An attempt to retrieve history (द हिंदू से साभार)

In the second and final part of his article, the writer analyses the challenges faced by inter-language translation in India.

Read the first part of the article here.

Translation came to be institutionalised in independent India as a consequence of the State’s perception that emotional integration of India is possible only through the arts. Literature had a major role to play here. The idea of translation thus got linked to the idea of the nation. If nation, as Benedict Anderson says, is an ‘imagined community’, literature plays a role in creating and sustaining that community. India’s linguistic economy underwent a change after 1947 and mother tongues were perceived to be the chief markers of identity and carriers of tradition. Inter-language translation continues to be one of the chief activities of the Sahitya Akademi and National Book Trust, two public institutions created in the times of Jawaharlal Nehru’s liberal and forward-looking regime. Now we also have other national projects like the National Translation Mission, meant to translate knowledge-texts from English into Indian languages (and hopefully vice-versa), and Indian Literature Abroad meant to make significant Indian literary texts available in foreign languages.

Inter-language translations have played a major role in creating movements across linguistic territories. Horizontal translations of patriotic works as well as social-reformist works during the Independence movement played a role in shaping our national consciousness. The same is also true of progressive literature where the translations of the likes of Premchand, Manto, Krishan Chander, Amrita Pritam, Jayakantan and Thakazhi encouraged an egalitarian ethos. This happened again during the Modernist movement. I remember how the works of Mardhekar, Muktibodh, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Nakulan, Dilip Chitre, Ananthamurthy, Nirmal Verma and others got translated into Malayalam during the 1960s. And it is happening again now, contributing to Dalit and feminist literary movements in many languages. The translations of Marathi Dalit writing have been crucial in creating a similar body of literature in languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi or Gujarati, though later many of these languages discovered the existence of earlier works. Translations have also helped create genres in languages where they had not originally existed.

However inter-language translation in India faces certain challenges. Globalisation and the cultural amnesia it imposes on countries like ours are trying to marginalise this important activity. We are becoming more and more monolingual, at least in terms of linguistic competence. However inter-language translation requires competence in at least two Indian languages including some knowledge of the regional cultures and literary traditions that inform the texts. Despite the level playing field supposed to be available for inter-language translators, the field in reality is not always that level. For example, Meenakshi Mukherjee — speaking of her experience of translating Alka Saraogi’s Hindi novels into Bangla — points out how Bangla resists translations from other Indian languages including Hindi even while translations from Bangla are available in Hindi and other Indian languages.

Literary translation is mostly confined to certain genres like the novel. This choice is dictated more by commercial interest than social or aesthetic concerns as, in some languages, poetry, drama, discursive prose or the short story may be doing better than the novel as a genre. This creates gaps and unevenness in our understanding of other literatures.

Truly contemporary works rarely get translated as it takes time for a new work written in an Indian language, unlike one written in English, to gain national notice. Only works produced by certain movements sometimes get translated as they often appear in academic curricula or are politically relevant.

There is a dearth of competent translators in each language from many other languages. To take the case of Malayalam, direct translations into Malayalam happen only from Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada. Even here —excepting Hindi — it is often one or two translators who do the job and they are often without followers. Our universities are doing next to nothing to create or upgrade skills in languages other than the mother tongues. This means we keep falling back on mediated indirect translations, mostly using English versions (at times Hindi versions), which may be far removed from the original and may well erase cultural markers.

There are very few journals in languages that promote inter-language translations and publishers in many languages too are indifferent to them, not to speak of the lack of quality editing.

Whatever little translation happens here is also accidental, hardly schematic. The result again is unevenness of impressions. There are few impact/reception studies on the original works to ensure their reception in another language.

We need to understand translation as an attempt to retrieve our people’s histories often lost or distorted because of colonial interventions, to resituate their past and reassess their present and to grasp their modes of imagination and creativity. And this, no doubt, is best done in people’s own languages.

(Concluded)

द हिंदू से साभार

Need for language ministry and translation cell: Dr Naresh (बिज़नेस स्टैंडर्ड से साभार)

Ruing that scheduled languages are being neglected even after 67 years of Independence, polyglot author Dr Naresh has demanded a separate ministry for language and a translation cell to enrich and promote languages.

