Meet the American who translates some of India’s finest Hindi writers into English: Daisy Rockwell

An interview I did for Scroll:

‘I was tired of translating detailed descriptions of male desire and women’s breasts.’

Daisy Rockwell is the translator of Hats and Doctors, a collection of short stories by the Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk, as well as of Ashk’s famous novel, Girti Diwarein, titled Falling Walls in English. Her 2004 book, Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography, is an exemplary work of literary biography, locating Ashk and his writing within the history of Hindi language and literature. An American, Rockwell is also an artist ­– her grandfather was the legendary painter (and author and illustrator) Norman Rockwell – and has written a novel titled Taste. She spoke to me about how she got into Hindi and translation, why Hindi literature might be more difficult to translate than Urdu, and where translations stand in the larger scheme of publishing. Excerpts from the interview, as published in Scroll.in:

You’re one of Hindi literature’s most devoted, thorough translators into English. How did you happen to set out on this path?

That’s very kind of you to say. I started off being interested in translation in graduate school, when I began my doctorate in South Asian studies. Before studying Hindi, I had studied Latin for many years, as well as French, and some German and ancient Greek. Classical languages really teach you to break down language into microscopic bits, and that is how I first started translating, although not with the purpose of publication.

My advisor in graduate school at the University of Chicago encouraged me, and I also had the great good fortune to take a translation seminar with AK Ramanujan, perhaps the best known and most talented translator from South Asian languages. My subsequent experiences in academia discouraged me from pursuing translation, as it is not currently considered an academically rigorous form of scholarship, at least not in the US. It was not until I turned my back on academia altogether that I returned to translation.

Many of us in India, growing up in a multilingual society, take it for granted that we move constantly between languages. For most bilingual or trilingual Indians, their relationship to different languages may not be something they actively consider very often. Do you think your relationship to Hindi is qualitatively different from that of a native speaker because you acquired the language as an adult? And does your (perhaps) more self-conscious relationship with Hindi aid your life as a translator, or make it harder?

My relationship to Hindi is absolutely different from that of a native speaker. I am an apt language learner, but I did not start learning Hindi until I was 19. By then, as studies have shown, your brain is less capable of soaking in new languages. It took me a long time to be able to read or speak Hindi with any fluency, and even now I make ridiculous mistakes and find some idiomatic phrases and words impenetrable.

There is a fluidity to the South Asian language-scape that is wholly lacking in the United States, which is, despite the diverse population, ferociously monolingual. Code-switching, the practice of sliding effortlessly from one language to the next, or mixed idioms, like Hinglish, are practically non-existent in the US, outside of immigrant communities. I find it very hard to switch back and forth mid-stream between Hindi and English.

I do think all of this difficulty makes me extremely attentive to linguistic details and nuances. Hindi and English do not flow into each other in my mind, the way they might for a bilingual person, and when I am translating from Hindi into English, I’m carrying every word and phrase to a completely different territory.

Like many well-known translators – William Weaver with Umberto Eco or Italo Calvino, or Constance Garnett with Fyodor Dostoevsky or Anton Chekhov – you have built up an association with the work of a particular writer. Why were you drawn to Upendranath Ashk?

I started reading Ashk in graduate school and I was drawn to his attention to detail and his focus on literary production. His work is full of poetry and quotations, and is a great meditation on what it means to be a creative person.

But I actually have five book translations in the translation/publication pipeline right now, and only one is by Ashk, the second of his Falling Walls (Girti Divarein) series. That volume, In the City, a Mirror Wandering (Shahar Mein Ghoomta Aina), was due out from Penguin RandomHouse last summer, but is held up over a copyright problem. Then I have two novels by the Urdu author Khadija Mastur coming out from PRH: The Women’s Courtyard (Aangan) will be published in September of this year, and Zameen, which I am working on right now, will come out next year. Both of these are Partition-related novels. I’ve also just finished Krishna Sobti’s latest novel, Gujarat, Pakistan se Gujarat, Hindustan, and that will be published early next year. Last, but not least, I have just agreed to translate Geetanjali Shree’s new novel, Ret Samadhi. Publisher, TBA.

