Big issues around a small-scale phenomenon: Vernacular pulp fiction in English translation for Indian readers

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of the recent appearance of some Indian vernacular pulp fiction texts in English translation for Indian readers. As background, the first of three main sections outlines the current scope of Indian Translation Studies, and also briefly examines recent thinking about the position of English in India. The second section examines the habitual Indian English-readers’ perspective of such pulp fiction in translation, and the third that of Hindi commentators insofar as relevant here. These two latter sections do not offer a linear argument, or undertake a close reading of specific texts. Rather, they draw a picture of vernacular and English popular print culture in India, wherein various slippages and cross-connections are apparent.

A small-scale phenomenon

Amidst the enormous variety and scale of Indian print productions, a relatively small – indeed miniscule – area attracted inordinate attention in Indian newspapers and magazines around 2010. A smattering of English translations from “pulp fiction” in Indian vernaculars appeared in the market. In vernacular book circuits such works have usually been cheaply and prolifically produced, publicized and packaged to highlight their sensational contents, targeted towards a mass readership, and considered unworthy of “respectable” readers. Chennai-based publisher Blaft mainly took the initiative, and produced English translations of two anthologies of Tamil Pulp Fiction (Chakravarthy and Khanna, 2008, 2010), four volumes of Urdu novelist Ibne Safi’s Jasoosi Duniya series (2011), and two from the Vimal (criminal-cum-hero) series by Hindi author Surender Mohan Pathak (2009, 2010). Random House India started publishing Safi’s work in English somewhat earlier, with two volumes of his Imran (superspy protagonist) series (2009, 2010). An English version of a Pathak novel from the Sudhir (private detective) series also appeared in 2011, from Delhi-based Diamond Books. The firms that put a stake in this nascent area of publishing evidently had promisingly varied profiles. Indian sales of these publications have been modest in the first instance (for useful accounts of the Indian publishing and marketing context, see: Das, 2004; Francis, 2008; Pathak, 2011). According to Blaft in March 2012 (personal correspondence), the bestseller from the above list is Tamil Pulp Fiction volume 1 (2008), having sold 11,000 copies. The translator of Pathak’s novels for Blaft, Sudarshan Purohit (2010), has publicly bemoaned their low sales in India. These translations also attracted little critical notice (such as, Wax, 2010) and sold indifferently abroad, where the Indian editions were made available by internet vendors. But then, they were published for a predominantly Indian readership, judging by interviews with Blaft publisher Rakesh Kumar (Post, 2009; World SF Blog, 2009). However, their appearance aroused significant interest in Indian newspapers and magazines. The media interest indicates that this small-scale phenomenon stands at the juncture of big issues in India: the status of English and of vernaculars, the mediations that take place through translations, the distinct print cultures that attach to English and vernacular literary productions (especially in the valuation of “popular/pulp” and “serious/literary” texts).

An analytical engagement with this emerging area of publishing could usefully begin with familiar academic concerns that seem to frame it and yet fail to account for it adequately. The next section consequently offers brief notes on the current scope of Indian Translation Studies, outlining polarized preconceptions which deter analysis of the implications of producing vernacular pulp fiction in English translation. This section also sketchily outlines recent reconsiderations of English in India, thus gesturing towards relevant social and political processes (changes in social stratifications and aspirations, and in practices/forms of cultural production). With these in the background – more as a pertinent backdrop than a rationale for what follows – the subsequent two sections discuss the small-scale phenomenon itself. The first of these presents the habitual English-readers’ perspective (that is, readers in India) of this small-scale phenomenon, and of its broader implications. The section after that contemplates relevant views of Hindi commentators on vernacular print circulations apropos this small-scale phenomenon. These two sections do not offer a linear argument; rather, they draw a picture of vernacular and English popular print culture in India, wherein various slippages and cross-connections are suggested. A range of material is used opportunistically here (news media reports, scholarly publications, personal observations, etc.), arranged to convey a reasonably coherent picture. The conclusion is accordingly left open, but returns briefly to the above-mentioned academic concerns.

Indian Translation Studies and English

With the growing vogue for Translation Studies as a distinctive academic area in the mid-1990s, it became something of a truism that translation has been predominantly conceived according to a dominant “Western model”, which doesn’t quite apply to the fluidly multilingual Indian context. In a 1997 Meta special issue on Indian Translation Studies, Indra Nath Choudhuri thus observed:

The major difference between translation practices in the West and translation practices in India is that in the West translation is considered a complicated linguistic and literary act, while in India it is an inevitable way of life. In the West translation has been subjected to scrutiny from a variety of [theoretical] perspectives […]. In India, in contrast, the focus has been more on the pragmatic aspects of translation. (Choudhuri, 1997: 442)

