Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
India Booked | Gujarat, Dhumketu, and Translations
99 Plays4 years ago
Writer, literary translator, book critic and a literary podcast (Desi Books) host herself, Jenny Bhatt speaks to Ayushi Mona how the themes of Dhumketu’s books resonated with the short stories of her own, prompting her to bring out her debut literary translation, ‘Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu’.
In this hour-long episode on short stories and translations, Jenny describes, through brilliant metaphors, how a short story differs from a novel and why it is unfair to expect authors with different skillsets to master both, and about the commercial pressures on writers in the publishing industry.
Recommending works by other luminaries in the field, Jenny talks about how regional translations break stereotypes and create a better understanding of diverse cultures, and touches upon the deficit representation of Indian literature in school curriculums and of Gujarati literature being translated in comparison to other regional languages. Tune in now!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: Exploring India Through Literature
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Ayushi Mona and you're listening to India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature and we speak to authors who bring this to life.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hi everyone, I am Ayushi Mona, your host on India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature.
Introducing Jenny Bhatt and Her Literary Journey
00:00:39
Speaker
Today I have with me Jenny Bhatt. Jenny is a writer, a literary translator and a book critic. She hosts the Desi Books podcast.
00:00:48
Speaker
Her writing has appeared across BBC culture, Washington Post, The Atlantic, scroll a bunch of other places. Jennie's recently translated, Dhuum Ketu. For those of you who do not know who Dhuum Ketu is, Dhuum Ketu was the pen name of Gauri Shankar Joshi, who was one of Gujarat's most prolific writers.
00:01:12
Speaker
in the early 20th century. I will actually hand this over to Jenny to tell us a bit about Dhum Kethu and how does she stumble upon this process of writing and translating and how does she
00:01:30
Speaker
now work on Dhumketu because she's also worked on her own original writing. So how did the translation segue? Welcome to the show, Jenny, and literally throwing it in your court at the beginning. OK, thank you so much, Ayushi. I appreciate this opportunity to be on this show. And I love how you, you know, like you said, you lean into the idea of India through its literature. That's just that's a little bit of what I try to do.
00:01:59
Speaker
with my podcast as well. So I think it's great. So coming to Dumketu, in my case, Dumketu was a name I heard often while growing up from my mother. She was a big reader. She hadn't even finished her college degree before she was married off because women in that generation, that's kind of what happened. But she was a big reader throughout her life. And
00:02:25
Speaker
Gujarati literature is what she loved the most, and she read Thumketu, Meghani, you know, Saraswati Chandra, and a bunch of other well-known Gujarati writers. And, you know, I guess for me, you know, we would hear some of Thumketu's stories, the age-appropriate ones, I guess, from her as bedtime stories, but that was about the extent of it. I never actually read his work until
00:02:55
Speaker
When she passed away in 2014, I inherited her small personal library. And that's when I realized how much she appreciated Dumkeitel because she had all his books, basically, all his fiction, I should say, not the nonfiction. She had all his short story collections, all his novels.
Themes in Dhumketu's Works and Translation Interest
00:03:17
Speaker
And then that's when I, you know, I was already a short story writer myself by that time. And I loved the short story form.
00:03:24
Speaker
I used to write a monthly short stories column for a U.S. venue. As a literary critic, I reviewed mostly short story collections. So I was very fascinated by the form and I was looking to find and go beyond, you know, our usual Tagore and Prynch and then Manto, you know. And so when I found these books finally and I started going through them, reading through them, I was taken aback by how
00:03:52
Speaker
you know, a lot of the stories felt, even though the era or the setting was not our time, that the themes felt contemporary to me. And interestingly, a lot of the preoccupations in Dumketu stories, which are about caste and class and gender, and you know, how our work defines us, it's just this weird coincidence where those were all the themes that I'd been writing about in my own short stories that
00:04:20
Speaker
were getting published at the time in literary magazines. Well, before I started reading Don Quixo, actually. So then I thought, well, you know, let me try to translate a couple of them, because I also love the Gujarati language. And I thought, you know, it just helps me immerse myself. And I've done translation before, but just never had anything published book length. So I just started to translate. And then as I was sending my own short story collection,
00:04:48
Speaker
out to agents and publishers. I happened to mention in my author bio, oh yeah, and I'm also translating Dume Kedu. And my agent for Dume Kedu, who's Kanishka Gupta, he called me after an email that I sent him, like half an hour after, and he says, I'm more interested in the Dume Kedu translation than I am in your own book. He says, your book is great, but it's not going to do so well in India. But the Dume Kedu book will do great in India.
