Talking walls: Translator Jason Grunebaum on Uday Prakash

An edited version of this interview was published in Time Out Delhi.
 

A sweeper’s life changes when he finds money stowed away in the wall of a Saket gym; a man in a Madhya Pradesh village finds he’s been robbed of his identity; a child in Jahangirpuri says uncannily grown-up things as his head gets bigger and bigger. These are some of the memorable characters who populate the surreal pages of Uday Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi, recently shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (the winner will be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival next year). Prakash’s is the third translated work to have been shortlisted over the last three years, and the only one this year. Should a translated work win the prize, the award is split equally between translator and the author, giving equal recognition to both arts. Translator Jason Grunebaum spoke to Trisha Gupta about a wider readership for Hindi literature, the power of translations and the acerbic voice of Uday Prakash.

The Walls of Delhi is the second translation of Uday Prakash’s work you’ve brought out – the first was The Girl with the Golden Parasol, in 2010. How did you become a Hindi translator, and what drew you to the work of Uday Prakash? 

I'm a fiction writer, and I learned Hindi, so it always seemed natural to translate. I began in college—I translated some Premchand stories. And I worked as an interpreter in Jammu & Kashmir in the 90s. After I left humanitarian work to pursue an MFA in fiction, I wanted to find a contemporary Hindi voice to translate. I'd heard of Uday Prakash as a poet. But I’ll never forget the day I found a copy of his Tirich story collection and began reading ‘Paul Gomra and his Motor Scooter’ (‘Paul Gomra ka Scooter’). I fell in love right from the first paragraph: the tone, the urgency, the relevance, the deft storytelling, unexpected characters, and, perhaps above all, the humour. As I read more of his stories, I also found his narrative modes—the way he told his stories, with their delightful meanderings and authorial intrusions—extremely innovative and inventive in ways quite different than prose I’d come across by South Asian writers writing in English.    

Why did you begin with Peeli Chhatri Wali Ladki?

The great translator Michael Henry Heim once said that the litmus test of whether a work of literature ought to be translated is if you think it’s a crime that it's not available in translation. I concluded it was a crime for the English-reading world not to have access to the urgent voice of ‘The Girl with the Golden Parasol’.

The stories in The Walls of Delhi – ‘Dilli ki Deewar’, ‘Mohanlal’ and ‘Mangosil’–

 originally appeared in separate collections. What made you bring the three together?

I had translated ‘The Walls of Delhi’ for a wonderful anthology edited by Hirsh Sawhney called Delhi Noir, though because of space limitations the story had to be cut significantly. Uday had asked me to translate ‘Mohandas’, which had just come out the first time I met Uday, and ‘Mangosil’ as well. Once I had these three stories side by side—really two novellas and a long short story—I thought that they could work very well together in one volume: the two city stories and one village story show the range of Uday's world and work, while all three stories are unified by the sense of a system stacked mightily against each of the protagonists. A single volume containing essentially three novellas is not something many publishers would consider, but luckily Terri-ann White of UWA Press in Australia immediately saw how well the book worked, and took a chance on it—one that’s paid off with the reviews in the Australian press, and now with the DSC Prize shortlisting. 

Uday Prakash wrote ‘Dilli ki Deewar’ as part of Dattatreya ke Dukh, whose darkly funny takes on 21^st century Delhi were united by a quietly cynical, desultory sutradhar called Vinayak Dattatreya. And there’s a first person narrator in both Mohanlal and Mangosil (the latter is even a freelance Hindi writer). Are these narratorial voices autobiographical? 

To some extent, absolutely. Uday toiled for years and years as a freelance journalist and filmmaker to support himself as a Hindi writer—no cushy academic posts for him, a decided outsider from the literary establishment—and it wasn't an easy life at all. To that extent, Vinayak Dattatreya is based on autobiography. But I would also say these ‘authorial intrusions’ aren’t simply a nod to Uday’s own life: they’re part of the urgency, play, and formal innovation in the stories.    

