Books: Stilted Attempt

"ARE ALL WOMEN LEG SPINNERS?'' ASKED THE STEPHANIAN
BY ANURAG MATHUR
FULL CIRCLE
PRICE: RS 125

Anurag Mathur is a leg spinner. A really bad one, with a shambling, bumbling run-up. Most of the time his deliveries are full tosses, leaving the batsman with little option but to despatch them to the farthest corner of the ground or even beyond it. Mathur's unease begins with the title. Too cute, too clever, too adolescent. It wasn't like that with his first novel which surprised everyone by staying on the front bookshelves for nearly a decade. The Inscrutable Americans was a slightly amusing Hinglish-babu-in-bigtown-USA satire, passable enough to stay in print and sell consistently well. But one half-century in domestic cricket does not make you eligible for a Test call-up.

Mathur mistook sales figures as a certificate of literary stardom. He is still under that delusion. His second book, Making The Minister Smile, didn't make anyone smile. Between innings, during his drinks break, as it were, he edited an anthology of travel writing which didn't go too far either. Maybe it was just a bad patch. This novel is another indication that a lot of writing does not necessarily help one get an insight into life or write a readable novel.

"Are All Women ... is not even a novel in the true sense. At least it doesn't read like one. There is some attempt to put together a plot: the Stephanian of the title, Babar Thakur, son of a joint secretary in the Income-Tax Department, decides he must become prime minister. He then proceeds through a series of utterly puerile sitcom situations, which Mathur obviously thinks are hilarious enough to get published, and worse, to make comments on Indian life and politics. There's also the attempt, equally stilted, to weave some pathos into the story. In the end, you're left scratching your head with irritation -- wondering what it was that Mathur was trying to say.

AUTHORSPEAK: RUPERT SNELL
Bridge to the World
The professor takes Hindi literature to the West

If you are in London, Hindi is unlikely to take you anywhere. Professor Rupert Snell of the School of Oriental and African Studies, however, has been going places flaunting his Hindi. When he is not teaching Hindi he is translating ancient Brajbhasha texts into English. Actually the entire gamut of Hindi literature falls within his purview and it is no wonder then that he chanced upon the four-volume autobiography of Harivanshrai Bachchan in 1989. Less than a decade later, Snell was ready with what has been claimed to be one of the most memorable English translations of any contemporary Hindi work. An Afternoon in Time (Viking) abridges the four volumes of the original into a compact and gripping autobiography. Bachchan suggested only 10 or 12 alterations in the final text, but Snell's problem was: "Kya rakh doon, kya chhod doon (What to retain, what to leave out)."

In this case at least, the translator's dilemma seemed to have been solved with panache. The candour, the slang, as well as the grand lines are all in place. "Harivanshrai uses different styles. Sometimes he is intensely emotional, sometimes Sanskritised, sometimes colloquial, sometimes Avadhi. It is impossible to capture it all in English. I have tried to be aware of the type of style he used and tried to make the translation reflect the original," says Snell.

Long before Snell read the Bachchan autobiography and fell for it, he had begun his impressive career as an Indologist by listening to Indian music. While doing his undergraduate course in London University, he got fully involved in Hindi and went on to do his doctoral thesis in Brajbhasha, the 16th century devotional texts. Since 1978, Snell has published a series of articles on ancient Hindi texts, apart from the occasional translation of modern Hindi writers. Snell is now concentrating on contemporary Hindi, at least for a while, as he is translating the poems of Kunwar Narain, Kedarnath Singh and journalist-poet Mangalesh Dabral.

But can any account of Bachchan be complete without an allusion to Madhushala. Snell recalls that Bachchan told him that whenever he went to kavi sammelans he was requested to recite Madhushala. "There is a musicality about it. It has strong rhymes and its imagery is very accessible," says Snell, analysing Madhushala's appeal. An Afternoon in Time shows us there is much beyond Madhushala in that great Hindi litterateur.

-Binoo K. John