Commercial Challenges in Literary Translation
00:05:17
Speaker
And knowing him and his reputation, I think he was quite on point. Well, I mean, I'm still a little disappointed, to be honest, that my own collection couldn't get published in India. It did get published in the US, and it's doing well. I'm happy about that. But, you know, my stories are also about India, and I really did want to get them out there. Now, it's fine. I mean, he's right. He knows commercially what works, you know, and it's a commercial decision.
00:05:45
Speaker
It's not so much about sentiments and, you know, what stories are written well. At the end of the day, it's a business decision. And he knew that as Tumketu has had no book-length translation. And yet, as a writer and as a short story pioneer, he's known as the Gujarati short story pioneer. He hasn't been known outside of the Gujarati community as much as, you know, Tagore and Manto and Premchand, right?
00:06:15
Speaker
and they were his contemporaries. So, I mean, Kanishka and then my editor at HarperCollins, who also jumped on the book, you know, they commercially and business-wise are savvy people. They knew that this is a project worth taking on. Jenny, you know, while you were speaking,
00:06:36
Speaker
You touched upon so many things and we'll, of course, unravel each of them, right?
The Role of Short Stories in Indian Literature
00:06:41
Speaker
One is, of course, the commercial aspect, which we just ended this snippet with, or the fact that you've written short stories, right? And I think your collection in the US is called Each One of Us. Of Us Killers, my bad. Sorry. I haven't read it yet. But I presume a copy is available on the Kindle, should I wish to read it?
00:07:03
Speaker
Yes, e-books are available on Amazon India, and just for your listeners, you don't have to have a Kindle to read it. You can actually just download the free Kindle app on any device, any mobile device or even laptop, and you can still read the book that way. And it's actually one of the greatest ways to discover books that may not really be, say, published or available as yet, right? And then sometimes, you know,
00:07:33
Speaker
It's also, I think, a really great way to read books that maybe, say, be published a little later in your country or have, you know, and I've seen that discovery can take you to interesting places. Moving on from, you know, the commercial aspect, which, again, I'll come back a little later in the conversation, I want to go back to what you started with, which is the whole short story piece.
00:08:00
Speaker
And in fact, your translator's introduction, Jenny, starts with saying that, you know, the short story form is an incomparable flower in the garden of literature. Right. And it's exquisitely beautiful and it's electrifying as a bolt of lightning to me. And when I was reading and I have to say this, I read the translator's introduction. And of course, then, you know, I moved on to reading the author's introduction.
00:08:30
Speaker
and the stories, but once I finished reading all the stories in the book and have copious thoughts in the margins, I came back and I reread the translator's introduction because to me, you'd elucidated a lot of things very beautifully there and which I want to touch upon once of course, and which I'm going to ask you upfront, is this short story as a format
00:09:00
Speaker
I, for one of course, like most Indian children, right, we grew up reading short stories in the name of English literature. So our textbooks are basically H.H. Monroe or Anton Chaka or, you know, or, you know, excerpts are mostly short stories, really. You don't have novels as a sign reading.
00:09:21
Speaker
until unless you're like maybe in the ninth or the tenth class or something. It comes way, way later. Your introduction to literature is by way of short stories. Do you feel that the short story as a writing format and from a critic's lens perhaps is what I'm asking, not so much as the author of this book. What do you think really makes it stand out?
00:09:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, so that's a great question. And I mean, there's a lot of, I have a lot of thoughts about it. I'll try and distill them because there's, I mean, I could write a whole essay. There's two aspects to your question. And it's very interesting that you bring up the schooling aspect and the way that we are exposed, because I grew up in India, I went to school in India. So I know exactly what you're talking about in terms of, you know, our introduction to fiction, to literature.
00:10:19
Speaker
in our schools is in the form of short stories for the majority. It's only when we get older, for me it was eighth, ninth, 10th onwards that we got into novels. And what's interesting though is that the writers you mentioned, the short story writers, they are what we call classic European and in some cases classic American writers, right? And a lot of them, I've looked at the curriculum again, is a lot of them are white male writers.
