Non-Fiction : Becoming in Translation

Translators are paradoxical beings—both creators and conduits, both self-effacing and self-assertive. Are they driven by an insatiable hunger for the text, or by a quiet dissatisfaction with its boundaries? Is translation an act of devotion or defiance, a proclamation of the text’s brilliance or an admission of its inadequacies? Perhaps it is both. To translate is to inhabit the margins of a text, to step into its heart while forever standing outside it. Translators are dreamers who need readers to believe in their dreams. They are intermediaries who refuse to let the words they love remain confined, forever asking: will you read this with me? Or, more ambitiously, because of me?

What drives a translator—a sense of pride or a fear of failure? Are they recommending the text to you, offering it as a gift, or—as we academics like to say—merely “filling a gap”? Their need is palpable, pressing: they need you to read. Translation is a singular act of generosity, but it is also an act of dependence. Without a reader, without the text’s new life in a different tongue, their work hangs in limbo, suspended between languages and worlds.

Such is the enigmatic condition of the translator: they are at once indispensable and invisible, celebrated yet often overlooked. It is in this liminality that they thrive, overconsumed and restless, tethered to a text they can never truly claim as their own.

__

Why did I choose translation? Perhaps because it offered a way to navigate the confusion of languages that shaped my sense of self. During my childhood, at home, we spoke in Hindi—structured, standard, and neutral. But when my mother spoke with her sisters and brothers or my naani, her words shifted, textured by a language I could not fully grasp: Bannu-wali, us paar ki bhasha—the language of a home lost to Partition. At school, in Rajasthan, we performed another linguistic dance, striving to master English, the language of aspiration and success. Speaking Hindi used to cost us—a rupee fine per word—but the real price was deeper: the erasure of connection, the alienation from comfort and belonging. Between my mother’s us paar ki bhasha and the strict discipline of English, I floated untethered, belonging to no language entirely.

I longed to root myself somewhere, to hold onto the words that seemed to slip through my fingers. “Naani,” I asked once, desperate for an anchor, “humari bhasha mein kuch bolo?” “say something in our language?” Her reply was as fleeting as the language itself: “keśā āḵẖā̃?” (What should I say?) That was all the practice I had in Bannu-wali—all the inheritance I could grasp. Just two words, heavy with the weight of migration, loss, and time.

In the sixth standard, I learned the Punjabi script—a language no one in my family wrote in or truly owned. Perhaps it was my father’s way of bringing me closer to my roots, though those roots weren’t in Gurmukhi. Or perhaps it was his rare attempt to root me culturally, to pass on something intangible. Usually, he discouraged anything that strayed beyond the upward middle-class dreamscape. Jao, padhai karo, he would say; “go, study”. In the middle-class translation, that meant: don’t read beyond the school textbooks; excel; become something. The script fascinated me, but its letters felt like another borrowed inheritance—another fragment of an identity that refused to coalesce.

Years later, during my Master’s program at the University of Delhi, I found the opportunity to learn Urdu. It was offered as an “extra” course in the Faculty of Arts. For me, it became a way of reaching for another language of Delhi—the city that had given me my first taste of independence and solitary introspection. Urdu felt like a thread running through Delhi’s many absences—its forgotten walls, lost homes, and silenced stories. It was a language that seemed to carry the city’s history and offered the possibility of connecting me to something deeper, beyond Delhi.

While getting acquainted with Urdu, I also returned to Hindi, a language I thought I had abandoned to the rigid corridors of schooling. Krishna Sobti’s Mitro Marjani became my re-entry point. I was, then, curious to return to Punjabi, too, so I re-read Amrita Pritam’s Rasidi Ticket, this time in Gurmukhi. Both these voices reminded me that language is not bound by rules or permanence. It is, in fact, a living, breathing entity—fluid, mutable, and open to reclamation and reimagination. In holding onto their words, it felt like I was stitching together a linguistic quilt, one that was mine, lovingly patched together. 

Inadvertently, translation became the next natural step in my journey as a reader, not quite a conscious decision, but rather an instinctive progression. Not shauq, but a strange necessity. 

__

Translation, for me, is both reconciliation and restoration—a way of reaching out to the languages I once felt alienated from, refusing to remain isolated in the silence they left behind. Instead of aligning myself with one language or identity, I engage with them all at once, navigating their textures, cadences, and contradictions. This interaction is far from seamless, but it is intentional, driven by a deep need to reconcile my fragmented relationship with language and self. 

I channel this effort in two ways: privately, through the texts I choose to translate, and publicly, in the shared space of the classroom.

