A Review of Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s Translation of Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, Which I Apparently Disliked a Great Deal More Than I Thought I Did

Isaac McQuistion
Jul 20, 2017 · 14 min read

Each text presents its own challenges to the translator, but some are particularly thorny. Such is the case with Joothan, the autobiography of author Omprakash Valmiki. First published in India in 1997 and in the United States in 2003, the work operates as a traditional bildungsroman transplanted to a basti of the untouchable Chuhra caste in post-independence India. It traces the intellectual development of the author, detailing the horrendous abuse he and his family faced at the hands of the upper castes who dominated life in his town, the struggle he faced to receive any kind of satisfactory education, and the life-changing effect that the works of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the famed Dalit leader who wrote the Indian Constitution, had on him as he came into a fuller sense of himself and developed a wider Dalit consciousness. What drives the book, however, are the deprivations and abuse showered on Dalits as a matter of course by society, and Valmiki’s growing awareness and resistance to these structural forces that restrained and continue to restrain him and his community.

Omprakash Valmiki was born in 1950 and grew up in the village of Barla, the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh. He worked in a government ordnance factory for most of his life (that appointment no small feat in itself, as is detailed in Joothan) and wrote poetry, short stories, and novels. Valmiki has long been considered a seminal figure in Dalit literature, and Joothan stands as his most important (and widely discussed) work. The title refers to the scraps of leftover food that Dalits were often given to eat by upper castes. As the introduction to the book points out, food can only be considered joothan if someone else actually ate it. It is the act that gives the word its strong connotations of pollution and defilement. To accept someone else’s leftovers, indeed, to relish them, as a key source of food is a stark reminder of one’s place in the social hierarchy. It is to be no better than the dogs that eat trash discarded by the side of the road. As a name, therefore, Joothan contains within it abject humiliation and a perverse sort of symbiotic relationship, describing the Dalits’ dependence on upper castes for scraps even as they are humiliated and their spot at the bottom of the social order further cemented by accepting them. This is the world described in Valmiki’s work.

The author, Omprakash Valmiki (1950–2013)

What makes Joothan a challenge for the translator is his style. He writes with an unnerving directness, using the tools Hindi provides him to make sure that each of his punches — against his teachers, against other Hindi writers, against society at large — lands with devastating effectiveness. The prose itself has a simplicity that should never be confused with simpleness. It’s lack of adornment is what gives it its power. Often, this is accomplished through word choice and structure. Valmiki favors simple sentences, free of convoluted syntax, the better to emphasize the violence shown against he and his fellow Dalits. He chooses words and images with a great deal of care, sometimes using Sanskritic vocabulary and references to mock the hypocrisy of upper-castes or to render the actions of people in the Dalit community in language similar to that found in epic mythology. Even the simplest of words often carry a great deal of resonance and are open to multiple interpretations and meanings. Always, though, there is a fidelity his own lived experience, communicating in unsparing detail what life is like for members of India’s Dalit community.

That sense of accuracy is carried over to this dialogue as well. Where his prose is polished and (more or less) conforms to the style one would expect in Hindi literature, his dialogue is rendered in dialect, written to reflect the accent of the Barla villagers. This does not mean that all of the people in the text speak with the same accent. Valmiki actually goes to great pains to show the social levels present in his community through the use of varying registers of speech. For instance, how a headmaster addresses a pupil is treated differently from how a Dalit child addresses his father. How does one communicate this change in accent in translation?

Perhaps the greatest difficulty, however, comes in his use of culturally-specific knowledge and circumstances. The very title, Joothan, refers to something with no ready English equivalent. The same is true of other words, some more well-known, such as the term “untouchable,” and others that aren’t as immediately apparent to an outsider, such as the use of “chuhra ka” as an insult. Others include the use of more regionally-specific language, such at jatak, a highly specific and derogatory way of referring to someone’s son or daughter that can easily enough be translated as “child,” and just as easily have the meaning wrung out of it.

