Archive for the ‘Translation’ Category

Dear friends,

Thank you Alaham Anil Kumar and Arundhati, it was lovely meeting Ravish Kumar and gift him a copy of my book.

The response overwhelmed me. As a person, as a writer, we make certain choices in life. Mine was to keep my nose to the ground, keep dealing with the world through my self, use writing to understand what I think/feel and share a bit of my writing with the world. Many of you have liked me, loved me, for my writing. Thank you!

Yesterday, for the first time, a social media influencer, but most importantly, a simple, earnest person who has consistently appealed to our commonsense over the years, chose to highlight my book – PANJAB Journeys Through Fault Lines.

While my own post on Facebook garnered much love from you, on Instagram the likes kept piling up by the minute. So much that at one point I had to put my head in the quilt and stop my heart from exploding.

I was telling Ravish Kumar, I know what to write, I learn how to write, but I do not know marketing. Ravish Kumar said: ‘many people want to read, they just do not know what to read.’

I am hoping he is correct.

800+ likes on Facebook, 65K+ likes on Instagram, is a huge blessing. Can I please hope for a 3-5% conversion of these numbers into sales?

PANJAB Journeys Through Fault Lines is available from Penguin at Rs 599. A discount is on at Amazon.

The Panjabi translation PANJAB Jinha Rahan Di Main Saar Na Jaana is avaiable from Singh Brothers at Rs 750. A discount is at Amazon.

Get your copy.


Dear Friends,

I feel, it is essential that all of us who articulate the #FarmersProtest must speak to a world outside Panjabi and in my case English. I must thank Saumya Gupta and Mayank Saxena for this interview in Hindi.

We talk of the Sikh tradition of langar and how it emerged as the greatest goodwill gesture in the protests, gender and caste diversity at protests, VM Singh and Chaduni issues, mused upon the reluctance of many friends from participating in the protests, the political dimension of the protest, and Republic Day.

1.06 hours. Do view and listen here …

Last summer I was in Munich and went to see the The Pinakothek der Moderne, the modern art museum. It was here I found a whole room dedicated to Nazi Art. The accompanying write up talked about how the Nazi’s had tried to build their own culture of art at variance with the trends in the world at that time. They banned Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and encouraged their own set of artists.

It reminded me of how the ISIS destroyed the ancient archaeological sites at Palmyra, Aleppo in Syria. How it destroyed Mosul, Nimrud, Nineveh in Iraq. How the Taliban destroyed the Bahamian Buddhas. How the rebels torched the library at Timbuktu. It reminded me of how the right wing everywhere destroys legacies but does not build new ones. It is the same with Nazi artists, they perished from memory.

Yesterday, on the eve of the Hindi movie Padmaavat release, I made a post on FaceBook. Please see …

Dear friend, excellent writer, sensitive Abhishek Srivastava translated it into Hindi. Please see …

In the second week of July Herr Rolf Spinnler interviewed me for a writer profile in the prominent Baden-Württemberg newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung. A few days later I put up the image of the page on my social media to be greeted by so many friends and readers. I am humbled. Thank you. What impressed me most was how Rolf wrote inter-culturally to carry into German what is essentially an Indian/Punjabi sensibility.

Anil Kumar Jagalur has been an old friend. I remember him travelling all the way from Nagavara driving a car borrowed from a colleague to the IISc campus to listen to my talk in January 2012. He knows German and has been so kind to translate the article into English. He took the writing back to English thus closing the circle of understanding that Rolf opened. Here is the translation. This is the beauty of how language works, across continents, cultures, sensibilities, thus creating meanings. Thank you Anil.

Stuttgarter Zeitung writer profile July 18, 2015

The Sikh without a Turban

The snow had fascinated him, it was a new experience for him. Like a white, blank paper: an encouragement to write. The Indian writer, Amandeep Sandhu, who had occupied his studio high up in the forest near Stuttgart in early December 2014 as a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, narrates how he had fallen into a depression when the white cover over the forest and meadows had disappeared in the spring. Now, in mid-summer, a month before returning with his wife to the South Indian metropolis Bangalore, he seems to have luckily overcome this phase and over Indian tea excitedly talks about his plans for the future.