Former Professor of Modern Literature at Punjab University and Chairman of the Chandigarh Academy of Letters, Dr Naresh has authored over six dozen books in English, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi and received several State, national and international level awards and honors for his contribution to literature.

"It is unfortunate that in a country like India where several languages and 'bolis' (local languages) are spoken, does not have any ministry for language. Apart from that there should be an initiative like government translation cell to enrich and promote our languages," he told PTI.

"Language can be a strong medium to unite the country but the government does not looked at this aspect. We are not aware of contemporary literature in other Indian languages apart from our mother tongue.

"There should be a government translation cell and they should publish the best literature of all scheduled languages annually," he said.

He also said languages like Hindi, Urdu and English should be declared the country's cultural languages as they have mass base and do not belong to any particular region.

"The real problem was reorganization of states on the basis of languages which caused disputes over water, land and languages. That reorganization was not pragmatic like Jammu Kashmir was declared an Urdu speaking state but who speaks Urdu there. Dogri is the language spoken in Jammu, in Kashmir they speak Kashmiri and Ladakhi in Ladakh," the author said.

Dr Naresh said he had written a letter to late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi back in 1980s and to the current government as well.

"I had written to late Rajiv Gandhi and got some letters from HRD ministry then but that's it. I wrote to current HRD ministry as well. I have proposed them to declare these three languages our cultural languages and they should be taught in the schools at elementary level," he said.

Dr Naresh has written several books in Urdu including 'Tashnalab' and 'Khushboo ka safar'. The author said he is deeply hurt by the 'step motherly' treatment given to the language.

"Urdu is our own language but it is widely related to Muslims. We must stop connecting languages with communities or religions. Government has opened academies and established awards to promote Urdu but that will not solve the purpose. We must preserve this urbane sophisticated language through proper education policy," he said.

"If we can include Chand Bardai, Tulsi Das and Sur Das in our curriculum who were the poets of Dingle, Awadhi and Brij respectively then why not Ghalib." the author said.

When asked if there is a dearth of good writers in Urdu, he replied in negative.

"It is not true. There are many good writers and poets in Urdu. We have seen the likes of Sardar Zafri, Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi, Khwaza Abbas Ahmed and Rajendra Singh Bedi post progressive writers moment. New generation loves Urdu Shairi and we must preserve this urbane sophisticated language and its culture," he added.

बिज़नेस स्टैंडर्ड से साभार

In other words, in other tongues (डी.एन.ए. से साभार)

Translated copies of Indian novels continue to do very well in European countries, providing a lucrative channel of income for Indian authors, finds Gargi Gupta.

It is one of those apocryphal stories that the publishing world thrives on — a manuscript by an unknown author gets picked up by a discerning agent/publisher and becomes a bestseller, not just in the language it was written in but also in its translated version.

Marc Parent, the French publisher and Indophile who now runs India Maya Literary agency, was at the London Book Fair in 2006, when an agent gave him a manuscript to read. "I devoured it through the night," he remembers, "and went back the next morning and acquired the rights to it." Parent was then editorial director of foreign literature for French publishing house Buchet-Chastel and the manuscript was Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.

By the time the French translation hit the shops in August 2008, Adiga's book had already been published by Atlantic to much acclaim. A month later in September, The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize and Le Tigre Blanc became a bestseller, selling as many as 150,000 copies to date. Not bad, if you compare it with the upwards of 300,000 copies of The White Tiger sold in India.

But this was not Parent's biggest success. That goes to Tarun Tejpal's debut novel The Alchemy of Desire (2006), which has sold 300,000 copies in its many editions, won the Le Prix Mille Pages for Best Foreign Literary Fiction and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina.

More recently, the German translation of Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia won the 2014 Leipzig Book Award for European understanding, the first non-Western book to get the prestigious Euro 15,000 award.

And it's not just in France and Germany that Indian authors are finding readers in tongues other than their own. They've also got a following in smaller countries such as Portugal, Italy, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Holland, and Greece.

Translation rights for The White Tiger were sold for 26 languages. Even Chandrahas Choudhury's Arzee the Dwarf was translated into German and Spanish. Polish publisher Wielka Litera is bringing out a translation of Arundhati Roy's Broken Republic early next month. Wielka Litera has also published Kishwar Desai's Witness the Night.

