Abstract
Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy is a well-known and celebrated poet and writer from Karnataka, India. He is here interviewed by Rowena Hill, who translated some of his poetry from Kannada into English. The interview, which is structured as a dialogue between poet and translator, emphasizes how important an issue translation is whenever one concerns oneself with Dalit literature, and how enlightening the collaborative work between a poet and his or her translator can be. In addition to this focus on translation as a concept, a necessity, a dialectics, and a pragmatics, the interview will also foreground some very sensitive and fraught issues linked to the globalization of a literature that was born out of an extremely specific social and political context. The collaboration between Chinnaswamy and Hill resulted in a volume which was published as Before It Rains Again by erbacce-press in 2016, after the interview took place.
Introduction
Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy lives in Bengaluru, in the south of India. He was born and brought up in a village called Mudnakudu in the state of Karnataka. He is a poet who rose from the lowest caste considered to be untouchables, whose elder generations were denied human recognition, let alone the freedom to learn or earn on their own. Even their access to food and clothes was at the whim of the upper-caste landlords and they lived the life of destitute outsiders in the village. Chinnaswamy was witness to all this and lived through many vicissitudes until, after graduating in commerce and Kannada literature, he succeeded in becoming a government official. This, he believes, was the fruit of Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s struggle against the oppression of Dalits (marginalized low castes and tribal people). However, the urge in him to write has always been awake. He wrote about his people, in the process capturing India’s social milieu in general and the exclusion of Dalits in particular. His contribution to Dalit literature is significant as his poetry represents the miseries of the persecuted and helps to open up an alternative epistemological and social discourse which was hitherto missing in the mainstream literature. Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy’s rise in the social, cultural, and literary hierarchy, breaking caste barriers, was extraordinary in a context where the mainstream literary landscape hardly made any space available to Dalit literature because the opinion-formers, the media, and publishing houses were always dominated by the upper castes.
Any outsider who gets to know India’s caste system is likely to be immediately repelled and to develop ever-increasing indignation as he or she gains greater awareness of how it works. The caste system bestows social status in a vertical order (from high to low) on an individual at birth, and this remains unchangeable up to his or her death. While those higher on the caste ladder celebrate life for their good fortune, those lower down the line are afflicted by stigmas such as untouchability and ostracism, and throughout their lives they suffer from a lack of access to basic human necessities. Rowena Hill, the translator of Chinnaswamy’s poetry, though an outsider, was nevertheless left deeply disturbed by the practice of untouchability.
Rowena Hill is a poet and translator, who predominantly works with the languages of her bilingualism, English and Spanish. She was born in England and now lives in Mérida, Venezuela, after retiring from teaching English literature at the University of the Andes. She had been a frequent visitor to India, particularly to the city of Mysore where she met with Chinnaswamy and was drawn to his poetry for the sheer intensity of his raw experiences moulded in striking imagery. With her basic knowledge of Kannada and Chinnaswamy’s communicable English, they worked together to evolve a style and structure for translating Chinnaswamy’s poetry from Kannada to English and to Spanish (see Chinnaswamy 2003, 2005a, 2005b, 2007, 2012).
Both Chinnaswamy and Rowena have been invited to participate in global events, such as the conference on Dalit literature and translation, organized through a network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) entitled “Writing, Analysing, and Translating Dalit Literature” at the University of East Anglia in June 2015. Their session was one of the highlights at this conference, at which English served as the common language between the poet and the translator as well as between them and the audience. The interview — we may also call it a conversation or a dialogue — emphasizes how important an issue translation is whenever one concerns oneself with Dalit literature. Besides focusing on translation as a concept, a necessity, a dialectic, and a pragmatic concern, the interview will also foreground the sensitive, and fraught, issues linked to the globalization of a literature that was born out of an extremely specific social and political context.
The dialogue
Swamy, I think you should tell us first how you became a writer.
I would say it was an arduous journey. I had no formal preparation to become a writer and nor had I dreamt of it; it just happened. I am a first-generation graduate in my family. But for the stigma of untouchability, but for the pain of inequality stemming from the caste system, and but for the insult and injury associated with these issues, I think I wouldn’t have been a writer.