End of June, during a Festival about Terrorism in the Stuttgart Theatre, the writer introduced his novel “Roll of Honour”. It plays out in 1984, in a military school in the Indian state of Punjab and describes the coming of age of a young man before the background of the conflict between the religious minority of the Sikhs and the Indian central government. I know very little about the Sikhs, but after the reading of the autobiographically inspired novel, it appears to me that Amandeep Sandhu cannot be identified as a Sikh from his clothing style. Where are the turban, the long hair and the wildly burgeoning beard, with which a few youth in the novel reveal themselves self-consciously as belonging to this religion?

The writer laughs and rolls himself a cigarette at the kitchen table in his studio at the Solitude. He explains to me that, as an orthodox Sikh, he is forbidden to smoke and elucidates the difference between “Mona” and “Khalsa”. It somewhat corresponds to the difference between laity and monks in other religions.  As “Khalsa” (Pure) one is duty bound to the five “Kakars”, to which, apart from the long but well maintained hair the “Kirpan” also belongs, the dagger as a sign that the Sikhs protect the poor, the weak, and the innocent. He had decided to fight with the pen instead of the sword – in this way Amandeep Sandhu has interpreted his religion for himself.

But he had actually attempted a military career as per the wishes of his father. Nothing came of it and after the military school Amandeep Sandhu studied English literature, instead, at the University of Hyderabad, worked as a journalist, moved to the software metropolis Bangalore and served reasonably well as a technical writer in different IT-firms. The military school had become necessary as his parents’ marriage was encumbered by the psychological illness of his mother who suffered from schizophrenia. The author has handled this childhood under the shadow of a sick mother in his first novel, “Sepia Leaves”, published in 2008 by the Indian publisher Rupa Publications. The book describes coping with the difficulties with the mentally ill in modern Indian society from the perspective of a young boy and the later grown up person alternately.

In the traditional society the mentally ill were integrated in the solidarity of the extended family. But, for Amandeep Sandhu’s family that was no longer true. He was born as an only child in 1973, in Rourkela in Eastern India, where his father had moved as an Engineer from Punjab because in the 1950s the Indian steel industry was built there with the help of German companies such as Krupp. The people who lived in these new towns had not only to familiarise themselves with modern working methods, but also with new social forms such as the small (nuclear) family. The mentally ill were, in the older society, shielded by the joint family, under the modern conditions the health system should step in. For that, India was not ready. Thus, in the meantime Amandeep Sandhu’s novel is considered in India as compulsory reading for medical caregivers, social workers and students of psychiatry.

Indian society had made headlines in recent years through news of violence against women. In his second novel “Roll of Honour”, published in 2012, Amandeep Sandhu shows that young men too do not have it easy. In Punjab, in the year 1984, harsh customs rule in the military school in which, along with his classmates, the seventeen year old Appu prepares for the entrance examination of the military academy. Not only does corporal punishment bother the youth, the conflict between the independence movement of the Sikhs and the Indian central government demands a clarification of one’s own position.

Appu, as the representative of his class, is torn between his loyalty towards the Indian republic and his solidarity with the community of Sikhs. On the contrary, a few of his classmates engage themselves as freedom fighters for an independent Punjab, whereas they are terrorists in the eyes of the government. In the course of the class year the class disintegrates further, anarchy spreads, this is what the author underscores by borrowing the chapter titles from the apocalyptic poem by Irish writer William Butler Yeats – “The Second Coming”.

And then, there is the sexual need of the young men. Together, they secretly consume porn, imagine the sexual life of their teachers and even have sex with each other. Homosexual relationships among cadets – one knows about it (not only) from English novels. Is it common to write about sex in India, even homosexual sex, I ask Amandeep Sandhu. No, normally not, he opined, but he has ignored this taboo.

Here the novel clearly differentiates between relationships that depend on violence, if for instance an older student exploits the dependence of a younger one, and the voluntarily entered tender contacts such as the one between Appu and his younger schoolmate Gaurav. In “Roll of Honour” the microcosm of the boarding school is a mirror image of the macrocosm of the Indian society. The machismo of Appu’s schoolmates refers to the machismo that reigns in Indian Politics.

