The International Booker Prize’s practice of sharing credit and prize money equally between author and translator is commendable, especially when translators are ignored in publishing rights, award credits, book reviews, and promotions
Published Date – 7 June 2025, 08:03 PM
By Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla
When Heart Lamp won this year’s International Booker Prize, it created history. It became the first short story collection, its author Banu Mushtaq the first Kannada writer, and the translator Deepa Bhasthi the first Indian translator to win the prestigious prize. This certainly is a big moment for literatures in Indian languages, and there will no doubt be celebrations, felicitations, and a rush to own a copy of the prize-winning book. But, honestly, how many of us non-Kanndigas in Karnataka’s neighbouring State have heard of Banu Mushtaq (and how many Kannadigas have actually read her) before the prize?
It is not as if Banu Mushtaq burst onto the literary scene suddenly. She has been writing for over four decades and has published six collections of stories, a novel, a poetry collection, and an anthology of essays. She also won the Karnataka State’s Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999. Yet, it is almost the case that the first time some of us had heard the names of Mushtaq and Bhasthi was only when they won the English PEN Translates award in 2024 for Haseena and Other Stories. After the Booker, however, they have become household names.
Linguistic Boundaries
The trajectory of Mushtaq-Bhasthi’s literary fame is hardly atypical. It is a sad but familiar fact that even texts considered seminal in an Indian language struggle to transcend their linguistic boundaries and reach readers beyond their own. Ironically, it is translation into English, the very hegemon that marginalises them in the first place, that allows Indian language texts to cross borders and find a new home in another language, sometimes even within India. As the poet R Parthasarathy said, the translated text, thus, “puts down roots in the host language to begin its life as an immigrant in hopes of eventually becoming a native.”
It is a sad but familiar fact that even texts considered seminal in an Indian language struggle to transcend their linguistic boundaries and reach readers beyond their own
By aiding border crossing, translation plays an important role in negotiating social tensions and language conflicts, and combating linguistic chauvinism. We come to appreciate our language and literature better not by shutting out others but through greater exposure and broader understanding. Parochialism is a sign of weakness and insecurity.
Expressing his exasperation at the insularity of the British, Rudyard Kipling wrote: “And what should they know of England who only England know?” In a similar vein, we can ask, “And what should they know of their language and literature who only their language and literature know?”
Translator’s Role
Without necessarily pronouncing the ‘death of the author,’ it is imperative, therefore, to recognise the translator’s key role in performing the rite of passage through which the original text attains what Walter Benjamin called “an afterlife.”
While giving translators their due might sound like a simple and self-evident proposition, we will do well to remember that until recently, translators were either erased or remained shadowy figures. Even today, it is not unusual for translators to be anonymised or ignored in publishing rights, award credits, book reviews, and promotions. It is against this bleak background that the International Booker Prize’s practice of sharing credit and prize money equally between author and translator is commendable.
Heart Lamp And Tomb of Sand
The International Booker Prize (started in 2005) is the counterpart of the Booker Prize (established in 1969). While the Booker Prize is awarded to the best original novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, the International Booker Prize is awarded to works of fiction (including short stories) translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.
There is no equivalent word in Indian languages for ‘translation’. None of the Indian words — anuvaad, bhashantar, roopantar, tarjuma — has the sense of “carrying across” that ‘translation’ does
While five Indian and Indian origin writers — VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, and Aravind Adiga — have won the Booker Prize so far, Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by the American translator Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, was the first Indian winner of the International Booker Prize in 2022. The prize jury was “won over by the joyous polyphony of Tomb of Sand,” its “epic sweep,” its ability to speak “to readers around the world, and its evocation of a range of authors familiar to an international audience — from Cervantes to Sterne, Borges to Marquez.
In contrast, when we read “Arey, I forgot. I should tell you all about Mujahid, no? Mujahid is my home person. Oh. That sounds odd,” on the very first page of Heart Lamp, we recognise at once the strangeness of its English and its easy relatability to the Indian context. It is not surprising, therefore, that the judges of the 2025 prize noted the “plurality of Englishes” in Heart Lamp and found it to be “something genuinely new for English readers.” They highlighted the book’s radical translation, which “ruffles language” and “challenges and expands our understanding of translation.”