Although I consider Ashk my first love, I am on a bit of a hiatus from him at the moment for a variety of reasons, one of which is that I decided two years ago that I wanted to focus on translating women authors. I realised suddenly that I’d only been translating men (Ashk, Bhisham Sahni, and Shrilal Shukla), and I felt fed up with the male gaze. It’s a bit of a Twitter truism to say this, but there are many interesting stories being told by women, and I was tired of translating detailed descriptions of male desire and women’s breasts. All of my most recent translations, therefore, are of works by women, and the stories really are much more diverse.

Tim Parks once wrote: “The translator should do his job and then disappear. The great, charismatic, creative writer wants to be all over the globe. And the last thing he wants to accept is that the majority of his readers are not really reading him. His readers feel the same. They want intimate contact with true greatness.” Do you think the role of translator requires this invisibility?

It is ironic that Tim Parks wrote that since, although he is a translator, he refuses to disappear, and is always popping up with unnecessarily nasty critiques of other translators, particularly women who are getting more attention than him, such as Ann Goldstein (Elena Ferrante’s translator), and Deborah Smith (the Man Booker award-winning translator of the Korean novel The Vegetarian).

Of course translators must disappear. Despite the very strenuous and granular work required in translation, in the end, the translator’s work generally billows like a diaphanous curtain across the work, and the reader doesn’t notice the translation at all, unless he or she is a translator too, in which case he or she notices all the details, both good and bad.

I think the nicest analogy I have seen is a comparison with classical music. A translator is like a musician, and the original author is the composer. There are an infinite number of ways to play Vivaldi on the violin, or Bhairav raga on the sitar. There are also a lot of ways to mess them both up horrendously so that the audience members clap their hands over their ears and run out of the room. When we say a translation is unsuccessful, it is because the translator has not been able to perform the underlying text in the target language in a felicitous manner so that it could be enjoyed by the new readers as much as it was in the original.

And yet, given the unequal power differential between English and other languages, certainly any Indian language, being translated into English is such a writer’s only route to world fame: eg, the recent case of Ghachar Ghochar, which has put Vivek Shanbhag on the global literary map. You’ve not only been Ashk’s translator but his biographer: your book on him is a stellar literary biography of a modern Indian writer, it really deserves a new edition! But even setting aside the biography, do you see yourself as Ashk’s representative in the English-speaking world? Does that feel onerous?

I don’t see it as onerous, I see it as a stroke of luck. Every time I get permission to translate something, and believe me, that is not as easy as it sounds, I feel tremendously grateful that I have been allowed to render that work into English. English is the power language and the link language, so much so that readers and publishers often show little interest in works translated from other languages. In fact, I have never published a book-length translation in the United States because there is simply no interest. Perhaps Ghachar Ghochar will change that, but it’s a heavy lift for one small book.

Thus, I feel that translation from non-European languages into English is a way to challenge that hegemony and remind English readers that there are other ways of expressing and thinking in the world. As far as fame and glory for the original author goes, Hindi publishing, for one, probably is much more lucrative than English publishing in India, at least in terms of raw book sales. A Hindi writer can expect a much larger reading public than many an Indian English writer, unless they make it into the global publishing market. So I don’t think Hindi authors are really feeling under-appreciated or read in that sense. Maybe they are not being invited to fancy lit fests, but fancy lit fests are really quite a hollow marker of fame compared to a robust and enthusiastic readership.

Are you more invested in the degree to which your translation is faithful to the original text, or in the degree of ease with which readers in English will be able to enter it? 

I wouldn’t commit to one or the other. My translations go through phases: each book will go through a minimum of five drafts before it hits the editor’s desk. The first draft focuses on accuracy; the fifth draft focuses on English readability. The ones in between are on a continuum between these two. My copy editors will tell you that I continue to aggressively revise the text all the way until it departs for the printer.

