A multi-lingual republic (दैनिक ट्रिब्यून से साभार)

Some states in the Indian Union have banned the popular snack Maggi as laboratory tests have found very high levels of lead in some samples of the product. The high-lead-in-Maggi issue has done something interesting -- in the metropolitan elite class, some people have actually started talking about ingredient details on a product package and how declarations on that package should actually mean something.

Maggi, like some other products, carried some such information on its packaging, in English. What is absent on both sides of this equation is the people. Neither the urban “consumer-rights wallahs” nor the shiny, happy, “customer-friendly” (what does that even mean?) companies have ever pointed out that English only reaches a miniscule portion of the sub-continent’s consumer class or have done something about it.

What is even more unfortunate is that companies can get away with this, since government regulations don’t force product-makers to make product information available in the language of the people. What good is the correctness and comprehensiveness of the Maggi product and ingredient information if most eaters can’t read it?

Given that most provinces of the Indian Union are more populous than most nation-states, they individually provide large enough markets for province-specific customised packaging. But they don’t and they won’t. Unless they are forced to. But who will force them?

If companies are looking for best practices from the Indian Union government’s own behaviour, they’ll get much reassurance. It will learn that there is no need to create government websites or forms or documents in Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Maithili, Odiya, Gujarati, Malayalam, or for that matter, any language that is not brown-sahib English or sanskritised Hindi.

In short, the central government teaches everyone who cares to listen that the languages of the majority of the people of the Indian Union does not matter when it comes to communicating information.

Actually, it goes further. You may have seen advertisements in which parliamentary committees, so crucial to the process of feedback and consultation in any functioning democracy, ask for the opinion of the people at-large and other stakeholders. But if your mother tongue is Kannada and you know how to write in Kannada only -- just like many people’s mother tongue is Hindi and they know to write in Hindi only -- you won’t be able to write back to the parliamentary committee with your views, but the latter person can.

Does that sound like a system designed to suppress the viewpoints of the majority? Who knows. If you are a Tamil-speaker and can only communicate in Tamil in writing, the central government will simply refuse to deal with any grievance you may write to them about. Not because of the nature of your grievance or query, but because of your mother tongue. If you think that is unjust, I am sorry folks. That boat sailed in 1947. So, deal with it.

The central government of the Indian Union will not employ translators to deal with some communications from its non-Hindi-English subjects. It wants more than 700 million of non-Hindi-English residents of the Indian Union to learn English or Hindi or preferably both to be listened to.

And if the biggest guy with the widest power and deepest pockets has this attitude, it is easy to imagine what message it sends to everyone down the pecking order. What can be construed as a matter of linguistic dignity for a bilingual Bengali elite like me, fast becomes a matter of life and death for another Bengali who is unable to access various public schemes because all information and forms are in English-Hindi. In a close-minded monarchy, the subjects have to make themselves intelligible to his esteemed lordship.

In a democracy, the powers-that-be have to make themselves intelligible to the people, which, incidentally, includes the non-Hindi-English majority. In what kind of situation we are in, is something I leave my readers to decide. But this has consequences. It starts with not knowing what ingredient there is in the packaged good that you bought and spreads through all walks of life.

Let’s start with elite ones. Emirates, an airline owned by the government of Dubai, provides information in more South-Asian languages (including Bengali and Malayalam) in the bathrooms of its flights than Air India does or can do or ever will.

Bureaucrats and clerks compose missing children or dead unclaimed body notices in English only, a language whose sole knowledge is a marker of total alienation and, hence, willfully targets the most unlikely respondent.

This is an example of conscious criminal apathy and should be called out for exactly what it is. ATMs of most PSU banks will show you a screen to choose “your” language and, of course, the choices do not have languages of most of “you.”

United Bank of India (UBI), headquartered in Kolkata and born out of the merger of four Bengali-owned and largely Bengali customer-based banks (including the Comilla Banking Corporation, whose erstwhile headquarters in Comilla city is still the grandest structure in its main intersection) does not provide Bangla as a language choice at their ATMs.

