With new translations of Swadesh Deepak’s works, dead flowers bloom again

AT the reading of his play ‘Sabse Udaas Kavita’, organised by the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi in 2002, Swadesh Deepak asked his audience, “If a play doesn’t relate to society, what use is it?” Only a few weeks earlier, revolutionary Telugu poet Varavara Rao had come visiting him at his Ambala house “to see who in North India could have written such a play”. A play on armed rebellion in an unnamed rural area, Deepak had visualised it as a symbol of hope. “One person’s death didn’t stop the struggle...” Like all of his other plays, this last scene had been written first of all — that is how Deepak ensured he didn’t deviate from the play. More than two decades on, ‘Sabse Udaas Kavita’ resonates.

A new English translation of Deepak’s plays (which includes ‘Sabse Udaas Kavita’ as ‘The Saddest Poem Ever Written’) and an anthology of his short stories offer a peep into the quiet genius of the man. Deepak’s talent had flashed before the world of Hindi literature in 1973 with his first collection of stories, ‘Ashwarohi’. Fifty years later — and 18 years after he went missing — a new generation is rediscovering his prose, thanks to translation efforts over the last few years, all spearheaded by Jerry Pinto, and now involving his son, Sukant Deepak. Together, the two books give a peek into his range, depth and concerns.

‘Kaal Kothri’ is the story of theatre actor Rajat, who fails to provide for his family. Much as he would try, he will not get a salaried job. Why? Because theatrewallahs are idealists, be it actors, directors or playwrights. The playwright in ‘Kaal Kothri’ is a 70-year-old ailing man. The critics think of him as a fool. Rajat’s wife considers him a failure and lets go of no chance to snub him. Deepak’s own wife raged at him: “Do not speak to me in poetry. Poetry has destroyed you; poetry has driven you mad. I hate your Eliot, your Yeats. I hate your Soumitra Mohan. Will poetry feed your children or me?” Sukant mentions this episode in his essay on his father in ‘A Book of Light’, and Pinto recalls it in the Preface.

And what can one say about Deepak’s audacious work ‘Court Martial’, set in the deeply hierarchical world of the Indian Army? The play has been performed numerous times; his friend Nirupama Dutt put the number at 5,000 some years ago. Originally translated by Pratik Kanjilal and Dutt for The Little Magazine, it narrates the court martial of a soldier who has admitted to killing his senior. No one cares about what forced him to kill. In the hands of the translators, the language becomes a tool to tell important truths that are otherwise hushed. The truth of casteism, class oppression, marital rape, misuse of free rations in the Army. What the Constitution confers, the upper echelons deny. Thus, small protests turn into a violent outburst, as in the case of Ramchandra.

In his stories, characters from the Army recur often, perhaps because he worked as a writer-translator with the Air Force in Ambala Cantonment and saw their world closely. There’s Major Ajay in ‘Name a Tree, Any Tree’; an unnamed Captain in ‘Jungle’; Captain Ranjit in ‘For the Wind Cannot Read’.

Wind is a character, too, as rightly pointed out by Pinto. Wind that takes the opportunity in ‘Name a Tree...’; the fatal wind in ‘Horsemen’; the guerrilla wind in ‘Dread’ that lengthens the night, the wind that smells falsehood, the wind that wants to come in, plucks the words and blows them away; the cold, cruel winds of January blowing relentlessly in ‘For the Wind Cannot Read’… So many characters are similar across the pages — strong women, sissy men, doomed lovers, hostile father-son.

Nimmi and Naveen from ‘Dread’ transition to Nimmi and Naveen in ‘Dead End’, the stories seamlessly flow from one to another; the bouquet of dead flowers in the hands of Sukant in ‘Horsemen’ features in ‘Dread’. Together with ‘Hunger’ (about a boy who doesn’t understand why the guards at a godown turn benevolent when they see his sister) and ‘The Child God’ (about hypocrisy in religion), the stories unsettle and provoke.

In the hands of the deft and prolific translator Jerry Pinto (others contribute much less), the stories flow perfectly. Only, if you compare the translations with the originals, do you wonder why the translators chose to add/omit what they did. In ‘The Child God’, the ‘siddhad’ boy’s ‘limited imagination’ has been translated into ‘imagination’ and ‘dhoop ki jungli billi’ as ‘the light, a savage panther’, and not a wild cat that would have fit our context better. In ‘Pears from Rawalpindi’, the initial paragraphs have been condensed.

Deepak’s sudden absence was long felt by his readers. Fortunately, through these translations, the bouquet of dead flowers is blooming again. And as Pinto rightly says in the Introduction, “What stories!”