What do you do about dialect, or idiomatic phrases? Do you try to produce an equivalent in English? This can be a difficult thing to do... I remember in Falling Walls, you have Chetan calling his Bhai Sahib, Ramanand, the Old Codger. The nickname is remarked upon at some length, but we do not learn the original term in Hindi.

Some aspects of dialect and idiom just cannot be translated, and if they were kept in the original language in the translation, it would not be a translation anymore. There is a school of translation in India which feels that smoothing these elements out is doing violence to the original text and that translating it into English at all is doing violence really, because of the hegemony discussed above. However, if one has committed to rendering a text in English, one must bite the bullet and figure out how to get it done. If a nickname or something is particularly hilarious, I might keep it in Hindi. It’s really a case-by-case basis for me. In the case you are talking about, the nickname was baṛhaū, which is a) not that funny by contemporary Hindi standards, and b) difficult and unattractive to render in the Roman script, thus I chose to come up with something a bit old fashioned in English.

Now the big problem for a translator from Hindi and Urdu into English is that one is bound to have many readers who not only know at least a passing amount of said languages, but may actually be fully fluent in them, and literate too. Why are they reading the English? Often it’s just their habit to read in English, but they are also the most critical readers of translations, and complain of translators “over-translating”, having a preference for being able to “feel the Hindi” through the English. I have seen many reviewers say such things about translations from Hindi and Urdu (not of my books, but of others), and I must say, if they are so eager to “feel the Hindi”, they really ought to take the trouble to purchase the Hindi original, since they don’t need an English translation.

As someone who is also a writer of fiction, how would you describe the difference between the work of writing and that of translation? Does translating ever create a temptation to rewrite?

Translation is a form of creative writing, it’s just creative writing within very strict parameters. Robert Frost once said that “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” Non-translation writing for me is like tennis with the net down as well. You can do anything, but do you want to?

Are there books you’ve read, especially before you became a translator, that you never considered as works in translation? Do you see them differently now?

I’ve always been very conscious of language and started studying Latin when I was eleven or twelve, so I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t conscious of the way translated language stretches English into new and interesting shapes.

Conversely, are there books you’ve read that you think would be untranslatable? Kazuo Ishiguro once castigated his fellow English writers for making their prose too difficult to translate. Does this idea of developing a style for its translatability – leanness, simplicity – make any sense to you?

Translatability I think is really the fluke of the individual writer’s style. I know that Murakami works closely with his translators and often prefers the English editions of his books to be the authoritative ones. Hindi writers are generally speaking all about regional specificity and inhabiting their linguistic sphere fully. Hindi literature was mostly born and developed as a nationalist impulse, somewhat like modern Hebrew, and I think that Hindi authors still feel that they are forging a new idiom and a new literature. This makes Hindi extremely difficult to translate at times. Certainly way more difficult than Urdu prose, which does not have the same “newness” chip on its shoulder. Hindi writing is still in a state of efflorescence and contestation. Krishna Sobti, for example, is extremely difficult to translate – she almost has her own idiolect – and I have just started to work on Geetanjali Shree, who is also very challenging.

Do you think there needs to be a different kind of translation for readers who are familiar with the cultural context of a work – Indians reading in English – than there is for foreign readers who have never encountered a basti or a chulha or a hakim? Are Indian publishers becoming more comfortable with and cognisant of this need?

I would say yes, and covered some of this above, as in the case of the readers who actually know Hindi but do not read in it. However, since publishers outside of India do not currently have any interest in South Asian literature in translation, I feel that we translators must attempt to create texts that can be all things to all people. I do keep many Indian words in the text, but I also tend to give a cursory gloss for terms that a non-Indian reader wouldn’t get. I don’t like having glossaries, and I do think in a long book, readers can learn certain terms from context. The trick is not to overdo it so that the non-Indian readers get overwhelmed and put the book down.