They want your money to be lent to various corrupt kings of good times, like the owners of the now defunct Kingfisher Airlines, but don’t want you to take advantage of their banking services in the language a significant section of UBI customers are most comfortable in. The examples go on and on. Look around you -- you will see them at every place where New Delhi has the powers to call the shots.

Making marginal by linguistic discrimination, restricting access on the basis of language to essential services and redressal mechanisms that can mean a matter of life and death, especially for the poor -- what kind of apartheid madness is this?

This sort of linguistic exclusion ought to be considered criminal. Those who support such suppression of the majority are deeply malevolent creatures. On this point, I am becoming increasingly doubtless.

As intelligent creatures, let’s reflect on this. As living creatures, let’s change this. And if this article feels like something that is relevant to the Indian Union only, let me gently remind my readers that the People’s Republic of Bangladesh is a multilingual nation-state, whether it admits it or not.

Author: Garga Chatterjee

http://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2015/jul/02/multi-lingual-republic

Cutting off the mother tongue (ढाका ट्रिब्यून से साभार)

While the Indian Union and Pakistan celebrated the transfer of power from London to New Delhi and Karachi respectively (something that goes by the name independence in these parts of the world), a Twitter hashtag made the news. On August 15, #stopHindiImposition was trending. This was a well co-ordinated campaign from citizens who wanted to bring their demands for linguistic equality to be brought into public notice.

Such an act, especially on August 15, was termed by some as being “anti-national.” From when did asking for linguistic equality and fighting against imposition of something become an anti-national act -- unless being patriotic and being for Hindi imposition are one and the same? It is precisely this right to protest uni-lateral impositions, among other things, that were supposed to have been achieved on August 15, 1947, or so we were made to believe.

Freedom also means equality. This means no one should have more or less advantage in any sphere of life because of his or her mother tongue. I will give two sets of examples. There are a million things that a non-Hindi mother tongue person can’t do in the Indian Union, and this becomes especially stark when one goes down the socio-economic ladder.

One can’t write to parliamentary committees in their mother tongue (thus cutting out a majority of the people from the legislative process); can’t expect public sector banks to provide forms, documents, and ATM choices in their mother tongue even in their own states and areas; can’t expect airplane safety announcements to be in the major languages of the origin and destination even when both are in non-Hindi regions (ironically, foreign airlines have announcements in Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, etc for flights to Indian destinations where these languages dominate).

One can’t expect that their prime minister will go abroad and open a non-Hindi language centre in a foreign country as part of PR and “soft-power” projection; can’t have passports and other documents in their own language (Canada does, Switzerland does in five languages, even neighbouring oppressor-of-minorities, Sri Lanka, mentions both Sinhalese and Tamil); can’t argue in their courts in their mother-tongue, even in non-Hindi states; can’t take competitive exams like IIT, IAS, and a host of other “national” exams in their mother tongue.

One can’t expect, in an age of increasing digitisation of information, that “national” websites will also be in their mother tongue; can’t expect that “national” institutions do essay competitions for children in any other language but Hindi; can’t expect that the income tax website and forms to be intelligible in the mother tongues of the majority of tax-payers; can’t expect signboards in Lok Sabha in their own language (Singapore parliament house, ironically again, has signs in Tamil and three other languages).

One also has to put up with disrespectful things like the reservation chart of trains between Chennai and Coimbatore being in Hindi but not in Tamil; can’t expect that central government and PSU bank employees will be paid cash incentives to learn some Indian language other than Hindi (hence non-Hindi speakers fund the cash-incentive based promotion and learning of Hindi -- clearly a Bengali learning Tamil won’t link anyone in any way that “matters” or results in “national integration!”); can’t expect their own mother-tongue signage in trains and metros in areas where they are linguistic minorities. Hindi signs exist everywhere in Bengaluru’s Namma Metro, a city where Hindi doesn’t figure in the three most spoken languages.

