Found in translation

Heart-wrenching family sagas, gripping political thrillers and the great climate-change novel—Malayalam literature in translation is on the rise, fast becoming a bestselling and award-winning favourite, finds book blogger and writer Resh Susan

- Resh Susan

Recently, I sped through Subhash Chandran’s A Preface To Man (Harper Perennial), a feudal Nair family saga translated by Fathima EV. In the novel, Ann Marie, through her dead husband’s love letters, guided me across three generations traversing 20th-century Kerala, instantly becoming a novel that I know I will reread (and probably recommend, ad nauseam). TP Rajeevan‘s The Man Who Learnt To Fly But Could Not Land (Hachette India), translated by PJ Mathew followed. It took me on a deep dive into Kerala’s history, from the 1920s to Independence. I was vaguely acquainted with this setting, it features often in my 90-something grandmother’s stories, “Those were the times,” she says of the budding nationalist movement and crumbling households of the upper castes, when a school teacher earned four to twelve rupees per month. With the boom in Malayalam translations in English, I found a portal to race into an elusive yet familiar world.

COMMON LANGUAGE

Over the last decade, translations in the language associated with colonial history (that ironically bridges our linguistic diversity) have been faithful renditions and beautiful reads. Mini Krishnan, translations editor at Oxford University Press India (OUP), explains the rise in translations to “a desire to know about a related but dissimilar community, armchair travel, and looking for patterns in the palimpsest of the country.”