00:10:49
Speaker
What happens is we end up, as kids, our other exposure to short story form is, at least for me, it was the Amar Chitrakatha, the epics, which are distilled into shorter stories, right? Each graphic short story, each comic to me was a short story, right? But it was in the graphic format. And so they were giving us these bite-sized chunks of epics. And so we never really got in our schooling
00:11:19
Speaker
unless we had, you know, in our Hindi class or Emirati class or whatever, Gujarati class, we would have maybe, you know, the odd story by Premchand or Manto, not even Manto, Manto was too risque for us, but, you know, Premchand maybe or whatever. And so I think our, because our exposure to the short story form in India as from a young age was for the majority to white
00:11:47
Speaker
male class what's considered the classic the canonical writers right which let's be honest how much did we identify with the worlds that they described yes some of them did have universal themes but as children we don't understand that we need physical markers we need to be able to look out the window and say oh yeah that book that i have in front of me i mean as children as older people we read differently but as kids when we look up from a book we need to be able to say oh yeah that's
00:12:16
Speaker
That's my world. I see it. We need to see some representation. And not only were we not seeing that representation in the short stories that we were learning and being taught, but the way we were being taught as well, it was for a particular purpose. It was so we could sit, take an English literature exam and pass it. And so we had to memorize the details of a story, right? And make sure we understood it that in a certain way, which wasn't how I teach now that I teach, how I teach people to read,
00:12:45
Speaker
and appreciate a short story. So I want to make that point because I think that has a lot to do with why short stories, when we translate them from regional languages, like with Dhumkhetu, Brimchand and Tagore, they do much better in India than an anglophone writer like myself, even though my stories are very Indian and they're using the same language as the translation is, right? And yet, you know,
00:13:13
Speaker
The commercial, the contemporary short story by an anglophone writer generally only does well if the writer is already an established writer like Ashobade or Twinkle Kanda or somebody, right? Like they've already well known. So let me come back to, so that's one thing I want to make, that's one point. Let's put that aside. Coming back to the short story form as a critic and what I think of it. So you mentioned, you read a little bit from the introduction, the translator's introduction, where I was quoting,
00:13:43
Speaker
felt about the short story. He was also a literary critic. He loved the short story form. And he was the one who said, it's like this beautiful flower in the garden of literature. And it's like this little spark or illusion. And he wrote, in his time, he pushed back a lot. As you see in the excerpt of his introduction, which is in the book, he pushed back a lot on people
00:14:11
Speaker
who tried to say that a short story was just a shorter version of a novel. And he was like, no, these are two very different forms of literature. You don't approach reading a short story the same way that you approach reading a novel. And so he wrote extensively about it. That's just a little bit that I put in there. But he wrote essays in literary magazines, Gujarati literary magazines at the time.
00:14:37
Speaker
saying, you know, this is the short story form when we don't, we need to understand it better. And I will say for me personally, as a critic and as a writer and as someone who loves the short story form, I've always seen it as it doesn't give you a whole character arc or a whole plot arc. That's not its purpose. That's what a novel does. A novel has three pages in which it can describe a sunset. A short story has maybe three lines. Okay.
00:15:05
Speaker
So with a short story, everything has to have a punch. Every word, every sentence has to have some reason for being there. And what's more, I think of a short story as, you know, it's, it's telling you about a life defining moment or event in a character's life. And it is that moment from which we can look back on the entire character's life and look forward from. So you look back from and look forward from. So it is.
00:15:33
Speaker
a single moment or event, a singular life defining moment or event. It isn't supposed to be a whole lifespan, a whole plot. Now, that's not to say we can't have short stories that do that. And many writers have done that. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and even Tagore has done that. And that's fine. Those are fine too. But in general, people, I think, approach the short story expecting it to be a compact version of a novel.
00:16:01
Speaker
And it's just, that's not its purpose. That's not what it's there for. It's there to show us that one singular life defining moment or event in a person's life and show it in a different way at a level of depth that we wouldn't see otherwise. So that's my take. Is it controversial, Jenny, if I ask you that, do you think that the short story is a true test of the metal of a writer versus a novel?
00:16:30
Speaker
The reason I ask you this question is, right, that a lot of luminaries who, as you mentioned in the translators and the author's introduction, for instance, a doll's toy, right, or
00:16:44
Speaker
people who write both novels and short stories. Do you think that because, as you very rightly say, the canoes that you have, perhaps because scarcity brings out the best, right? Do you think people who only write short stories or authors who write both novels and short stories are actually better writers when they write short stories versus novels?
00:17:10
Speaker
So I think, you know, as you rightly said, there are some writers who do both, and they do them very well. And then there are some writers like Alice Monroe and Grace Paley, who stuck with short stories and never written novels. And then there are novelists who've never written short stories. So I think it comes down to it. I don't personally, I don't like to compare that, you know, Laurie Moore, who was a short story writer, she says that she's used this thing where she says that a novel
00:17:41
Speaker
is like a marriage and a short story is like a little affair. They're two very different things. You're getting to them for different reasons. There's another writer, I think it's Catherine Mansfield, who said that a short story is like a photograph and a novel is like a movie. I'm trying to, I may have got that person wrong, but so you think of both of these, they're two very different mediums in a way, right? A photograph, when you take a photograph,
00:18:07
Speaker
You're thinking about how to frame it, what's in the frame, what you have to leave out, and you have to leave out a lot, right? When you take a photograph, you have to frame it very carefully so that what you are taking a picture of stands out the way you need it to stand out so that it catches the light properly and everything. So to me, a short story is very much about that framing of that singular event or moment, whereas a movie,
00:18:33
Speaker
You have props, you have multiple people, multiple voices, lots of characters. Again, not to say that a short story can't have that, but you know, the brevity and the economy of that space limits you to certain things. So to me, these are, I feel like these are two very different skills. A good movie maker can take good photographs, but a good photographer doesn't, you know, but it's not normal. It's not usual. And the same way a good photographer doesn't necessarily mean they're going to make a good movie.
