Six books translated from the languages of the Indian subcontinent to read during the lockdown

(HarperCollins India for Firstpost)

Those of us who have the privilege to do so are using the lockdown period to catch up on our reading – and ‘reading more translations’ is on a lot of people’s to-do lists. Here are a few recent acclaimed titles to get you started on getting acquainted with contemporary literature from the Indian subcontinent. From Urdu to Bengali, Hindi to Malayalam, these five extraordinary titles should give you good taste of fiction — and a world! — outside the English language.

And for our sixth pick — because great literature is timeless (and to go along with the reruns of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan on TV) — we’ve included a brilliant translation of one of the world’s great epics. Enjoy!

1. This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels

By Subimal Misra | Translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy

Subimal Misra — anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental ‘anti-writer’ — is a contemporary master, and among India’s greatest living writers.

This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale is a novella about an author trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite who is arrested during a worker’s strike and fatally beaten in custody. When Colour Is a Warning Sign goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretense of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes and snippets of dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc.

Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the ‘vast conspiracy of not seeing’ that makes us look away from the realities of our socio-political order. In V Ramaswamy’s translation, they make for difficult, challenging but immensely powerful reading.

2. Diary of a Malayali Madman

By N Prabhakaran | Translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil 

The unforgettable men and women in N Prabhakaran’s stories have an uncanny ability to expose the fault lines between the real and the unreal, the normal and the mad, as they explore their own inner worlds and psychic wounds. Brilliantly translated by Jayasree Kalathil, Diary of a Malayali Madman marks the very first time this major Indian writer’s work is available in English.

3. Blue Is Like Blue

By Vinod Kumar Shukla | Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai

Vinod Kumar Shukla has long been recognized as one of India’s foremost writers, with a voice uniquely his own.

Blue Is Like Blue is Shukla’s only collection of short fiction, available in English translation for the first time. The stories here deal with ‘smaller-than-life people’. The book also includes Shukla’s memoir, ‘Old Veranda’, with its unforgettable scene in which a bus bound for Rajnandgaon, the city of his birth, is traveling ‘through the air at great speed’.

Few works of modern Indian literature come alive in English, and fewer still in the way that these stories do in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s and Sara Rai’s brilliant translation.

4. Hassan’s State of Affairs 

By Mirza Athar Baig | Translated from the Urdu by Haider Shahbaz

Mirza Athar Baig is one of the most important contemporary Urdu novelists. Hassan’s State of Affairs, his first book to be translated into English, is a surreal ride through Pakistan. It follows an accountant, Hassan, and a group of filmmakers, Masquerade Productions, who are working on Pakistan’s first surrealist film, titled This Film Cannot Be Made. Brilliantly translated by Haider Shahbaz, this dazzling, audacious book is a fitting introduction to one of the most exciting writers working in any language today.

5. Moustache

By S Hareesh | Translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil 

Set in Kuttanad, a below-sea-level farming region on the south-west coast of Kerala, Moustache is as much a story of this land as it is of its inhabitants. As they navigate the intricate waterscape, stories unfold in which ecology, power dynamics and politics become key themes. Originally published in Malayalam as Meesha, S Hareesh’s Moustache is a contemporary classic mixing magic, myth and metaphor into a tale of far-reaching resonance.

6. Valmiki’s Ramayana

Translated from the Sanskrit by Arshia Sattar

Valmiki’s Ramayana, composed as early as 500 BCE, remains a story that speaks to every generation and continues to enthrall millions of people in the Subcontinent and beyond. And Arshia Sattar’s translation, as Wendy Doniger notes, “is the only one that is both accurate and a pleasure to read”.