tolerance and the ready acceptance of other faiths.

 

Political correctness has also done untold damage to languages by bowdlerizing certain ways of describing colour, gender or caste. Noble as this was up to a point, its militant use across cultures and languages has blunted its purpose and made our common modes of address an unforgivable crime. Faced with these Talibani rules, many prefer to translate only those texts that will be politically acceptable. Fatwas, bans and social ostracism belong to the medieval ages, how can they be wielded as instruments to censure and define creativity today? The irony of this seems to elude most of our high-minded critics and theorists. And if we lose the capacity to hear other voices, we will surely kill the true purpose of translation.