I was born in a village. Babasaheb Dr Bheemrao R. Ambedkar described the Indian village as a cesspool of cruelty, caste prejudice, and communalism. The concept of community living is absent there. If there are 20 castes in a village, there will be 20 streets full of unseen barricades. Here live groups of castes which could otherwise be described as groups of blood relations. Far away from these groups there will be another group living in abject poverty in thatched mud huts, who are called untouchables. They are the symbol of pollution and a bad omen, but their presence is essential for the dirt of the village to be cleaned, be it digging the burial pit or removing the carcass of a cow.
I spent my childhood in that part of the village, in the late 1960s and up to my matriculation (10th grade), witnessing the barbaric, inhuman acts of so called upper-caste people. For us, swallowing insults was routine, and being treated as abnormal in society persisted. The British opened the door for education to all but failed to break the barriers of the caste system. Of course, caste was and is unbreakable since it is shielded by religious sanction. Even now, with the constitutional guarantee of equality under democratic rule, it is unbreakable as it is safely guarded in the guise of religion. The conservative caste people (Savarnas as they are called) still believe that untouchables are lesser mortals born out of sins committed in their previous birth. Hence a sense of equality and respect for others in Hindu society is nullified by the religion itself.
As I moved forward in the pursuit of learning, my pain intensified and insults multiplied. It always puzzled me why my society is not like anywhere else outside this country. The experiences started crystallizing in the form of poetry, plays, stories, essays, and so on. In a biased society replete with caste prejudices one can imagine the hurdles a Dalit, who is on the lowest rung, has to overcome in order to make his voice heard. Therefore a Dalit writer needs to be four times more competent to get into the limelight and attract the attention of the media, critics, and other opinion-makers who are still from the dominant upper castes.
As a teenage boy I had to trek five miles up- and downhill every day to attend the high school in a nearby town. One day at the halfway point, out of thirst, I stopped at a door in a hamlet. I requested the householder for some water to drink. His immediate question was: which caste do I belong to! When I said that I am AK (abbreviation for “Adi Karnataka”, a euphemism used for Holeya, meaning filth), his face turned red and he cringed a little. However, he brought the water, only to pour it from above. I bent down with my hands cupped, gulped water and quenched my thirst. When I was a college student I visited my friends’, mostly shudras’, houses. The urban middle class would allow us as far as the entrance but my presence would change the very attitude of the housewives. They would not serve snacks on plates but prefer banana leaves to avoid pollution. These incidents caused excruciating pain in me and made me revolt in my own way, and that was to become a writer.
What reactions have you had from foreigners to your writing and the experiences you describe?
Outsiders will understand the real horror of untouchability and will sympathize with its victims’ predicament. I realized this when I visited the University of Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, on the invitation of the Centre for Studies of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean Diaspora. Students and teachers there were flabbergasted on hearing about the practice of untouchability. They would flock around me and gently touch my skin as if an electric current flowed there, and they would hug me with overwhelming warmth. The younger ones would mock the sinister system and ask me, “Why don’t you revolt?”.
Do you see any reason why there is no revolt as such from the low-caste untouchables?
As I said, caste being intertwined with religion in the Indian situation makes it difficult to revolt. The political power, land holding, trade, and industry all being traditionally garnered by the upper caste, the whole system exists on their behalf. Moreover, the caste system, to them, appears very normal and there is nothing to be ashamed of. Those who are soft on the caste system feel that they should be considerate and helpful towards the lower castes. They view this as their own magnanimity. They give the example of Gandhi. It is sad that Gandhi, who once upheld the caste system as an ideal social system, continues to lead the common masses ideologically even today. He dreamt of changing the upper-caste mindset but could not achieve this. All that Dr B. R. Ambedkar said about the caste system is true even now in the twenty-first century. The ugly face of the caste system has not been dented even a little, let alone its annihilation. But a Dalit movement has emerged in Karnataka since the early 1970s, such as the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra which pre-dated Dalit literature. Each was complementary and supplementary to the other. There has been some awareness about caste that has emerged over the last 40 years. In spite of this, the Dalit population is despised and treated as second class citizens.
My poems have been translated into English, Spanish, and Hebrew, and have aroused passionate reactions in readers of those languages. You, Rowena Hill, were responsible for carrying my poems to the other side of the globe, to Venezuela.
Do you remember our meeting in Mysore?
Yes, I met you there in 2002. You were a regular visitor to India — Mysore in particular — having done a Master’s degree in English at the University of Mysore. When you were in search of some poems with a different sensibility to be published in translation in a Colombian magazine, Arquitrave, someone suggested my name. Surprisingly you had begun the work before I even met you. It was in the house of a common friend, Prasanna, where you were attentively listening to our friend Rameshwari Verma reading my poem “Chappali mattu naanu” in Kannada and explaining the meaning in English. My sudden appearance there surprised Rameshwari, and she exclaimed: “Here is the poet!” This meeting was so touching and unforgettable for me.