Friederike Barakat, part of the foreign rights team at German publishing house Hanser, says Indian authors like Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Jeet Thayil are well known in her country.

"The trend began with Roy's The God of Small Things, which was the first real bestseller by an Indian author," says Barakat, who was in New Delhi for the World Book Fair. Hanser has published the Mumbai-based poet Ranjit Hoskote and is coming out with a book on Gulaabi Gang founder Sampat Pal Devi.

But what is it about Indian novels that so appeal to European readers? Most of their narratives are specific to India, and refer to experiences that are unique to it. "The Germans don't necessarily want to read only about themselves. Cultural difference can be interesting too, or how would the Scandinavian detective novel become such a global rage," says Barakat.

"What played a part in The White Tiger's success was the French desire for the sweeping story of India," says Parent. "While India is a developing country and an emerging economic power, for most French people it is still associated with poverty."

Sometimes, a minor tweak can work wonders. Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva sold a creditable 18,000 copies in its French version, but its publishers, Albin Michel, changed its title to Mother India.

Of course, the West's fascination with India is not new. After all, the French were one of the major purveyors of Orientalism, and Indian and Eastern cultures had a major influence on Western philosophy, culture, arts, music, even fashion. Among Indian writers, Rabindranath Tagore is best known in Europe. Pioneers of Indian writing in English such as RK Narayanan have been widely translated, as have the first-wave of Indian writers in English who made it big on the international scene — Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh. What has changed now, says Parent, is the pace of the translations and how well they do commercially.

As a result, translation rights have emerged as a lucrative source of income for Indian authors. Parent negotiated the sale of the German translation rights for Saltwater, the debut novel by Mumbai-based Shrey, for a "five-figure Euro." Parent says it was a generous deal, but overseas rights can bring in as much as Rs10 lakh at current exchange rates. A tidy sum by any reckoning!

डी.एन.ए. से साभार

Do you understand me? (द हिंदू से साभार)

K. SATCHIDANANDAN

India’s culture of translation dates back to pre-colonial times that had witnessed several kinds of literary translation, though our ancients may not claim to be doing so. This is perhaps natural to multilingual culture where poets (Kabir, Mira, Nanak, Vidyapati) easily moved from one language to another without even being aware of it and translators did not fear being executed for deviations as in the West. (Remember the fate of Etienne Dolet, the 16th century French translator of Plato). We do not even have a proper word for translation in the Indian languages, so we have, at different times, borrowed anuvad (‘speaking after’) from Sanskrit and tarjuma (explication or paraphrase) from Arabic, or created words likerupantar (Bengali), bhashantar (Hindi), mozhi paharppu (Tamil), or paribhasha (interpretation),vivartanam (one specific appearance of a phenomenon) and mozhimattam (changing the tongue) (all Malayalam).

Our predecessors used texts as take-off points and freely retold and resituated them, as was done in the case of the many Ramayanas, Mahabharatas and Bhagavatas in different languages. A reassuring example from early pre-colonial days, probably sixth or fifth century BCE, pointed out by Sujit Mukherjee, (Translation as Recovery) is the Jataka stories, first collected in Pali, forming the 10th book of Khuddaka Nikaya and later developed in Sanskrit, mixing prose and verse, as full-fledged narratives. A later example is that of Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha (fourth to fifth centuries CE), a voluminous cycle of stories originally composed in a Prakrit speech, almost dismissively namedPaishachi. Even when the original text was lost, the stories were preserved in three Sanskrit texts, two Prakrit abridgements and one Tamil fragment. Both the examples do not satisfy the modern criteria of translation, but embody the choice as well as the compulsion behind the rebirth of texts in another language, which apply to translation in general.