One can’t expect central government schemes and missiles to have names that mean nothing in Hindi but are meaningful in other Indian languages (while the reverse seems to be the rule); can’t expect that CISF-CRPF-RPF-Army-BSF will speak and understand the language of non-Hindi locals (but you can’t find a government-paid Khaki in UP who doesn’t understand Hindi); can’t expect government adverts about cleaning India, greening India, making India, and whatnot in non-Hindi languages to be in newspapers and billboards of Hindi regions (while the reverse is true).

One can’t expect that their population proportion will at least hold somewhat constant, if not grow (no points for guessing whether the population proportion of major non-Hindi language speakers have decreased or increased since 1947 -- and the decrease closely parallels the increase in Hindi speakers); can’t expect the central government to fund World Kannada Conference or Tamil Language Day; can’t expect a Bangla film to have a CBFC certificate in Bangla; can’t expect someone to “break into” their non-Hindi mother tongue in English language TV channels; can’t expect government websites that cater to the poorest (like MNREGA information) or government TV channels that cater to farmers (like Kisan TV) to have anything in their mother tongue (as Mohammed Shafi points out: “Farmers of non-Hindi states have real challenges to overcome. Let’s not include ‘learning Hindi’ and ridicule them.”)

The list goes on and on. When a nation-state treats huge sections of its citizens as second class, do those citizens have the same obligation of loyalty to that system as the first class citizens? Only a twisted and hypocritical supremacist can claim to believe in “diversity” and then unilaterally dictate the “common” interface that needs to be developed.

Who are these “non-Hindis” anyways? They are people with individual populations as large as Canada, Mexico, Italy, and Egypt, depending on which state we are talking about. Five of their languages figure among the top 20 languages, with some of the largest numbers of native speakers.

If you are discriminated against on the basis of your mother tongue, are you independent or free? You are not. Who rules over you then? Well, those who oppose linguistic equality and hence, want to continue the discrimination against your mother tongue, that is, against your mother, you, and your coming generations till your kind gives in to this discrimination as “normal” and considers New Delhi-sponsored promotion of a particular language as being “normal.”

If one learns to speak, think, write, and feel in that imposed language, can sing Bollywood tunes to be included in “national” antaksharis on TV and feel included in informal settings among cosmopolitan friends in Mumbai, Delhi, and, increasingly, Bengaluru, one becomes the kind of citizen the state wants one to be.

This is not accidental. It is by design. This is not some new design either. Macaulay had something similar in mind but he is now dead. His ghost now speaks official Hindi and writes that in Devanagari script. Any imposition works best using the resources of the people on whom the imposition takes place. Curzon knew that then. The powers-that-be know that now. 

Author: Garga Chatterjee

http://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2015/aug/21/cutting-mother-tongue

When the majority are excluded due to their mother tongues (ओपन से साभार)

“Tamil was a major factor for my fame within Tamil Nadu; but it was only after the translation in English that Salma rose to different heights,” says the Tamil poet and novelist Salma, whose Irandam Jamangalin Kathai, about the world of women in a Tamil Muslim community, was published in Lakshmi Holmström’s translation as The Hour Past Midnight. The novel was longlisted for the DSC Prize in 2011, and sold over 3,000 copies (roughly 5,000 in Tamil, says her publisher, Kannan Sundaram of Kalachuvadu). Shamsur Rahman Faruqi may have long been the brightest star of the Urdu literary world, but to the Indian reader in English, he really only appeared on the horizon with the publication of The Mirror of Beauty (2013), his own translation of his magnum opus Kai Chand Thay Sar- e-Aasmaan (2006). KR Meera’s Aarachar might have won coveted Malayalam honours like the Vayalar, Odakkuzhal and Kerala Sahitya Akademi awards, and sold close to 50,000 copies—but it was only with its translation into English as Hangwoman (2014), that the book entered literary conversation outside of Kerala, applauded for its startlingly ambitious take on life, death, sex and the media through the eyes of a young Kolkata woman appointed executioner, and for J Devika’s effervescent translation. And so it goes.

