Satya Vyas’s Banaras Talkies is a Hindi campus novel published in 2015. Vyas is an award-winning writer of five books and is known for his popular novel Chaurasi, which earned accolades when converted to the web series Grahan on Disney Hotstar. While the plot of Chaurasi centred on the 1984 Sikh riots in the country, Banaras Talkies revolves around a set of three close friends living together in the law students’ hostel at Banaras Hindu University, where Vyas has been a student himself.
We follow these “BD Jeevis” or Bhagwan Das (BD) Hostel residents through a host of experiences – performing embarrassing tasks while getting ragged by seniors; proxying for friends during boring lectures; first crushes and awkward romantic conversations; competitive cricket matches; conspiracy theories among friends; and shocking revelations that could change their lives. The narrator is one of the three friends – Suraj (or Baba). His two closest friends are Anurag De (or Dada) and Jaivardhan.
The English translation of the novel by Himadri Agarwal, facilitated by the recently launched Ashoka Centre for Translation from Ashoka University, brings the work to a new segment of readers.
The challenges of translation
The language of Banaras Talkies is as lyrical as it is brash, with equal doses of rhyme, poetry, idioms, cuss words and slang. As you read the translation into English, you get swept up in the hustle of dialogue and action, while remaining fully aware that you are reading a text written in a different language. Words like “abbey”, “arrey bhai”, “ghanta!”, “yaar” and “guru” are used effortlessly in the translation, but students also refer to each other as “bro” and “man” at times.
In fact, the Hindi original is equally comfortable using popular English words and phrases, just as the English translation is comfortable using words and phrases in Hindi – a nod to the rich multilingualism of Indian student life. The Hindi novel seamlessly accesses Bhojpuri and English words and phrases and the translation captures these linguistic variations beautifully.
If the novel could be defined by one emotion only, it would be humour. The translation masterfully brings out the jokes and wordplay in the Hindi by taking dramatic risks. For instance, in one of the early ragging scenes, the joke is centred around a student’s father’s name, “Shridhar Dubey”. Seniors make lewd jokes about “dharna” and “pakadna”, holding and grasping, based on this name.
Agarwal changes this name to “Jaikumar Dubey” in the English, so that it can lend itself to jokes about ‘jacking off’. In fact, she explains this decision in the Translator’s Note at the end, saying “I did have to change the father’s name and raise the scale of the joke a little, but I would choose these changes over compromising on the emotion or the humour of the text”. There is another brilliant moment where the word deltiology mispronounced as “dalteology” lends itself to innuendos around “daalna-dalvaana” (“putting in”) in the original but is changed to “dallying and dalliances” in English.
To take this a step further, the translator has at times created rhymes where there are none in the original to balance out the poetry and jokes. Lines of rhyming poetry have been translated as rhymed poetry in English as well. Some English rhymes have been directly imported from the original, as in “Guru, whether they make us pee on a heater, or pee a litre, we will have to do it” (the original said “heater par karaayein ya litre bhar karaayein”).
The Hindi novel is filled with such internal rhymes and assonances, and the translation brings out this aspect of the novel well. Idioms have also been translated deftly – Jaivardhan’s character is known for speaking in complex idioms which nobody understands, and this would have been an additional challenge in translation. The translator however finds creative ways to bring out this complexity in English.
English plays an important role in mapping social dynamics on campus. One of the university professors, Abhay Kumar, is shown to be obsessed with the word “being” – his pet phrase is “What nonsense are you being talking?” I was curious about what the original was for this and realised that his lines have been written in English in the Roman script itself. This separation of script plays an interesting role in distinguishing characters and their talking registers in the original.
The translation has attempted to bring some of these out, by giving a different kind of English to certain characters – like the hostel cook Durga Maharaj has been given a style of speaking English with grammatical errors to show his discomfort with the language. While this works in some cases as the hostel cook or warden, it erases some regional identities such as Roshan Chaudhuri’s. During his first interaction with Prof Abhay Kumar, his extremely local Bhojpuri dialect is translated into a nonchalant English slang using words such as “yo” and “haven’t got the foggiest clue”.
The use of English in the original is telling of personality traits and class positions of characters in the novel – but this becomes a challenge in translation, where it is not easy to sustain the multilingualism of the original. There is also another student, Vineet, who speaks passionately about student union politics and switches to English during those debates – this seemed like a deliberate choice in the original. It is also interesting that some characters’ English lines are grammatically incorrect when in the Hindi original, but this has been corrected in translation – I wonder if it would have added more layers to characters to keep them as they are.
The politics of language
Unfortunately, some of the glaring language politics in the original have also been lost in translation. There is an incident where Suraj and Anurag are buying two highlighters in a stationery shop (Modern Pen Company), and Suraj’s love interest is eyeing the same two highlighters. Suraj sacrifices one highlighter and tells her, “You may take it.” In the English translation, Anurag mocks him, saying, “You start speaking politely every time you see a girl, don’t you?”
Whereas in the Hindi original, it was “ladki dekhke angrezi bolne lagte ho?” (You start speaking in English when you see a girl?). I believe this switch to English to impress his love interest was crucial for Suraj and would be integral to understanding language and class dynamics on a college campus, and this had to be glossed over in translation because it wouldn’t have made sense if the entire novel is in English.
Another place the translator has had to dodge language politics in translation is when another student Dubeyji (who refers to himself as Dubeyji too) writes down a ridiculous answer in his exam. He ends up writing about “types of hares” instead of “types of shares”, and this is a great solution to translating the confusion between “anshon ke prakaar” (types of shares) and “hanson ke prakaar” (types of swans) in Hindi, even going so far as to include an animal-related wordplay.
The only confusion is that it does not follow logically because even in the English version, classmates remember that Dubeyji takes his exams in Hindi, so his incorrect answer couldn’t have been in English in the first place. There are hardly any solutions to such a dilemma in translation but I think Agarwal has found an excellent way out.
In a campus novel situated in a boys’ hostel, one cannot escape cultural references. In one incident, one of the mock love letters written to a student was filled with Shilpa Shetty song lyrics in the original, and the translation innovatively brought in contemporary English song references instead, to artists such as Justin Bieber, Maroon 5, and Tina Turner.
But the letter remains addressed from Shilpa Shetty even in the translation, and the Baazigar reference is lost on the reader. The translation could either cater to an Indian English reading audience who would understand Bollywood references, or transpose the context completely, but this would be difficult given the rootedness of the novel in a campus in Banaras.
Having said that, I believe is time to open up our minds to judging a translation not by how “accurately” it keeps to the original text, but how authentically and innovatively it “recreates the reading experience” (as Agarwal puts it) for a wider audience. I believe Agarwal’s translation is an admirable attempt to recreate the experience of the original. It is an experiment in the right direction and deserves credit for the hat-ke decisions she has taken to remain true to the soul of the text.
Banaras Talkies, Satya Vyas, translated from the Hindi by Himadri Agarwal, Penguin India.
Disclosure: Arunava Sinha, editor of the Books & Idea section of Scroll.in, is co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation.