‘Confining a language to a nationality is narrow-minded’: JCB-Prize-winning translator Baran Farooqi

Khalid Jawed’s Urdu novel Nemat Khana, translated into English by Baran Farooqi as The Paradise of Food, won the 2022 JCB Prize for Literature. It is the first Urdu novel to win the prestigious annual literary prize – Farooqi’s first translation of a novel.

As Farooqi pointed out, while there is no dearth of classic works of Urdu in translation, contemporary Urdu writings have mostly been ignored by English language readers. She hopes that their win will change that.

She retired recently from her post of professor at the English Department of Jamia Millia University in Delhi, and has relocated to Allahabad to work at the school set up by her mother for underprivileged girls. She divides her time between teaching children and translating.

Farooqi is not an accidental translator. Her father, the great Urdu writer and scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, was also a translator and gave it pride of place in his literary magazine, Shabkhoon. Her reverence for her father is unmistakable when she talks about her own career as a translator. Along with introducing her to the best of Urdu, Persian, and English literature, her father also made her appreciative of the many ways of reading a language and practicing caution while translating.

In a chat with Scroll, organised by the 2023 Jaipur Literature Festival, Farooqi spoke about her first encounters with translation, the present scenario of Urdu literature, her concerns about the othering of the language, and more. Excerpts from the conversation:

The great Urdu writer, editor, and scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi is your father. What was the reading culture at your home like?
When I was a kid, we were made to read Urdu at home during the holidays or whenever my father was home. He was a civil servant and was posted outside Allahabad since I was as young as five years old. He would visit his family on the second Saturday of every month. My mother was an educator and she had started an institution for underprivileged girls in Allahabad. She was passionate about her job and chose to stay back in the city with her two daughters.

My father made sincere efforts to give us a solid foundation in Urdu and Persian literature even though we were studying in an English medium convent school. Both my sister and I had a flair for the languages – be it English or Urdu. We did not speak English at home. My mother, who was fluent in English, would still pronounce English words as if they were Urdu words! In her tongue, “plate” became “pa-let”!

Now, many years later, I marvel at how my father would make us sit down for Urdu lessons even when he was home for a short while. We were expected to read not just English storybooks but also books written in Urdu. But Urdu books were not so readily available and we fell into the habit of reading voraciously in English.

I finished reading my Enid Blytons, Agatha Chrisities, and Nancy Drews at a very young age. I was in class seven when my father gifted me a copy of Pride and Prejudice. I found it a little difficult to understand but he insisted I was old enough to read it – I persisted and ended up enjoying the book. By class ten, I had finished reading almost all the English classics.

As far as Urdu is concerned, I have read many novels in the language but not all. My father’s library had a fair number of English books and a huge, enviable number of Urdu and Persian books. He also had several dictionaries. Sometimes when he was writing and wanted to look up a certain word, he would call my sister or me and ask us to scan the dictionary for the word. And he would tease us if we took too long. This helped me immensely – to this day I am good at spotting unusual words and looking up their various meanings. It’s all thanks to these little habits that he inculcated in us.

Can you tell me about your first encounter with translated literature? What inspired you to translate?
When I was growing up, books from the USSR were a hot favourite in India. My father used to buy Russian books for us from book fairs but I did not realise that what I was reading was actually Russian literature in translation. The translator’s name would be mentioned but one tended to overlook it.

Once my father made my sister translate something quite difficult from English into Urdu. I was very young at that time but I remember her sweating over it…it was then that I realised translation was a labourious activity. My father reminded us that he had been translating for a long time – he was the one who introduced translation as a discipline in Urdu studies. He gave it pride of place in his literary magazine, Shabkhoon. He ensured that at least one piece in translation was published in every edition. Translators were hard to find back then, so, along with the editor of the magazine, he became a translator too.

I used to think of translation as an activity that I could sail through easily. But when I actually attempted it, I realised that I need resources to translate – just a dictionary would not do, I needed a thesaurus and other reading material too. Khushwant Singh used to translate Urdu into English but his works were full of glaring mistakes. It was not because he didn’t know English but because he was not well-versed in the conventions of Urdu poetry.

For example, he had translated “hazaar” as “thousands” whereas it actually meant “bulbul” or the nightingale in the context of the poem that he was translating. When I learnt about others’ mistakes, I became wary of my translations too. I made it a point to ask for help if anything appeared remotely dicey. My first brushes with translations were a little challenging because I practised great caution from the very beginning. Urdu is rich in metaphors that one might not be able to grasp in the first reading. It requires several rounds of reading to even interpret the writing correctly. This is a huge responsibility for any translator.

