The Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid thirty years ago wondered why English failed allowing India its legitimate place within the literary dialogue between cultures in the world. Why (even today when English Indian literature seemingly achieved that goal) are the regional literatures still ignored by their legitimate partners in the West, as opposed to Chinese or Japanese literatures, although English should have helped transcending the de-colonization misunderstandings and bitterness. Why? Because, he says, English has created an “enchanted circle” and imposed among Indians themselves a mode of communication which bans the majority of Indians out of its “enchanted circle”, so that we have perverted the way we perceive each other, and similarly the way we and Europe see each other.

One of the side effects of this “enchanted circle” is that Indian literature abroad means to-day English literature, and Hindi literature (and other Indian languages) seems even more and more invisible in bookstores, literally drowned under flows of English Indian novels, Another side effect of this “enchanted circle” is the degradation of cultural awareness and knowledge, as stated by Pollock (2003:3), regarding the state of scholarly knowledge on literary culture:

Over the past fifty years, however, the ranks of this category of scholar [well versed in their literary tradition] have gradually diminished – so much so that the study of South Asian literary archives in their historical depths has lost two generations of scholars. There is now good reason to wonder whether the next generation will even be able to read Pingal texts in old Gujarati or riti kavya in Brajbhasha or ghazals in Indo-Persian. After a century and a half of Anglicization and a certain kind of modernization, it is hardly surprising that the long histories of South Asia literatures no longer find a central place in contemporary knowledge in the subcontinent itself, however much a nostalgia for the old literary cultures and their traditions may continue to influence popular culture (I underline).

Similarly, Agnihotri (2002: 45): “A new generation had grown up: unfamiliar not only with Ghalib and Faiz but also with Kabir and Premchand; nor could they understand Prasad or Nirala (…).; the stapple diet was Bombay film Hindi”.

Why is English so problematic, although an Indian language now? Because it has conveyed its cognitive categories as prevailing in the 19^th century and largely contributed to alienate the Indians from their own traditional cognitive categories, and because even today, well ‘indianized”, it cannot voice the whole of Indian culture, if we agree with Ramanujan (1999) in defining Indian civilization as eminently “context sensitive” and “reflexive”, each text reverberating previous traditions, enriching them or subverting them, in an interconnected pattern of dialogue between learned and folk culture, or with Ananthamurthy in defining it as a continuous discussion between the “front yard” of high canonical culture (marg) and the backyard of rural indigenous traditions (deshi) : “The tradition of lively dialectical contention between the royal highway and the indigenous in India will be marginalized if globalization encroaches over everything”. Globalization: the utmost consequence of modernity, and, ultimately, of colonization, since modernity came to India with colonization[1].

With the term “modernity”, or further on “Western”, I am alluding, to quote Ashis Nandy’ Intimate Enemy (1998:VI), to “a world view which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman and the subhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage”, of scientific rationality over intuitive emotion, of objectivity over subjective empathy, and, above all, a system of clear-cut categories in binary opposition with a clear hierarchy[2].

The prevalence of the modern European based pattern is particularly clear in the novel, a genre born during colonization in India, and during the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe.

However, the Hindi novel (as does Ananthamurthy’s Kannada novel) may also voice the subdued yet not extinct voice of the traditional indigenous culture: in contradiction, or beyond, or beneath, all its apparent, structural or stylistic, modernity: in contention with it.

I will take two examples of such contention, both from writers supposedly over-“westernized” either in their thematics and characters (Nirmal Verma) or in their experimental ways (Krishna Baldev Vaid’s so-called complacency to the “absurd”), and both criticized by Jaydev (1993) as pastiche of the West[3].