Many regional language writers have only received national recognition late in their lives, because of translation into English. “Before the award, I was known as ‘a leading writer from Kerala’... When I won the Crossword Book Award in 1999, the press qualified me as ‘a leading Indian writer’,” says M Mukundan (Crossword website), whose Kesavan’s Lamentations won in the translation category in 2006. This is, of course, testament to an unfair linguistic landscape where English has an easier claim on the national. But it warrants greater scrutiny. If, as Marathi writer Bhalchandra Nemade and Indian English novelist Aatish Taseer would have it, English has squeezed the life out of Indian languages —“English is encroaching upon the innocence of children,” Nemade said, in an interview on Scroll; ‘How English Ruined Indian Literature’ is the title of Taseer’s New York Times opinion piece—why does English publishing seem more enthusiastic than ever in directing the many streams of that literature towards us, in translation? If this were a pessimistic critical theory paper, one might argue that the very impulse towards translation is preservationist, and things can only be preserved when they’re dead. But however seductive this idea of embalming might be, literature in the other Indian languages seems anything but corpse-like. And yet, being translated into English seems to afford writers in even the most thriving of these literary languages—Bangla, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi—a new lease of life. Because those of us who live in India but read only in English have grown dead to these languages; translation is the jadui kathi, the magic wand through which we might awake to their pleasures. English has turned us into Sleeping Beauties, and now only English can rouse us. And because whatever Nemade might wish for, neither our history nor the market allow for a clean separation between English and regional language cultures. A dedicated and growing community of Indian readers in English—while not exactly huge yet—is keen to read regional language literature (and read about it), while Indian language readers are often influenced by the ‘buzz’ English can create around authors.

Translation lists at HarperCollins India and Penguin Books India have certainly increased both in number and variety over the last five years. Penguin brought out 22 translations in 2013, 20 in 2014, and has 23 on the 2015 publication schedule. “We now publish an average of 20 titles in translation: five contemporary fiction titles and 15 classics (a mix of fiction, drama, poetry, memoir),” says Penguin’s executive editor R Sivapriya, who heads its translations list. “The numbers must have been half that in 2012.” Minakshi Thakur, who heads the same list at Harper, concurs: “We used to do five to six titles, this year onwards we’ll have 10 to 12. Earlier most publishers would only do classics, but we want to work with writers who are working now; [build] a list of future classics.” Penguin’s recent successes include a book as contemporary as Sachin Kundalkar’s 2006 Marathi novel Cobalt Blue, which sold over 2,000 copies in Jerry Pinto’s 2013 translation, and one as grand and dastan-like as The Mirror of Beauty, which sold 5,000 copies in 1,000-page hardback.

At the more academic end of the spectrum, too, the translation list at Oxford University Press has seen 10 percent annual growth since 2009. It now stands at 125 titles from 18 languages, including less-represented literatures like Dogri (Shailender Singh’s Hashiye Par (For a Tree to Grow) and Tamil Dalit writing like Cho Dharman’s Koogai: The Owl (translated by Vasantha Surya). But this is still a niche readership, and the slow rate of growth makes publishing solely translations unsustainable. The independent Katha Books, which pioneered translations from the Indian languages, has shifted its focus to translations of children’s books.

In a country as multilingual as India, translation has often been the only medium for a Malayalee reader to read the work of a Bengali writer, or an Oriya reader to discover a Kashmiri poet. Most readers in each of these linguistic communities have historically read translations in their mother tongue. Perhaps literary flows, even then, were somewhat unidirectional: I can’t keep track of the Biharis and Malayalees I know whose literarily-inclined parents grew up reading Sarat Chandra Chatterjee and Tagore in Hindi and Malayalam translations respectively, but I would be hard put to name any Bengali readers who read Hindi or Malayalam writers (they did read Russian and English classics in Bangla). But as the Indian upper middle classes have grown more monolingual, reading almost entirely in English, it is mainstream English publishers who must take on the task of bringing a multifarious Indian literature to these readers. In SR Faruqi’s words, the rising readership for English translations is attributable to “the growth, in geometrical proportions, of Indians who... sadly enough, have no real claim to any other language”.

Sometimes an older translation in another language still serves as a route to English. Khushwant Singh and Vikram Seth had both read Sankar’s Bangla bestseller Chowringhee in a Hindi translation, and their admiration for this chronicle of life at a 50s Calcutta hotel was partially responsible for Penguin’s agreeing to publish Arunava Sinha’s English translation, according to both Sankar and Sinha. Today, while Hindi remains an important link language between readers in North India and writers elsewhere, at least some Hindi publishers’ decisions about translations may be routed through English. Aditi Maheshwari, translations head at the Hindi publishing house Vani Prakashan, stresses Vani’s commitment to translating directly from the original language, whether it be Herta Müller’s German or KS Sethumadhavan’s Malayalam. But it is hard to deny the role of English (publishing and media) in foregrounding a potentially translatable writer, such as Tamil’s Perumal Murugan.

Many Indian language writers cannot but recognise the unfortunately disproportional power English wields, knowing the only way to deal with it is to make it work for them, as much as possible. But writers from languages with a strong critical culture and a large literary readership can often experience a gulf between that vibrancy of exchange and their reception in English.

“Within Hindi, there’s a rich conversation my work and I are part of, though not without its politics and prejudices,” says Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree. “English took me to other forums [but I soon saw the] lag between the interest in English in translation and English in original.” Her 2001 novel Tirohit appears in Rahul Soni’s attentive translation as The Roof Beneath Their Feet (HarperCollins, 2013). “Some 60 people have done research on my books [before any translation], colleges have held discussions. For Katha Satisar (2005), I got ten Hindi literary prizes, including the Vyas Samman and Mahatma Gandhi Samman,” agrees the Hindi writer Chandrakanta, author of this acclaimed historical take on Kashmiri Hindus, which Zubaan publishes later this year as A Saga of Satisar. Her intimate account of life in a Srinagar neighbourhood, Ailan Galli Zinda Hai (1986), was shortlisted for the 2012 DSC Prize as Zubaan’s translation, A Street in Srinagar, but has not even sold 2,000 copies. “How is it possible that a novel that has been recognised, does not sell? Perhaps Satisar will do better.”

While Hindi’s literary universe, for example, was (and is) perfectly able to provide a launching pad for a serious writer such as herself, Shree concedes that its “being older” means it “has still to update its training in events, awards, markets”. Yet vastly more copies are sold of a successful book in most Indian languages than in English. Benyamin’s novel Aadujeevitham, a spare, arresting account of one man’s brutal experience as a labourer in the Gulf, sold over one lakh copies across a hundred editions in Malayalam, according to its author. Translated lucidly into English by Joseph Koippally as Goat Days, the book is also one of Penguin’s greatest successes— but with 10,000 copies. Even Chowringhee, with over 30,000 copies sold in English, barely compares with the 100,000 copies its author ascribes to Bengali sales (not counting the huge pirated edition sales in Bangladesh, as he reminds me). And while Hangwoman gave Aarachar and its author a new visibility, only 2,000 hardback English copies have sold till date. Of course, any comparison of sales figures must acknowledge that English books are priced much higher.

“I hope we help the writers with their ambitions, I think we do, but not as much as they deserve,” says Sivapriya. “It requires enormous effort to train the gaze of the English reader on them.” Thakur agrees, admitting, “It is still a struggle to sell out 3,000 copies of most titles”, but adding, “That’s the case with most original English [literary] fiction too.” Bhima: Lone Warrior, Gita Krishnankutty’s 2013 translation of Randamoozham, Malayalam giant MT Vasudevan Nair’s classic telling of the Mahabharata from Bhima’s perspective, has sold 6,000 copies, she says. “The epic still sells, retellings do well in our market. Translate anything [to do with] Satyajit Ray and it’ll do very well. [Take] our 14 Stories project, stories by various writers that Ray made into films—that’s the kind of book which goes on to backlist well.”

Controversy of any kind works wonders for sales, in any language. Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja, banned in Bangladesh and inciting death threats, is one of Penguin’s highest selling translations, with 30,000 copies sold till date. And in a bitter irony, Murugan’s novel One Part Woman, which became the focus of a moral censorship campaign that forced the author to give up writing, has sold nearly 10,000 copies. The independent publisher Zubaan Books sold almost 7,000 copies of Urvashi Butalia’s translation of Baby Halder’s candid memoir of life as a domestic servant, A Life Less Ordinary. Penguin’s other successes from before 2012 are all 20th century classics in their original languages: Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari, Manto’s Bitter Fruit, Tagore’s stories and poems, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas.

