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  • "Found" in Translation:Multilingual Scholars, Vernacular Archives, and Postcolonial Studies
  • Shobna Nijhawan
Henitiuk, Valerie, and Supriya Kar (eds.). Spark of Light: Short Stories by Women Writers of Odisha. Athabasca: Athabasca UP, 2016.
Kaul, Suvir. Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics. Photographs by Javed Dar. Durham: Duke UP, 2017.
Nerlekar, Anjali. Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2016.

The three books discussed in this article all practice multilingual scholarship as methodology for South Asian literary and postcolonial studies. They result from the consultation of primary sources in South Asian vernacular languages and the belief in the translatability of these linguistically and culturally complex materials. Moreover, they point to the interconnectedness and interplay of the regional, the national, and the transnational in various forms of literary expression and communication. Their focus, however, lies on the local, which stands, inevitably and necessarily, in relationship to and in interaction with the global. From this focus, the questions that concern the books arise: How do writers, poets, and scholars make sense of the world(s) around them? How do they write the everyday lives of actual people? Thankfully, the three books are testimony that it is possible to bring the vernacular and its culturally specific idiom to the reader who may otherwise be disconnected from the people and subject matters written about. Furthermore, they help us in reconsidering the notion [End Page 789] of the marginal in regard to places, languages, and literary cultures. A multilingual framework is crucial to such projects.

The books share the goal of making accessible, providing context, and creating meanings for poetry and short stories written in the South Asian vernacular languages Oriya, Kashmiri, and Marathi, and English. Arguably, their audiences are English-language readers around the world. The short story collection is conceptualized for the Western reader as well as for the South Asian English reader without access to the Odishan originals. Kaul and Nerlekar's work may be speaking to the bilingual reader who has lost touch not so much with the non-English mother tongue (Guha) but with the tongue's script. Kashmiri, Urdu, and Marathi sources are included in the books; however, they are rendered in Roman transliteration and do not appear in the languages' original scripts.

Though they all deal with translation and biliterate exchange, the books' underlying concepts thereof differ. The short story collection Spark of Light may come closest to what the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters (est. 1954), would promote and support as the preservation of regional literatures, cultural diversity, and multilingual literary dialogue across India and the world. In fact, translation as a national project has been a pillar of the literary institution's activities. Many of the contributors to Spark of Light are Odisha Sahitya Akademi awardees and trained translators, including one of the editors of the volume, Supriya Kar. Kaul and Nerlekar are translators as much as they are bilingual scholars. Unlike the Odishan female short story writers, the poets discussed in Nerlekar's volume defy translation as much as they refuse the categorization of the Marathi (monolingual) writer. This category was a nationally promoted (but contested) one after the creation of Maharashtra as a monolingual state in 1960. Instead, Nerlekar suggests, their work may be conceptualized more accurately in a bilingual framework. Kaul, on the other hand, makes it a point to place the Kashmiri poetry next to his annotated English translations. In all cases, the literary analyses offered by the scholars are rich and thorough. Beyond the consideration of the primary source materials, the books are also important historical studies on post-independence contexts, such as sociolinguistic politics of Western-Indian urban spaces (Nerlekar), political analysis of the contested and highly militarized region of Kashmir in the North (Kaul and Dar) and lives, often human suffering, of the socially marginalized in Odishan literary culture in the East (Henitiuk and Kar).

Spark of Light

Spark of Light offers English readers rare and precious insights into Odishan literary culture. It presents a collection of short stories authored by women writers spanning the entire twentieth century. The themes of this literature revolve around the everyday lives, social interactions, and...

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