These are the difficulties that the translator Arun Prabha Mukherjee had before her when she sat down to render Joothan into English. For the most part, she does a serviceable job. In some cases, she actually improves on the original, as when she resists the urge to use some of the more euphemistic language that Valmiki sometimes does, and instead changes the register to better communicate the overall tone of the piece. She mostly manages to convey the meaning of Valmiki’s prose. However, she seems to miss some of the finer points. Her English, though quite good in spots, sometimes feels inert. The bruising effectiveness of the Hindi feels drained in spots. She makes hardly any distinction between dialogue, which Valmiki chose to write more naturally, and the more polished prose. She sometimes make curious decisions about when to translate certain words and their connotations and when not to, leaving the reader without anything to grip onto as she or he tries to understand some of particular sentiments of the text. At other times, she adds in some explanatory material that is not present in the original, apparently not trusting the reader to connect the dots as much as Valmiki did. In general, she gets a bit careless at points, translating to get a across a general sentiment but missing some of the finer shades of meaning built into the original. At the risk of sounding too harsh, it feels at times like a good cliff notes summary of the work rather than an attempt at re-imagining the original in English.

An excellent case in point for examining Mukherjee’s successes and failures as a translator come on the very first page of the book. The book begins with the sentence: “हमारा घर चंद्रभान तागा के घेर से सटा हुआ था |” Mukherjee translates this as “Our house was next to Chandrabhan Taga’s cattle shed.” This is both accurate and insufficient. The verb सटना has a few different meanings, and in general is more specific and evocative than what Mukherjee gives us in translation. It means to join together, to unite with; to stick, to be stuck together; to be placed together or to lean against; or to nestle/cling together. That is an awful lot of meanings to replace with the bland phrase “was next to.”

It is also crucial, when you look at the overall tone and message of the book. As alluded to earlier in this essay, the very concept of joothan describes a tragically symbiotic relationship. The leftover food becomes joothan through the Dalit community’s acceptance of it, and by accepting it, they reaffirm the social hierarchy and the dominant position of upper castes. That intertwined relationship is contained in the simple verb सटना, with its alternating meanings of being stuck together or nestled against. It describes both the intransigence of the position and the complicity of both parties in that relationship. In short, it is the thesis of the book. Mukherjee, however, completely misses these shades of meaning, choosing to only communicate a sense of spatial proximity.

It is in the next paragraph that Mukherjee most aptly demonstrates her strengths as a translator. It is not a hard and fast rule, but academics (Mukherjee is a professor of English at York University) tend to favor communicating direct meaning rather than aiming to convey a sense of tone or other, more formal aspects of a text. One can be scrupulously accurate and write boring prose, or one can sacrifice a little bit of that accuracy to communicate more of the tone and feeling of a work. Sheldon Pollock commented on this tendency in academic translation in his essay “Philology, Literature, Translation,” where he made the case for a more adventurous style. Here, however, Mukherjee’s tendency towards accuracy (the previous example notwithstanding) serves her well. Her deviations are a more complicated matter, sometimes enhancing the text and at other times detracting from it.

Valmiki opens his book with a scene that stands in direct refutation of the pastoral scenes that blanket much of Hindi literature. As Mukherjee points out in her introduction, many Hindi poems and novels contain a portion describing the village idyll, with happy peasants living in harmony with the land, the writer waxing poetic about their simple nobility. It’s absurd, and absurdly romantic, as Valmiki shows with his radical reinterpretation of village life:

जोहड़ी के किनारे पर चुहड़ों के मकान थे, जिनके पीछे गाँव भर की औरतें, जवान लड़कियाँ, बड़ी-बूढ़ी यहां तक कि नई नवेली दुल्हनें भी इसी डब्बोवाली के किनारे खुले में टट्टी-फरागत के लिए बैठ जाती थीं (1) |

And Mukherjee’s translation:

The homes of the Chuhras were on the edges of the pond. All the women of the village, young girls, older women, even the newly married brides, would sit in the open space behind these homes at the edges of the pond to take a shit (1).

Here, Mukherjee follows Valmiki’s structure fairly closely. She breaks the sentence up to make it more readable, but otherwise retains what gives the sentence its visceral impact: the long list of people who come to the banks of Dabbowalli pond, each new entrant adding another segment of society, described matter-of-factly and without immediate judgment, until he gets to the end, where he shows his departure from other Hindi writing by describing them as “टट्टी-फरागत के लिए बैठ जाती थीं |” Mukherjee, perhaps in an effort to communicate more of the visceral impact of Valmiki’s prose, translates the earthy language as “to take a shit.” This is perhaps too coarse for the register that Valmiki is using here, which, if McGregor is to be believed, comes closer to “relieved themselves.” However, here, Mukherjee’s deviation is, if anything, an improvement on Valmiki’s original, which seems a bit coy. She seems to sense that Valmiki may have been better served by using a cruder vocabulary. Overall, Mukherjee does a good job retaining the original impact of this first paragraph, as when she describes “pigs wandering in narrow lanes, naked children, dogs, daily fights” and the overwhelming stench of the pond and the Chuhra basti.