In Nirmal Verma, my first example, let us first start with the lesson on the art of looking at things, which we find in Ek Chithra Sukh, scenarized as a possible metaphor of the whole writing. The young boy is playing his usual game (khel) of looking at familiar things and beings as if for the first time, and then remembers his school master teaching them how to see in order to draw:

dekho, yah seb hai, yah seb tebul par rahtaa hai. Ise dhyaan se dekho. Siidhii aankhon se – ek sunn nigaah suuii kii nok-sii seb par biidh jaatii Vah dhiire-dhiire havaa men ghulne lagtaa, gaayab ho jaataa. Phir, phir, acaanak pataa caltaa – seb vahiin hai, mez par, jaise-kaa taisaa – sirf vah alag ho gayaa hai, kamre se, duusre larkon se, mez aur kursiyon se – aur pahlii baar seb ko naii nigaahon se dekh rahaa hai. Nangaa, saabut, sampuurn … itnaa sampuurn ki vah bhaybhiit–saa ho jaataa, bhaybhiit bhii nahiin – sirf ek ajiib-saa vismay pakar letaa, jaise kisiine uskii aankhon se pattii khol dii hai (p. 19: I underline).

look, this is an apple, this apple is on the table. Look at it with attention. With right eyes – an empty look pierced the apple like the head of a needle. It/he began to slowly dissolve in the air, disappeared. Then, then, suddenly became aware – the apple is exactly there, such as itself – only he has got separated, from the room, from the other children, from the table and the chairs – and for the first time looks at the apple with new eyes (a new look). Naked, entire, complete … In such a wholeness that he became kind of frightened, not even frightened – only a somewhat strange wonder seized (him), as if someone had lifted a bandage from his eyes (literal translation)

The object put before the pupils to observe, the apple, belongs to the well known tradition in the training of western still-life painters, but this tradition receives a different inflexion from the words used to describe it. The apple, while disclosing its pure object-ness after dissolving in a literally wonderful (vismay) way, becomes part of a process. This process, the perception that unites the perceived object and the perceiver through the act of perception itself, is a classic reference in the theory of meaning and grammar as well as in the theory of aesthetics in Sanskrit. In Nirmal Verma’s novel, the still life, once perceived correctly (dhyaan se: with attention), is perceived with both acuteness (tezi acute, sui-si nok needle head, bhinc pierce) and emptiness (sunn empty, ghul dissolve); dhyaan and siidhii in Hindi also connect with the tradition of ascetic devotion and spiritual achievement. The acuteness, which allows the thing perceived to stand in absolute isolation (nanga), complete in itself (sampurn), is dubbed by a blurring of the distinctive categories (approximative –saa, jaisaa[4]) in a kind of sideration (vismay: womder) which enables the object to dissolve within the ambient elements. It is at the same time a part “apart from” and “part of” the whole, a double apprehension typical of Nirmal’s view of the relation between subject and world. On one side there is tatvivek (discrimination), enabling for the chiseled representation of things, and on the other side tanmayataa (empathy), both allowing for non differentiation between perceiver and perceived, both allowing things to vibrate and connect together.

So that the still life perception is subtly distorted into a vibrating life, things becoming living entities and active participants, again a subdued reference to the classical vision of the cosmic world in Indian tradition.[5]

Further on in Ek Chithraa Sukh, after the suicide of an important character in one of the last chapters, when the boy is already becoming an adult and a writer (one who remembers, since writing is remembering, and remembering is seeing things a-new, “as for the first time”), and when the fusion of his « I » and his « he »[6], allows a « you » to appear in the shifting process of (de)identification, objects are also described as active entities endowed with a consciousness of their own, a crucial feature in a world of inter-relatedness connecting « I », « he », « it », the self, the other, the world, make the “he” alternately a “I” and a “you”.

vahaan ab koii nahiin thaa. Koii nahiin thaa. Sirf vah thaa, jo ab main huun…

Durghatnaa kii bhii ek aatmaa hotii hai. Yah mainne dekhaa thaa. Dekhaa thaa, main thiik kahtaa huun, kyonki uskii gandh aapas kii ciizon ko bhii pataa cal jaatii hai aur ve apnii-apnii jagah se uthkar tumhen gher letii hain… aur tum unheN hakkii-bakkii nigaahon se aise dekh rahe ho jaise unhen pahle kabhii nahiin dekhaa (p. 140)

Now there was nobody there. Nobody was there. He only was there, who is now I…

Catastrophies have their own soul. This I have seen. I have seen, I say right, because even the things around become aware of their smell and get up from their place to circle around you… And you look at them with dumbfounded eyes as if you had never seen them before.