My politics compels me to amplify voices of ‘women’ writers—some who are part of the canon, others who remain overlooked or underrepresented. The choice is not driven by a desire to elevate their voices but to engage with their complexities, contradictions, and distinct narratives. Translating female writers feels urgent—an intervention in a literary landscape that has traditionally favoured male perspectives. Women writers have shaped my understanding of translation as a practice that mediates between literary recognition and the intimate realities their works explore. Especially when I engage with those who are acknowledged within the Hindi, Hindustani, Punjabi, or broader North Indian literary canon—such as Krishna Sobti or Amrita Pritam—I strive to translate more than their words. They taught me that translation is not about fidelity to a source text but about fidelity to experience. Writers like Sobti and Pritam inhabited many cultures and created spaces where the ‘unspeakable’ could be voiced, the ‘lost’ could be found. I must acknowledge, that they did not merely write in one language. I must translate their defiance, their longing, their resilience. 

Krishna Sobti famously resisted being confined to the label of a “woman writer”, even creating the persona of “Hashmat” as a parallel identity to distance herself from gendered readings of her work. Her refusal was not a rejection of feminist concerns but a demand for broader acknowledgment of the universal scope of her writing. On the other hand, Amrita Pritam embraced the female question, exploring themes of love and domesticity in her works very much as a part of her literary rebellion. Pritam’s writings transformed the intimate—letters, poetry, and reflections—into a form of public defiance, using her voice to question and subvert societal norms. These authors inhabit contrasting spaces within the literary landscape, yet both demonstrate how women’s narratives grapple with and resist the structures that seek to define them.

By translating these authors—whether into English, Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi—I aim to navigate the intersections of canonization and marginality, foregrounding their diverse concerns while expanding their reach. This practice is less about “bridging gaps” and more about creating pathways for their stories to resonate across contexts, retaining their complexity and resisting simplification.

This negotiation is exaggerated when I teach literatures of South Asia and the “rest of the world”. Here, translation assumes yet another layer of complexity. In an Indian classroom, where students often inhabit diverse and overlapping linguistic worlds, teaching itself becomes an act of constant translation. Explaining the nuances of a phrase in a story or unpacking the cultural resonance of a poem often requires moving fluidly between languages—Hindi, English, Bangla, Kashmiri, Odiya, Kannada, and beyond. Each language carries its own weight of history, regionality, and identity, shaping how students interpret and connect with a text.

Translation in this context is not merely a tool for understanding; it becomes a bridge between my students’ lived realities and the texts we explore together. For instance, contextualizing the mehfil of an Urdu ghazal requires translating more than words—it involves evoking the atmosphere, the subtle gestures, and the unspoken cultural nuances embedded in the language. Similarly, finding an equivalent for the dynamic exchange of a Bangla adda requires creative strategies that go beyond direct equivalence. Such a classroom demands not only linguistic dexterity but also cultural sensitivity and the courage to embrace imperfection. 

This imperfect process, however, is deeply rewarding. It creates a space where languages meet rather than compete, where students can see their own linguistic and cultural inheritances reflected in the works we discuss. It allows for conversations that stretch across boundaries, opening up texts to multiple interpretations and creating a richer, more nuanced engagement with literature. Teaching, in this way, becomes a collaborative act of translation—one that bridges the gaps between language, identity, and meaning.

Every act of translation is entangled in the hierarchies of language, shaped by colonial histories and the global dominance of English. Languages that once thrived as vessels of thought and culture are often relegated to the margins, their complexities flattened, and their rhythms distorted to fit moulds of global consumption. The act of translation, then, determines whose voices are amplified, how they are represented, and who gets to hear them. As a translator, I grapple with this tension constantly. When I approach a text––either to translate or teach––I question whether I am preserving voices or packaging them for an audience that may not fully understand their weight. For whom am I translating? What do I gain, and what is lost? These are not easy questions, but they are essential ones, for to translate without confronting the power structures that frame the text or its translation is to risk perpetuating the very erasures we seek to resist.

Translation is also a question of access—who has the resources, the education, the privilege to translate, and who gets to be translated? The privilege of fluency in multiple languages, often a prerequisite for translators, is not distributed evenly. For many, translation becomes a way of reclaiming cultural legacies, of asserting the value of their language in a world that often undermines it. For others, it is a way to amplify voices that have been silenced. But in both cases, translation involves negotiating the uneven terrains of privilege and exclusion, always mindful of the delicate balance between giving voice and speaking over.

There is much to be said about the failures of translation, the silences it cannot capture, and the voices it reshapes––deliberately, or by accident. But those reflections are for another time. It is, instead, about the hope that translation as a practice has offered me. Every act of translation affirms that languages matter, that their distinct rhythms and textures are worth preserving, and that striving for understanding—however imperfect—is an act of care and connection. It has given me a way to hold onto what I feared I had lost, to interact with languages not as barriers but as bridges. It has allowed me to find myself in the spaces between words, to create meaning where there was once silence. ‘Translating’ is not just a practice—it is a way of being, of living in multiplicity, and of making the fragmented whole.