00:19:01
Speaker
You know, these are two, to me, they're two different forms. So I don't, it is controversial, like you said, because a lot of people try to say, Oh yeah, you know, uh, and this is that mindset in India where they will be more accepting of short stories from somebody who's already written a novel. And I feel like, why, why are you more accepting? I'll be honest with you. I read novelists in India who I think are terrific. And then they put out a short story collection and I think, Oh no, this is not working. You know,
00:19:31
Speaker
or vice versa, I'll see a short story writer who's trying to do novels because that's what sells. And I'm thinking, you're so much better at the short story form, and I wish they would pay you. And I'm not going to name the names, but these are all Indian writers. I think, you know, unfortunately, writers succumb to the commercial pressures. And so you've got somebody who might be a very good short story writer,
00:19:59
Speaker
who feels they have to write a novel because that's what sells. And then there's a novelist who feels that, okay, I've written a few novels and now I'm going to write a short story collection to round out my portfolio. And I just feel like I wish we as readers and those of us in the critics establishment and also publishers would just step back and treat these as two different forms and not
00:20:30
Speaker
you know, pressure authors to try to do one versus another because we come to this with different skill sets. So, yeah. I think that's immensely well put in and I think both the analogies that you used, right?
00:20:49
Speaker
I can see why just because it's the written form, right? Much like a photograph or a film, both are visual forms. One should really not, you know, look at it in a silo as, you know, the form being representative of the art, it finally gets created.
00:21:07
Speaker
My next question, Jenny, to you is that we discussed a lot about this whole white male piece, right? And Dumketu's work is very interesting here, right?
Cross-Cultural Influences in Gujarati Literature
00:21:17
Speaker
In this context, because he, I think even one of your, one of the stories from your collection has his translation of Gorky's work. Did I get it right? Yeah, Maxim Gorky says one story. You're absolutely right, which he, it's more a retelling
00:21:35
Speaker
It's not a direct translation, but it's a retelling where he recasts the story for Indian, for Gujarati culture. He makes it more pertinent to the Gujarati and our Indian culture.
00:21:49
Speaker
And there's also, again, a lot of impact, right, that European literature in Russian and American short stories of the 19th and early years whom Ketu was writing has on Gujarati literature. And this was very fascinating to me, of course, much like everyone else, I'm absolutely ignorant of
00:22:12
Speaker
literature from Gujarat because because while I've seen read literature translated from like a bangla to English which is obviously a lot more common or or now occasionally Tamilian writers and and and and a lot more writing is
00:22:30
Speaker
mercifully being translated. But Gujarati literature, of course, is something that I was not very well aware of. In this whole cultural exchange, right, that happens when somebody like a bhagindar, a devitya, translates Tolstoy into Gujarati, and then, you know, a dhunketu, and how he's influenced. And of course, this whole aspect of
00:22:53
Speaker
him and the kind of interface that he has with like Tagore's works or Gibran's works, right? And he's translating them. What is this cultural milieu in terms of Dhumketu's writing and in terms of Gujarati literature during this time? Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I feel like the little research that I did so that I could write that introduction
00:23:21
Speaker
I barely scratched the surface and I would love to, you know, if I could go back in time, I would love to go and finish that degree in Gujarati literature that my mother never got to finish because there is so much to learn. And so, as you rightly said, there was a point in time when given the rise of the European short story with, you know, Tolstoy and Saki and Chekhov and all these writers was making its way
00:23:52
Speaker
into India, because of course we were still in the colonial times then. And so the European short story was making its way into India. And you had these, you know, handful of, you know, brave Gujarati literary folks like the Vethya, who decided to translate them. And that just set off this, you know, sea change of events. Because once you
00:24:18
Speaker
you know, people started reading those and then they turned back and looked at the Gujarati short story form and said, well, you know, OK, so our stories don't necessarily do that because till then our stories were more didactic or they were more religion driven or nationalism driven or humor satire. Satire was and remain continues to remain very big in Gujarati literature. And that's good. And then, of course, as we said, you know, with Tagore's work being translated,
00:24:46
Speaker
Gebran's work being translated, well, Gebran's was poetry, but Tagore, especially, even Premchand's work got translated to some extent. So I think it certainly influenced, there were a lot of literary essays being written, not just by Dunghetu, but by others, criticism, literary criticism in Gujarati magazines. And it was not just criticism of Gujarati literature. They were writing these amazing essays about the literary landscape
00:25:16
Speaker