The English publishing market in India is a busy, fast-growing one, but translations from other Indian languages are still few and far between. Why is that, and what do you think publishers ought to be doing more/better?

It's a huge and tragic problem throughout the English-reading world, actually. About two-thirds of the books published each year in Germany comes from translated literature; in contrast, in the US, in a good year, the figure is about three per cent. The reasons are complicated, but essentially publishers view translations as an even greater risk to take in a market already heavily squeezed—they also have to pay both the author and translator. And yes, there is a lack of good translators: in the end, translating is really a labor of love, with few prospects for good pay or recognition. But since a translation can only be as good as the translator, I would suggest that if publishers were serious about attracting better translators, they need to pay them more.

Books only really get one shot to be translated, and it's heartbreaking to see wonderful works in Hindi represented poorly by a mediocre translation. Translating is not just a technical job; translating is writing. Publishers need to strengthen efforts to find new voices in Hindi and other Indian languages to translate, and promote and make a commitment to these writers as they would any others. Often it’s during periods when a large number of works are brought into a literary culture via translation that a literary culture can really blossom: English-language readers always need ‘news from abroad’— even if the ‘abroad’ might still be the same country.

Is there a Western readership for contemporary Indian-language literature in translation? What has been the response to Uday Prakash’s books?

Very positive. In Australia, particularly, The Walls of Delhi received several in-depth, positive reviews. There is a considerable readership to be had, despite so few such works making it to the West (72 works of Hindi prose were published in English translation from 2000-12, all but one in India). Devotees of South Asian literature in English will be, I'm sure, quite excited to discover voices like Uday’s that bring news of an India they don't even suspect exist—a world wildly different from one populated with overripe mangos.

How tied is this Western readership to the university-based teaching of Indian languages: the University of Chicago where you are a Hindi instructor, or the University of Australia, whose press published The Walls of Delhi?

I would say that the university functions as the place where the necessary deep language training and hands-on practice with the craft of literary translation occurs. And, absolutely, university presses have historically been the ones most consistently publishing high-quality literary translations.   

With more mainstream publishers, the overpowering tendency seems to be to play it safe: most translations that come out are of books already considered classics in their own languages. You’ve chosen to translate a writer who is utterly current, whose work is even now ruffling feathers among the Hindi-reading public. How does this contemporaneity, this live socio-political debate, affect the fate of a translation (or doesn’t it)?

Yes, you’re right about why publishers re-publish ‘classics’. Also, they’re often in the public domain, and so there’s no need to pay for rights: it’s cheaper. And who can resist the latest retranslation of Rangbhoomi or Anna Karenina? Unfortunately, it's a zero-sum game on the bookshelves at bookshops: for every retranslation, there’s one less new translation. I realize they have to play it safe some of the time, but any publisher worth his salt needs to take risks, too. We have found good homes for Uday's work, and luckily I still think there are plenty of excellent publishers who take risks on the controversial. Reading and translating and publishing can and should still be a little dangerous, even in a free society.  

Uday Prakash’s work often uses forms of address that frame his reader as Indian – references to the corruption of the country, to specific political events, to the Page Three phenomenon, for instance. How does this sort of exhortation, to an imagined community that reads the same newspapers, work with a non-Indian reader?

I’m always keenly aware of audience: who’s reading the English version? Is it someone in the US or Australia, or India or Pakistan? Hopefully there will be readers in all these countries and more. Translation is about enlarging the conversation of literature, and as a translator, I try to make sure no reader is left out. So if there are important details or local references that a non-Indian reader might not be expected to understand, and if the context doesn’t provide enough of a clue, I’ll try to gloss the item within the text as unobtrusively as I can. I avoid footnotes and glossaries, partly because they weren't in the original and suggest more academic than literary writing, and partly because I don’t like the way they divide the readers into those-who-know and those-who-don’t. The challenge for me is to achieve a text that won’t leave a non-Indian reader scratching his or her heard, while at the same time not seeming too “pre-chewed” to the Indian reader. I call upon Americanisms as needed, and have drawn upon phrases and cadences from Indian English when appropriate. What I seek is a creative hybridization, that rewrites Uday’s Hindi into an English that realizes the voice, originality, and vitality of his prose.