In the sequence of the Allahabad fair, which accounts for the title[7], the two children, alone, sitting in the sky, in the abandoned giant wheel at night, similarly step into a space where they can reach at this “true” vision of things. Here tanmayata is obtained by the repetitive, almost mesmerizing, creation of an interspace (biic men, na uupar, na nice), again with a profuse use of the approximative –saa, jaisaa, which progressively results in a reversion of the “outside” darkness into a shared “inside” darkness in both children (ek duusre ke andhere men jhakre hue frost in each other’s darkness). This is the precondition discretely stated for suddenly reaching at “truth”, in counterpoint with the children’s dialogue on happiness, rebirth, detachment, leaving one’s ordinary self; and truth is presented as a travel from appearances toward the “impossible”, which is the real.

use kuch samajh men nahiin aayaa, kintu us raat biic havaa men baiThe hue use sab kuch sac lagaa thaa, asambhav lekin sac, candnii raat men peron ke niice ek khel jaisaa, jismen jo dikhaaii detaa hai, vah nahiin hai, jo sacmuc men hai vah dikhaaii nahiin detaa.

he did not understand anything, but sitting in the air of that night he felt as if everything was true, impossible but true, like a play under the trees in the silvery (moon-lighted) night, in which what is visible does not exist, what does exist is not visible.

And then right after this piece of dialogue already set in such a specifically “evocating” frame, occurs a short piece of poetic description:

vah bhaybhiit-saa hansne lagaa (…) [Bittii] kaa svar itnaa halkaa thaa ki andhere men jaan paraa, jaise vah kisii svapn kaa chilkaa hai, jo uske haath rah gayaa hai… taaron kii piilii chaah men kaamptaa huaa – use nice kii taraf khiinctaa huaa, jahaan Illaahaabaad ke itne varsh bekaar tukron kii tarah havaa men ur rahe the…

kind of frightened, he started laughing (…). Bitti’s voice was so light that it seemed in the darkness as some peeling of a dream which had remained in his hand… shivering in the yellow/pale shadow of the stars – pulling him down, where all the many Allahabad years were flying in the air like useless bits and pieces…(literal translation)

How is the poetic dimension obtained here? No particularly poetic word except the vagueness of the “dream” in its Sanskrit equivalent (svapn), no great metaphor, no elaborate phraseology or metaphor. But this single sentence, further de-articulated by the punctuation (suspensive marks, dashes), is right from the beginning framed, or lit, on the background created by the boy’s state of mind: bhaybhiit-saa, the very word associated with the feeling of wonder (vismay), which creates an expectation for what follows. What follows is a series of low-keyed metaphors. The voice, made the outer shell of some dream, then made immaterial, further recovers materiality when described as shivering or trembling in the boy’s hand, and this trembling is in a way borrowed from the twinkling light of stars. The whole scene becomes strange (suggestive of metaphysical / aesthetical wonder) because words are slightly displaced, either by a trope or by an apparent inadequacy (chilkaa, chaah): the selection of the improper word, a well-known impressionist device, is handled by Nirmal Verma as a subtle “anaucitya” with great mastery. A dream has no chilkaa, but the chilkaa makes it physically sensible that the boy is left with a shesh, a remain, a left over in both analytical and physical meanings (the echo, pratidhvani of the voice). Similarly the prosaic “pieces” (tukre) refreshes the worn out metaphor of “gone with the wind” — distort it too, since the memories are not exactly gone with the wind and forgotten, they are half forgotten, half part of the surrounding wind, as are the contingent pieces of the past for the detached “seer”, apart from him yet a part of him.