that they were coming into contact with, right? Which was also from other languages. And so, as I say, I've only scratched the surface. I wish I could go back and read all those magazines and understand what they thought of all the stuff that was coming, you know, across the waters, as it were. And certainly, like you said, it influenced the Gujarati short story form, the social realism aspect, especially that came across from European short stories. And even, you know,
00:25:44
Speaker
when he first started writing his stories, in terms of literary devices, I would say, understanding how plot and character worked, understanding that, you know, you don't just do pages and pages of describing a character's interior mindset. You have to allow, you have to show it through how they experience the world around them. And so there's that, you know, what he talked about, thanka. Thanka means spark. Thanka and Gujarati mean spark. And he talked about how
00:26:14
Speaker
You just have to spark the reader's imagination. You have to imply things. You don't have to spell everything out. You can't anyways, because the short story is, you know, the economy and the brevity of a short story means you have to choose your words carefully. You can say only so many things, but you say them very pointedly and you leave that lasting impression. And so that's, you know, I certainly think the European short story form influenced, you know,
00:26:43
Speaker
the Gujarati short story and even other a lot a lot of other writers are Kinarayan short stories Tagore himself who was a well-educated well-read man with a huge library of you know European and American literature. To me this entire cultural exchange is so fascinating Jenny and you know while you are speaking and I'm just musing to myself right
00:27:08
Speaker
that this is say the turn of the century and there's an independence movement afoot and like for instance right Gandhi read a lot of European writers and there's the war and changing the landscape or approach that a lot of regional writers have and if I were to say draw a parallel to today right if
00:27:29
Speaker
there is so much potential of a very similar cultural exchange, right? When we take our regional literature, sort of make it more accessible across languages. And of course, I don't mean just translating into English, but there is so much potential because there are these fascinating stories and of times in people and which we have no longer any access to because either we live like very sort of
00:27:58
Speaker
sterile and commonplace urban lives or it's just lost because everyone has say only so many hours in the day and we consume what's presented first. But a lot of what we see today I think as content consumption right whether it's like on an OTT platform or movies you see all of these stories of you know the heartland right and in say the case of say like a Bollywood cinema.
00:28:21
Speaker
Malayalam movies for instance obviously do this better because they're much closer right and then Mumbai and the Hindi film industry and the TV industry when they want to sort of bring our stories right they'll bring our stories of
00:28:37
Speaker
UP and Bihar or you know or Haryana or something right but I think there is so much potential for people to now start reading stories that were written in these other languages I was just you know very recently I spoke to Priyanka Sarkar who translated Bhervi
00:29:00
Speaker
Again, I did not even know that Shivani was a Padmashi winning writer or that she was an extremely commercially successful writer way back in the 16s and 70s and literally magazines sold because of her name. And this was like a woman writer. I mean, just a housewife, right? If you sort of divorce her writing, she was not somebody who was a celebrity in the sense of a political figure or something, right?
00:29:29
Speaker
It was just an average woman writing from her son with a family and spinning out these best sellers, I would say, which today we will look at as feminists because they talk about passion and betrayal and love and women making their own choices. Yeah, no, I mean, I think you raise a lot of excellent points. I think the first point you make is about how, you know, in today's world, you would think with the 24-7 access that we have to
Reading Habits and Cultural Echo Chambers
00:29:58
Speaker
media and information and literature from everywhere all around the world, you would think we'd be more informed. But I think what's happened is we end up living more and more in our own echo chambers or filter bubbles. So we even though we have access, because in social media, we have, you know, we stick with our circles. And so we don't get to know what's outside of that as much unless we make an effort. So that's the first thing.
00:30:25
Speaker
And I think to your point about when that cultural exchange is possible even now, I think the same way that European literature permeated boundaries and entered India because of colonization or whatever. Yeah. The same way now we have an opportunity as more enlightened citizens to take our own regional literature.
00:30:51
Speaker
and make it permeate boundaries and get into the Anglophone world within India. And I think what it does, like you said, reading these stories, and I've had some feedback from readers on Instagram and Goodreads also saying how much they love getting this whole different slice of life and different view of Gujarati culture. They're not Gujarati themselves, so they have these stereotypes sometimes in their mind about Gujarati people or the culture.