This argument constructed two counterposed sides: on the one hand, the pragmatic and fluid everydayness of multilingualism and translation practices in India; on the other hand, the comparatively monolingual character of Western contexts, wherein translation is an academic matter, grasped in directional terms (from target to source), and complicit with the workings of top-down power. This argument has been pressed consistently in Indian Translation Studies since (to cite a few instances, Kothari, 2003: 38-40 and passim; Wakabayashi and Kothari, 2009b:12-13; and Prasad, 2010b: 11-12). In making this argument, impressionistic evidence is usually cited: a few examples of (educated, middle-class) multilingual exchanges and life experiences are given as representative. However, broader evidence suggests that the construction of counterposed sides is implausibly reductive. Statistics on monolingual constituencies in India and European countries, for instance, are against the grain of that argument. According to the 2001 Indian census, around 75.2% of those counted declared themselves monolingual (Census India, 2001); whereas a 2006 Eurobarometer report (European Commission, 2006) noted that 44% declared themselves monolingual in the EU (lower than 53% in 2001). The most monolingual European country, the UK, had 62% declaring themselves monolingual in 2005.

The polarized constructions of Western and Indian attitudes to translation are, arguably, more revealing of language politics within India than in the West. Actually, this argument gestures tangentially towards the position of English in India: what happens in English in relation to translation is taken as the norm of Western attitudes to translation in India; and, concurrently, what is perceived as happening in English happens largely within India. There are relatively few instances where Indian Translation Studies has engaged translations from other languages into Indian languages (as in, for instance, Trivedi, 1997), or translations between two Indian languages (as in, for example, Kothari, 2010). To an overwhelming extent, Indian Translation Studies has been anxiously preoccupied with the relationship of English to Indian vernaculars.

The polarized construction of models of translation symptomatizes two levels of anxiety about the position of English in India. First, from a historical perspective, the inculcation of English in India is rightly understood as complicit with the nineteenth-century project of organizing Indian texts and knowledge so as to comply with British colonial power. The history of translation from Indian languages into English is accordingly thought of as a means of subjugation (Chandra, 2010; Kothari, 2003; Niranjana, 1990). The argument from polarized models therefore gestures towards that history, suggesting that the colonial relationship persists in the “political unconscious” of academic discourse, if not in the everyday life, of postcolonial India. Second, arising from colonial education policies, the English language has been complicit with the political and cultural domination of an elite professional and bureaucratic class, a minority of the Indian population (English proficiency is now estimated variously between 10-20% of the population). Social inequalities exercised through English proficiency have continued to be embedded in the education system since independence (trenchantly outlined in Faust and Nagar, 2001; Ramanathan, 1999). The uneven flow of translations between English and Indian languages, favouring the former, reflects the domination of this English-using minority. The above argument, then, also indicts the hegemonic interests that operate through English, and recommends an agenda for liberating Indian languages from corollary neglect. In both these ways, Indian Translation Studies has tended to place English in a delicate inside/outside position – more outside than inside, more a powerfully ensconced excrescence on the linguistic–literary national corpus than a domesticated organ.

A number of scholars with a significant investment in bringing Translation Studies into Indian academia (generally in English literary forums) and representing Indian Translation Studies internationally (under postcolonial studies) have broadly subscribed to the argument outlined above. Several of them appeared in the 1997 Meta special issue cited, and consistently thereafter in relevant publications (for example, Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999; Prasad, 2010a; St-Pierre and Kar, 2007; Wakabayashi and Kothari, 2009a). Scholarly debates around the above argument were engaged in several directions, all replete with anxieties about English. Ganesh Devy’s After Amnesia (1992) opened up a discussion on elite languages (such as, Sanskrit, Persian, English) in relation to vernaculars, which bore upon Translation Studies. As if spurred by Niranjana’s (1992: 167) warning about postcolonial Translation Studies being vulnerable to chauvinistic nationalism and “nativism”, the pros and cons of both in the Indian context were explored (for example, “nativism” in Paranjape, 1997; and national perspectives in Kumar et al., 2007). Debates about the competing place of Hindi and English as claimants to national dominance (discussed in Sadana, 2012) have also frequently referred to the argument outlined above.

These familiar academic approaches to English in India and Indian Translation Studies are, however, in the midst of being reconsidered. Reconsideration does not imply revaluation here: it is unarguable that in India the English language was and is complicit with hegemonic interests, both as colonial language and as repository of elite postcolonial interests. Reconsideration here has to do with instrumentalizing English for various kinds of empowerment because of its historical and current dominance (nationally and internationally), rather than with trying to resist its dominance. In post-independence academic circles, arguments favouring the cultivation of English in India have appeared intermittently and have generally been charged with covert promotion of hegemonic interests. However, the kind of reconsideration that has been underway since, particularly in the early 2000s has pressed upon academia from ground-level developments, from the midst of a complex of social realities. Such developments have pushed upon English and Translation Studies in India before they could be fully registered and conceptualized, and embraced or countered – demanding change. Indeed, the demand presses upon the study of modern Indian languages generally.

Some of these ground-level developments are matters of broad social and cultural import. The success of the Business Process Outsourcing industry in India is pertinent here. Elsewhere I have examined the connotations of the term “outsourcing”, and discussed the balance that media and political discourses struck between regarding Indian outsourcing as an expression of persistent inequality between North and South and as promising gradual equalization (Gupta, 2010). Relevantly, these discourses also revalued English-proficiency as not merely an important element of cultural capital but also directly translatable into financial capital in India. The impact that such media and political profiling of the industry has had on valuations of English in India (for instance, on student recruitment, on career choices) is yet to be systematically studied. Scholarly discussion in this context has centred on questions of identity and attitudes to variant language usage in training Indian call-centre workers (Cowie, 2007; Poster, 2007; Taylor and Bain, 2005). However, it is generally accepted that the perceived financial value of English-proficiency à la outsourcing must have spurred the growing demand for English in India. Interestingly, in 2003 a wide-ranging lecture by Susan Sontag (2003) on literary translation and the international dispersal of English mentioned Indian call-centre workers in a celebratory spirit. This observation drew a bitter rejoinder from Trivedi (2003), dubbing call-centre workers “cyber coolies”, much to the delight of controversy-seeking news media.

Ongoing reconsideration of the position of English in India has to do also with Dalit leaders and intellectuals promoting English as their preferred language of aspiration and opportunity. The Dalit political and cultural movement that gathered force through the 1990s has brought Dalit life experiences and perspectives, at odds with traditionally dominant cultural discourses, into the forefront of the Indian public sphere. That ideologues of the most oppressed constituencies in India prefer English as the medium of aspiration and opportunity, both now and historically (Omvedt, 2006), has undoubtedly interfered with grievances about the hegemony of English and neglect of vernaculars. Indeed, it is not only Dalits, but dispossessed rungs of Indian society more largely, which now seem to pin aspirations on the English language, and seek a strong English-language education for their children despite the costs (often through private schools, see Desai et al., 2008: 18-20). Playing alongside that, since the 1990s production and consumption of texts by and about Dalits, especially memoirs/biographies and literary works, have grown significantly. These have appeared numerously in English translations from Marathi, Tamil, and other languages, and provide new fodder for Translation Studies (see Kandaswamy, 2007; Merrill, 2010; Mukherjee, Mukherjee and Godard, 2008; Sivanarayanan, 2004). Dalit literary texts often test the conventional boundaries of literary expression, and take liberties with linguistic and literary norms, in a manner that translators find challenging.

Yet other factors encourage reconsideration of the position of English and the scope of Translation Studies in India. The incorporation of English words and phrases into Indian vernaculars is increasingly manifested in public exchanges (advertisements, commercial films, newspapers, popular songs, etc.), and suggests a greater degree of acceptance of such linguistic hybridity than heretofore. With reference to such hybridity in Hindi – commonly called “Hinglish” now (for various perspectives, see Kothari and Snell, 2012) – scholarly attention has both downplayed the phenomenon as confined to elite metropolitan circles (Trivedi, 2008: 203–206) and been upbeat about it as a “re-vernacularization” of Hindi via English after concerted efforts to promote the purity of Hindi as national language (Saxena, 2010). From a quite different direction, the noteworthy development of Indian commercial fiction in English since the 1990s, targeting an Indian readership, also bears upon reconsiderations of English in India. I have outlined the broad features of this development elsewhere (Gupta, 2012), noting that such commercial fiction texts attempt to take possession of English as an Indian language. In these, English appears to be used as if it were familiar in the Indian habitus, whereas Indian English literary fiction has often been regarded as “inauthentic” to, or “exoticizing”, Indian contexts. Also relevant here is the constant increase in the numbers of English literary translations from Indian languages being produced for the Indian market since the 1990s (Kothari, 2003).

These observations give a reasonable, albeit cursory, sense of the directions from which a reconsideration of English and Translation Studies in India is currently being pressed. That these developments cause both disquiet and excitement among academics in these fields is widely recognized but little documented. It is against this backdrop that an analytical perspective could be extended to the small-scale phenomenon with which I began: English translations of Indian pulp fiction.