What, according to you, is the most difficult thing to do when you’re translating from Hindi to English?

This is a difficult question! A translation is really a series of challenges. It’s never really done: there’s always the nagging feeling that a better choice could have been made, a different strategy adopted. (And this nagging feeling is quite different than the one I get when I read something I’ve written directly in English.)

There are many things about Hindi-to-English translation that are particularly challenging. Let me give you an example from my current work with my colleague Ulrike Stark – we’re translating Manzoor Ahtesham’s novel The Tale of the Missing Man (Dastan-e Lapata). How does one reproduce in English an effect that’s analogous to Hindi’s various lexical registers: Sanskrit- versus Perso-Arabic-derived words, particularly when the use of different registers is an important stylistic feature? You’ll have to read the book to find out how we solved the problem!

As someone invested both in Hindi and English, how do you view the publishing scene in India in both languages? Is it hard to bridge the deeply divided worlds of English and Hindi, or does being an outsider make it easier?

Looking at it from the outside, it’s pretty clear that English publishing is booming in India, and it’s been great to see traditionally English-language publishers like Penguin India start a Hindi list. Big Hindi publishers like Rajkamal and Vani continue to publish in Hindi, though a quick comparison of list prices between the Hindi and English publishing world shows you where the divide lies. I think that more of the big publishing houses would probably like to publish more in Hindi and other regional languages, but I think the problem for them has been how to price the books.

And yes, I think it has been easier for me to be an outsider when it comes to taking part in both the Hindi and English literary worlds. My Hindi self has its allegiance with the writers I translate because I love their work, my English self likes the English writers I like, and in the end I feel privileged to have access to both worlds, and lucky that I might be able to contribute to some small degree to bridge the two. But I reserve my greatest respect for those who are truly and deeply conversant with both literary spheres. As you said, the two are deeply divided, and there ought to be more points of overlap. Clearly, translation can play a critical role—and how translations are perceived is also crucial.     

Are you and/or Uday Prakash planning to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival this year? What impact, if any, do you think the DSC Prize will have on the world of Hindi literature and Hindi literature in translation?

I’ve heard only great things from friends and writers who’ve attended it in the past, and I’m excited to say that both Uday and I will be attending this year. It’ll be my first time. Over the three years of the DSC Prize, it’s been heartening to see three works from Hindi make the longlists. My hope is that publishers will make an even stronger commitment to seek out and publish translations of important Hindi literature, both new and old, and that the right authors and right translators are able to find one another in the process. 

Godard's Own Country: the IFFK and the oddities of Malayali cinephilia

A long-form piece, for The Caravan, on the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) -- a window into the state's old love of world cinema and its changing relationship to a complex cultural legacy. 

The first thing I hear in Thiruvananthapuram is a Kim Ki-duk joke. A Malayali goes to Seoul and is wandering the streets of the South Korean capital. But no one seems to know where the famous filmmaker lives. Tired and disheartened, the Malayali is about to give up when he sees a house bearing the sign “Beena Paul has blessed this house”—and he knows his search has come to an end.

If that seems a bit hard to decipher at first, worry not. Like the film festival that spawned it, the joke depends on a sensibility that’s simultaneously international art-house and merrily, irrevocably local.

 It requires you to know who Kim Ki-duk is—an art-house director whose films often bomb at his country’s box office, but who is internationally renowned for his alternately savage and lyrical cinema (his Pieta won the Golden Lion at Venice this year). It also requires you to know who Beena Paul is—the Artistic Director, since 2000, of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), a woman of remarkable foresight and enthusiasm. It assumes you know that Beena Paul curated a hugely popular Kim Ki-duk retrospective at IFFK as far back as 2005, making him a household name in the state. And last but not least, it assumes (an ability to appreciate the irreverent marshalling of) local knowledge: many Christian homes in Kerala have a sign outside proclaiming ‘Jesus Christ has blessed this house’.