Similarly, one should not under-do it because then the Indian readers will get annoyed. One rule of thumb I use is I ask myself: “Is this word used very often in Indian English?” “Did this word make it into Hobson Jobson?” If the answer is yes, I will keep it. I might also put in a word to give the reader a hint, like “crunchy chiuda”, but never naan bread or chai tea.

Kinship terms are hands down the most difficult aspect of translation into English from South Asian languages in my opinion. Women’s writing contains way more of these terms than men’s writing, simply because there is more action inside the house than outside, generally. With these I try my best to come up with English equivalents, but also include some original terms so I won’t be accused of over-translation. The problem with the kinship terms of course, is not only are they very elaborate, but they are all context-centric, so one person’s devar is another person’s bhai sahib, is another’s chacha ji, etc. In Falling Walls, I called Chetan’s elder brother Bhai Sahib and used as I would a name, because I simply couldn’t imagine him without that title, and he was an important character. I called the mother Ma because this is perfectly understandable in English, but I didn’t call Bhai Sahib’s wife Bhabhi, because he also gives her real name, and it would get confusing with all the bhabhis in the house.

This interview continues. To read the whole thing, please go to it on the Scroll site, 13 May 2018.

Writing Filmi Fictions

Today's Mirror column:

Though we speak of great Urdu writers shaping Bombay's cinema, we forget how much cinema also shaped their writing.

It is a fact often remarked upon that the Bombay film industry of the 1940s and '50s was a place of prodigious literary talent. A list of those who wrote lyrics and scripts and dialogue for Bombay cinema reads like a veritable who's who of modern Urdu literature - Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Kaifi Azmi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz, Meeraji. Some of these are now better known as film people, while others, even while writing for the cinema, retained their primary identity as litterateurs. Chughtai, for instance, wrote 12 film scripts, including Ziddi, Buzdil, Sone ki Chiriya and later, Garm Hava, but she is primarily known as a writer of books.

A young Ismat Chughtai

But while discussing how much these writers shaped the cinematic milieu of the time, what is often forgotten is how much that cinematic milieu shaped their writing. This writing could be non-fiction: A famous example is Manto, whose classic collection Ganjey Farishtey (translated as Stars from Another Sky) offered his readers a possibly embroidered but ostensibly factual glimpse of the '40s film world as he knew it. Or a writer might channel their experience of the film world back into it. Ismat Chughtai's script for Sone ki Chiriya (1958), directed by her husband Shahid Latif and starring Nutan and Balraj Sahni, was one such - the tale of an actress who becomes the golden goose for her exploitative family was believed to echo Nargis' real life. 

More often, however, these writers turned the film industry into a setting for literary fiction. Some of these stories and novels offer insightful, sometimes humorous, often brutally honest depictions of what life in the Bombay film world was like. Manto, whom Salman Rushdie once identified as an author of "lowlife fictions", wrote several stories featuring men and women who inhabit the lower echelons of this world, or just hover hopefully around its fringes, trying to angle their way in somehow. 

A youthful Manto

In his famous story 'Babu Gopi Nath', for example, we are introduced to the eponymous protagonist as "a great good-for-nothing" who "after sitting around doing nothing in Lahore" has "decided to grace Bombay with his presence, and...brought a Kashmiri dove with him". It turns out that Babu Gopi Nath's project in Bombay is to introduce this young woman, Zinat, into the film industry. "[Ghaffar Sayyan] told me to take her to Bombay because he knew two prostitutes who'd become actresses there," Babu Gopi Nath tells the narrator, who is called Manto and edits a newspaper like the real-life Manto. When Zinat's many meetings with men who "were only pretending to be directors" don't translate into film roles, Babu Gopi Nath decides to secure her future by marrying her off to a young Hyderabadi landlord from Sindh. 

