Kalpana Raina on the Art of Translation

Kalpana Raina has been a finance executive and a director on numerous boards. Over the last four years, she’s taken on a new mantle: translator. In March 2024, Raina, together with three collaborators, released the first translated collection of Kashmiri language stories to be published in the United States. For Now, It is Night contains decades of stories by Hari Krishna Kaul, one of Kashmir’s greatest modern writers, and the author of a number of acclaimed short stories, dramas, and plays. Kaul, who passed away in 2009, was also Raina’s uncle.

In a conversation with Sunil Amrith, Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, and Sonam Kachru, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies on 28th March, Raina discussed her translation process, her connection to Kaul, and the importance of the collection to Kashmiri culture. In this interview, Raina delves deeper into her newfound work.

Daevan Mangalmurti: You spent most of your career in the financial and strategic services industries. What was your journey to translating a collection of short stories, which strikes me as another world entirely?

Kalpana Raina: I started life, you know, as a student of literature. I was working towards a PhD in English literature, but of course there were no jobs to be had. So, I switched to the world of finance, which was not an obvious choice, but it worked out very well for 25 years. This strand of translation came out of my being a bit of a frustrated writer myself, I think. I was in India just before the pandemic, visiting family, and had my father read these stories to me. I had heard many of them growing up—my whole family knew what my uncle did and his plays were constantly on radio and television. But I had never read his stories

As my father read out these stories to me, I realized that they were very good. Some translations had been done earlier and when Kaul won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2000. But when I read those translations, I found that they didn’t really capture the spirit of the stories. Kaul’s characters were bawdy, they were boisterous. He didn’t shy away from cuss words. But I found that some of that had been sugarcoated in ways that made the stories less vibrant. That made me feel that it was time to get some younger, fresh translations and I  set myself the task of trying to find new translators. I had no intention of translating myself. I thought of it as being like one of my investment projects: I would put it together, find the right people, supervise it, and get it done.

It was in the process of finding people to actually do the translating that I started to realize that my connections with Kashmir had become quite tenuous. There was a mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989–90, so the family I had there had left decades before. Working with a translation residency in Bangalore, I found a couple of people. We got together in the summer of 2019 in Bangalore to start talking about this project. That was just before the abrogation of Article 370, which meant that two of my three collaborators were stuck in Kashmir without internet for many months. We’d already selected some of the stories as a group. I convinced my one collaborator who was still in Bangalore to record the stories for me so that I could start listening to them and get the project started, because I knew we wouldn’t be able to get together for a while.

It was when I listened to those recordings again and again that I realized that, being a dramatist, there was a very strong oral quality to Kaul’s work. It fascinated me, the way I was absorbing the stories, and I toyed with a draft of “Sunshine,” the first story in For Now, It is Night, based on one of the recordings. When we put the band back together in Bangalore in March 2020, we decided that this time we could collectively work off of the recordings as well as the print texts.

We found all four of Kaul’s short story collections in the library of Jammu & Kashmir University, where they were literally bleeding ink. In those days, Kashmiri writers took their manuscripts and gave them to calligraphers, who would hand write them before the stories were printed on a lithographic press. This meant there were all sorts of what we would call “typos” today, as well as lacunae in the manuscripts. So when we got together in 2020, it was to try to resolve those issues. By this time, I’d made my mind up that I’d be translating as well.  We divided up the stories, taking three or four each, and dispersed again—and then, of course, the pandemic happened. I was stuck in India for the first three months of the pandemic, and having nothing else to do, I could really devote time to this. Over Zoom for pretty much every weekend for almost two years, we would go through the stories line by line, word by word, and read and listen and translate together. Through that process, ownership of the stories became very dispersed, very fluid. The end result was that none of us could really sign off on any one story individually, and that’s why the front cover of the book names all of us as translators.

DM: You write in the introduction to For Now, It is Night that Kaul “lost his Kashmiri-speaking audience” when he fled Kashmir. Who were Kaul’s stories written for? What do you hope that new audiences will get from being exposed to them?

KR: Kashmiri writing has historically been mostly poetry. There are now many short story writers but few novels that I am aware of. And while poetry was written all over the state, short stories were primarily written by urban people. Kaul and his contemporaries all lived in basically one square mile of downtown Srinagar, which is very, very dense. When these stories were published, Kaul was a college professor of Hindi. For every story he wrote, he would read it out to his community of colleagues and writers before it got published. His contemporaries have told me that when he did that with “Sunshine,” they were simply blown away. That catapulted him to fame. But I think he found a wide audience not through his fiction, which assumes a level of literary literacy, but through his radio and television plays. When I visited Kashmir recently, I was told by people who had been involved in those plays that the dialogues from one of them, Dastar, were more popular in the Kashmir of the 1970s than the dialogues of Sholay. His writing formed a part of the Kashmiri curriculum. And then they were totally expunged after the exodus.

I’m hoping these translations achieve two things. Fundamentally, this was about finding a good writer writing beautifully and saying, “Here, read this and see what you think.” I wanted to get these stories translated because they’re very good, and if they’re translated into English, they can be even more widely available. This Archipelago edition of the book is the first published translation of a writer writing in Kashmiri outside of India.