The religious metaphor has its place in the joke, too. The IFFK, whose 17th edition will run from 7 to 14 December 2012, is the largest secular festival in a multi-religious state. Every December, Kerala’s rather sleepy capital city, Thiruvananthapuram, plays host to what is arguably the most widely attended film festival in South Asia, with screenings in many theatres witnessing such a massive press of people, especially in the initial days, that people constantly joke about the IFFK-as-pilgrimage. “The first film I went to last year was at Ajanta, and the crowd outside was just a mob. People were mock-chanting ‘Swamiye Ayyapo’—because it felt like being at the Sabarimala temple,” said Praveena Kodoth, an economics professor at Thiruvananthapuram’s Centre for Development Studies.

The numbers are impressive. Last year’s festival, held from 9 to 16 December, had 9,232 registered delegates. “If you include media-persons, officials and guests, the number of people registered came to over 11,000,” says Beena Paul Venugopal.

But what makes the IFFK remarkable isn’t so much the numbers as something else—a popular enthusiasm for world cinema that, far from being limited to the post-liberalisation English-speaking metropolitan elite that tends to dominate film festival audiences in other urban centres, seems to cut across class. The most obvious (but also most far-reaching) sign of this wide-ranging interest is the fact that the festival handbook, as well as the daily free newsletter brought out during each IFFK, are bilingual. In the case of the handbook, section headings and introductions are in English, but each film synopsis is provided in both English and Malayalam.  Venugopal is full of stories about running into festival regulars who come from all walks of life: auto rickshaw drivers in Malappuram, or Thiruvananthapuram nurses who take leave for IFFK. “The funny thing about Kerala is that… a film festival is not only judged by the quality of the films or the people who attend or even the press it gets,” Venugopal said in an interview published in 2011. “It is judged by whether it was a popular success, whether it was a people’s festival.”

IT’S ALMOST DE RIGUEUR FOR FILM FESTIVALS in India to feel like mass secular rituals: theoretically open to everyone—but requiring truly religious commitment from the elect. My first film festival experience was the 27th IFFI, held in Delhi in 1996. I was 19: a wide-eyed world cinema newbie willing and able to watch films from 9 am to midnight. But in the sarkari India in which I came of age, getting an IFFI delegate pass to the Siri Fort complex required you to prove that you’d been a film society member for over five years. So I began that IFFI watching as many films as I could at the ticketed public screenings, being enchanted by Wim Wenders’ Lisbon Story at Regal, mystified by Carlos Saura’s flaming flamenco romances at Plaza, and—to my eternal shame—failing to stave off sleep during Theo Angelopoulos’ stately Ulysses’ Gaze at Priya. Things were going well enough until the afternoon I skipped college to go watch Sai Paranjpye’s Papeeha    at Sheila, a cinema near the Old Delhi Railway station that I had never been to before—for good reason, it turned out. When the lights came on in the interval, I found myself alone in a hall full of men—Sheila regulars who made it rather clear that a female presence in the theatre was potential compensation for the disappointment of Paranjpye’s tame romance.

Daunted but indefatigable, I called a friend whose aunt was a high-up at Doordarshan, and begged her to share a delegate pass for Siri Fort screenings. Over the remaining days of the festival, my friend and I became experts at passing the card discreetly to and fro through the Siri Fort railings, confidently striding past suspicious guards, as well as occasionally charming small-time government employees within the hallowed gates into giving us an extra pass or two from the stacks they clearly weren’t using. It was all rather fun, of course. But my memory of that IFFI—and the equally sarkari      affairs I’ve attended since, in Delhi or Goa, where IFFI has been housed since 2002—is bittersweet. Youthful triumph at having beaten the system is coupled with the sad realisation that the system was one that enthusiastic film-goers inevitably had to ‘beat’.