Hence Appu could write after the bad guys have stolen his personal diary: “The rape of the diary was like the army’s attack on the Golden Temple … Operation Blue Star was an act of sodomy”. In 2013, “Roll of Honour” was among the five finalists for the prize of the English language newspaper “The Hindu”. Meanwhile the novel has been translated into Punjabi, the mother tongue of the author.

I point out that he writes in English, the language of the former colonial power. He laughs and cites the slave, Caliban, from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse”. Yes, the cultural imperialism of Britain had destroyed much in India.

Amandeep belongs to the generation of writers after the well-known Indian writers like Salman Rushdie or Vikram Seth who serve the western readership’s need for the exotic. Authors of his generation must however attempt to make English their own language to deal with the current problems of India. The Indian writer regrets that in his country there is no culture of remembrance as there is in Germany, and attempts to change it.

A planned book with the title “Journey through Fault Lines: Punjab 25 Years After Insurgency” wants to explore, a quarter of a century after the unrest subsided, the fault lines that the conflict of the eighties left behind. And his new novel, “The Memory Maker”, that Amandeep Sandhu started to write in Solitude, will also concern itself with migration and memories.

Friends, here is my translation of Daljit Ami’s column on how the politics of Punjab is now informed and even controlled by voices outside Punjab. How these moves reduce the issue to sloganeering and not much else.

Please read …

Friends, here is my translation of Daljit Ami’s latest column on the situation of temporary cooks in Punjab who support the government’s mid-day meal program in government schools.

Please read …

Friends, if you want to understand Punjab, read this letter. Observe how the powers that be use multiple methods to silence people: they appropriate the meaning of language, turn public infrastructure towards their own private gains, favor the coterie, create their fiefdom, use coercion and compensation to divide people such that voices can’t rise in opposition … Yet, the people of Punjab will speak, they will ask questions.

An open letter to Punjab chief minister Prakash Singh by Daljit Ami. Translated by me.

‘Does your qualification, of being India’s most experienced chief minister, now stand dwarfed in front of your son’s business acumen?’

It is a bit long, bear with us. India Punjab is now a small state, its problems have very long histories.

Please read here ...

Preeti Singh read and reviewed Roll of Honour. Then she interviewed Daljit Ami, the translator, and me for her article on the book and the process of translation. I wish more such pieces are written on the efforts of translations between languages worldwide, all books.

Read on

For a long time now Prof. Rajesh Sharma of Punjabi University has remained supportive of my efforts to write about Punjab. When Roll of Honour was translated into Punjabi Gwah de Fana hon to Pehlan he invited the translator Daljit Ami and me to a joint reading at the university. Since the VC Jaspal Singh had already heard me speak at the university in February this year, he kindly consented to grace the occasion. The Guru Granth Sahib studies department lend us their beautiful horseshoe shaped well lit and airy hall.

The reading was a jugalbandi between Daljit and me. Each of us read out same sections of the book to give students a flavour of how the text feels in the two languages. We also commented on our work and on how we worked together. Prof Jaspal Singh was moved enough to present his experience of the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi of which he had been a victim.

Here is Rajesh Sharma’s account of the presentation in which he appreciates the novelty of our approach and raises further questions on the phenomenon of translations. I am humbled. Please read

 

For many years now Punjab has both attracted and perturbed me. As a novelist writing in English on Punjab I have wondered why does Punjab remain lukewarm to my attempts  at writing about it. It has taken a long time for me to recognize and grapple with the language divide which exists in Punjab.

Punjab remains lukewarm to the attempts of the English media to narrate its multiple realities. So, while the translation of ‘Roll of Honour’ was much reported about recently in all major English newspapers, assi Punjabi tan udo hi bolange jado kitab Punjabi wich aaugi. (We Punjabis will respond only when the book comes in Punjabi). That has been the unheard comment I have discerned. For that and to connect with the land we decided to translate the book into Punjabi.

Just before leaving Chandigarh on November 6th, to my satisfaction, I saw a four column coverage of ‘Gwah de Fana hon to Pehlan’ in the Punjabi Tribune. With foto and all ji. In picture are the Vice Chancellor Punjabi University Jaspal Singh, Head of English Department Rajeh Sharma, head of Guru Granth Sahib studies.

Please read

Let the dialogue begin!