The habitual English-readers’ view

In Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger (2008) the narrator and main protagonist, driver Balram, recalls being introduced to a particular sort of pastime reading by another driver: a cheap magazine, Murder Weekly, devoted to sensational stories of “Murder. Rape. Revenge”. Since the narrative is ostensibly addressed to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (and Adiga’s novel to those who read habitually in English), Balram feels some explanation of this pulp publication is necessary:

Now I have to tell you about this magazine, Murder Weekly, since our prime minister certainly won’t tell you anything about it. It’s sold in every newsstand in the city [Delhi], alongside the cheap novels, and it is very popular reading among all the servants of the city – whether they be cooks, children’s maids, or gardeners. Drivers are no different. Every week when this magazine comes out, with a cover-image of a woman cowering from her would-be murderer, some driver has bought the magazine and is passing it around to the other drivers. (Adiga, 2008: 125) ¹

The magazine is obviously in Hindi. The newsstands and cheap bookshops in question, and the readership described, belong to a circuit other than that of English publications. Balram, who doesn’t know English but nevertheless appears to tell this story in English, had begun his long letter to Wen Jiabao with the playful conundrum: “Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English” (3). The point at which one in Balram’s circumstances might encounter popular reading material in English is also described later, when he runs into a footpath-bookseller of pirated publications:

• The books drew me towards them like a huge magnet, but as soon as he saw me, the man sitting on the magazines snapped, “All the books are in English.”

• “So?”

• “Do you read English?” he barked.

• “Do you read English?” I retorted.

• There. That did it. Until then his tone of talking to me had been servant-to-servant; now it had become man-to-man. He stopped and looked me over from top to bottom.

• “No,” he said, breaking into a smile, as if he appreciated my balls. (205)

It turns out that the bookseller deals with his ware by remembering the cover images – a mixture of Harry Potter fantasies, James Hadley Chase and Desmond Bagley thrillers, sex manuals, something by/on Hitler.

For habitually English-reading Delhi denizens (not those like Balram) there is an immediate plausibility about this account of popular print circulations. On the one hand, the vernacular popular print circuits (such as newsstands) and the English popular print circuits (even at the, literally, ground level of pirated book vending) appear not to overlap. The readerships seem immiscible, distinguished along the class lines of masters and menials. On the other hand, there is a kind of thematic consanguinity between texts in the two circuits, focused mainly on sex and crime, with some spirituality and self-help thrown in. And yet, this thematic consanguinity merely accentuates the separation. The popular imaginary, wherein, for instance, sex and crime figure in the English-language circuit, is referred either to a remote Anglophone “West” or emulates international bestselling genre fiction. The counterpart of that imaginary within the vernacular-language circuit has an immediate resonance and subversive potential which disturbs, and which has to be suppressed. Suppression works mainly through vernacular genre fiction being trivialized, being seen but apparently not read, or read but not acknowledged as read (except by “all the servants of the city”) – kept firmly outside “respectable” circles and “serious” discussion. In The White Tiger the evocation of Murder Weekly comes with an immediate recognition of the unease it causes: Balram explains (125) that the magazine’s popularity among servants suggests the possibility of resentful violence against masters – obviously, what masters fear. In this account, vernacular popular print circuits seem to exist at a significant distance from pirated popular English print circuits, and at a great distance from the entire legal circuit (both popular and literary/serious) in English as well as from literary/serious vernacular print.

According to the picture painted in The White Tiger – and it is an immediately plausible picture – the schism between English and vernacular popular print circulations is not a matter of discrete social and cultural spaces or geographical distance; it is a schism within a coherent social and cultural space, maintained by the exploitation of one class by another and the mutual dependency and aversion that follows. That class schism criss-crosses other divides (such as, urban and rural, metropolitan and provincial, regional), and is roughly mapped on to the great internal linguistic divide of India: between elite English-reading fiction consumers (who have some access also to one or more vernaculars) and the vast numbers of vernacular-reading consumers (many of whom don’t know English). The walls of distinction seem particularly impervious where popular fiction in English and in the vernaculars, and their respective habitual readerships, are concerned.

From the perspective developed thus far, the enormous significance of translations of Indian vernacular popular fiction into English for an Indian readership becomes obvious. This is not merely a matter of interlingual translation; more potently, this involves cultural translation across a powerful internal schism, which is paradoxically dispersed within a coherent social fabric. The dominant equipment of Translation Studies described briefly in the previous section, with its counterposed Western and Indian approaches and anxieties about the inside/outside status of English in India, offers indifferent purchase on the various levels of translation involved here. Ongoing reconsiderations of English in India and the scope of translation, also briefly outlined above, present complex reckonings that are perhaps more relevant here – relevant in their ideological drift if not in offering direct analytical analogues.

The above mapping of distinctive popular print circulations, somewhat glibly inferred from Adiga’s novel, is actually rather simplistic. Insofar as the focus here is on Indian popular print culture, a more nuanced picture is called for. The rest of this paper attempts to sketch such a picture in broad strokes. That the above observations are simplistic has little to do with The White Tiger: the novel foregrounds the master–servant divide within the variegated and yet coherent social fabric of India (in my view, with perfectly justified sharpness), not print culture. Interestingly, however, the substantial English-language media response to the appearance of Indian pulp in English (mentioned at the beginning) seemed to agree with the simplistic view of Indian print cultures outlined above, without Adiga’s ideological interest and social vision. Following a media logic, much of this English-language reportage imposed simplistically conceived structures on their accounts of print circulations. And, following a market logic, the publishers of these translations also used packaging and publicity strategies which anticipated that sort of simplistic reception. But the complexities elided thereby are, nevertheless, in the region of common knowledge for most in India. Vernacular language reportage and commentaries reveal further levels of complexity. In the context of Indian popular print circulations, the complexities of cultural translation – woven into interlingual translation – are manifested at the interfaces of distinctive patterns in reception and commentary.