I remember the order of things a bit differently, but that may be just an example of how human memory works, and the differences are not crucial. I think we first met in the year 2002, in a small flat opposite the Mysore theatre and cultural centre, where the playwright and director Prasanna was staying at the time and in the company of my great friend, the actress Rameshwari Verma. You were introduced as a poet of a new kind, and our friends read and translated for me a few of your poems. I said immediately I would like to translate some of your work, since it would be a way for me to appreciate it more closely. The connection with Arquitrave came later.
I had already translated, in collaboration with experts on the subject, a collection of vachanas, the poems of a metaphysical and social movement in Karnataka from roughly the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and a number of works by poets of the renewal of Kannada literature that occurred from the middle of the twentieth century onward. Apart from the vachanakaras’ directness of speech (these writers in fact became an important reference for the Dalit poets), nothing in their work prepared me for the anguish, the indignation, and sometimes the crudeness of your verse, which nonetheless retained the concentration and the attention to sound of poetry. What I felt was in a way relief, because after the exhilarated fascination of my first stay in India, on subsequent journeys I had become more and more strongly aware of the inhuman suffering and injustice at the root of Indian society. Finally someone — you, Swamy — was giving it a voice.
From then onwards we continuously met for translation work. You had some knowledge of Sanskrit and could grasp the Kannada words easily. With my village childhood experience, my poems were replete with rural dialect and region-specific metaphors. Sometimes we would discuss them at length to find suitable substitutes.
We started to meet at the flat I was renting in Mysore, where you were still living at the time. Later your work with the Karnataka transport corporation caused you to make Bangalore your base, and on further journeys of mine we met whenever your schedule allowed. We evolved a method of translating.
I have long been — and I still am — ashamed of my inability to learn fluent Kannada. I speak several European languages and used to think of myself as something of a linguist, but Kannada defeated me. Maybe I was too old to absorb a language so different from any I knew. In my own defence I have to say that I tried, and took lessons in India with several tutors, none of whom seemed to have much idea how to teach a foreigner. In Venezuela, where I live, there was no one who could help me with Kannada and nothing like a language laboratory. I studied the grammar by myself — I like grammar and Kannada grammar is quite simple and logical — but that didn’t seem to help me to follow and use the spoken language. However, it did help me to work out the patterns and structures in any poem I faced. Of course, I had also learned to read the script.
When we started our work together, your English was quite limited, although with the help of gestures and a dictionary, it was perfectly adequate for the kind of discussions we had around your texts. The language of your poems, fortunately for me, although it uses some particular terms, is common Kannada (for want of a better term), so we didn’t have the complication of dialect as happens with some Dalit writers. As time went on, your English improved rapidly, and the dictionary could be set aside. At all stages, our attention was focused on the words, the fundamental matter, of the poems — anecdotes and history mostly came separately, over coffee — and your presence as well as our joint concentration made the texts more accessible and somehow friendlier. I’m well aware it’s not often possible for a translator to have this kind of backing from the author, but this is an experience worth seeking.
Once each poem had been illuminated in this way, it became a space, a room I could stand inside, recognizing the furniture and moving it around where I needed to. There is quite a lot of moving to be done to turn Kannada into a European language, since its structures tend to be back to front as compared to ours. I could see how each word related to each, and I’d been given all the meanings. I could hear the assonance and the repetitions of sounds, largely from verbal suffixes. It was up to me then to turn it into acceptable English — if possible keeping some of the qualities of the original Kannada. I should perhaps also briefly state that my conception of the function of the translator is to keep as close to the original as is compatible with producing a text readable as a poem, or at least as an object to be appreciated. Not a direct, literal translation, then, but not a recreation either. Although, for Dalit writers, poetry is an instrument of social activism, these authors choose poetry because of a formal impulse — and it is the translator’s job to represent both intentions.
The invitation from the Andes University provided another opportunity for us to meet in Mérida, where you became my host. We completed 40 poems altogether. Your decision to translate my poems presented me with a double opportunity. I observed that you were first translating the work into English and then into Spanish. When I asked why, you said that it was easier to grasp the meanings in your mother tongue first and then to think them out in the other language. That’s how the English translation of all the 40 poems is available now. Some poems are also prescribed as texts in university and pre-university English language text books in India.