Your translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry was published in 2017 under the title The Colours of My Heart. What was translating Faiz like?
Faiz has received some very good translators including the great Agha Shahid Ali. When I was commissioned this book, my father suggested that I read the other translations of Faiz’s poetry first. While I was reading them, I realised that his famous poems have been translated by almost all his translators. These poems would be a challenge to translate. I did not want to plagiarise, but there was also no way I could leave them out! I had to be careful while translating them anew, but I also decided to translate poems that were not as popular.

Poetry can be read in many different ways. Faiz was not alive when I translated his poems and therefore, I was not strictly bound to the words he had written. While translating Faiz, I was a reader first and then a translator. It was a good experience.

How did you come across Nemat Khana? What made you want to translate it?
Oh, I had promised Khalid Jawed I would read his book and so I did! The truth is anyone who knew my father also knew that his daughters were steeped in Urdu literature and its traditions. Finding a translator who can translate the work into English while appreciating its value and worth in the Urdu literary culture is rare. So even if you have excellent translators from the Urdu language, many of them miss out on the nuances since they do not come from a similar cultural or literary background.

Jawed wooed me into translating Nemat Khana! My father was really appreciative of Jawed’s writing and he too encouraged me to translate the book. That was how Nemat Khana became The Paradise of Food in English. My father read and liked my translation, but by the time the book was published, he was no longer with us.

What is the present scenario of Urdu literature? What are some of the themes or ideas that appeal to young Urdu fiction writers?
Contemporary Urdu fiction is actually very promising, but I cannot say the same for Urdu poetry. We are going through a time where we have lost many of our senior poets and among the younger poets, no one has yet been established as a major literary voice. So there is a kind of lacuna that has formed but, hopefully, it will be filled soon. After all, poetry is beautiful and everyone is keen to read and write it.

As far as fiction is concerned, Khalid Jawed’s novel winning the 2022 JCB Prize for Literature is going to give a huge boost to Urdu fiction. For the longest time, it was either English or Malayalam novels in translation that won the prize but now readers will be excited about Urdu novels too.

Many young writers in Urdu are writing to replace the lethargy that has overcome the world in terms of politics – you know, like people not speaking up or trying to make their voices heard. Then there are also a group of writers who do not directly engage with social concerns in their fiction but with human concerns – the aim is to write something poignant with subtlety and not be apologetic about it.

Now that you have won the 2022 JCB Prize for Literature, what excites you about the future of Urdu literature in translation?
There are plenty of books that have been translated from Urdu. Think about how prolifically Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, and Saadat Hasan Manto have been translated. In a way, they have almost cloyed the reader’s appetite for Urdu fiction. Now is the time to look beyond these known names and see what other writers are writing. Institutions like the JCB Prize for Literature are eager to discover new writers. And translators. Their patronage can really make a world of difference.

The government tries to impress upon the public that Urdu is a “foreign language.” We are seeing the erasure of the language from public spaces. As a translator of the Urdu language, what are your foremost concerns about this trend?
I don’t feel very greatly concerned as long as Urdu is one of the languages recognised by the Constitution of India. Though I will admit that there is a lot of trepidation in my mind with regard to the Muslim community and not so much about the Urdu language itself. I am also heartened to see that there are so many takers of the Urdu language in the southern states…And the south is not going to become bigoted so easily. That is my hope, at least.

The current trend is to dismiss Urdu as a version of Hindi. They have reduced both languages to a matter of nomenclature. There is a mass pretence of Urdu being a foreign language, as though it is an exotic tongue, but that is not true at all! The Hindi film industry, something that binds us all, has roots in the Urdu language, which if you think about it is also an oxymoron. The reason Hindi movies have become a target for hateful politics has a lot to do with their affection for the Urdu language. We are stuck between the devil and the deep sea.

I will reiterate that Urdu is an Indian language and perhaps in more ways than many other languages. That is because it is made up of many Indian languages and Urdu has also lent its vocabulary to other regional languages. Any zabaan, be it Urdu or Sanskrit, is a traveller – to confine it to a nationality is to be narrow-minded. I am old enough to understand that states are temporary entities and we have no business claiming or disowning any language.

What are you translating next?
I am translating another novel by Khalid Jawed and it will be published soon. I have also told him that I would like to translate some of his earlier works of short fiction. I also want to translate a few women poets from Urdu.