Upendranath Ashk

Another Manto story called 'Janaki' also centres on a young woman who is dispatched from Peshawar to try and break into the movies. "Get her into a film company in Pune or Bombay. You know enough people. I hope it won't be too difficult," runs the letter from a friend that presages her arrival. The story's narrator (again a version of Manto, this time called "Saadat Sahib") is a little worried: "I had never done anything like that before. Usually the men who take girls to film companies are pimps or their like, men who plan to live off the girls if they can get a job." But having tried and failed to get her a job in Pune, he dispatches Janaki to friends in Bombay, where she manages to get a yearlong contract with a studio at 500 rupees a month. 

In a third story set in filmdom, called 'Director Kripalani', Manto describes a similar situation - but from the opposite side. Here it is the film producer - the Seth, in Manto's terminology - who tells Director Kripalani that he has a girl in mind to be the heroine of the film. She turns out to be a young Sindhi woman from Kripalani's hometown, with a rather implausible connection to him. The other woman in the story is a successful actress playing the main part in another of Kripalani's films, whom he gets thrown out of the role because she tries to seduce him. 

The women in these stories can scarcely be said to be similar in social background: Zinat Begum is a Kashmiri girl who has been "rescued" from a Lahore brothel by a rich man; Janaki comes from Peshawar where she was the mistress of a married man called Aziz, while the Sindhi girl seems from an educated middle class family. Yet all of them seem to have arrived from great distances away, with different levels of ambition and ability, to knock at moviedom's doors, and wait for them to magically open. And though he is too worldly-wise to be outraged by their free-and-easy ways, Manto clearly thinks of these women as occupying a tricky moral terrain. 

In a 1948 story called 'Formalities' ('Takalluf'), the writer Upendranath Ashk (who switched from Urdu to Devanagari on Premchand's advice, and who spent a few years working in Filmistan Studio in the '40s) mentions yet another such young woman of dubious morals. This "Miss Shameem", an upcoming actress whom we never actually meet, is described as having arrived in Bombay from Lahore. When she is "having a great deal of trouble finding a house", "Director Qadir" offers to put her up, only to find that she has promptly made herself at home - and shows no signs of leaving. 

Unlike Manto's wannabe actresses, who seem like gullible creatures despite all their gumption, Ashk's Miss Shameem is a shamelessly manipulative type. So, it turns out, are Director Qadir and his wife. Perhaps I'm reading too much into a few stories, but Manto and Ashk do serve up two possible readings of the film world that Madhur Bhandarkar may not balk at - either everyone's a crafty manipulator, or everyone's a gentle victim. Unlike Bhandarkar's, though, their takes are perfectly believable.

Published in the Mumbai Mirror, Oct 11, 2015.

Book Review: To the Farthest Rock

A book review published in last week's BL Ink:

Travelling Light

An impeccable translation of the Hindi writer Mohan Rakesh’s travelogue Aakhiri Chattan Tak brings 1950s India vividly to life

At the age of 27, having quit his recently-acquired position as Hindi teacher at the Bishop Cotton school in Shimla, Mohan Rakesh decided to travel. Here is how he describes it: “I had long wanted to travel by coastal roads along the sea. Sometimes I had time, sometimes money, but seldom both together. Then I resigned from my teaching job and time and a little money became available. I set out for the seacoast immediately.”

It was December 1952. To the Farthest Rock, translated from Rakesh’s Aakhiri Chattan Tak, details his three-month journey along India’s western coast, starting with a train ride from Delhi to Bombay, and ending in Kanyakumari. Rakesh went on to become a major Hindi writer — his best-known works are the Delhi-set novel Andhere Bandh Kamre, and the plays Adhe Adhure, Ashadh ka Ek Din and Lehron ke Rajhans, all regarded as 20th-century classics. At the time he made this journey, though, he had published only one book of stories: Insan ke Khandahar.