Admittedly, more open-access models do exist. The one I know best is the Osian’s Film Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, earlier known as Cinefan. Founded by Aruna Vasudev, the festival started out as open as well as free of cost. Having experimented with 20-rupee tickets a few years ago, Osian’s has now settled on a one-time registration system that gives anyone who wants one a free delegate pass to the whole festival, which is now housed in the Siri Fort complex. For anyone with memories of the artificial bureaucratic scarcity of the ’90s, the pleasure of this is palpable.

Unlike the privately-funded Osian’s, attending the IFFK is not free of cost. Delegates must sign up and pay a registration charge of R400, but this princely sum gets you a pass to eight marvellous days of film screenings, five shows a day. And somehow the fact of having paid that delegate fee seems to give people a nicely proprietary air. Even more radically, the festival has no ‘main venue’ reserved for VIPs or the press. Unlike Siri Fort in its IFFI days, or the Nandan complex in the contemporary Kolkata Film Festival, there is no privileged space that remains closed to regular ticket-buyers. Instead, IFFK screenings are spread across 11 different single-screen theatres in Thiruvananthapuram, all open to anyone with a delegate pass. Most wonderfully, whether the screening is of a Robert Bresson classic from the 1960s, a cutting-edge Turkish film or a controversial new Malayalam one, the theatre is almost always full. And if it isn’t, well, at least one can be sure that it isn’t because the passes have all gone to the undersecretary’s sister-in-law.

(Piece continues...)

Read the rest of it on the Caravan site, here.

Khiladi 786: Pray for fuzzy vision

Khiladi 786 is touted as the eighth film in the ‘Khiladi’ series. The first was way back in 1992: Abbas-Mustan’s Khiladi, which is commonly accepted as being Akshay Kumar’s breakthrough film. The films in this so-called series have never been connected to each other, in terms of story or characters or even feel; all they share is the word ‘khiladi’ in their titles – and the heroic presence of Akshay Kumar. But even when one zeroes in on him, it is hard to see any similarity between the puffy-haired, endearingly inexperienced college student of that first Khiladi and the strutting, special-effects-driven machismo of this one.

Perhaps the similarities are to be found elsewhere. Certainly, it feels like we have travelled little distance between the Khiladi of 1992, who sang ‘Khud ko kya samajhti hai’ at a ribbon-wearing Ayesha Jhulka (while his gang of boys, in a surreal-but-subliminal-message-wala song-moment, tore off newspapers from walls to literally ‘reveal’ gigantic caricatures of girls in bikinis), and the “Khiladi Bhaiya” of 786, who is picked as potential groom for the ‘hot-headed’ don-ki-behen Indu Tendulkar (Asin) precisely because she needs a ‘real man’ to control her.

The maker of the match is Hangdog Himesh—the Reshamiyya himself, playing the (ill-fated) son of a Gujarati marriage arranger whose father has thrown him out of the house. The prospective groom – Akshay Kumar, with the magisterially ridiculous name of Bahattar Singh – doesn’t seem to care much about who the girl is. His rather minimal requirement is that he be matched up with an Indian girl, because his (ill-fated) family of Punjabi rural henchmen has only been able to acquire foreign women in the past: Black, White and East Asian. But the Indian Indu is in love with a chap by the name of Azad – the purpose of whose (ill-fated) name is to keep him oh-so-ironically in jail through much of the film (and who we anyway know to be ill-fated because surely Asin is not going to actually marry anyone except Akshay).

But returning to the matter of our hero’s manliness, I think we’re supposed to think of Mister Bahattar as an evolved sort of chap because he
a)  doesn’t force himself upon the girl he’s besotted with (yay for small mercies)
b) demonstrates his greatness to her in a truly khiladi sort of way (mainly by driving her car better than she does), and
c) brings the above-mentioned Azad out of prison, all the better to show his ladylove how mistaken she’s been in her romantic choices (“like a little child crying for a toy that you know will only last a day or two, but you have to bring it to her anyway”).