Punctuation also, although a modern invention in writing, is made by Nirmal a device for sustaining the particular lay of the text: the flat pauses (– , …) prevent the reader from operating hierarchies in the syntactic levels and clauses; and oppose the logical demarcations between clauses and especially the lowering tone of end marks: hence the creation of both an anti-dramatic rhythm and a melodic line with almost no peaks and many silent pauses, a space for internal echoes to reverberate. Assuming that standard punctuation in a written text is a marker of logical junctures and helps interpreting logical dependencies, we are dealing here with a process of de-intellectualization, allowing for a parallel reading with a non-logical interpretation, a relation of equivalence and not of dependence and hierarchy which best suits the register of perception than that of rational interpretations.

Similarly, the “short imperfect”, a specific Hindi tense without temporal marker (jaataa for jaataa thaa, “used to go”), helps in Nirmal Verma’s novels, particularly in Lal Tin ki Chat[8], delocalizing the sequences in the short imperfect from the temporal frame; this is not a purely formal play used to subvert the classical orientation of the narrative time, from a “before” to a logically articulated “after” (as other disruptive devices in modernist western novels used to contest the imperium of realist canonical narration). What is at stake here is defining a space beyond the rational and phenomenological points of reference which build the ordinary time-space frame, reaching at this literally extra-ordinary time-space which is outside time-space while proceeding from time-space, in a search for immanent transcendence. In that novel as in Ek Chithra Sukh, we also find almost philosophical passages which relate the “right” way of seeing to the trespassing of the clear-cut categories of time and space, for instance when describing the mesmerized state of the girl after the little dog’s death: “a speedless speed, where there is no time, no death, neither night or day, only a life running along the rail, a woolen ball — ek gatihiin gati, jahaan na samay hai, na mrityu, na raat na din, sirf patriyon ke biic bhaagtii huii ek jaan, uun kaa golaa… (51)[9]. The location of truth derived from such settings is a special kind of memory, which is not memory, the memory before memory is born, a memory transformed for the girl into the dream of a very ancient night: jo smriti nahiin hai, vah smriti banne se pahle kii smriti hai, jo mere lie ek bahut puraanii raat ka svapn ban gayaa [10]. What is this memory, which is beyond memory, and builds for the girl a primeval night beyond the very concept of beginning, before any process, before temporality itself? it transforms the things experienced into the memory of them, introduces a distinctly non narrative dimension in the text, but also points to an atemporal present which coincides with the “right” vision: time as an all embracing present rather than a succession of clearly oriented events, memory as a collective memory grounded on a diffuse feeling of belonging rather than on a clearly preserved collection of facts and things « of the past ».

Nirmal Verma’s essays largely deal with the concept of time as an eternal atemporal present (nirantar vartamaan), which is the time of myth and not of history. They also deal extensively with the diffuse feeling of belonging, an all-inclusive empathy with one’s culture in traditional societies, as opposed to the modern conception of culture; they deal with the interconnectedness (antargumphit, sanlagnataa) of all living and even non animate beings in a non-centred, non-hierarchized universe where the sacred, nature and humankind share the same living space (19991, 1995). The Essays are in this regard very similar to what Nandy defines as the traditional vision of time and relations in the indigenous Indian cultures opposed to the sequential, discrete, oriented time in the modernist and progressist view. Very similar to Gandhi’s views also, and the condition for morality and real civilization according to Nandkishore Acharya[11].

But I wished here to draw this claims of the “uncolonized mind” from Nirmal’s poetic prose rather than from his ideological contributions, since the very style of the novel achieves without meta-discourse what is elsewhere discursively explained. And this has been my “program” as a translator, in Berman’s terms, or my “task” in Benjamin’s terms, to honor such claims, even at the cost of fighting with the editor and publisher! (on punctuation, on saving the many –saa/jaisaa, seemed as, felt as, etc.).