But reading this book, one does not often feel that one is reading a 27-year-old. If anything, there is an admirable maturity in the way Rakesh holds out against the temptation to hold forth. There is a definite authorial voice here: observant, sensitive, and open to experience. But his refusal to marshal authority — either journalistic or writerly — is what makes this an unusual travelogue. It is not that Rakesh isn’t interested in places, or history, or art; it is rather that he is more interested, always, in people.

There is no ‘point’ to this book except as the travel diary of a young writer. It goes where he decides to go, and much of it unfolds as everyday conversations between strangers, on trains, in boats, in hotels, or just walking around a village. It has little in common with the judgmental audacity of a similar travelogue written by a young Indian man at the start of his writing career: Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. The sympathetic, observational tone put me more in mind of Upendranath Ashk’s 1940 short story ‘Furlough’, also set in a train compartment, a decade or so before Rakesh. 

To the Farthest Rock, by Mohan Rakesh
Translated from Hindi by Satti Khanna
Rs. 299, 192 pages, HarperCollins, 2015.

There is no pretence here of neutrality, of being a fly on the wall. Of course, Rakesh describes what he sees and hears, and does so with both precision and poetry. But what makes his pen-portraits of encounters with people so appealing is that he is always present in them: a quiet, sometimes surprised, occasionally irritable interlocutor. 

The muscular old boatman who rows him across the Bhopal lake, for instance, only gradually acquires a personality — and Rakesh describes the process with charming transparency: “We had been addressing him as ‘Boatman’. At the end of his recitation of Ghalib I asked him his name. “My name is Abdul Jabbar Pathan,” he replied, emphasising the surname Pathan.” When Rakesh says to Abdul Jabbar, “I would not have expected somebody your age to enjoy romantic poetry,” he is being candid about his own youthful tactlessness. Later, when Abdul Jabbar says he has “sworn off carnal desires”, and asks if they have the time to listen to “something different”, Rakesh again lets us in on his eyeroll: “I thought we were in for Sufi preaching”, before telling us how wrong he was.

While it does not consciously seek to locate itself in time, To the Farthest Rock is charged with a post-independence melancholy. There is the teenager travelling ticketless, who describes his life’s Partition upheavals with not a glimmer of complaint. The many unemployed young men Rakesh meets in Kerala are perhaps the strongest indicator of the national mood: an English-speaking, Sanskrit-reciting beggar; the jobless ‘debating society’ that gathers at Tellicherry’s railway station.

But even those who have jobs seem to have all the time in the world. Perhaps this is what the world was like in the 1950s, or perhaps it would still be like this if we were to only try getting on a train without a hotel booking or a return ticket. From the middle-class Karvakar, who persuades him to stay a night in Vasco, in his house, to the labourer Govindan who leaves his work to show Rakesh a coffee plantation, locals seem to go out of their way to spend time with him. Perhaps because Rakesh seems genuinely interested in their lives — from the young man who has decided not to marry “to avoid changes in his and his mother’s peaceful routine”, to the travelling salesman whose work keeps him away from his wife and child, the less he asks of people, the more they confide in him. But he also captures, with quiet poignancy, the experience of linguistic alienness.

The mention of language brings me to what is perhaps the most attractive thing about this book: the writing. I have not read the Hindi original, but in Satti Khanna’s excellent rendering, the language feels crisp even when the thought is meditative. The descriptions are crystal-clear, never indulgent with imagery. When there is an image, it is memorable. “Waves rose from the water like sharks.” Or when describing a spontaneous harmonica competition on a steamer from Goa to Mangalore, he writes: “The contest shifted from the quality of playing to the volume of ovation.”

The black-and-white sketches by Trinankur Banerjee add an attractive new layer of imagery. Satti Khanna’s ‘PS’ — a wonderful feature of HarperCollins’ translations — insightfully locates Rakesh in the Hindi literary context, and adds another visual layer: photographs, among which I was delighted to discover one of Rakesh with Ashk. It made for a perfect end to a book of companionable conversations.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 19 June, 2015.

