Gaining in translation

A new literary consultancy sets out to fill a gap in the promotion and nurturing of literature in Indian languages.

For the past three years, Mita Kapur has been planning, organising and overseeing the annual Jaipur Literature Festival, an event that started small but has grown in scale and prestige with each edition: this year, it was headlined by the presence of Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai and featured a host of other well-known authors, publishers and agents. But while Kapur has been pleased about the festival's progress, there have been areas of dissatisfaction too. "Every time I interacted with writers from languages other than English," she says, "there was a sense of discontent "" invariably, they felt that they haven't been represented well enough in the mainstream."

The Jaipur festival itself has made a conscious effort to incorporate regional writers, but such efforts can only have limited utility at an event attended largely by people whose first language is English. In a country as vast and varied as India "" connected more by English than by any other single language "" it becomes all too easy for pockets of insularity to form, denying readers of one region the chance to savour the literature of another: as Kapur points out, the average reader in Gujarat or Rajasthan would not even have heard of a major Malayalam writer like O V Vijayan, much less had access to his work. "I felt more needed to be done in terms of giving regional languages a chance to compete on an equal footing." This was the genesis of Siyahi, a literary consultancy intended as a forum for authors, poets, researchers, translators and publishers to evolve and expand the scope for Indian literature.

The mission, Kapur says, is to bring literature in all regional languages to the forefront by ensuring cross-language translations globally. The next five years will see the consultancy serve an intermediary role in the publication of 10-12 books each year through mainstream publishers, nationally and internationally. "We have signed up two writers, Sampurna Chattarji and Karthika Nair, with Harper Collins, and have also begun work on translation," says Kapur. One of the books on which work is underway is Kissa-e-Rangeen Guftaar, a hand-written Urdu novel by Ajmat Ullah Niyaj Dehli, first published in 1817, which is being translated into Hindi and later, possibly, into English as well. "We are tying up with publishers in the South to spearhead the process there as well."

To provide a platform for writers and publishers, Siyahi will also have literature-based events in the form of festivals and seminars. A keynote event will be the "Translating Bharat" conference, to be held in Jaipur in January "" just before the literature festival, which Kapur will continue to co-direct. "The authorities have decided to call it the Jaipur Literature Week," she says with some satisfaction, "since Translating Bharat will take place on January 21 and 22, and the regular fest will follow from the 23rd to the 27th." Highlights (see box) will include a session on the North-eastern languages, including a Mizo reading (the audience will be given papers with an English translation), a dastaangoi enactment by Mahmoud Farooqui and a performance of "Kabir ke Dohe" by singer Tipaniya ji (who, Kapur notes regretfully, has performed in the US but never before in Jaipur "" despite being Rajasthani).

Intense as Kapur is about her new project "" she spends much of her time travelling with her laptop, arranging meetings with publishers, authors and potential translators, or having prolonged online discussions with her co-directors and editors, and looks appropriately frazzled through it all "" she admits that Siyahi was born out of "laughter and insanity". Her original name for the consultancy was the tongue-in-cheek "Rejection Note" (a reference to the predicament of many promising regional-language writers, whose manuscripts publishers often don't have time for) before deciding to change it to something more austere. She's pragmatic too, knowing that nothing will get done in a hurry. "We'll have to build things up gradually," she says. "For instance, I want translations to be of a very high quality "" which hasn't historically been the case in India "" so I'm looking at samples of two-three chapters before hiring anyone." Siyahi will also consider drawing up separate contracts for translators, rather than paying them on a measly Rs 1-2 per word basis, which Kapur believes has the effect of encouraging assembly-line work.

It was extremely gratifying for Kapur when nearly everyone she spoke to about the idea "" including author Namita Gokhale and publishers Ravi Singh (Penguin Books) and Jaya Bhattacharji (Zubaan) "" agreed to help out. She's also grateful for the support Siyahi has received from the Sahitya Akademi, the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), UNESCO and the Rajasthan government, but says more financial help is needed. "I'm out there with a begging bowl every day, but it's hard to sell this sort of thing to corporates. For many of them, a literary project has to have big names associated with it," she sighs. Another offshoot of the glamorous-writer-as-society-person phenomenon encouraged by sections of mainstream media. Hopefully, Siyahi and Translating Bharat will help transform some of these perceptions too.