To begin with, the English media commentary in question often seemed to present vernacular popular fiction as one thing – pulp – though some of this popular fiction (not pulp) has appeared in English translations with increasing regularity since the 1970s. As in English, the field of vernacular popular fiction contains multiple registers and readerships, and pulp is a segment therein. The middle classes do not simply read serious vernacular literature and all kinds of English literature; there is, naturally, “respectable” middle-class vernacular popular literature. For example, in Bengali, detective fiction, science fiction, and fantasies by Hemendra Kumar Roy, Nihar Ranjan Gupta, Premendra Mitra, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Adrish Bardhan, and others have generally been staples for middle class readerships, often serialized in prominent journals (or published whole in special issues for Durga Pooja, the most important religious and social event in the Bengali Hindu calendar), and produced accordingly by mainstream publishers. These aren’t considered pulp, but neither are they viewed as serious literature. Bengali pulp fiction targeting, mainly, working-class and menial readerships (generally publicly shunned even if privately consumed by the middle classes) are published by suburban and provincial publishers and packaged accordingly. This kind of Bengali publishing is associated with the Battala (a district in North Kolkata) tradition, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. Anindita Ghosh’s (2006) history of Battala publications in the colonial period summarized their thrust and readership thus:

Both in terms of content and in a linguistic sense, these [publications] were the defining “other” of an emergent standardized modern Bengali language and literature. Shared by a range of urban and semi-urban groups – women, poor Muslims, and petty servicemen – they ran counter to the educational efforts to define boundaries of “polite” and “vulgar”. (2006: 18)

Standard Bengali language and literature has a considerable history now, and the demographics of the “others” have changed in some ways, but the conventional boundaries still distinguish pulp from other popular Bengali fiction. Generally, the recognizably pulp fiction – risqué, sensational, garishly designed, cheaply produced – is a segment of popular fiction in any Indian vernacular. On a related but different note: reportedly, what is regarded as pulp often attracts significant middle-class readerships. It isn’t only servants who read Hindi pulp fiction, for instance. Looking back to the rise of Hindi pulp in the 1960s and 1970s, Mrinal Pande observes:

Most of the readers belonged to upwardly-mobile middle classes from, mostly, upper caste families that had moved from villages to small towns. This group lusted after change but also valued its social identity too much to risk sacrificing it by open rebellion against caste norms and taboos. The paperbacks introduced just the right amount of forbidden excitement in the lives of young men and women living in ancient and congested localities with tribal social ties. (Pande, 2011: 36-37)

Further, the aesthetic sensibility and entertainment value that mark Hindi and other vernacular pulp fiction inevitably cut across all classes through audio-visual media if not in print. The Bombay film mega-industry has fed off pulp fiction by Surender Mohan Pathak, Ved Prakash Sharma, Pyarelal Aawara, Gulshan Nanda, and others regularly (Rism, 2011, lists ten popular Bombay films in 1967-1977 based on Nanda’s novels alone). So have more localized vernacular film industries.

A sharp class-based division of circulation and readerships between vernacular pulp and English fiction (and serious vernacular fiction) was severally highlighted in English-language reportage and commentary. Key here is the manner in which vernacular pulp fiction is reportedly retailed and accessed. Descriptions of the latter speak for themselves: “When I was in college, railway station bookstalls were crammed with Hindi novels by Gulshan Nanda” (Kesavan, 2008: n.p.); “Elbow your way past the passengers rushing to board the 2560 Up Shivganga Express, find the lone well-stocked bookseller, make yourself heard amid the clamour of chai garam and grab your copy [of Pathak’s novel]” (Raaj, 2009: n.p.); “these were available on 2/- per day rent from local Karyana (grocery) store, these were the most easily accessible form of literature” (Rism, 2011: n.p.); “Pulp is […] sold at rock-bottom prices at places where people want something to pass time with on journeys – railway stations and bus stands” (Purohit, 2009: n.p.); “These [Tamil pulp books] we would regularly purloin from the driver of our school bus, Natraj, who kept a stack of them hidden under the back seat” (Chakravarthy, 2008: ix). The habitual English reader evidently thinks of these circulations of vernacular pulp as a somewhat exclusive zone, where serious literature or books in English don’t exist – a circuit which is registered only in passing or approached surreptitiously or recovered from the recesses of memory, surprisingly cheap, found amidst the all-too-familiar and yet remote (almost exotic) everyday of ordinary people (poor people, menials).