Post Facto: The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

My Sunday Guardian column this month:

The late Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk

The late Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk has a great story called 'The Dal Eaters'. First published in 1955, 'Daliye' only came to my notice earlier this year when I read Hats and Doctors, a selection of Ashk's short stories in Daisy Rockwell's impeccable translation. 'The Dal Eaters' is about North Indian tourists in Kashmir. Early on, two little girls on a bus from Pathankot to Srinagar "shriek" and "squawk" until the narrator caustically suggests they be enrolled in a school to nurture their musical genius. "That's what I think too," says Mr. Bhalla, oblivious to the sarcasm, "but right now they just get their education from the movie theatre nearby."

Setting his story in the tourist economy of 1950s Kashmir allows Ashk to do something literature does far too infrequently – talk about money. Mr. Bhalla's remark about the 'free coaching' his daughters receive from the cinema is of a piece with the scathing characterisation of the Bhallas as misers and freeloaders. 'Daliye', the story's title, is the contemptuous Kashmiri term for tourists like the Bhallas — "people who take pleasure in the paradise of Kashmir while eating only tandoori rotis that come with free dal." "If only tourists like them started coming here, who would buy all these Kashmiri almonds and walnuts, peaches and apricots, apples and pears, shawls, woodcuts and papier mache?" wonders Mr. Chopra.

The monetary theme is established right at the story's start, when Mr. Chopra, strolling along on the banks of the Lidder in Pahalgam, introduces the narrator to his brother-in-law. "He's a very famous artist from Delhi," [says Chopra], "his pictures should be in the President's Mansion, but he doesn't even care, he just makes them and hands them out to his friends. But believe you me, whoever has a painting of his in his hands has a fortune worth thousands of rupees." Of course we've come a very long way since 1955 with regard to the monetisation of art – and with regard to the sums of money that might be considered a fortune. But the sensibility which judges art primarily – even only – in terms of money is immediately and unsettlingly recognizable as being alive and well in our times.

I refer, of course, to the way in which the idea of writing transformed in the Indian public eye from something quiet, dull and penurious to the source of a potential jackpot (codeword: Arundhati Roy). That conversation — with the slow gleam dawning in a great-uncle's eye — is one many of us have encountered at the extended family gathering, and Mira Nair cottoned onto it perfectly in Monsoon Wedding. But it goes deep into the childhood psyche, this stuff. In New York in the mid-2000s, I went to an opening at one of the only two galleries that showed South Asian art then, and found one wall covered with the artistic outpourings of the offspring of potential (NRI) art investors, the result of a workshop that had been conducted that day. On the verge of being charmed by a rarefied space like an art gallery having allowed itself to become the site of a home-style proud-parent display, I went closer. And discovered that the little squiggles on each crayon mess weren't just 'signatures': they were 'signatures' accompanied by an imaginary price tag, each and every 'price' ending in several zeroes.

                                                       ***

Another novel I recently read, John Lanchester's excellent 2012 novel Capital, is an insightful unravelling of the world wide web of money via a truly superb slice of London life on a fictional street. In December 2006, when the novel begins, real estate prices have risen so spectacularly that everyone who owns a house on Pepys Road is now rich. Some of these are people like Roger and Arabella Yount, who up until Roger's pre-Christmas-2006 bonus fiasco were the sort of people "who could unthinkingly afford a £3.5 million house" — and even after said fiasco, remained the sort of people who think nothing of buying a new table to spruce up a bedroom to make the house they're having to sell "more saleable".

But Lanchester also gives us people like Matya, the Younts' lovely Hungarian nanny, and Zbigniew, the Polish plumber, who Matya decides is much more right for her than the really rich man of her fantasies because he'll know what it's like to lose a £30 Oystercard. The book also counts among its central characters a hugely talented young Senegalese footballer whose only capital is his long, loping football stride, and a "performance and installation artist and all-round art-world legend" whose "anonymity was his most interesting artefact".