In other words, while both Tomb of Sand and Heart Lamp are deserving winners of the International Booker Prize, they appeal to the readers differently. It is tempting to juxtapose the two books with their Booker-winning counterparts and observe that Heart Lamp is to Tomb of Sand what The God of Small Things was to Midnight’s Children. The nearly 800-page Tomb of Sand is as big as Rushdie’s magnum opus. It is similarly a generational family saga, traverses borders, and employs magical realism, a playful tone, and exuberant wordplay.
Ironically, it is translation into English, the very hegemon that marginalises authors, that allows Indian language texts to cross borders and find a new home in another language, even within India
In contrast, Heart Lamp, with a little over 200 pages, is nearly as slim as Roy’s novel, and is similarly rooted in the local. Like Roy’s novel, Bhasthi’s translation alludes to the multilingual context of the text’s English. It draws its vocabulary from different languages — varieties of English, varieties of Kannada, Dakhni, Urdu, and Arabic — and stubbornly refuses to italicise any of them. Without striving to either foreignise the source or domesticate the target languages, the translation draws our attention to the plurality and the politics of language — the imprints of caste, class, region, religion, and gender on the languages we use.
Original Unoriginal
In a multilingual country like India, translation is routinely practised and rarely theorised. It is, therefore, not an aberration that in a country that has produced numerous treatises — from Arthashatra to Kamasutra — there is no formal theory of translation. In fact, there is no equivalent word in Indian languages for ‘translation’. None of the Indian words — anuvaad, bhashantar, roopantar, tarjuma — has the sense of “carrying across” that ‘translation’ does. As a consequence, translation is understood and practised in India quite differently from that in monolingual cultures of the West. However, the difference is not merely linguistic but cultural.
As GN Devy observed, “The implicit idea of translation as a fall from the origin and the ethical and aesthetic stigma attached to it are foreign to Indian literary culture.” Anxiety about what is lost in translation, and translation as betrayal — as in the Italian adage ‘traduttore, traditore’ (‘translator, traitor’) — are notions alien to the Indian context.
Rather than being persecuted for heresy, as the early Bible translators were, translators in India were promoted and patronised to recreate culturally foundational texts. Hence, the many Ramayanas and many Mahabharatas, each version known by its creator’s name rather than as translations of Valmiki and Vyasa’s originals.
While the Booker Prize is awarded to the best original novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, the International Booker Prize is awarded to works of fiction (including short stories) translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland
In fact, the very idea of the ‘original’ is rather unoriginal. It is a historical concept originating in and is advanced to justify imperial ideology. Susan Bassnett argued that “the idea of the original [was] invented” in the 17th century: “Shakespeare did not know anything about the original, he just took his stuff from everywhere, and there was no question of an original. Then we have the 17th century invention of the original, and I am convinced that it coincides, not accidentally, with the development of colonies, where Europe, the European model … becomes the ultimate original, the ultimate source.”
The perceived dichotomy or hierarchy between translation and original writing is, thus, false and artificial. As Sujit Mukherjee pointed out, “Until the advent of Western culture in India, we had always regarded translation as new writing.” It is not surprising, therefore, to find translation and new writing flourishing simultaneously.
In Telugu literature, for instance, what is regarded as the Age of Translation (11th to 16th century) was also an age of great creativity. Poets “just took [their] stuff from everywhere”, as Shakespeare did, but retained their freedom to express it in their own distinct ways.
Writing in Itself
Affirming the complementarity of original writing and translation, several writers who made a deliberate choice to write in a particular language later translated them into another language — often the language they forsake. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who sadly passed away a few days ago, refused to write in English after attaining international fame for his first four novels in English and switched to writing in Gikuyu. However, he translated every novel he wrote in Gikuyu into English himself.
Ngugi’s return to his mother tongue in his writing, while retaining his claim over the other tongue in translation, is reversed in the case of Samuel Beckett. The Nobel Prize-winning Irish writer, though being a native speaker of English, turned away from it and wrote most of his later works in French, but translated them into English.
The circumstances and motivations for their language choices may be different, but what is similar is that in the careers of both Ngugi and Beckett, translation and original writing ran in parallel, revitalising each other and collectively expanding their creative arc.
As Deepa Bhasthi said in a press meet recently, “Translation is never easy. … It’s not just a mechanical process — it’s a form of writing in itself.”
(The author currently teaches at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad. He translates occasionally from Telugu into English)