However, further on in this paragraph, she again opts for an English translation that strips some of the meaning and effect of the original. At one point, Valmiki writes that women in purdah इस सार्वजनिक खुले शौचालय में निवृत्ति पाती थीं | Mukherjee renders this as “found relief in this open-air latrine.” This sells Valmiki short, however. Valmiki is a wickedly sarcastic writer, and he often uses deliberately ironic language to highlight the distance between the actions and social standing of the upper castes. Here, he use the word निवृत्ति, which does mean “to find relief,” but also has a religious overtone to it. It can mean that one is finally released from the cycle of death and rebirth, a core idea in Hinduism. These women are not just finding relief, they are finding final release from the shackles of this world. The juxtaposition of this idea with the image of them squatting by the banks of the pond, looking out over the Chuhra basti, and shitting is exactly what makes this image so powerful, but Mukherjee misses it. One wishes that she had adhered a bit more closely to her own self-professed strategy of translating as described in her introduction, when she writes “At times the English version may sound awkward, but I have chosen awkwardness over falsification or softening” (XLVII).

These are the types of things that chip away at a work, but any translator will acknowledge the impossibility of conveying every nuance present in the original text. Some sacrifices must be made, in the hopes that gains might be made elsewhere. One strategy for accomplishing this is to retain some of the culturally-specific vocabulary that gives a work a sense of place as well as communicate specific concepts. It is what we might call a text’s “intelligible cultural otherness.” In this area, Mukherjee seems to play it safe. She wisely leaves the title of the book untranslated. There is no concise English word or phrase that gets across everything that joothan embodies without sounding hopelessly banal. Instead, Mukherjee leaves the title as is and explains the concept in her introduction to the book, which does a good job of laying a foundation for the reader in general.

However, in other instances, this strategy does not work so well. For instance, throughout the book, Valmiki and the other members of his caste are referred to as “Chuhra ka.” This literally means “of a Chuhra” and on its face does not seem derogatory. It is, however, extremely so, akin to calling someone a bastard or a son of a bitch, but with the added layer of acting as an ethnic slur. None of this is made apparent in Mukherjee’s translation. She opts to transliterate the phrase “Chuhra ka” and adds nothing else to emphasize the pejorative connotations associated with the phrase. To somebody who is already familiar with the context, this is perhaps a reasonable expectation, but to anyone else, it leaves the job half-finished. A reader may understand intellectually that “Chuhra ka” is an insult, but the emotional impact fails to register. In a work where the visceral, emotional impact of these daily slights is vital to its overall meaning, it amounts to a significant loss.

Other times, when she does try to translate concepts that are foreign to English, she still seems to miss the mark. This is the case with the word jatak. As she explains in the introduction, jatak refers to children, but it is a cold, emotionless word, filled with caste contempt. She opts to translate this as “progeny” since child and children both have more positive connotations in English. Mukherjee acknowledges the awkwardness of this choice, but opts to keep it because of her stated commitment to accuracy. That is fine, except “progeny” seems to be awkward for its own sake. It may not have a positive connotation, but it also does not necessarily have a negative one. On top of that, it is a rather archaic word in English, more suited to Biblical texts or medieval histories. The result is that it ends up becoming a distraction. This may have been a case where Mukherjee would have been better served by opting not to translate the word at all, treating it like joothan or Chuhra ka, or by trying to make up for the lack of a comparable English word by introducing that coldness in other areas of the text. There are certainly plenty of words that refer to the offspring of animals in English, and any of these might have communicated the cold, dehumanizing qualities of jatak (for example, brood or spawn are both primarily used with animals, and carry with them the sense of unwantedness and out-of-control proliferation). Instead, Mukherjee seems to trust “progeny” to do a great deal work for which it is not quite suited.

