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As India takes confident strides, it is shedding the mantle of English language supremacy. Indian writers want the world to engage in conversations with them - in their native languages. Local languages are becoming an important tool of identity and cultural assertion due to their superior literary expressions. This shift in perspective has not come under a government scheme. Publishing industry is witnessing a churning.

 

Though, Indian bibliophiles have enjoyed a globalised world view. Russian, French, German, Latin American or Japanese - the best literature of these languages has been made available in English and Hindi translations for decades.

 

But this has been a one-way traffic. While Indians were reading world literature; the language-literature of India was not made available to the global audience. Thereby limiting the reach of writers writing in 24 Indian languages.

 

While Indian writers, writing in English — Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie et. al. became global celebrities; this was not so for other Indian languages. Few writers in Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese etc. produced world-class literature yet their reach remained limited to the region.   

 

Not only great works of literature written in regional languages of India were not getting translated into foreign languages; almost no translation activity was taking place among the 24 literary languages recognised by Sahitya Akademi of India. This made the writers feel isolated. Even when they did get translated, the translations remained obscure, locked in some government library. Readers could not access them.

 

Changing the script

 

This scenario is changing. When Penguin India, the largest English publishing house in India, publishes an English international award-winning book; it simultaneously gets it published in Hindi translation. Almost all popular authors of English want their books to be available in Hindi. Hindi readership is, by some rough estimates, five to ten times greater than English.

 

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Incomes and literacy rates are growing nationwide; contributing to publishing in local languages with a rigour not known before. An estimate puts roughly 19,000 active publishers in India, mostly in Hindi and other regional languages like, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, which have had a long tradition of libraries and reading clubs. The corporate publishing houses are tapping these small publishers to capitalise on their writing traditions.   

 

International Booker and translation

 

Recognition to the quotidian; the voices emanating from narrow, smaller spaces has come, by the fillip given to translation as a literary activity. The Booker International Prize 2022, received by Hindi novelist Geetanjali Shree for Ret Samadhi, translated by Daisy Rockwell and for 2024 by Banu Mushtaq’s, Heart Lamp translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has put the status of translator at par with the author. The Booker Prize money of 50,000 pounds is divided equally between the author and the translator to acknowledge the significant contribution of translators in bringing literary works to a wider audience.  

 

“The coming decade of world literature belongs to translators. They are getting money and recognition at par with the authors. Most literary awards are going to be based on translations which used to be a missionary work; in India translators’ names did not appear on the cover page. This is changing—the translator shares the same space as the author. The world is going to be unified by translators; they have more power now,” comments Madhav Kaushik, President, Sahitya Kala Akademi.

 

Almost all major universities are teaching comparative literature and translation, which is no more limited to the linguistics department; where the linguists debated over the nomenclature—to call it trans-literation or trans- creation. Foreign embassies are engaging translators to introduce their literature to India and vice versa.

 

Translation has arrived as a well-paid, well-recognised creative art.

 

Self- translation

 

While the name and money of the Booker Prize is shared with the translator, India’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, preferred to translate his own poems from original Bengali into English. His collection of poetry Geetanjali, for which he was granted the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, Tagore did not want to rely on others’ interpretations of his poems. He was not always satisfied with the translations done by others —as he wanted to ensure his voice and finer nuances were preserved in the English version. Though, several English writers pointed at the flaws in his translations for their Indianness—Tagore stuck to his conviction—to his uniqueness. 

 

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Tagore was not alone. Many great authors and poets translated their own works. Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, known for his complex and intricate characters, translated his own works from Russian into English. So did Samuel Beckett, a French Nobel Laureate, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and others. Despite the best efforts of the translator, at times the author feels, no one else can get the soul of his/her writing. Especially in the case of poetry.  

 

In the market-driven economy of demand and supply, nuances are replaced by speed. Now, readers demand instant translations of popular books. 

 

From creativity to AI

 

Several established authors are engaging in translation to enhance their understanding of creative processes of writing — of translating thoughts and emotions into a language. Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer award-winning author says, translation has transformed the way she writes; in her book Translating Myself and Others. Deepa Bhasthi, translator of Banu Mushtaq’s Kannada short story collection Heart Lamp, says, “I was very deliberate in my choice to not use italics for the Kannada, Urdu or Arabic words that remain untranslated in English.” This is reflective of a new kind of confidence in the local culture and its expressions, while engaging with a global audience.

 

Writers no longer want to wait for the long process of translation that takes years and, at times, decades to see the light of other languages. Vikram Sampath, a well-known published author of several research-based books in English, says he had to wait for his books to be translated into Kannada, his mother tongue, for almost 15 years. His well-researched book; Splendours of Royal Mysore, meant for Kannada readers; his two-volume authentic biography of Veer Savarkar; Tipu Sultan; The Saga of Mysore’s Interregnum etc. are still not available in Kannada or Marathi languages.

 

Not giving up, he has started a start-up NAAV AI, that aims to get writings translated into Indian languages “to infuse frenetic speed, functionality and efficiency into the publishing industry through AI-generated translations.”

 

The future of the publishing world belongs to good translators — with or without AI.   

 

By Vandana Shukla