First two volumes of ‘The Routledge Writer in Context’ series explores texts, contexts in translation of writers Krishna Sobti, Joginder Paul | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
A welcome and timely series, it makes accessible the critical corpus of the two leading figures in Hindi and Urdu literature
The Routledge Writer in Context series on Indian writers has originated from this perspective. Needless to say, it is a very welcome and timely step in the publishing of Indian-language literature in translation, for what it offers through the anthology, is a combination of the writer’s works and their critical appraisal. Although Indian language literatures, or bhasha works, are steadily being brought out of their regions through translations, the critical corpus in the bhashas is yet to be made accessible to readers in other languages. It is this lacuna that the Routledge series addresses very effectively; what makes these books invaluable to the researcher and the reader are the translations of critical works on the writers by critics in their languages.
The first books in the series are on two feisty writers who were leading figures in the languages they wrote in — Krishna Sobti in Hindi and Joginder Paul in Urdu. Sobti, as the title of the book Krishna Sobti: A Counter Archive indicates, was the author of works that challenged and changed the conventional notions of mainstream literature and literary writing. There was nothing normative about her life and work, and they exemplified her statement: “The romance of life is not in a straight line. Things would go stale if that were to happen.”
The Krishna Sobti anthology, edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Rekha Sethi, consists of five broad sections — translations of Sobti’s fiction, her major works of non-fiction, critical perspectives on the writer in English as well as translations from Hindi, interviews with Sobti, and personal reminiscences by other writers. An entire sub-section is very appropriately devoted to what is perhaps the most important in her oeuvre, Zindaginama. The critical essays by Priyadarshan and Rekha Sethi (written originally in Hindi) give us an idea of what the writer meant to the Hindi literary world.
Sobti was revolutionary in her writings, boldly exploring the limits of language and sexuality at a time when very few women writers dared to do so, especially in Hindi. The most eloquent work in this respect is her Mitro Marjani, published in 1967. But this revolutionary spirit did not fortunately limit her to categories of the woman writer or feminist writer. Rather, what we see in her is an androgynous spirit that prompted her to write Hum Hashmat in the male voice. As explained by the editors in their Introduction, “she wanted to create within herself an androgynous self; she wanted to have an alter ego or a self that would give her another perspective from within.” It is interesting to note the coincidental similarity of this with Virginia Woolf’s concept of the androgynous mind which is “woman-manly” or “man-womanly”.
The Joginder Paul anthology titled Joginder Paul: The Writerly Writer is edited by Chandana Dutta and is organised around similar lines as the Sobti volume. Borrowing the term from French literary theorist Roland Barthes, the editor in her preface describes Paul as a ‘writerly writer’ who leaves his texts open-ended, thereby allowing the reader greater freedom in the reading process.
Rating: 5