We must of course disregard the fact that our hero is a man whose life consists of posing as a cop, capturing trucks full of smuggled goods and beating up people for a living. After, all the heroine’s father is a mafia don, too – and neither of them have the slightest self-doubt about their dubious life-choices, except lamenting the fact that they can’t get shareef girls to marry into their households. (Er, yes, foreign women are automatically un-shareef.)

Yes, yes, this is a ‘comedy’, I know, and next I will be told that I ought to “leave my brains at home”, like a misplaced pair of spectacles. Yes, fuzzy vision would certainly have been a help getting through this film, which assaults the senses in every possible way. When we’re not reeling from looking at Akshay Kumar’s electric blue kurtas (worn with orange-yellow scarves in what is meant to be an approximation of Punjabi trucker costume), we must deal with watching him romance an Asin fully-clad in Marathi-style saris or flowing scarlet gowns, as bikini-wearing white girls pirouette around the pair. That’s in his fantasies, of course – in real life, our poor hero only gets to dirty dance with a lean, mean white woman in a 1970s-Hindi-movie style disco, while Asin gets to be the object of the  taming of the shrew narrative I mentioned earlier.

What else can I tell you about Khiladi 786 that you might not have already imagined? That a brother-sister pair called Mili and Bhagat are meant to provide comic relief by being plump and disabled respectively? That Mithun Chakraborty is so bored by his massively over-done, massively moustachioed character that he’s already reprising his previous role in an Akshay Kumar movie –Housefull 2? That this is the sort of film where even the characters have to be reminded of what happened to them three days ago by being shown a sepia-toned flashback?

Khiladi 786 begins by announcing that the world has two categories of people: earners and spenders. And every wedding is an occasion celebrating the union of the two types: “jahan ek kamaane wale ko ek kharch karne wala mil jata hai”. That offensive, sexist beginning doesn’t keep the film from paying its cynical lip service to ‘love marriage’—and it’s not going to keep a whole country from spending our hard-earned money on it either. We only get the movies we deserve.

Published on Firstpost.

Post Facto - Found in Translation: Manto’s Bombay and Uday Prakash’s Delhi

My column for the Sunday Guardian this fortnight:

This has been a week of reading in translation: first Saadat Hasan Manto's Bombay Stories, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, and then Uday Prakash's The Walls of Delhi, translated by Jason Grunebaum. Manto wrote in the '30s, '40s and '50s, and Uday Prakash in the last two decades, but the English translations are brand new. Bombay Stories came out last month from Random House India, and The Walls of Delhi will be out in January from Hachette India (I read an Australian edition, which has just been shortlisted for the DSC Prize). Translation is a strange and wonderful thing. A book rewritten in another language is like a person given the gift of new life: a new name, a new look, new turns of phrase — and hopefully new admirers. Sometimes the makeover can feel radical. Both these books bring together pieces that have never been published alongside before, giving the authors' work a new form, and — for me — suddenly placing them in potential conversation. { Prakash’s bitingly satirical takes on contemporary Indian life and literary culture, while not exactly subject to censorship like Manto, have often brought down upon him the ire of the Hindi establishment. Bombay Stories unites all Manto's fiction set in Bombay, while The Walls of Delhi puts the eponymous long short story next to two novellas, 'Mangosil' and 'Mohandas'. The translators' focus on Manto's richly animated depictions of a particular urban milieu allows a different Manto to emerge than the Partition-heavy figure that has been the staple of Manto publications in English. (The one exception to this is the deliciously irreverent filmi Manto of Stars from Another Sky, Penguin's translation of Ganje Farishte.) The book also, as Reeck observes, "represents the first and best literary evidence of Bombay's emergence as the modern city we now recognise it to be", a publishing back-flip that finally enables Manto to take his legitimate place at the head of that now extensive sub-genre of Indian writing which Reeck designates as 'Bombay fiction'. This world, populated by "prostitutes, pimps, writers, film stars, musicians, the debauched, the rich", is one that Manto seems to have inhabited with ease. As a writer of 'lowlife' fictions, in Salman Rushdie's description, Manto may share something with Hindi writer Uday Prakash, whose sharp-angled tours of post-globalisation Delhi are often routed through the city's poorest quarters. Also, Prakash's bitingly satirical takes on contemporary Indian life and literary culture, while not exactly subject to censorship like Manto, have often brought down upon him the ire of the Hindi establishment.