Ashk's dal-eaters, who scrounge on hotels and food, grossly underpay the shikarawallas and never pay the poor tour guides at all, are described as people who own their own fifty-thousand-rupee homes in Delhi's Patel Nagar. These were well-off people oblivious to the poverty of others, but also seemingly oblivious to their own wealth. In the world of Capital, the richest of the rich – like Arabella Yount – are so used to being rich that they remain oblivious even to their own impending poverty.

Life's Little Ironies: the stories of Upendranath Ashk

Hats and Doctors: by Upendranath Ashk 

Translated by Daisy Rockwell 
Penguin, 240 pages, Rs 299

A review-cum-interview I did for Mint Lounge:

Upendranath Ashk (1910-96) is one of Hindi literature’s biggest names, a writer whose oeuvre spanned over a hundred volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and translation. Hats And Doctorsoffers the English reader the first proper glimpse of Ashk’s very particular sensibility: profound yet light-hearted, satirical yet deeply engaged.

He unravels the ironies of his protagonists’ lives with a wry humour: sharp as a scalpel, yet somehow understated. In some stories, likeWho Can Trust a Man?, this is achieved through a glancing narratorial style: People are bereaved, remarry, undergo all kinds of tumult, seemingly without great emotional labour. In others, like In the Insane Asylum, wryness emerges from tragedy.

These stories range as widely across 1940s-1960s India as Ashk himself did, from the Bombay film industry to Kashmir, and across the north Indian towns he knew well: Delhi, Lucknow, Jalandhar, Allahabad.

The milieus are delightfully detailed: if Brown Sahibs gives us a marvellously credible sociology of Allahabad’s rickshaw pullers and its bureaucrats, the title story contrasts the ills of Lucknow’s allopaths and homoeopaths.

Upendranath Ashk. Photo courtesy: Neelabh

Excerpts from an interview with Daisy Rockwell, Ashk’s translator and biographer:

How did you come to be interested in Ashk’s writing?

In graduate school at The University of Chicago, I did a lot of reading on Hindi novelists. One writer compared Ashk’s novels to (Marcel) Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This intrigued me and I ended up writing my PhD thesis on Ashk’s six-volume novel cycle Girti Divarein(Falling Walls). There are indeed many similarities with Proust, but Ashk never actually read his novels.

You wrote a biography of Ashk for Katha Books in 2005. Tell us a little about Ashk’s early life.

Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography was based on my PhD thesis. Ashk was born Upendranath Sharma, the second of six sons in a Saraswat Brahmin family in Jalandhar. His father, a station master, was an alcoholic with a violent temper. Girti Divarein is semi-autobiographical, and there are many riveting passages about the impact of Ashk’s father’s violence on the family.

Ashk has said that his father wanted his sons to grow up to be the best at whatever they chose to do. He was just as intent that they learn English and Sanskrit well as he was that they become first-class pehelwans (wrestlers). Ashk and his Bhai Sahib, who became a dentist, failed miserably at this second task, but some of the other brothers did become top-notch pehelwans. After college, Ashk escaped his family, and what he saw as the provinciality of Jalandhar, to make a start for himself as a writer in Lahore.

You met Ashk in the last years of his life. What was it like?

It was terrifying. He was very ill, but quite sharp. I think he believed that researchers should come armed with lists of numbered questions. I had in mind a more organic process of discovery which he didn’t really understand. He wanted me to come to see him every morning to ask these questions that didn’t really exist. His family thought these daily visits were not good for his health, and I’m sure they were right, but his word was still law in the house. So I’d spend the afternoons coming up with new questions, dreading what the morning’s session might bring. Sometimes he would berate me and send me away. There was no knowing what would happen.

It’s fascinating that Ashk started by writing in Punjabi and then Urdu, before shifting to Hindi. Was the choice a difficult one? What did it mean for him as a writer, and for the Hindi-Urdu divide in general?... [INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Read the whole of my interview with Daisy Rockwell on the Mint site, here.