These were all, in a sense, acts of appropriation, which were academic — as they required competence in the other language — and also free enterprise — as the translator left the mark of his/her imagination and creativity on the product. This tendency to transform texts from older languages like Prakrit, Pali, Sanskrit, Tamil or Persian continued almost to the end of pre-colonial period. (I will not deny here the chances of many of these stories themselves originating in smaller tribal languages and dialects, a possibility that demands clearer proof). Texts from more recent — ‘modern’ — Indian languages were an exception during the period, the well-known examples being Padmabati, a 17th century Bangla work adapted from Padumavat — a 16th century Hindi work by Malik Muhammad Jayasi — by the poet-soldier Alaol. Another example is a minor work narrating the tragic tale of Madhavanala, a musician, and Kamakandala, a dancer, which has several versions in Sanskrit and Hindi besides in Marathi and Gujarati. Alam, a court-poet of Aurangzeb, based his Hindi version on a Sanskrit version by Jodh, a poet in Akbar’s court. Alam admitted how he composed parts and also borrowed from Hindi as well as Sanskrit versions. “Kachhu apni, kachhu prakrit choro/Yathashakti kari akshar jodo” (Some mine, some stolen from Prakrit, putting letters together as well as I can), he has said, laughing at four strong Western individualist ideas: absolute originality, faithful translation and the author’s moral right and the publisher’s copyright.

Most pre-colonial translations, however, were what Gianfranco Folena would call ‘vertical translations’, where ‘the source language has prestige and value which transcends that of the target language’. The translator here often feels humbled by the superior power of the original forcing, for example, Jnaneswar — who translated the Bhagavad Gita into Marathi — to compare himself to a tinytitibha bird trying to sound the ocean’s depth. ‘Horizontal translation’, on the other hand, is what happens ‘between languages of a similar structure and strong cultural affinity’ (Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Power and the Case of Horizontal Translation’, Translating Power). Apparently, there is no hierarchy here; the languages are considered equal. This is what happens between modern Indian languages, though even here translation into a less known or recognised language, like Bhili or Santhali, Garo or Gammit, may involve a power-relationship. Sisirkumar Das (History of Indian Literature: Western Impact, Indian Response) observes that there have been only a handful of translations from one Indian language into another at the beginning of the 19th century, produced mainly to meet the demands of pedagogy. There were plenty of translations from Bengali into many other Indian languages. Tulasi Das’s Ramcharitmanas was translated into Urdu and the first Marathi novel, Yamunaparyatan, got translated into Kannada. Das also notes that geographically contiguous literatures were translated into each other more often — like Kannada into Marathi or Marathi into Gujarati. He also says South Indian languages got translated more into each other than into the languages of the North. But this is not always true, as for example, Malayalam has more works translated from Bengali and Hindi than from Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.

The translation scene in India underwent a major transformation with English joining India’s linguistic landscape. Three areas of translation prospered during the colonial times: translation of Indian literary texts into English; translation of English language texts, as also the European language texts available in English versions, into Indian languages; and translation from one Indian language into another. Tejaswini Niranjana, in Siting Translation, has studied the working of the colonial ideology in the translations done during the period. Translations of texts like Bhagavad Gita, Manusmriti andArthashastra were mainly meant to help the rulers understand the Hindu ethos and practices, while old literary texts like Abhijnana Shakuntalam, besides being excellent literature, also satisfied their Orientalist mindset with its concept of the wild, exotic East and its coy, vulnerable and beautiful women. In Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories, Romila Thapar contrasts Kalidasa’s frail heroine with the brave and independent Sakuntala of Mahabharata. If first the translations were made by Western scholars like William Jones, by late 19th century, Indian scholars like Romesh Chandra Dutt (Lays of Ancient India, 1894; Mahabharata, 1899; Ramayana, 1902) also joined the effort, sometimes with the noble intention of correcting Western perceptions of Indian texts.

This is a living tradition as we realise from the practices of P. Lal, A.K. Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Arshia Sattar, H.S. Shivaprakash, Ranjit Hoskote, Vijay Nambisan, Bibek Debroy, and several other poets and scholars. The translation between Indian languages during the period of the freedom struggle was no more just a literary exercise; it helped the building of a nation. These translations during the late colonial period and the early years of independence were not profit-oriented; dedicated translators came up in many languages making a Tagore, a Sarat Chandra Chatterjee or a Premchand household names across the country.

K. Satchidanandan is an award-winning poet and author.

द हिंदू से साभार

DU Undergrads Develop App For Offbeat Languages (सिलिकॉन इंडिया से साभार)

Ever wondered if you could speak in Ladakhi and Mao Naga? The Indic Language application that is being developed by a few enthusiastic students from the Delhi University’s Cluster Innovation Centre will allow you to do so. It is being put together by a group of four undergraduate students including Himanshu Patel, Vivek Shekhar, Leelambar Soren and is lead by Vikalp Kumar.