The Hindi story 'Dilli ki Deewar' originally appeared as part of Dattatreya ke Dukh (the title would translate as 'The Woes of Dattatreya'). There, this tale (of a sweeper called Ramnivas whose life changes when he finds a stash of money in a wall) was one among many pieces ranging from a paragraph to 40-odd pages, with the narrator Vinayak Dattatreya as unifying factor. A composite of middle class types—honest government servant, unsuccessful Hindi poet, benevolent colony uncle, lowly research scholar—Dattatreya is bemused, long-suffering. Told in his voice, these riffs on life in Delhi at the start of the 21st century have a familiar conversational quality that cushions us a little from their darkness. A very different effect is achieved in The Walls of Delhi, with its three fully-realised narratives where the odds are stacked heavily against the protagonists. The quirkiness of Dattatreya's voice is somewhat overwhelmed by the epic sweep of Mohandas's tale of unrelenting caste and class injustice in an MP village (beautifully formulated as identity theft), and by the even more surreal 'Mangosil', in which a fifty-year-old couple in a Jahangirpuri hovel have a baby whose head gets larger and larger, endangering his life even as he gets more and more thoughtfully adult. Rather than the darkly comic, musing tone I remember from the Hindi, what The Walls of Delhi produces a powerfully despairing sense of a flawed system that creates dreamworlds but dashes hopes against the wall again and again. These lives can only come to tragic ends. Another trait that Uday Prakash and Manto share is the authorial intrusion. Manto, of course, was ahead of his time when he included an eponymous Manto character or made sly self-reflexive references to writing. Prakash's authorial interventions are more forceful, less ambiguous, often bringing in his take on political news, or locating himself in the story as a full fledged character. But even more than the 'I', what's really striking is his use of 'you'. That direct address — "If you want to get lucky, come to Delhi right away — it's not far at all. Forget about being a millionaire; coming to Delhi is the only way left to scrape by." — conjures up a imagined community of readers who share both newspapers and hopes. How does that address work outside India? Micro-decisions a translator makes can transform characters. Ramnivas and Sushma going to see a film at "the Alpana" instead of at Alpana Cinema changes them, as does Sushma's mother calling her "honey". And the girl from Pydhoni seems altogether cooler playing 'Why, You Fool, Are You Always Falling in Love' from her 'Untouchable Girl' record, instead of 'Kise Karataa Murakh Pyaar Pyaar Pyaar Teraa Kaun Hai' from Achhut Kanya. Some of this may seem unavoidable, an attempt to make these worlds more recognisable to the imagined reader in English. But if she is to be truly inserted into Uday Prakash's imagined community of readers (or Manto's), the real reader of translations must work a little harder.

Film Review: Talaash captures the right shade of Bombay noir

There’s a great scene in Talaash where the laconic Inspector Surjan Singh Shekhawat (Aamir Khan) gets a phone call from a Times of India reporter, probing for details of the high-profile case he’s working on: the death of a Bollywood star in a mysterious accident on Mumbai’s Seaface Road. Shekhawat bangs the phone down in irritation, goes out and asks his staff who has good connections with the media, and promptly confiscates the cellphones of all those who put their hands up. Nothing about this case should get out in the public domain, he says sternly – not until the mystery is solved.

The scene could well be a nice little in-joke cracked by the film’s makers—substitute ‘case’ with ‘plot’ and you have before you the problem of reviewing Talaash. Reema Kagti’s second directorial outing (after 2007’s delightfully quirky Honeymoon Travels) is a film whose effect depends heavily on plot. And because I think you should all have the pleasure of that plot unfolding, slowly but surely, on screen as well as in your head, I am going to try and write the impossible: a review that tells you everything you need to know, but gives away nothing.