Dialogue is often the trickiest aspect of translation. In many instances, an author will attempt to mimic the rhythms, cadences, and sounds of actual speech, aspects that do not always come across in translation. Plus, certain languages have different registers and levels of formality, often expressed through different verb forms or modes of address that are impossible to translate directly. Joothan contains both difficulties. The dialogue is naturalistic, with Valmiki doing his best to get across the sounds particular to Hindi as spoken in his home village. He accomplishes this through alternative spellings of words, for example, by using ण instead of न, resulting in a more nasal quality to the speech. Mukherjee has no way of imitating this, and perhaps it is for the best that she did not try.

But there are other ways that she could have communicated some of this change in tone and register. In the end, however, her dialogue often sounds either stilted or indistinguishable from the prose. I have already mentioned her choice to leave the derogatory phrase “Chuhra ka” mostly unexplained (it is brought up in a footnote, but, in this reviewer’s opinion, this valence should be discernable in the text itself). The other, larger problem is that the full distance in social position between, for instance, the headmaster of the school and Valmiki, are not made apparent. At one point, Valmiki is called before the headmaster and interrogated before he is made to sweep the school, which is the traditional occupation of the Chuhra caste. This interaction, filled with status markers in the book (the headmaster using the slight pejorative बे and the insulting तेरा, his short, clipped phrases and Valmiki’s deferential tone) are imperfectly captured in Mukherjee’s translation. “क्या नाम है बे तेरा?” becomes “Abey, what is your name?” This gets the point across, but it is missing the disdain inherent in it. A better translation might have been to still keep the “Abey,” untranslatable as that word is, and add in other touches to communicate the tone, since that word alone is not enough for a reader unfamiliar with the context to understand. One possible route is to add in “boy,” used frequently in the American context when one wants to talk down to someone. It is especially apparent in racially coded interactions, as when a white person is addressing a person of color (a parallel that makes it especially appropriate in a casteist society). It has the same slightness as बे and communicates far more contempt and disrespect than its single syllable might suggest. The end result, in keeping with the informal tone and phrasing, might look like “Abey, what’s your name, boy?”

A similar strategy could be used later, when the headmaster says to Valmiki “तेरा तो यो खानदानी काम है |” Mukherjee gives us “It is, after all, your family occupation.” She manages to capture the slippery quality of तो here, inserting “after all,” but then gives खानदानी as family occupation. This is literally what the word means, but it is far too stilted. I would have prefered something more along the lines of “It’s what you people do, right?” “You people” being another in the regrettably long list of racially charged phrases available in the American idiom. This way, the whole sentence keeps the more colloquial phrasing present in the original.

A similar problem occurs elsewhere in the text when she makes repeated reference to “agricultural labor/laborers” for खेती-बाड़ी and खेतों में मज़दूरी. It is a rendering that is accurate, but again, stilted, and obscures the backbreaking quality of the situation. “Agricultural laborer” sounds like an occupational category one would expect to find in a census, not how a child might refer to what his parent’s do, which is the context in the book.

In conclusion, Mukherjee’s translation is fine, but contains some rather glaring inadequacies. She does share Valmiki’s reluctance to mince words, and even outstrips him in some instances, introducing coarser but more visceral language to the text. But she also misses some of the finer nuances that Valmiki has been so careful to include in his text. Part of this is due to stilted phrasing and an adherence to literal accuracy that ends up ignoring some of the other connotations of certain words, connotations that are crucial to the overall tone of the story. At other points, it appears to be carelessness, as in the first sentence, when she flattens out all of the meanings inherent in सटना and in the process misses the larger point that Valmiki was trying to make. And finally, her choice to leave certain phrases, such as Chuhra ka, untranslated and to provide the full sense of the phrase only in a footnote does not go far enough to communicate the derogatory nature of the phrase and the tone of the dialogue. The sum of all of this is a translation that is mostly accurate, but fails in many places to leap off the page and grab the reader in the same way that Valmiki’s original does. Since this is the greatest strength of Valmiki’s book, it amounts to a great loss indeed.

Works Cited

Valmiki, Omprakash. Joothan. New Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashna, 1999.

Valmiki, Omprakash. Joothan. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

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Isaac McQuistion

Written by

Staff in the International Office @UTAustin, former web content guy @sunyjcc. Studied Hindu Nationalism and the Internet at UT. Also writes about Browns stuff.

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