‘A window for seeing, a window for hearing’: On translating Dalit writer Chandu Maheria’s memoir
· Scroll
Visit afnews.co.za for more information.
One of my favourite poems of all time is “To a Crow” from Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), where the humble bird ponders over a roadside twig, wondering if it’ll be a perfect fit for the nest it is building. The bird’s dilemma represents all creative processes, but it also stands in for the ontological and epistemological dilemma of humanity. A dilemma about a home one dreams of, wishes to erect and inhabit, be it textual, cultural, social, national or universal. To cultures attuned to binaries, home is the self to the other of the outside. But a home, with its inheritance of chains, can also be a cage the self seeks to break free of. Thus, the struggle of a creative practitioner, including a translator, is a concomitant abjuring and conjuring of homes. I decided to translate Chandu Maheria’s Homes Without Windows because it afforded my crow the possibility of both: breaking a home and making a home, leaving a nest and weaving a nest, twig by choice twig.
The seedy architecture of caste
The memoir unearths the vibrant community life of the Dalits who had to migrate post-independence to Rajpur and Gomtipur, the working-class suburbs in east Ahmedabad, from far-flung villages in Gujarat because “there...