00:31:21
Speaker
and how these stories, even though they're set in a different time, some of them are timeless because they're still giving them a good view and understanding of the culture. And so I think that is, to your point, yes, we've had a lot of stuff from Bangla. We've had a lot of Tamil, Malayalam, even with K.R. Miro's books being translated these days. We have a lot from Urdu.
00:31:43
Speaker
you know, with Isma Chuktaai, Manto, the Hindi Urdu. So we've not had that much from Gujarati literature being translated. We have had, I will point out a couple of good ones in case your listeners want to know. We've had K.M. Munshi's epic parten trilogy. There's a three novel volume by K.M. Munshi called the Parten Trilogy. And that was translated by the amazing Rita Kothari and her husband, Viseet Kothari. And it came out with Penguin Random House.
00:32:13
Speaker
a few years ago. And that's a great one to get into if you want to read all about. I mean, put aside Game of Thrones. They should make the Partan trilogy into a TV series, I'm telling you. There is just so much royalty, intrigue, and war, and this and that in there, I'm telling you. It's fascinating. There's also Karan Gelo, translated by Ayad Mukherjee, and one other person. I forget the other translator's name, I beg your pardon. But Karan Gelo is also about a king.
00:32:38
Speaker
and how he had to leave his kingdom and run away after losing a war. There's a lot of other things in there. There's obviously Trideep Sarood's very scholarly translation of Saraswati Chandra, which Govardhan Ramshraman Tripathi, that book was made into a big movie, right, years ago, decades ago, with Newton. Everybody knows the movie, not many people have read the book. So I would say, you know, Vajwati literature, we have a lot of scope,
00:33:07
Speaker
There's a lot of women writers. We're talking right now, I've mentioned all these male writers from Gujarat who've been translated. But there's also been, as you pointed out with Shivani, there's been women writers who won Sahid the Academy Awards and nobody knows about them. And they've written feminist work. The only one that I think people may know is Ilha Arab Mehta, who was also translated by Pita Kothari, one of her novels called Fence, which I highly recommend, set in Ahmedabad contemporary times.
00:33:35
Speaker
So I would say there's so much scope. You're absolutely right. And I wish, I think there will, I know at least two other Gujarati to English translators. One of them had a novel out and then she didn't do any more after that because she was disappointed with how it didn't fare very well. I don't know why that was, but it didn't. And then the other translator lives, actually lives in the US. And I'm not, again, she's not, you know, she likes the work, but she doesn't like all the,
00:34:05
Speaker
activity after you get a book launched. So I'm not sure if she's going to be wanting to do that. But I do believe that we lose something culturally when our literary works get neglected and forgotten. Because a book, to me, is a literary artifact. It's a record in a way, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
00:34:35
Speaker
It is a record of how things were or how they were seen by the writers and thinkers of their times. So in that sense, it is a historical, a literary, and an aesthetic artifact as well. So to me, preserving these, elevating these through translation so that we can find new audiences, I feel like that's just such an important
00:35:02
Speaker
task and I wish I had come to this sooner, but I had a whole full-time working life that I couldn't, you know, I had to pay my bills. But I wish I could have come to this task sooner. I wish there were more of us out there doing translations. And I wish the industry, let's be frank, I wish the industry paid us well enough because it's a lot of work. It's hard work. So yeah, I think you're right that there's great opportunity given the cultural exchange possibilities.
00:35:32
Speaker
But there's a lot of factors that are not allowing us to get there. I'll mention one last thing and then I'll pause. But I find, you know, I follow a bunch of folks, readers on social media, and I love how everybody gets so excited about the Booker Prize and the JCB Prize and, you know, all the amazing new books by, you know, Anglophone writers, you know, writers
00:36:01
Speaker
whether they're in the West or in India, but Anglophone writers. I wish, I just, I keep thinking, why don't we get as excited about our own culture? That we have so much diversity and if nothing else, if nothing else, translated books like these, which give us a window into another culture in our own country, it will help us appreciate the diversity and tolerate the diversity a lot more. And right now,
00:36:31
Speaker
given up political times, what we need more than anything else is that appreciation and tolerance of diversity, right? Would you agree?
00:36:39
Speaker
You know, Janhir, you've made such fantastic points. And I'm so glad you gave out a bunch of those reading recommendations, because I was, of course, anyway going to ask you. And I just realized that while you were mentioning, right, I have actually read Dilip's work, because I studied for two years at M the month, and he was the acting director of my institution.
