There are certain things that feel distinctly Indian.
The way we weave through traffic as pedestrians. Nod our heads and jog our shoulders to indicate yes, no and who knows? Leap effortlessly from one language to another and another, often in a single day, sometimes in a single sentence.
Within our spectacular diversity, these are the kinds of things that unite us.
Let’s stay with that last one. A land of this many tongues (about 19,000, including dialects), could have been riven by the variations.
Instead, we learnt long ago to share.
Most of us have, at some point, read at least a bit of Sant Tukaram and Maithilisharan Gupt, Premchand and Amrita Pritam, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Perumal Murugan.
We have at some point been read the Panchatantra, which makes for a great example, because its delightful fables have journeyed, over about 1,500 years, from the original Sanskrit into dozens of Indian languages (and an array of foreign ones too).
And yet… so much remains hidden. Translations exist, but not in enough languages. Treasures exist, but in libraries and archives invisible to the mainstream.
Now, an effort led by Ashoka University’s Ashoka Centre for Translation, in collaboration with the literature-and-research-centric New India Foundation, is working to spotlight as many of those treasures as possible on a single platform.
Bhashavaad (bhashavaad.in; Hindi for Discussions on Language) is India’s first non-profit, open-access, crowdsourced database of Indian translations. Now in its third year, it has gathered data on 34,000 titles.
“We often assume translation happens only when there are grants, prizes, royalties, publishers and institutional support. While translators absolutely deserve recognition, the history of translation in India tells a different story. Long before any of these structures existed, people were translating across languages in astonishing numbers,” says Rita Kothari, co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation and a professor of English at the university. “The Bhashavaad database is an attempt to uncover that vast, messy, vibrant ecosystem.”
CROSS TALK
It all began, Kothari says, when she and her co-director at the centre, fellow translator Arunava Sinha, decided to try to find data on which Indian-language titles had been translated.
“One of our primary duties at the centre is to identify books that need to be translated and find publishers for them. A major roadblock here is the lack of this information in a structured format,” says Sinha, who is a professor of creative writing at the university.
Catalogues from publishers helped them get started. Then the hunt began, with Kothari, Sinha and their team scouring, libraries, private collections, magazines, archives, and literary and cultural institutions.
They unearthed, among other things, translations of books on Zoroastrian culture going back over 100 years; several versions of the 12th century Tamil epic Kamba Ramayanam, in Bengali, English, Malayalam and Kannada; essays and jokes; treatises on medicine science, religion and spirituality.
The eventual aim, Sinha says, is to attempt to map what is and isn’t being translated, which languages are most widely represented, what the most translated language pairs are, and where focus might most urgently be needed.
Some of this data is already taking shape. So far, for instance, the Indian languages most translated are Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu, Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit and Odia. The Indian languages most translated to are Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali and Telugu.
Another trend the data points to is the uneven flow of translations between languages. Bengali, for instance, appears more often as a source language than a recipient. So, while Bengali literature travels widely across India, there isn’t a corresponding influx of translations from other languages.
The position of English as a dominant medium in this arena means that many works are often first translated into this lingua franca and then into another Indian language. With a lot often lost in the process.
Researchers can now mine the website for more such patterns, and explore unanswered questions about the ongoing evolution of Indian literature as a whole.
What we have now is just the tip of the iceberg, Sinha says. There are plans to add more titles, as well as works of oral history, songs and folklore. The vaster and more varied the archive can be, he and Kothari agree, the better.
“Translation is, after all, the glue that binds us together,” Sinha says. “Without it, we’d be islands with no bridges.”