Vikalp Kumar, 21, developed a liking for languages when he was able to impress his friends by writing their names in different languages. He is basically from Chennai and knows 5 more languages than the usual suspects Tamil, English and Hindi. The other languages that he is proficient in are Telugu, Kannada, Urdu, Punjabi and Sarazi –which is spoken in a district of Kashmir. He has an understanding of Sanskrit and Persian as well.

Under the guidance of Sukrita Paul Kumar, Coordinator of BTech in Humanities in DU, the group started by doing spadework and followed it up with a questionnaire. It took half a year for them to accomplish this preparatory work. Sukrita, who was an editor for People's Linguistic Survey of India knew just how big an undertaking this project was. Though this sort of exercise would claim generous funding and involves daunting field visits, the team found ways around both.

Vikalp said that,"There are speakers of 80 northeastern languages in Delhi." The questionnaire which contains over 2,600 English word and phrases in English is circulated among native speakers of a language to find the closest equivalents for it.

In September 2013, in what Vikas calls as "rapid vocabulary collection workshop" in about four hours, 2,500 words in Ladakhi were collected and recorded. Speakers of Dhatki, from Sindh region of Pakistan were traced at the South Asian University in Delhi and they took part in the exercise.

Facebook helped Vikalp cross borders and he contacted a speaker of Khowar through the social network. Email, instant messenger and Whatsapp were also put to use to collect words.

The app is not just another online dictionary. It is having songs, subtitled videos and indicates the geographical spread of a given language. Patel and Shekar worked on geography, culture and politics part of the project and tech team comprised of Patel and Soren. Kumar took the overall responsibility.

Kumar said, "We can go public when we have about five languages." Sukrita is also considering letting future batches of students pick up where the current batch leaves off, enhancing the number of languages in the app.

सिलिकॉन इंडिया से साभार

Veteran wordsmith who created world’s first Hindi thesaurus (हिंदुस्तान टाइम्स से साभार)

Arvind Kumar is India’s answer to Peter Mark Roget. Following in the footsteps of the British physician and lexicographer, who published the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget’s Thesaurus) in 1852, contributing the understanding of English language, Kumar has created the ‘Samantar Kosh’ — India’s first-ever modern Hindi thesaurus. It’s online version is called ‘Arvind lexicon’.

At 84, Kumar is continuously working to expand his lexicon of words from Hindi, helping millions to improve and learn India’s national language.

In 1952, then 22-years-old Kumar had been shifted from a Hindi magazine to an English publication of the company he had worked for first as a cashier, then typesetter, proof reader and ultimately a sub-editor. The shift in the medium of expression at his job meant that Kumar was always looking for the appropriate expressions in English. To solve his problem, Kumar bought his first edition of Roget’s Thesaurus.

The moment he held it in his hands, he wished if somebody could write a similar collection in Hindi.

And Kumar embarked upon the project — something nobody had attempted before — 20 years later.

The work began in earnest in 1978. Kumar was sure that he would able to complete the work in two years by following the pattern of Roget’s Thesaurus. He decided to write down words on small ruled cards, assigned numbers to concepts and topics and put the numbered cards in the Rogetian sequence. All he needed to do now, he thought, was fill the cards with appropriate Hindi words.

“In fact, I even went to the extent of noting down all his heading and entry numbers in a register and write possible Hindi head words for them and made cards accordingly. All I would have to do was to fill the cards with Hindi synonyms. I was sure that walking in Roget’s footsteps, I would reach my goal pretty fast and be able to present my magnum opus to Hindi and India — within two years,” he said.

But a few weeks into his venture, Kumar realised that it was not going to be that easy. He found that several concepts in Hindi, such as Brahmins, Banias, had no parallel in Roget. “Roget had organised his data on the basis of the so-called scientific classification, not on the mental associations of a human being. For people like us wheat is an edible cereal, banana an edible fruit. To a scientist, both are grasses,” said Kumar.

In order to improve upon Roget’s system, Kumar ignored all the numbers assigned to the cards and reorganized them in subject-wise groups. “I was sure a new associational system would emerge. Fortunately nobody had agreed to finance us. Thus there was nobody to chide us. Nobody to seek any explanation from us: Why was the project taking such an inordinate time! We were on our own.”