The English was for your approval and use, but the final stage for me was translation into Spanish, for publication in Venezuela. I did not translate from the English versions to Spanish, but went back to the originals. I think the Spanish translations are probably more satisfactory than the English, since in Spanish word order is more flexible. There are also more repetitions of sounds in parts of speech than in English, and these can to some extent match the repetitions in Kannada. The rhythm of Spanish is also more musical, with longer cadences. Of course, no European language can do anything more than hint at the formal quality of an original in an Indian language.
The language used till then in Dalit poetry was boisterous, violent, full of an anger and fury that were not palatable to me. I tried to vent my feelings in a different tone and texture altogether. I honed my language; I wanted it to be as poignant as possible, as vibrant as possible. That is the reason academia received my poetry with awe and a sense of inspiration. Even now I am surprised that the readers in my native language look to me for something distinct from the mainstream of Dalit writing. I will try to live up to their expectations.
I hope I have succeeded in rendering these qualities to some extent. In any case, formal approximations being unsatisfactory, what one falls back on — as any translator of poetry knows — is the images in the poem. Because these images are set up in concrete terms, they can usually be reconstituted directly in the target language. That they may have different cultural associations is not something the translator can be responsible for, unless they could lead to serious misunderstanding. “Bath”, for example, is unlikely to have for the unprepared reader in English any further implication than physical cleaning, whereas in India it has connotations relating to contamination and worship, which are particularly relevant to the situation of the so-called untouchables. The image of washing, in any case, retains its force.
In your poems much of the anger and horror is contained in the images, as in these lines from a poem — a now famous poem — called “To a Rag-and-Bone Boy”:
Here and there, once pretty broken dolls may kindle a light in his mind, finding marbles can push him into playfulness. Broken eggshells may cut his feet, he may thrust his hand into the pocket of old shorts and touch a blunt blade and the gush of spurting blood will further squeeze his sapless frame. (Chinnaswamy, 2016: 30)
The poem contains no direct outcry of protest or pain; the detailed portrayal of an abominable reality, seen from the point of view of an innocent young boy, is quite enough to arouse horror and indignation. Sometimes the protest and the indignation are expressed more directly, as in this passage from the poem “Untouchables”:
With a dead weight of inferiorities inside their heads and out, fearing a slip, hiding their pride, their bodies shrinking from offensive looks, they drag their legs as they walk. Plants can’t sprout, birds can’t fly — a pall always masks feelings; inspiration dead, spirit withered, they sit silent, keeping still. Their nature is to be frightened. (Chinnaswamy, 2016: 20)
However, here also the description of emotional states depends on images of physical behaviour, and the sense of frustration is also expressed in metaphors: “Plants can’t sprout, birds can’t fly”. This of course means that the strength of a translation will also reside in the images, in the exactness of descriptive words rather than those for emotions.
The kind of situation I described in those poems has not stopped occurring. Recently, in a town in central India, a Dalit girl was beaten by an upper-caste woman on the pretext that her shadow had fallen on the kinsman of that woman. The girl was carrying water from the hand pump. Such incidents still happen in this new century, in so-called modern India, and disturb sensitive people like me. I can only write poems and continue to write as it is the only beacon light for me and doesn’t cast a shadow on others.
There are other Kannada Dalit writers, such as Siddalingaiah, in whose work the anger at and hate for oppressors is extremely outspoken, and the right terms to express these feelings become particularly important. Perhaps it is not easy to make choices across languages, taking into account also that the translator will identify with the horror and injustice being represented and will want the translation to shout for the poet to all the world. In your writing, Swamy, there is a restraint, a sublimation that needs to be respected for the poem to carry out its work of arousing pity and horror. In the end, the chief emotion that remains after reading a number of your poems is perhaps sadness: sadness at the human suffering and the waste involved in Dalits’ destiny.
The Sanskrit word for sadness as one of the rasas, the nine fundamental human emotions on which the ancient Indian aesthetic theory was based, is karuna. In Buddhism, karuna is the term used for compassion, an essential quality and activity of the spirit. It is not only — perhaps hardly at all — from political expediency that you, like many Dalits, have followed the advice of Ambedkar in becoming a Buddhist. Compassion is always present in your vision of the loss of life, of opportunities for fulfilment, in Dalit destinies.