Often, however, English’s ripple effect bears little connection to sales. Meera’s Yellow is the Colour of Longing (2011) was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor prize and short-listed for the Crossword award, but did not sell beyond the first print run of 2,000. Being translated, however, brought Meera national exposure, with glowing reviews across the English media and speaking engagements at literature festivals, from Jaipur to Chandigarh, Odisha to Goa, held on a scale that most regional literatures cannot yet muster funds for. The publicity that an English translation receives sometimes triggers fresh interest in the original linguistic community. “If a book is awarded nationally or internationally, it gets more attention [from local readers],” says Benyamin.

Meera and Benyamin both believe the English media covers literature more than Malayalam, and Benyamin, like Sankar, thinks reviews in English are fairer. “A Malayalee reader would believe a bookshop owner more than a critic,” says Benyamin. “English reviews were well-researched and positive, maybe because my book was already famous.”

“Through English, I rediscovered my Bengali readers,” agrees Sankar, long dismissed as middlebrow by Bengali critics. “I never had any good reviews [in Bangla. But] some Bengali readers think, if it’s translated by Penguin, and getting rave reviews in London, maybe they should read it.”

For writer Uday Prakash, English translation has helped lift his work out of what he sees as Hindi’s insular, non-risk- taking, institutionally corrupt world, and made it part of ‘world literature’. “When I wrote Peeli Chattri Wali Ladki, I was attacked and abused in the Hindi world. But Jason Grunebaum’s English translation, The Girl with the Golden Parasol, got me to Penguin and then to Yale University Press.”

Yet English translation is no panacea. Much depends on quality, the publisher’s interest and distribution channels. “Older translations of my work, like Jai Ratan’s [one of India’s most prolific translators], were targeted at an Indian English reader, and could not travel abroad. Jason is young, and a fiction writer himself; his translation reflects how language in America has changed,” Prakash adds.

English translation does not guarantee exposure. Although she gained an Indian English readership as early as 2000, after academic Nita Kumar translated her 1997 novel Mai into English for Kali For Women, Geetanjali Shree insists that her writing continues to be routed through Hindi. “Serious readers of my works, such as Annie Montaut, Alessandra Consolaro, Vasudha Dalmia and Francesca Orsini are advanced scholars keen to promote Hindi literature in the West. I am known in Russia and Poland because of Hindi!”

Certainly, Euro-American academic networks have been crucial in spreading regional Indian literature, providing the focused language training and university presses needed to support high-quality literary translation. Hindi departments in the USA, for instance, have produced such wonderful translators as Grunebaum and Daisy Rockwell, who has translated the late Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk.

But how far have translations to English travelled? Over the five years that the DSC Prize has been awarded at the Jaipur Literature Festival, only six out of the 29 shortlisted titles have been translations (UR Ananthamurthy’s Bharathipura and A Street in Srinagar in 2011, Uday Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi in 2013, Anand’s Book of Destruction and Goat Days in 2014 and The Mirror of Beauty in 2015). None has won yet. All of this is not to ignore that several regional language cultures inhabit positions of superiority with regard to some others: think of Hindi with regard to Urdu, or at a very different angle, to Bhojpuri. English may not be able to speak to this (though it has brought Dalit writers like P Sivakami, Urmila Pawar and Ajay Navaria some welcome attention). But it seems to me difficult to stand either with Nemade, denying that this collective landscape has been forever altered by a flood called English, or with Taseer—taking a position higher and safer than everyone else, and then bemoaning the flood. Bilinguality—reading in at least one Indian language besides English—is one way to withstand the waters. But translation, even in English, if we do more of it and better—while acknowledging that the ground is not level—can let the monolingual reader into several languages. For many of us, it might be the most feasible way to grow some roots.

Author: Trisha Gupta

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/books/going-mainstream