Partition

So it’s happening finally. We are in the process of being presented with English translations of all of Saadat Hasan Manto’s 255 known stories. Published by Aleph, the stories are spread across three volumes, all translated by historian, writer and activist Nasreen Rehman. Of the three, we have in hand the first volume of this mammoth pioneering translation project - a set of 54 stories and two essays pertaining to Manto’s life in Bombay and Poona, a period of roughly a decade between 1937 and 1948. Volumes two and three…

A quarter of a century since his last screen appearance and two decades after he died, film buffs still recall Ashok Kumar’s (1911–2001) multiple contributions to Indian cinema. Starting as a reluctant actor in 1936, his career, that spanned 64 years and 350 movies, spanned the evolution of cinema in the country. Launched opposite Devika Rani in Jeevan Naiya, Kumar went on to become Hindi cinema’s first super star. Such was his popular appeal that, for seven continuous years, Roxy Cinema in Bombay showed only Ashok Kumar…

Wajida Tabassum is barely known outside Urdu literary circles. Her best known short story Uttaran (Cast Offs) — about the vindictive fury of unequal female friendships and the weaponisation of sex — has appeared in translation in English in several anthologies. It was made into a soap opera in 1988 (the jealousy theme was also coincidentally the premise of a popular drama of the same name on Colors TV). And most famously, it was adapted by Mira Nair for the first half of her 1996 film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love — the…

American translator Daisy Rockwell on translator recognition and remuneration, among other things. It has been heartwarming to see a global online community of translators rooting for you to win the International Booker Prize, and now rejoicing in your victory. Do translators live in a parallel universe where people support and encourage each other? Or are you blessed to have kind friends, colleagues, peers and mentors? Well, certainly I am blessed with kind friends, colleagues, peers and mentors, but I also believe…

We grew up reading the history of the losses of the Partition of the Punjab. Anirudh Kala’s novel Two and a Half Rivers tells the story of the Punjab’s immense losses since Partition. Making good use of his own training as a psychiatrist, he spins a yarn that weaves together the various political and cultural schisms that have affected the north-western province and its people with a variety of ailments. Civilizational loss and guilt seems to weigh heavy in the air. This is personified in the title itself, where the…

The scenes are familiar, brought alive in vividly sensuous prose: “The acrid smell of burning cow dung hung in the air. Through a door left ajar, I glimpsed a mud-plastered courtyard, and a stack of ploughs and wooden cartwheels in a corner. Inside a thatched courtyard, two veiled women were pedalling a wooden mortar. It produced a sound like muffled heartbeats.” Parimal Bhattacharya writes of a locality called Mahashaypara in a village called Sthirpara near Plassey, the historic battlefield where Robert Clive defeated…