Cheapness is important, though cheapness is obviously a relative matter. At an average, judging from a cursory survey in Delhi bookshops, a book of Hindi pulp fiction is about a third of the price of a book of Hindi literary fiction, and about one-fifth (or less) the price of English pulp or literary fiction. Given that pricings both derive from the existing market and predispose the potential market for books, it isn’t at all surprising that Hindi pulp sells considerably more than anything in English. Nevertheless, the English media commentary in question seemed constantly amazed at how well vernacular pulp sells compared to even the most successful Indian English-language fiction. The figures cited (usually more indicative than precise) naturally served to accentuate the distance between vernacular pulp-reading masses and English-language pulp-reading elites. The great language-cum-class divide in popular reading habits seems sensational when comparative figures are offered as follows:

Just the top three authors of Hindi pulp together sell more than 15 lakh [1,500,000] copies a year. Each of them annually churns out between 2 to 10 books, each of which sells between 50,000 and 2 lakh [200,000] copies. In comparison, any English language title that has sold 5,000 copies is termed a bestseller, even if the number is achieved over a couple of years. (“The Amazing Tale…,” 2008: n.p.)

and:

The men churning out these [Hindi] potboilers prolifically might not be as famous as Chetan Bhagat [the highest-selling Indian novelist in English], but enter the Hindi heartland and you will find that they are celebrities. Bhagat’s last book, Two States: The Story of My Marriage, has sold about a million copies – stupendous but still 500,000 short of [Ved Prakash] Sharma’s Wardi Wala Gunda. Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, River of Smoke, has so far sold around 60,000; Shobhaa De’s bestsellers do around 25,000. Take the case of Anil Mohan. This Delhi-based [Hindi] writer has written over 180 books in two decades. On an average, his books sell about 50,000 copies each. (Sharma, 2011: n.p.)

The contradiction between the status of being recognized as “bestselling” in English and Hindi and the sales figures respectively of English and Hindi popular fiction shadows such observations. This seems especially ironic because Hindi publishers often observe that pulp fiction (such as Pathak’s books) is selling considerably less now than in its heyday in the 1980s (the growth of television entertainment is held responsible – see Pande, 2011: 37–38; Kaur, 2012); and it is generally held that English-language commercial fiction written by and for Indians is booming (Gupta, 2012). Some reports in English were also much taken by the celebrity that Pathak enjoyed after English translations of his novels appeared, in contrast with his erstwhile long and successful but relatively low-profile career (see Susan, 2010; Varma, 2011).

At the bottom of these perceivable divides there’s a very real linguistic gap which habitual English-readers in India occasionally acknowledge. Almost all have functional proficiency in at least one vernacular, but, as Mukul Kesavan observed: “like many Anglophone Indians, I find reading in an Indian language a chore. The reason our reading lives aren’t nourished by popular novels set in locales we know is not because they aren’t written, but because they aren’t translated” (Kesavan, 2008: n.p.). Even the translator of Pathak’s The 65 Lakh Heist (2009), Sudarshan Purohit, candidly admits in the Introduction that the experience of translating had improved his Hindi reading speed, which was somewhat slower than his English reading speed. However, the gap that the English translations of vernacular pulp fiction bridge is, from many Indian English-readers’ perspectives, very much more than a matter of proficiency in languages. It is a gap which is shaped by overlapping divisions in socio-economic class, circuits of book distribution, print cultures, and cultural capitals.

English-language news media reception of translations of vernacular pulp enthused about the “different world” within that was thus opened up to the habitually English-reading elites of India: “One reason why the books are catching on is that they represent a different world” (Swamy, 2010: n.p.). The publishers anticipated this perception of the habitually English-reading Indian market – at least Blaft did. The two Tamil Pulp Fiction anthologies were presented in a curiously dislocated fashion for English-reading Indians: as ethnographic objects that capture this “different world” for a kind of academic or tourist gaze, rather than as straightforwardly pulp fiction to be consumed for unthinking and transient entertainment. That these anthologies were entitled “pulp fiction” in itself presented them as ethnographic objects (pulp fiction doesn’t ordinarily label itself as such). Within the volumes that tilt was accentuated by inserting interleaf-pictures of typical Tamil pulp fiction covers, giving details of and quotations from interviews with the authors featured, and offering an introduction. Similarly, the Blaft translations of Pathak’s novels came with an introduction and interim pictures of Hindi advertisements of his other novels. While the fiction dominates, there’s enough of an apparatus in these volumes to suggest that these are akin to reference books too, or that these are collectable objects. With the tourist gaze in mind, Blaft also produced a book of postcards of Hindi pulp fiction covers by cover-artist Shelle (Mustajab Ahmed Siddiqui), entitled Heroes, Gundas, Vamps, and Good Girls (2009).