00:37:05
Speaker
So I realized that okay at least I've read one of these and I'm going to you know obviously I have a note of these and I'm going to read them for sure and other things also I think that there's so much
00:37:19
Speaker
And I think one of the most fascinating pieces with all of these different literary works is their whole commercialization. And you're very right that it's so easy to get excited about. And I'm obviously on multiple book groups and I run one myself and we've done 1890 book club meetups.
00:37:44
Speaker
And every time it's people getting excited about the silent patient or Murakami or something like that, right? And you have to sort of prod people along and tell them that, ah, like, have you tried reading Abni or Amitamahale or a Jerry Pinto or, you know, just the sheer breadth of good Indian writers in English today.
00:38:07
Speaker
is stunning unfortunately i think for most people in their heads right and i'm and i hope that people don't stop listening to my podcast because of this and i hope i don't sound judgmental but i think a lot of people think of indian writing in english right as very binary if think of these superstar commercial writers who sell gazillions of books writing what is by way of literary merit considered mediocre
00:38:37
Speaker
or they think of Indian writing in English to be, you know, something that's only the custodian of a gentleman who's won the book twice. And Indian writing at these very fag ends. And when I started the podcast, you know, and why I did not want to do every kind of literature there in the world is because I realized that I was reading such fantastic writing in English and I wanted to speak to people about it.
00:39:04
Speaker
I'm just chuckling to myself because 100% agree with you on how people really need to reimagine and introduce
00:39:14
Speaker
themselves to books, just look at the number of literary adaptations that Netflix makes in the US versus the number of adaptations that get made in India. I mean, I'm glad that there's something like a SCAM 1992, which Cheta Delal wrote, and a Patal look, of course, which they did not mention Tejpal due to obviously all the media cases.
00:39:38
Speaker
But speaking of that, did you watch Panchayat? I loved that. You were talking about, you know, how rural life and getting to know about UP and Bihar and all that. Panchayat is a TV series on Amazon. And, you know, I think just Panchayat and what Dhumketu wrote, right? And that's why I love the book. I mean, I went and I rated the book Day on Goodreads before we were due to have a conversation.
00:40:05
Speaker
And, you know, I loved reading the volume of the stories that you've translated, number one, because, of course, they're very universal in nature. And a lot of reviewers have also spoken about, you know, say the relationship between a parent and a child or how your public life or the time and the, you know, circumstance. It's very universal and very human, really. Right.
00:40:32
Speaker
And also, it's very geographically diverse. So for some reason, right, because when I read the blurb, I thought, oh, dhum ke tu, the Gujarati writer. So I had this before starting the book, very absurd imagination that, oh, this will just be based on Gujarat, because for some reason, we think that regional writers only write about their region in their regional language, right, as if they don't have worldviews. Right. Well, and
00:41:00
Speaker
Yeah. No, to your point, I, I was surprised too, when I first started reading his short stories, I thought they were all going to be set in Gujarat. Then I find all these stories from the Northeast. And then there was a couple that are also set in the South. Then I found that he wrote a lot of travel memoirs and he traveled a lot. And so, you know, I mean, you're right. We have these ideas about certain writers in our heads, and then we read their work and we find that maybe, you know, we were not
00:41:30
Speaker
We didn't know enough. But to your point, I think, can I just mention coming back to where you said that you want people to read some of these other Indian writers and people look at the two fag ends like you were saying,
Podcasts as a Medium for Literary Diversity
00:41:47
Speaker
right? You've got the extreme commercially successful folks and then you've got this
00:41:53
Speaker
Extremely literary award-winning and there's like there's this whole spectrum in between and we don't seem to know enough about them or even care and I think what that speaks to is Something that I think is at the root of why you and I both have the podcasts that we do So I want to mention that and what that because what that speaks to is The things that our mainstream media likes to promote because if you look at what these when you talk about these two faggots our mainstream media
00:42:23
Speaker
which covers books, whoever's covering books, which there isn't a lot of book coverage, unfortunately, in India, but, you know, whoever is covering these books, they like to cover, you know, the prize winners, the Booker winners and the whatever, or they like to cover these commercially highly successful writers, who may not be the best writers, but because they have some celebrity, because they happen to have some Bollywood or cricket connection or political connection. And so it's because of what the mainstream media is promoting,
00:42:52
Speaker
that the average reader gets focused on those kinds of books. So what podcasts like yours and like mine try to do is we're trying to bring to readers these other books that are out there, right? You and I are trying to highlight and spotlight these other books. I do the same with my podcast. I don't have on my show the award-winning writers or the hugely commercially successful. I'm bringing, I hope, writers who I think deserve more attention.