In 1994, he shifted Mumbai to Delhi. By this time he had 60,000 cards with over 250,000 hand-written expressions. His son, a medical surgeon, helped his father in digitising the data and wrote a programme to structure it. An operator took about ten months to feed the data.

Finally, in December 1996, Samantar Kosh — India’s first-ever modern and vast Hindi thesaurus, containing 1,60,850 expressions grouped in 1,100 categories and 23,759 sub-categories was published by the National Book Trust, India, a Government of India undertaking.

It was made part of the celebrations of the golden jubilee of Indian Independence the next year by the publisher. The book has already seen a sixth re-run in 2012. In fact during the past two decades that he spent on the project, Kumar discovered various interesting aspects such as there are as many as 2,534 synonyms for names of Lord Shiva.

In 1990, his daughter, Meeta Lal, a nutritionist, stressed the need for a bilingual English-Hindi thesaurus and kickstarted the project by jotting down English equivalents for all its Hindi headwords in Samantar Kosh. “The product was world’s largest bilingual thesaurus in three-part (3,200 pages weighing five kgs), “says Lal.

In 2011, his thesaurus’ online version — Arvind Lexicon was launched.

It also has an android version. Everyday, this wordsmith, rises at 5 am, works till 6.30pm at his house in Chandra Nagar, in east Delhi, revising the data and improving it and adding more concepts.

“The biggest compliment for my work was when a Hindi weekly ‘Nutan Savera’ called Samantar Kosh as ‘Hindi ke Maathe par Sunehri Bindi - A golden dot on Hindi’s forehead. And, when a reader called it the Best Book of the Century. Now, my only wish is to remain active till my last breath.”

हिंदुस्तान टाइम्स से साभार

Gained In Translation (आउटलुक से साभार)

Guess what India is reading in its small towns and villages these days? Almost exactly what Washington or New York was reading a year or two ago. Go to a bookstall in any railway or bus station across the country and the books topping the racks are curiously familiar in an assortment of regional avatars:Mera Cheez Kisne Hataya; Harry Potter Aur Paras Pathar; Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Saat Aadatein of Highly Effective People; Mangalvaarlu With Morrie and, of course, that perennial bestseller: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale ("Doll") Carnegie.

"There's a huge curiosity among non-English readers in India for books that are making waves around the world," explains Vikas Rakheja of Bhopal's Manjul Publishing House. "Readers want to know, for instance, what this Harry Potter is all about even if they can't read it in English." So Rakheja decided to take the leap three years ago by buying translation rights of international bestsellers. The advance that J.K. Rowling's agent demanded—Rs 1 million—would have deterred most Hindi publishers in a market where margins are low and average print runs a mere 1,000 copies, but Rakheja was ready to take the risk.

It was a hunch that more than paid off. The first of the Harry Potter series they translated was beyond Rakheja's—or any other regional publisher's—wildest dreams: a combined sale of 1,00,000 copies in Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Gujarati. The young Bhopal publisher now hires an editorial team whose job it is to read all the world's bestsellers to see which ones would do well in the regional, especially Hindi, market. Then Rakheja begins his hunt, through book fairs like Frankfurt and London, e-mails and networking, chasing publishers and agents of "time-tested" authors such as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer for Indian translation rights.

But the gold rush is really in the self-help and management books. Rakheja bagged the Hindi translation rights of Who Moved My Cheese which has crossed the 50,000 copies mark already.Business School by Robert Kiyosaki sold 70,000 copies while Allan Pease's Questions Are the Answers sold 1,00,000 copies in Hindi alone. "There are so many young men and women working in top companies nowadays who are not comfortable reading in English but can't afford to be ignorant of the latest management books," he explains.

Some of these young men and women are visible at Manjul Publishing House's stall at the World Book Fair in Delhi. Rajesh Kumar, 23, who works in network marketing, is leafing through a Hindi translation of Magic of Big Thinking. "These books are easier to understand in Hindi," he says shyly, even as his sister, Priti Sagar, a graduate of Mata Sundari College, shamefacedly distances herself from the Hindi version of 201 Networking Marketing Simple Ideas by Richard Tan and K.C. See. "These books are meant for those not so much educated, they are better for them because they are easy to understand," Priti says.