The Hindi commentators’ view

Hindi commentary on the appearance of Pathak’s and Safi’s novels in translation, on the relation between English and Hindi print culture, and on the idea of the bestseller, gives a somewhat differently-nuanced picture. A few notes on these to complicate the habitual English-readers’ perspective seem expedient. Undoubtedly similarly interesting responses, possibly nuanced in yet other ways, also appeared in other Indian vernaculars beyond my focus here. The situation in Tamil responses, for instance, is as relevant here and likely to be substantially different from the Hindi responses outlined below.

Unlike many of those cited above, Hindi literati writing for newspapers, magazines, and journals largely keep in touch with both Hindi- and English-language media and publications. The social dimension which catches attention here is thus not so much of English-reading elites vs. vernacular-reading masses, but of the divisions within Hindi literary and print culture. Here, English-language print circulations in India seem to put Hindi print circulations into a renewed perspective. The general argument that relevant Hindi commentaries offer takes issue with the excessive attention that elite and canonical Hindi literature (distinguished by its conceptual and ideological underpinnings, complexity and style of expression) receives from mainstream publishers, news media, and academic critics. Contrastingly, the prolifically-consumed Hindi popular fiction that is produced alongside is comprehensively neglected in the public sphere, played down in mainstream print circulations, and considered unworthy and disparaged in media and academic discourses. As a result, it is observed, firms which produce such popular texts work in a marginal and localized fashion, and publishers of serious literature naturally cater to a limited elite market – and consequently Hindi print circulations at all levels suffer from poor organization and market-penetration. The manner in which English-language publishers promote popularity and commercial success appears, from this perspective, to obtain in a stronger and better-resourced industry which is suitably placed to stimulate all sorts of print circulations (whether popular or serious) and print culture as a whole. The English-language industry is necessarily sustained by mass media interest in commercial as well as serious literature, and by critical attention that extends in sophisticated ways to both. To many Hindi commentators this aspect of English-language print culture seems worth emulating. At the same time, they also frequently and disapprovingly note that the English-language industry has become over-commercialized – making “bestsellers” of books that don’t actually sell well, and rewarding commercial success at the expense of literary achievement.

Thus, with an approving nod towards the appearance of English translations of Pathak’s and Safi’s crime novels, Prabhat Ranjan observed:

The “bestseller” is beginning to be discussed again in Hindi. There was a time when advertisements of The Magic Ring used to be published beneath Nirala’s [Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi] poetry. Rahi Masoom Raza [Urdu poet] used to write for the magazine Spy World [Jasoosi Duniya], and the books of Gulshan Nanda and Rabindranath Tagore used to be published in the same set. At that time the divide between “popular” and “serious” literature was not too deep. The relation between books and readers was a direct one. Now the search for those lost readers has begun again. First it started in English, and now it appears to have begun in Hindi too. (Ranjan, 2012: n.p.; my translation)

It is doubtful whether this nostalgically characterized past actually obtained, but the desire to incorporate something of the current English commercial print culture in Hindi is writ large here. Apart from the translations, Ranjan also looked hopefully to the stake made by international publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins in Hindi-language publishing, the diversification of Hindi publisher lists, and moves to promote Hindi “bestsellers”. The English translations of Pathak’s and Safi’s novels have encouraged new readerships of and thinking about popular fiction, Ranjan maintained, not only in English but also in Hindi. In an earlier piece, Ranjan had anticipated the emergence of Hindi popular fiction reading networks, similar to those in English, on the internet, and felt that this was happening “quietly”, not as “loudly” as in English (Ranjan, 2011: n.p.). The Hindi publication programmes of international publishers also suggested optimistic prospects for popular Hindi fiction to Vivek Gupta. Unlike Ranjan though, Gupta didn’t regard these as a revival of a past ethos but as a transfer of the commercial spirit of English print culture: “In English being a ‘bestseller’ has always been regarded approvingly, but in Hindi literary value is preferred to commercial gains arising from popularity” (Gupta, 2011: n.p.; my translation). This point was elaborated in a broader context by Sudheesh Pachauri (2004), in a book which both introduces European and North American theories and studies of popular culture, and analyses Indian popular cultural forms and themes. A brief explanation of how market considerations and professional writing converge with literary production in English print circuits took Pachauri to the contrasting situation in Hindi print circuits. With a touch of annoyance he observed:

In Hindi the word “market” (bazaar) evokes such awe and, nevertheless, such ostentatious rejection that as soon as it appears literature seems to become indifferent. Contemporary discussions on Hindi literature in relation to the market suggest that Hindi literature is written by ascetics who live in ravines and caves. What have they to do with the market? […]