00:43:22
Speaker
So I think that this space, this kind of non-traditional space, we, you and I are filling a gap that we feel isn't being addressed by our newspapers and mainstream media, correct? Absolutely. You know, to your, Jenny, your credit and to all the translators
00:43:49
Speaker
And to people who are trying to speak of these things in the mainstream, India is such a huge market of expectations, of culture, of everything. There's always room for everyone. And I'm always fascinated by when I learn how much Indians read.
00:44:14
Speaker
You know, India as a country is a country of readers. It's a country where newspapers are still very well read, very well received, despite like having cheap mobile and internet connections where people can read news on the phone.
00:44:30
Speaker
because we are a nation of leaders in a lot of ways and also a nation of business because of this whole impact and influence that we've had due to radio. So of course video is a big thing and what is big and what is newsworthy or celebrity or Bollywood cricket and those, the larger things will of course always endure in the mass and public imagination.
00:44:55
Speaker
But there's room for so much reception of niche writing, right? Even today, what we know as like popular fiction, something like, books like Ola Moojang Kya Han writes, when she wrote The Zoya Factor, and I was in eighth grade when it came out, you know? I remember the first, one of the first interviews she gave was on NDTV, and it was like one of these 4pm or 6pm slots that no one watched news in.
00:45:24
Speaker
And then they only interviewed her because it was related to cricket. But the book found so much love and it grew. And last year when we say hosted Amrita for milk tea or Jane Borges and we spoke to her for Bombay Balchaw and my book club, right? We realized that when people read these books, they love them because
00:45:44
Speaker
This is your neighborhood in the spice that you make your prawn curry in and the martunga cafe where you have your idliad. And these things are so much immortal connect. Yes, exactly. It's representation. You see your life, your worldview and yourself in a way represented in that literature. So, you know, coming back to the point you were saying earlier, and I just remember this, you were saying how, you know, in school,
00:46:12
Speaker
You know the writers you mentioned that you studied and I do when we were growing up in school in India Here's the thing about two years
Limitations of Indian School Curricula
00:46:21
Speaker
ago. I went to look at I think it was the ICIC or SSC syllabus Okay, but English literature for I think it was 9th and 10th grade I just wanted to see what they were studying and you know, here's the sad part there was not there was maybe just one Indian novelist on there we our school curricula has to change and
00:46:42
Speaker
because we need to get to readers from an early age. Now, luckily, people like you did find Zoya Factor when you were in eighth grade, but I'm telling you, there's a lot of eighth graders who don't know about our Indian writers because what they're being given to study are still white, classic European and American writers, which I don't understand why.
00:47:04
Speaker
Why are our own educators not saying, hey, let's study Anisma Chuktai book. Let's study a Krishna Sopti novel. Let's study K.M. Munshi novel. You know, why not? Absolutely. I think for me, you know, it's been such a great session, Jenny, to talk to you about this.
Book Recommendation and Closing Remarks
00:47:23
Speaker
And I'm taking away so much from this session. Of course, I've had the good fortune and the privilege to finish reading your book before speaking to you. And for everyone who's hearing this podcast, please do read Jenny's book. It's available at independent bookstores. It's available online on your Amazons and Flipkarts. You can check it out on HarperCollins website.
00:47:48
Speaker
There's also a book trailer for those of you who want to sort of get a glimpse of what it's all about. The stories are so universal, so humane and very, very approachable because they're not, you know, for a certain generation or a certain time. They can pretty much be read by anyone and everyone. I really recommend that people go and read us.
00:48:13
Speaker
the book and pick it up and I for one at least personally am definitely going to check out your work which is not out and published in India yet but available on Kindle so I'm going to do that as well. Thank you so much Aayushi. I really appreciate
00:48:31
Speaker
this opportunity and I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. I just felt like, yeah, I think we connected on many levels. So I really appreciate that. Thank you so much Jenny. And thank you, you know, once again for doing this. You know, when I got your book and I read like Namita's blurb and Jerry Pinto's blurb and I was like, okay, fine. Every book has a blurb. Like what's the big deal, right? I mean, it's the PR and marketing team's job to give you guys a good cover and then have people say nice things.
00:49:01
Speaker
But it's very, very well deserved, right? And then something like, you know, Jehbindo even says about train your telescopes and whom keto is your. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great, it's a great quote. Yeah.
00:49:15
Speaker
Yeah, there's so much possibility to love these books and learn from them. And I am just thankful for your time and for the privilege of having you share, you know, your point of view, of course, translating the work and your journey
00:49:33
Speaker
with Dhunketu, but also sharing so many personal pertinent points about the short story as a format about how we consume literature in our schools and everything else. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Ayushi. I appreciate it.
00:49:57
Speaker
Do not forget to tune into us on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Ghana, and HT Smartcuts.