Two, the Kashmiri language is dying. Among Kashmiri Muslims in Kashmir, Urdu and Arabic are being emphasized over Kashmiri. Among Kashmiri Hindus in the diaspora, the language has totally died. Reading fluency among my three collaborators varied widely. You can imagine what it looks like for people in their twenties. And so, I thought this was one way of making the stories more accessible to younger readers, whether inside of Kashmir and India, or outside.

On a very positive note, we made sure that we did the book launch of the Indian edition in Srinagar, and the response was phenomenal. It was really well received. Every periodical, every newspaper did a full, huge, blown-up review of it. That book launch was a way of reestablishing Kaul in the literary canon.

DM: There is a tendency in liberal parts of Indian society to long for the days of Kashmiri syncretism. But for the last thirty years, if not much longer, the relationship between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir has been conflict-ridden. Kaul was a Hindu; you were the only Hindu among the four translators. How did your collaborators feel about the translation project?

KR: When I decided to do this, I knew that the translators would be Muslims for the obvious reason that young Kashmiri Hindus don’t know the language and have not lived in Kashmir for the last 30 years. At least one of my collaborators admitted to me during the project that they had never really interacted with a Kashmiri Hindu before (my name gives away that I am a Kashmiri Hindu, even though I don’t draw my identity from that). But I want to make the point that throughout the whole translation process, not once was it mentioned that we were translating a Hindu writer, nor was it asked why we were doing so. My collaborators had not read the stories themselves before we started translating, but once they had, they were as blown away as I was. It was a given to all of us that this was a really good writer who deserved to be translated.

I’ll also emphasize that Kaul never called himself a Hindu writer, and his writing is not just about Hindus. It did become obvious as we worked through our Zoom sessions that there were aspects of Kashmiri Hindu culture in Kaul’s writing, certain words and concepts missing from their vocabulary, that they simply could not know about because they had not encountered Kashmiri Hindus. There were two instances that stood out to me: once when they didn’t know about a festival called Pann, and another when they could not believe that a Kashmiri word, naveed, was a synonym for the Hindi words prasaad. And as I tried to explain these concepts to them, I realized that I didn’t have much credibility in their eyes because I’ve lived outside of Kashmir for all this time and they wondered if I really knew what I was talking about.

I went back to Srinagar last August, after 48 years away, to see the place for myself. I went back to the old house and reflected on how I knew the locality there inside-out. It was the only locality I knew, that one square mile in Srinagar. I knew where the house and the ledge from where the narrator hears the music in one of Kaul’s stories, “A Song of Despair,” were located. I knew where the convent bus that pops up in another story, “Tomorrow,” stopped, because that was the bus I took to school. And I realized that I brought certain elements to my collaborators that brought the stories alive for them. I brought in a version of Kashmir that is not the Kashmir of today.

DM: One story in the collection that intrigued me was “Tomorrow,” about a world that’s always changing but in which the future never comes. Can you tell me a little bit about it and the process of translating it?

KR: That’s a difficult story. One of my co-translators has a lot to say about “Tomorrow.” What Kaul describes in the story are two communities that are, due to history, locked together and living next to each other. What binds them together is a common landscape, a common language, and a common history. But there’s also a lot that separates them. You don’t have to look very hard for the fissures. I remember that growing up, while everyone in my family had Muslim friends and colleagues and neighbors, there wasn’t a fusion of cultures. The two groups lived very separate lives. Of the two times I’ve actually experienced curfews, one was when a young Muslim man married a young Hindu woman, which incited riots. So—and you mentioned a syncretic culture in Kashmir—I think that two cultures coexisted and, for the most part, lived together quite well in Kashmir. But from time to time, there were ruptures.

There’s a reference in another story, “Tales That Cannot Be Told,” to one of the first Muslim-Hindu agitations, in 1931. Kaul deals with it beautifully, but he also brings in this notion that there are Hindus and there are Muslims. They are neighbors, but religion and class keep them apart. He talks in that story about how Hindus realized that everything was in the hands of Muslims, that they had better get Hindus into the jobs, like being milkmen and barbers, that kept their own society running. But there’s this beautiful line at the end: “They say that this was what compelled some Batta boys to give up the proscriptions and become barbers. The throats of the old Battas remained safe, but those young boys were unable to find girls to marry. No respectable Batta would marry his daughter to a barber.” That one line encapsulates the whole genre of hierarchies permeating Kashmiri society.

DM: This collection will have access to a much bigger audience than Kaul’s original writing, which is beautiful. But there remains the problem of a lack of familiarity with and access to Kashmiri writing, including Kaul’s work, in Kashmiri itself. What do you envision for the future of Kaul’s work in Kashmir?

KR: An adjacent project to this is to revitalize and reprint Kaul’s short story collections, which are all out of print right now, in the original Kashmiri. One of my co-translators has undertaken that project, and the texts are being set on a computer, which will make it easier if someone wants to go ahead and translate Kaul down the road. My hope is that all four collections will get translated at some point.

Kaul’s oeuvre includes a lot beyond short stories. There are a whole bunch of recordings of dramas that we don’t have access to but are trying to access through talking with Doordarshan and Prasar Bharati. We understand that there are some scripts in private hands. And Kaul also wrote a bunch of articles on Kashmiri literature, as well as a seminal essay on playwriting, that are in private hands. My hope is that we can create an archive of his writings, including his letters and his novella, which was written in Hindi, and then as we get our hands on these critical writings, both preserve them and create a template that will encourage more Kashmiri writing and translation.

DM: Thank you!

Byline: Daevan Mangalmurti