Abstract
The Dark Room has a spectrum of characters urban and rural, working-class and professional, Tamil and English speakers. In the first part of this paper, I analyse key passages in the book, and in its translation, Iruttu Arai, to examine the strategies Narayan invents to distinguish the speech styles of his characters. The translation cannot match Narayan's irony and spare narrative style, but it renders more closely the speech styles of some of the Tamil speakers, the shifting power positions between the characters and the book's cultural milieu. In the second part, I show how the translator deals with the proto-feminist theme of The Dark Room. I analyse key words and images, used by Savitri when she leaves her husband and when she returns: the translator is unable (or unwilling) to match Narayan's vocabulary of equality and rights, choosing instead the ideology and vocabulary of honourable dependence.