But it's graduates like Priti—knowing just enough English to want, without being able, to read the books the world is talking about—that regional publishers are cashing in on. As Marathi publisher Sukumar Beri says, "While the number of English medium schools and colleges across the country has increased enormously, the quality of education has fallen so low that few students are comfortable reading in English. These translations fill that hunger for the best books."

There's something else that has sparked this new hunger for international bestsellers in the regional market, according to Beri. "In Maharashtra, even as recently as the '70s, few had the purchasing power for books. We had to price them at Rs 3 or 5. But not anymore. Farmers are making money, and after the first splurge on consumer goods like TVs and refrigerators and mixies and toys, it's now books, especially ones on self-development. "

But even so, regional publishers claim that their markets are acutely price-sensitive. "If you price a book at Rs 500, it has few takers," explains Piyush Kumar of Prabhat Prakashan. Prices of regional translations are roughly half or one-third of the English originals, a rule that even multinational publishers like Penguin are forced to respect as they step into the regional market.

There are other hiccups as regional publishing gets a cosmopolitan makeover. Publishers say they have to be very careful in choosing the "right" kind of books because foreign publishers and authors are notorious sticklers when it comes to translation: no adaptation or bowdlerisation is permitted for the more strait-laced market in India. When Prabhat Prakashan picked up Hindi rights for Vikas Swarup'sQ & A, for instance, they had a tough time persuading Swarup's publisher to omit a few paragraphs, including all references to homosexuality. "We've sold translation rights in 23 languages, and this is the first time we received such a request," Piyush was told before he was reluctantly granted the rights.

These constraints are certainly not stopping them from entering the race to grab translation rights from the international market. Regional publishers like Rakheja have built up an impressive network of international agents and publishers. "You can miss dinner, but never Frankfurt Book Fair," quips Piyush, who has bagged three titles by V.S. Naipaul in Hindi—India: A Wounded Civilisation; Beyond Belief andMagic Seeds. It was not that easy, Piyush recalls. Naipaul was offended when he discovered that Prabhat Prakashan was planning a print run of a mere 1,000 copies. "We print 3,000 copies only for free distribution," Naipaul's agent Gillon Aitken informed him loftily. But like Swarup, the Nobel laureate eventually relented, attracted by the prospect of selling even 1,000 copies in Hindi. "Even the minimum signing amount of $750 is sometimes beyond our budget," Piyush complains.

But publishers are fast discovering other, cheaper alternatives to high-priced English and American authors. Books from West Asia, for instance, are suddenly much in demand in the Hindi market, especially books from Israel and the UAE. "Their culture is compatible with Hindi readership," Piyush explains. And presumably, their prices as well. Equally affordable are a new brand of bestsellers written by Indian authors in English. President A.P.J. Kalam's titles rank on the top in almost all regional languages. In Hindi alone, Piyush's Prabhat Prakashan has sold over 75,000 copies of Kalam's Wings of Fire. His Ignited Minds comes a close second, followed by half-a-dozen other titles. Similarly, Sudha Murthy's collections of essays and short stories are moving more briskly in regional languages than the original English.

Will this wholesale invasion of English books strangle regional writing just as it is getting its second lease of life? It certainly is the death knell for the kind of regional writers who have been cashing in on the hunger for self-help books, according to Telugu publisher D. Ashok Kumar. These clones—publishers hesitate to use the stronger word plagiarists—are on their last leg now as the Deepak Chopras, Stephen Coveys, Dale Carnegies and Napoleon Hills hit small-town bookstalls in translation. As for the rest, it's very much like the Hollywood versus Bollywood debate. "How can authors from the West ever replace the novel, drama, short story with the local flavour?" as Beri says, adding that even in non-fiction, there are some genres, such as autobiographies and memoirs of local icons, that foreign authors can never replace. "These books will enrich regional literature but can never replace it. There's room for everyone, the market is so huge. "

Agrees a Hindi schoolteacher, Bharati Bindal. "I read these books to learn about people outside, what they think. But for me, Hindi literature will always be a staple. There was a time when people were ashamed not to be able to speak or read in English, but that's no longer the case. Only look at how many media channels that have opened up in regional languages. I think we now have the pride and confidence to read authors from outside without any chip on our shoulder," she says. Publishers would happily agree.

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