Of course, at the beginning Ambedkar was the force behind my accepting Buddha. But when I started learning Buddhism I realized that it was a necessity in order to overcome suffering. When you have the knowledge of suffering you will certainly be compassionate towards fellow human beings. Now I cannot hurt even my oppressors.
I understand that caste is churned out of ignorance. The wisdom of the world should descend on India to remove that ignorance which is of Himalayan proportions. Even the low-caste Dalit people, who are the objects of insult and humiliation, are not prepared to believe that caste was created by a few vested interests. They fail to understand that religion and gods are manipulated for one caste’s selfish ends. Therefore, Babasaheb Ambedkar was right in finding a solution for both social and religious problems in conversion to Buddhism. A large section of Dalits are keen to follow Ambedkar, who is more relevant now than ever. What is important to me is to express the truth and, as you know, this truth is bitter to swallow.
For several reasons — your use of commonly accessible Kannada, the restraint as well as the force of your poems, the pictures you create of a side of Indian life that many have ignored but are willing to see and be moved by, the more philosophical themes of your later work — your poetry has been accepted as a part of contemporary Kannada literature in general, rather than limited by the label “Dalit”. However, you don’t forget for a moment that you are a spokesman for your people, and your work — your prose writings as well as your poetry — has played an important part in raising consciousness among kannadigas of the unjust fate of a large section of their fellow citizens.
Certainly I am considered to be a mainstream writer. From the beginning I was not branded as a Dalit writer either by critics or my readers. The reason may be that my target audience is not only Dalits but the whole of society and the people around me. I don’t believe in killing someone to give justice to another. Buddha was enlightened but not content. When someone questioned him, he said he wants the last man to be happy. As long as discrimination and inequality exist, we writers need to remain discontented. My ideological heroes are therefore Buddha, Basava, and Ambedkar, and they comprise a central part of my consciousness.
Anthologies of your poems have been published in Hindi and Urdu, and Telugu and Marathi anthologies are on the way. What has the response been?
The response in those languages is very good. I know it through my translators. These translators are invited to many places, where they are heard and appreciated. A poem has been prescribed in the syllabus for pre-university in the state of Maharashtra. You yourself witnessed how students and teachers responded to me in Mérida. In Tel Aviv, when I recited the poem “To a Rag-and-Bone Boy”, a woman came and hugged me and said that it was as if written in Hebrew. I must tell you another incident that occurred in Jerusalem. The organizer of the poetry festival, Mr Amir Or, wanted a poem to be dramatized and presented that evening. He gave to the actor about 89 poems collected from all the participants at the festival. The actor surprisingly chose “If I were a Tree” (Chinnaswamy, 2007) and performed it very well. There are many such instances to quote. Your translations are so appealing and I share the success with you.
I should say something more about the fate of our translations. The Colombian critic and poet Harold Alvarado Tenorio published in his journal Arquitrave (Chinnaswamy, 2003) a selection of my translations into Spanish with my introduction. Arquitrave is considered by some the best contemporary poetry journal in Colombia, and appears both in a print edition and online. There were enthusiastic reactions to the poems. When you came to Venezuela in 2004, a fortuitous meeting in Caracas with Miguel Márquez, director at the time of the literature section of CONAC, the Ministry of Culture, led to the publication, in the series Poetry of the World, of a collection including all of your poems I had translated up to that date (Chinnaswamy, 2005). I received many excited comments on the book, which should have gone to further editions. However, the political situation in Venezuela pushed governmental cultural organizations in a different direction, and the excellent Poetry of the World series was allowed to go out of print irrecoverably and almost in its entirety. At least the original edition is still out there.
As for the English translations, you will know better than me where they have been published over the years. I have several times received requests for permission to publish them in Indian journals, and of course always agreed. The most important publication of some of the poems has been in the admirable, comprehensive anthology of new Dalit writing from South India edited and introduced by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu (2013) of Hyderabad University. Three of your best and most loved poems are included in my translations in the second volume, called Steel Nibs are Sprouting (Chinnaswamy, 2013: 135−39). I should acknowledge that the editors of the volume corrected a few errors that had slipped through my imperfect method. My chief desire with regard to the English translations now is that someone, in India or elsewhere, should publish a complete collection of them. A poet who commands the huge audience you have in your own language, for whom you are a voice of truth and compassion, should surely be given the space to expand your recognition and influence in the language which can reach readers in all regions of India, as well as many countries in other parts of the world.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.