The euphoria over Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize win has largely to do with the fact that a work in translation, especially from a language like Hindi, has received £50,000 as reward—an astronomical sum. It’s a great moment for Hindi literature, but it will do precious little for literary translations in India, which grapple with woeful lack of funding, say publishers and translators.
The government established Sahitya Akademi in 1954 because it was difficult for independent, unfunded and unfinanced publishers to undertake translations in a multilingual country with 22 Scheduled languages, 122 regional languages and 1,726 mother tongues (at the last count). “It was understood that no private player could support such a labour-intensive endeavour for long,” says Ritu Menon, author and publisher/founder of Women Unlimited. For a majority of publishing houses, both indie and big, translation work has to be subsidised. “No one can sustain a translation-only programme; it’s just not possible. With long gestations and slow returns, it can only be a labour of love,” says Menon.
Literary translation is not economically feasible. If a stray translation wins an award, the publisher can feel justified for backing the effort. Otherwise, it doesn’t make commercial sense even for people like Menon, who has published translations of Qurratulain Hyder and Ismat Chughtai’s works for over 30 years. Women Unlimited is an associate of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist press, which Menon established in 1984 with Urvashi Butalia. She didn’t conceive it as a commercial venture, but as a non-profit.
Activist and author Gita Ramaswamy founded Hyderabad Book Trust (HBT) with a similar objective: HBT had to stand on its own feet without external funding. This meant shoestring budgets, low salaries and payments to translators and authors, and no-expense accounts. In this ecosystem, she looked for passionate translators. “We were lucky that in the 80s, there were a few people dedicated to translating into Telugu. We were also lucky that bi-lingualism and tri-lingualism prevailed. But after Andhra Pradesh’s linguistic bifurcation, the need for multi-lingualism has been erased,” she says.
HBT managed to publish great translations at minimal cost because many authors allowed it to translate gratis. Forty years later, the situation has changed drastically. “While translations into and from Telugu have increased substantially, as have the number of publishers involved, quality has taken a beating,” says Ramaswamy. Today, authors and English language publishers rarely give away translation permits. In Western countries, there are agencies like PEN, Arts Council, etc that fund writing or translation, to give literature a fillip. “Writing in Indian languages gets no such support. Our corporates fund temples but not literature. A society that does not value its literature can’t live by religion alone—it can only go downhill, as is happening in India,” says Ramaswamy.
Today, translations happen in all directions—to and from Indian languages, as well as to and from English—but the individuals who have been associated with such ventures are people committed to the idea of translation. Geeta Dharmarajan started Katha in 1988 to introduce Indian readers to the richness of its languages through the Katha Prize Story series: “I was under the illusion that these translations would transform lives. I believed that we could help people in entrenched poverty and sorrow to translate their own lives, or to better understand the human predicament from literature.” Today, she wishes there were ways to stand up against “the robbing of the helpless, the earth and its myriad cultures”.
In 2010, the Union ministry of culture founded the platform, Indian Literature Abroad (ILA), to project India’s literary canon on the world stage. It aimed to translate works written in 24 languages in India into eight foreign languages. But when the ministry refused to release the promised funds, ILA slipped into irrelevance. The project was later transferred to the Akademi, following a suggestion by the founder-director of Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) Namita Gokhale, who had once served as a member of the Centre’s committee to anchor the programme. Along with Neeta Gupta and Shuchita Mital, Gokhale co-founded Yatra Books in 2005. Its core activity was translations—it published 500 titles in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Bengali and Urdu before it wound up in 2021.
Literary awards for translations, like the JCB Prize or the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, makes no difference to 99 per cent of translations that get published. For a majority of translators, there is no pecuniary incentive. National Book Trust’s grants for translators are nominal. Mini Krishnan, who ran a successful translation programme during her stints with Macmillan and OUP, has now tied up with 14-odd private publishers, including HarperCollins India, Penguin Random House and Niyogi Books, to co-ordinate a project of Tamil-to-English translations. It is a buyback programme—500 copies of every book published are bought by the Tamil Nadu government.
Corporate support for translations is hard to come by. Shinjini Kumar, co-founder of Indian Novels Collective (INC), a not-for-profit initiative to promote Indian storytelling in translation, partnered with Speaking Tiger and JSW Foundation after she started the collective in 2017. Their first two books were translated by Daisy Rockwell and Jerry Pinto—Usha Priyamvada’s Fifty Five Pillars and Red Walls and Vishram Bedekar’s Battleship, respectively. The collective was born when she realised ‘the need for building a dialogue around Indians novels in translation’. She recollects: “Our concern arose from the lack of visibility for regional literature, even though some quality translations had started to appear. We felt this could be achieved using digital media, partnering with litfests, and working with publishers.”
Indie publisher Seagull Books stays afloat with funds from European agencies and embassies by translating works from their countries. “No book ever becomes a profit centre. Some compensate for others,” says its editor Bishan Samaddar.
In such a scenario, the onus of translating literature in Indian languages rests upon a creaking Sahitya Akademi. “Our core activity is translations,” says Sreenivasarao. The Akademi’s annual translation award is given to books across 24 languages. But the amount, Rs 50,000 for each translation, is too little in exchange for the arduous task.
Awards can help put a translated work on the literary map. But they hardly make any difference to the world of translations.
(This appeared in the print edition as "No Country for Translations")
