Penguin India has finally launched its blog. Their second post in the blog is a very nice roundup of the launch of Manohar Shyam Joshi’s T’ta Professor in English where Ira Pande and her cousin Prof. Pushpesh Pant spoke about Mr. Joshi and the book.

Mr. Joshi was a prolific writer and an early pioneer of the TV drama format in India. He wrote Buniyad and Hum Log. Prof. Pant was also part of the writing team for these two TV dramas that changed the history of television in India.

The English translation of the book is by Ira Pande, whose mother Shivani, was a well-known Hindi writer. Shivani’s stories almost always had a strong element of her Kumaoni or pahadi culture.

Translating from Hindi to English is never an easy task and my suspicion is that translating a pahadi or Kumaoni story in English has got to be doubly hard. The Kumaonis are a very small community of people, whose culture and idiosyncratic habits are not very well know as Guy Fowles, who wrote the Penguin blog post discovered:

“(I) discovered the Kumaoni possessed a rich heritage of storytelling but also an equal amount of eccentricity, resulting in a flowering of imagination, or, as Ira put it: ‘high rates of literacy and lunacy!’ That these people originated from 7 or 8 clans who often inter-married meant these creative, expressive genes were never far away. Kumaoni writers such as Joshi, Sumitra Nandan Pant, Shivani (who happens to be Ira Pande’s mother), Mrinal Pande (Ira’s sister) and Pankaj Bisht were all mentioned in the same breath.

As a fellow Kumaoni I was laughing my head off when I read Ira’s description of the pahadis. It is so true we have such a rich history of storytelling and I grew up listening to so many stories about eccentric extended family members. Like the Irish I suspect the pahadis too have the gift of the gab.

Ira’s translation of the book has received mixed reviews and I suspect this stems largely from the fact that many of the reviewers are unfamiliar with the Kumaoni people and their eccentricities. And those who say that the translation in English is not faithful to the Hindi version – I think it is important to remember that things do get lost in translation. Instead of nit picking we should celebrate the fact that Ira has translated a well-known author’s book in English and made it accessible to non-Hindi speaking readers. I happen to be one of them. Thank you Ira for translating the book.

Getting a review copy from Indian publishers is not an easy task. I guess I will have to wait until I am back in India to pick up my copy of the book.

In case you missed you might want to check out my interview with Ira about her mother. Ira is a delightful and gifted story-teller, who speaks at length in this interview about her mother and Kumaoni culture.

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