Interview: Author Lalit Kumar On His Translation Of Maithili Classic 'Kanyadan'

Lalit Kumar’s English translation of Harimohan Jha’s critically acclaimed Maithili novel Kanyadan (1933) is perhaps the first Maithili classic from colonial times to be translated into English. Published as The Bride by HarperCollins, it focuses on the theme of female education and ill-matched marriages and has a contemporary resonance. An iconic Maithili author and an ardent advocate of girls’ education, Jha portrays the tension between tradition and modernity in a hilarious vein. The novel narrates the tale of an English-educated young man C. C. Mishra whose worldview is shaped by reading English books and watching Hindi films and Buchia, an unlettered country girl. Recently, The Bride won the Kalinga Literary Festival (KLF) Book Award and made it to the Valley of Words (VoW) shortlist in the category of English translation. Ashutosh Kumar Thakur, a Bangalore-based management professional and literary critic, speaks with Kumar, an academic, columnist and Fellow at NMML, New Delhi.

What prompted you to translate this book? What are your early memories of speaking and reading in Maithili?

As a child, I talked to my mother in Maithili but switched to Hindi when my father was around because he had instructed us not to speak in our mother tongue. He would have preferred English as our medium of communication, but since neither we nor anyone in the immediate vicinity could use it, he chose Hindi, the next best option. Years later, when I was pursuing research on the coming of colonial modernity and print in north Bihar at Delhi University, I realised how we were yet to rid ourselves of the colonial hangover that made us look down upon mother tongues. As I started reading more and more in Maithili and began exploring the cultural ethos of Mithila and the neighbouring states, I found out that the novels written originally in Hindi, Bengali, Odia, and other Indian languages abounded in English translation but perhaps not a single novel from Bihar had been translated into English. Then, my thoughts returned to Kanyadan, which is arguably the most popular work of Maithili literature. When it was first serialized in a Maithili magazine titled Mithila in 1930, it became so popular that one person read it aloud for many who could not read. In Mithila, it had become almost a ritual to gift a copy of the book to a bride when she left for her husband’s home for the first time. University students kept it on their study table even during exams. It helped create a reading public in Bihar for the first time. My resolve to bring this seminal text into English, therefore, grew stronger.

How does one view Harimohan Jha’s Kanyadan in relation to other works of Indian literature which dealt with the woman’s question?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, Saratchandra Chatterjee, and Premchand highlighted the problems of child marriage, dowry, incompatible and ill-matched marriages, and denial of education to girls. But here I would like to mention, in particular, Gurajada Apparao’s Telugu play Kanyasulkam (Bride Price, 1892), Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Odia short story “Madha Mohantynka Kanyasuna” (The Bride Price, 1915), and Nagarjun’s (Baidyanath Mishra ‘Yatri’ in Maithili) Maithili poem “Budha Vara” (Old Groom, 1941). All these works share a thematic similarity with Kanyadan as they provide a scathing indictment of ill-matched marriages and bride prices. Apparao, Nagarjun, and Jha explore the prevalence of social evils among the Brahmins whereas Senapati’s short story shows their existence outside the Brahmin community. Here, it would be apt to point out that ancient Indian texts barely contain examples of paying the bride price to the bride’s father in marriage. Kautilya in his Arthashastra and Manu in Manusmriti denounce this evil custom of taking money from the groom as ‘Asur Vivah’. In the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata, there is one isolated instance of Bhisma paying a pride price to Madri’s brother when he seeks her hand in marriage for Pandu, yet the practice was thriving in colonial India.

Do you perceive Kanyadan as a reformist novel? Under what circumstances the novel was written?