These vociferous and hypocritical writers do want their poems and stories to reach everyone. They wish to be popular, to be famous, for their books to sell well, to receive fan-mail as English writers are rumoured to. […] Hindi writers wish to be popular, but while pouring invective and scorn on popularity. In the process they appear ridiculous. […]

Hindi publishers seem to encourage this attitude of authors. They claim not to care about popularity. They desire all the profits of popularity but appear not to favour investment in it. (Pachauri, 2004: 76-77; my translation)

A large part of Pachauri’s broader argument was that the attitudes described here coincide with academic attitudes to Hindi literary and cultural studies, which simply hasn’t developed a serious analytical apparatus for popular cultural productions – including in print – such as that found in the work of the Frankfurt School and other theorists. As the combative tone of this suggests, resistance to commercial literary values and dismissiveness about popular culture has been persistent in Hindi literary discourses. For instance, in an edited volume (Tiwari, 2005) surveying the condition of Hindi literary reviewing, published soon after Pachauri’s book, the editor’s introduction complained bitterly about increasing marketization (bazaarvaad) of Hindi literature (Tiwari, 2005: 11-12) – a sentiment echoed by several other contributors thereafter. This debate in Hindi between the conflicting calls of popular writing and serious literature is an old one: it recalls, interestingly, a late 1980s discussion between prominent Hindi authors like Rajendra Yadav, Mohan Rakesh, Bhisham Sahni, Kamleshwar (Gaur, 1990: 60-62). But the current debate has intensified in view of the development of Indian English commercial fiction and English-language publishing. The conventionally disdainful neglect of Hindi pulp fiction is beginning to peep through the current discussion, and the English translations played their part here.

One of the ways in which Hindi commentators’ view of the popular fiction market differs from those in the English-language media relates to retailing and distribution. In the English-language commentary cited above, the railway station bookshop, local book lender, newspaper stands, roadside Hindi or Tamil book vendors seem to provide outlets for exclusively popular – predominantly pulp – reading material, at a remove from bookshops in metropolitan markets where books in English and serious books in other Indian languages are found. In fact, in my experience, serious Hindi literature is often found in exactly the same retailing spaces as Hindi pulp fiction. Railway station bookshops (in Delhi, as well as in smaller cities like Jhansi and Gwalior) stock both pulp fiction and contemporary literary fiction and poetry in Hindi. The book-vending carts around Old Delhi sometimes carry cheap editions of classic Urdu poetry. In fact, for those who aren’t aficionados of serious Hindi literature, it is quite difficult to locate bookshops with reliable stocks of such literature in Delhi. The situation is described fairly precisely by Avaneesh Mishra:

Bestseller. In the world of English publishing it is a notorious word. In English every second book is a bestseller. […] The word “bestseller” does not mean much in Hindi circles. […] Books do not reach ordinary readers. If one were to look for Hindi literary books in cities like Delhi, Allahabad, Bhopal, Patna, Ranchi, considered centres of Hindi literature, one would face considerable difficulties. Those who know the addresses where they may be found will reach those addresses; those who don’t have to make do with the bookseller’s carts by the railway station, where they may find Premchand’s Godaan and Gaban or buy some cheap books. It is understandable that for the ordinary reader Hindi literature means either Godaan and Gaban or the cheap popular books found on railway platforms. (Mishra, 2012: n.p.; my translation)

In the useful observations that follow, Mishra cites several Hindi publishers and editors who are contemplating ways of understanding and changing this situation. In most of these a sense of the unfairness of the kind of print circulation that English commercial literature enjoys in India is attended by programmes and strategies drawn from it for Hindi print circulations in the future.

Conclusion

The above observations, threaded around the small-scale phenomenon of the appearance of English translations of Tamil, Hindi, and Urdu popular or pulp fiction targeting Indian readers, do not lend themselves to a pointed conclusion. Rather, a mesh of complex relationships and negotiations surrounding that phenomenon appear. This paper seeks to convey that complexity by throwing an (admittedly inadequate) net over contemporary relationships between vernaculars and English in India, the place of translations, the categories of literary production (high and low, popular and serious), the corresponding print circuits, the print cultures that accrue and change accordingly, and the academic concerns that arise.

I started with academic concerns – with Translation Studies and related attitudes to the status of English in India – and in that respect there is a firm conclusion to offer. The study of literary translation and of the relations of languages in India will remain an imperfect project if undertaken only with broad preconceptions (such as, pre-emptively assumed binaries of Western and Indian models, colonial and postcolonial conditions, English as inside/outside) and the nuances of specific texts. Translation, especially within the Indian context, is not simply a bridging exercise which can be located in and through texts and broad preconceptions. A great many layers of cultural translations and negotiations and communicative crossings and slippages of communication take place around texts. Translations and mistranslations surround the textual artefacts, impinge upon their production and reception, and intervene between them and academic criticism. That complexity necessarily needs to be centred in Translation Studies in and of India.