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Importance of translation from the vernacular for women writers
This article is authored by Pushpa Sundar, columnist and author.
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Have you heard of Bano Mushtaq, the Booker prize winner in 2025, and of Geetanjali Shree the winner of the Booker prize in 2022? Probably. And of Damayanti Naregal? Outside of Karnataka, probably not. Though her work is no less worthy, and has won many prestigious prizes in Karnataka, she has not been translated into other national or international languages. Therein lies the importance of translation.
Each region and state of India has a rich literary tradition, yet the literature that is available to the ordinary outside reader is minuscule. And this is especially true of writing by women. If we are to compare the writing by women from different regions and languages it is clear that women’s lives are remarkably similar in many essentials. But most of all they show how a woman has to hold in all that she wants to express and share about herself, about her world, about her yearnings till finally fate and time allow her to live and write for herself. And if she is lucky, to share her dreams with the world through publication of her work.
This was certainly the case with Damayanti.
Born in 1937, in Baghalkot, Vijapur district of Karnataka, all her education in Hubli, Dharwad, was in Kannada. Her subjects were unusual for a girl of the times--maths and statistics, and later, computer programming. Moving to Mumbai, after her marriage to a boy whom she had known in school and college, she did several jobs -- translating popular science books into Kannada for high school children; teaching maths and statistics to undergraduates and post-graduates and the like. She wrote whenever child rearing and household duties allowed her time, but did not publish anything. Life in Bombay was as hard for her as a working woman, as for many like her in Bombay. There was no time to even think of writing.
When she moved to Muscat with her husband there was time but no stimulation--no books, no social contacts, a lonely existence. It was only when she moved back to Dharwad in 2001 after her husband had passed away, that her thoughts turned again to writing.
Dharwad was a small town then but it was stimulating intellectually. An educational and cultural centre, many writers had settled there. It was also a familiar background.
Brought up in a traditional joint family, exposed to lots of books read by the older boys in the family, and with many acharyas, and purohits, (priests) frequenting the house to perform the required rituals, she was exposed to traditional as well as modern thinking. Her enquiring mind now began to question and reinterpret traditional thoughts, scriptures and legends. This found expression in her writing. Not surprisingly, her first book, a novel called Yayati Prasanga, using the idiom of Yakshagana , the folk theatre of Karnataka, reinterpreted Yayati, a character from the Mahabharata who was in quest of eternal youth, through a modern lens.
This very first published work won her an award in a competition organised by the Masti Prashasti Samiti, an organisation founded to memorialise the famous Kannada writer Masti Venkatesh Iyengar.
Gaining confidence from this, she wrote her second novel, a semi-autobiographical work called, Kallu Khadi Yago, the traditional blessing a mother gave her daughter and with which her mother always blessed her when massaging her head with oil for the traditional head bath. It is a message for girls to stay strong always, as strong as a rock or as firm as a root of grass.
She was now set on her career as a Kannada writer. She has since then written five novels, two collections of short stories, two biographies and three plays, which have been enacted by the Kannada Sanghas in Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore. Her novel Triveni won an award from the Kannada Sahitya Parishad, as did her translation from Marathi into Kannada of a book of articles on music and musicians, for the best translation of the year. But, she is most proud of her biography of Gangubai Hangal, the famous classical singer, which won the State Sahitya Akademi award. She presented her as a fighter for women classical singers, who then were not allowed to sing on the main platform of a musical performance. Clubbed with women entertainers, Gangubai fought back and did not sing till she was allowed on the main platform, paving the way for other women.
Her influences? People around her, memories of childhood, the famous Kannada writer Dr Shivram Karanth, and Marathi and Hindi writers read in translations such as VS Khandekar, and NS Phadke.
If Damayanti’s life and work have any message, it is the importance of translations from the vernacular into national and international languages particularly for women writers, who have much to contribute but remain in shadows.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Pushpa Sundar, columnist and author.