While reform emerges as an important theme in the book, it cannot be reduced merely to a reformist novel. Jha’s primary concern was the yawning gap between the education of boys and that of girls. He had seen the abysmal state of girls’ education first in his village and later at Patna University. In 1928, while pursuing his Bachelor of Arts in English, he noticed that there was only one female student in Patna College, and she too came from Odisha. When he saw her study, he wished for the same privilege to be enjoyed by the girls of Bihar and began writing the novel two years later. It was sheer coincidence that back then everyone in his family was hunting for a suitable groom for his younger sister. He overheard his mother sharing her problems with a neighbour and the endless conversation and juicy gossip gave him the right kind of start he needed. Having said this, I must stress that the novel also foregrounds the cultural distinctiveness of Mithila -- the Madhubani paintings, the lyrical wedding songs, Sabhagachhi, a veritable marriage market, and above all, the tongue-in-cheek humour of the unlettered country women. This humour creates a vibrant and loudly joyous world of rural women animated further by their boisterous laughter and energetic banter which is in sharp contrast with the listless and tepid world of the English-educated youths.

Could you reflect on contemporary Maithili literature? Does it mark any sort of departure from the past?

The biggest myth about Maithili is that it is the language of the upper caste. This myth was constructed in the early twentieth century and Maithili print played an instrumental role in it. In 1882, when George Abraham Grierson published the first grammar and chrestomathy of Maithili, he compiled various literary specimens of the language which bore testimony to the fact that the language was used by people cutting across cast, class, gender, and religion. But in 1905, when the first Maithili periodical titled Maithil Hitsadhan was published from Jaipur, its contents were so serious and language so highly Sanskritized that a critic had sarcastically said that the periodical should be renamed as Maithil Pandit Hitsadhan, for it catered to the interests of only pandits. However, the future of Maithili literature seems quite promising. Some prominent names among contemporary Maithili authors include Usha Kiran Khan, Jagdish Prasad Mandal, Kathakar Ashok, Shiv Shankar Srinivas, Subhash Chandra Yadav, Taranaand Viyogi and Vidyananad Jha. The list is long and inclusive and runs counter to the claim made by Lalu Prasad Yadav in the early 1990s that Maithili is the language of the upper caste and therefore Yadav, the then chief minister of Bihar, had removed it from the list of subjects offered by Bihar Public Service Commission.

In what ways do reading other texts and translators feed into your translation and who are the contemporary translators in English whose works you admire?

I believe a good translator, like a good author, needs to be a voracious reader. While reading any text, my eyes are drawn to idiomatic expressions and aesthetically pleasing phrases, especially if the world or the situation that the text depicts resembles our world. Among the contemporary translators, I admire Harish Trivedi, Jatindra Kumar Nayak, Arunava Sinha, Rahul Soni, Gautam Choubey, Murali Ranganathan, and Priyanka Sarkar, among others. Prof Nayak’s English translation of J. P. Das’s historical Odia novel Desh Kala Patra as A Time Elsewhere, and Fakir Mohan Senapati’s novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha as Six Acres and a Third drew my attention in particular on account of the elegance and finesse of the prose that I try to emulate.

Has the practice of translation transformed you as a person or your perspective on life and literature?

The practice of translation has taught me lessons in humility. It made me a conscious reader and enabled me to respond more fully to the nuances of language. It also taught me that one can never, ever take a language for granted. Before I started this project, I had assumed that I was conversant with both English and Maithili but as soon as the work progressed, the painful but rewarding realization dawned upon me that I needed to work on both my mother tongue as well as the language that I had been teaching at Delhi University for over a decade. Having finished my first draft, which I had already revised many times, I remained glued to the screen of my laptop, trying to weed out the infelicities of expression in my translation for months. I consider myself extremely lucky to have friends and teachers who themselves are discerning readers and acclaimed translators whose valuable feedback took multiple revisions to incorporate the changes they suggested. In the long run, the whole exercise turned out to be exhilarating when I looked at the final draft and handed it to Kanishka Gupta who played a key role in finding the book the right publisher.

(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bengaluru-based management professional, literary critic, and co-director of the Kalinga Literary Festival. He can be reached at ashutoshbthakur@gmail.com)