(Review continues)

Read the whole review here.

Post Facto: Keys to another world

My column for the Sunday Guardian this fortnight. A large part of my adult life has been spent inside books. There are books I read too fast because I want to know what happens, and so must read a second time to savour all I missed. There are books I hate from page one, but read all the way through, sometimes because it's work (one cannot review half a book) and sometimes just out of masochism. There are books abandoned midway, which look at me accusingly as they sink to the bottom of a pile. There are books I refer to for facts magisterially marshalled, and books I turn to for analytical clarity. The best books are ways to enter the world afresh. But there are times when what you want is not to find a different route into the world, but to leave it behind entirely. Fantasy and science fiction are increasingly popular genres in writing for adults. But the books of my childhood provide a dual escape: a temporary reprieve from the adult world, and in the case of three of my most favourite children's books — an entry into a parallel universe. In the first of these, that parallel universe is an entirely domestic one, imagined to exist under the floorboards. Mary Norton's fertile imagination created a world of little people — six-inch-high creatures who looked and behaved like minature versions of ourselves, but lived by 'borrowing' from us all the little things that disappear so mysteriously from every home: "Safety pins, for instance... And all the other things we keep on buying. Again and again and again. Like pencils and matchboxes and sealing wax and hairpins and drawing pins and thimbles..." The Borrowers, as Norton named them, first appeared in print in 1952, and were such a success that she continued to create new adventures for her chosen fictional family — Homily, Pod and their daughter Arietty — for the next 30 years. { The books of my childhood provide a dual escape: a temporary reprieve from the adult world, and in the case of three of my most favourite children’s books – an entry into a parallel universe Much of the delight of the Borrowers' universe is in seeing familiar household things in a new light: a cogwheel becomes a fireplace, a wristwatch is a clock, a matchbox a chest of drawers, a single chess-piece provides both a pedestal for a dining table and a knight's 'bust', which "lent that air to the room which only statuary can give." The other pleasure of this world is to experience, vicariously through the Borrowers, a life which involves precision and danger in equal measure, a world in which innovation is not a luxury but a need, and in which the everyday act of survival has the thrill of constant adventure. The thrill is also enhanced by juxtaposition: the Borrowers, by their very nature, live in houses where no new things happen, where the humans live to a routine. "Routine is their safeguard," says old Mrs. May, who first tells Kate about them. "They must know which rooms are to be used and when. They do not stay in houses where there are careless people, or unruly children, or certain household pets." The key to another kind of parallel universe is magic. Of all the many stories about magical creatures and magical worlds that I have ever read, I think E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle is the most wondrous. The children in it move constantly in and out of a magic universe — but not in the predictable manner of, say, Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree, in which a trip to the Enchanted Forest guarantees access to a magical world, but the everyday, regulated life of the nursery remains unaffected. In Nesbit's 1907 book, magic turns the everyday world topsy-turvy in a way that can be both frightening and marvelous: a girl disappears, statues talk, a whole secret world comes to life at night where there is nothing but lifeless stone in the day. Nesbit credits the power of the imagination in some far deeper way than most books — magic itself, she suggests, is a matter of belief. If you believe a ring will make you invisible, it will. If you believe it'll make things come to life, it will. But if you say it won't, it won't. The last book — Tom's Midnight Garden — uses a third route to enter an alternative world: time. Philippa Pearce's 1958 tale -- of a boy stuck alone at an aunt and uncle's place for the summer — uses an old grandfather clock as the bridge between the regular world and a past one. When the clock strikes thirteen, late every night, Tom finds he can open an old rusty door and go into a garden that seems not to be there during the day. And there, in that world of the midnight garden, he forges a bond with a girl named Hattie — a bond that feels stronger than almost anything in the world of the day. But Pearce is not really interested in old-style magic. At the end of the book, she gives us an explanation that hovers on the edges of the psychological. But her vision of the garden — a place so intensely remembered that it manages to communicate to someone else — remains a haunting ode to the power of memory and dreams.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.