My program is of course different when translating Krishna Baldev Vaid’s stories and novels, where questioning, inner criticism by means of reformulations, negations, constant alternatives and non assertive modalities, appear as one of the most significant stylistic devices converging to the expression of a generalized skepticism and ultimate indeterminacy of causes. But it is a skepticism (along with derision and comic) which also questions clear-cut identities and the very notion of category itself.

The whole narration in Duusraa na koii for instance aims at discarding the limit allowing for distinctive notions, so that there remains, at the end, no difference (farq, antar) between here and there, he and I, before and after, outside and inside. For instance, when the narrator attempts to measure the age of his partner: « to me she looks much older than, in fact twice or even thrice as old as, I am. Old enough to be my mother or even grandmother. Paternal or maternal. Which is not to deny that, to me, I look old enough to be her older brother or her ancient lover. If not her father or her grandfather” (p.6), or of his parents (“I am indistinguishable in my mind from my father and my mother”: p.53)[12].

Metaphors too appear as a way for getting notional borders indistinct. If nails are as limp as the flesh (p.3), if the skull is at the same time a “rotten soft papaya” and “hardened by years of head beating so that it is impregnable as a rock” (p.97), if the narrator, circling his neck with his hands, has the impression he holds his penis or the neck of a chicken, if he cannot make the difference between his feet or his belly, if the liquid oozing from his eyes is neither tears nor blood but still evokes blood tears, the whole process of metaphor and hypothetic or negative reformulations amounts to casting a doubt on clear-cut categories. Since differentiation and distinct categories are the only warrant of stable identities, the very notion of character vanishes as well as the possibility of judgment (which also requires categoriality).

Significantly, the only character really opposed to the narrator, his hereditary enemy (janm se dushman), which structures the narrative because he is the opponent, finally becomes indistinguishable too from “I”. The contrasts between both I and he become more and more uncertain: “by now our ages have reached that enormity and our faces that anonymity that no observer, howsoever keen, will be able to tell at a glance who is who, or who is speaking and who thinking, or who is the owner or the house and who the visitor. Had there been a hidden observer, he might have thought he was singing while I was dancing, weirdly, to his tune” (p.36). And at the end of the novel comes the point “where the difference between he and me becomes negligible” (p.74), and “although I have not been able to decide so far whether he is or not, whether I am or not”, I finally cross the bridge with him, to fly in the open sky, free, blissful (“now we are soaring in one form”: p.105)[13]. What is this bridge, from where all distinctions vanish, where there is no longer discrimination “between pain and panacea, between ordinary and extraordinary, between anything and nothing” (p.74)?. It is, the mentor suggests, the point where the great void (mahaashuunya p.99) is visible, this great void the narrator has been aspiring at since the beginning. A point he sporadically reaches, when discovering that at his age belonging “nowhere” and not belonging “here” get identified (p.7), then later that being nowhere and here identifies (p.83), as well as “upstairs and downstairs”: “I have reached a point where death and life are one” (p.80). Blurring the limitations of differential notions and categories by various textual devices results in this narrative achievement of finding freedom and bliss in the great void, in conformity with the narrator’s quest, as a writer and as a character: he manages to literally construct infinite by deconstructing finite limitations.

