CARVING A NEW NICHE

LAST YEAR, AFTER GEETANJALI SHREE'S Hindi novel Ret Samadhi/Tomb of Sand (translated into English by Daisy Rockwell) won the International Booker Prize, my inbox was abuzz with messages from American acquaintances and some fellow writers.

Who's this incredible Indian writer and why are we hearing about her only now, they wanted to know. That apart, there has been a general surge of interest in books translated from the Indian languages and the momentum has been building for a few years. In 2017, Vivek Shanbhag's novella Ghachar Ghochar (translated into English by Srinath Perur) received rave reviews across America and ended up on The New York Times' end-of-the-year Notable Books list. The year 2020 saw Tamil writer Perumal Murugan's novel Poonachi (translated into English by N. Kalyan Raman) being nominated for a National Book Award for Translated Literature, one of the most prestigious American literary prizes. Earlier this year, Murugan was also on the International Booker longlist for his novel Pyre (translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan).

In the domestic market, too, translated literature is seeing success. Publishers are placing more bets on translations and are looking to build a library of translated Indian literature from across the country. Earlier, Bangla or Malayalam dominated the translated literature shelf, but now, certain languages that saw little to no representation are coming to the fore.