But the emptiness, the great void at the end, resulting from the vanishing of differential categories and referential mimesis in general, although its narrative elaboration in Dusra na koi somewhat evokes Beckett’s nihilist quest out of the given categories of narration and judgement, owes little to western existentialism. The mahaashuunya is an Indian concept, and the metaphysic or mystic path Vaid achieves with modern stylistic devices in an Indian one, the quest for moksha, repeatedly emphasized with its modern names (chutkaaraa, sometimes azaadii) as the narrator’s major goal. The feeling of bliss and freedom he experiments at the end when merging in the great void is also repeatedly conveyed in the narrator’s favorite song, duusraa na koii, there is none other, a pada from Mira Bai which is deemed important enough to be the title of the Hindi novella. In Mira the absolute is Krishna, there is no other than Him, and the goal of the devotee is to merge in the absolute embodied by Krishna. Its first occurrence at the end of the first chapter ironically concludes the love affair. At this stage, the words of the mantra, repeated during the whole day, generate a feeling of freedom although they represent the “essence of my angst”. The narrator has forgotten the other verses, only remembers the tune and enjoys it so much that he gives up the idea of looking for the forgotten integral text. The second occurrence of the song echoes the feeling of liberation experienced when he stops perceiving a difference between upstairs and downstairs (p. 68). At this stage he peacefully registers the absence of any other one who could supposedly arrange things, conveying through Meera’s pada an agnostic mysticism, with the simple statement: no other, no discriminating limit, no differential feature. A statement which associates with intense jubilation at the end of the story, when he and I are soaring “in one form” in the emptiness. The merging of I and he is concomitant with the fading of spatial categories (here and there, nowhere/ anywhere/ here, up and down) and temporal categories: the very frames of classical narration are eroded, while at the same time the feature “exile” (belonging nowhere) with no stable identity (a dubious ‘I’[14] unable to fit into any opposition, since he is equally dubious) gets its full meaning: rootlessness (belonging nowhere) is depicted as a state of exile from the indistinct fusion with the cosmic emptiness, the absolute principle, the blissful state of non separateness which is obtained at the end of the novel. This state, beyond differentiating tensions, is equated with peace (shaanti) and freedom, itself equated with detachment as the way to peace, a leitmotiv in the story right from the beginning.

Besides, this explicit nostalgia for the state beyond differences, the fusionnal state of the sanyaas, is mapped in the multiple frame of the bhakti reference (with nirgunta as the asymptotic line which tends to blur every clear qualification), the many popular traditions of vairaagya, absolute detachment, and Sufism, as well as the classical philosophy of aesthetics, particularly the shanta-rasa, the mood of tranquillity.

As stated in the very beginning of Bimal urf jaae to jaaen kahaan[15], what is at stake for the author in literary language is how to grasp at the always elusive “fundamental questions” of human mind by seemingly word-plays. The intitial page itself deals with the question of the beginnings in a play with no beginning (no end, no middle): should I begin with the illusion (bhram) or with the creator (brahm) ? By the action (kaarya) or the cause (kaaran) ? By the caused (kartaaram) or the non-caused (akartaaram) ? By the act (karm) or the affect (marm) ? By the pain (aah) or the desire (chaah) ? By time (samay) or space (sthaan) ? By music (raag) or disease (rog) ? By penance (tap) or heat (taap) ? By the here (idhar) or the there (udhar) ?… By Shiva (shiv) or lash (shav) ? By aum or ego (aham) ? By baby (shishu) or sex (shishn) ?… By the character (paatr) or the reader (paathak) ? The fact that the signified engenders itself out of the playful moves of the signifier, a device so characteristic of Vaid, is not an empty play totally cut off from the signified. It essentially amounts to questioning distinctiveness, a property inherent in language categories, but which may be subverted by the music of the words, rhythm or material sonority. A questioning echoed by the favourite thematic of the empty road leading towards the suspension of contradiction and abolition of differences (Lila, Sair ki sair, Mera dushman, etc.).

My reading and understanding of Vaid for translating the great novel on Partition should of course be induced by the nature of the text, which is fare more realistic than the “metaphysical” novellas but still voices similar undertones, in a more explicitly Gandhian stand (with the images of a Pakistani Surdas or a Hindu fakir, or a childish old man bent over his walking stick as he wanders across borders…).

Last, but not least for the translator’s programs, always plural: the general concepts of non modernity are certainly not exclusively Indian nor even Eastern. As Said has shown, this « other » which the colonial discourse has constructed into the image of the non-west has once been part of the medieval European consciousness. Although it is far more present and still vivacious in India than in Europe in spite of the internalization of the western model of modernity there, it may not have completely been uprooted in Europe itself and this is why reading and translating Hindi great literary works to-day in Europe is also maintaining alive this part of our non modern selves and resist to the brutal face of the postmodern market.

Notes