The man from Chinnamasta!

Goswami weaves into her narrative the turbulent history of Assam and her prose is marked by compassion and humanity. In the novel, we see the force with which the great weights of tradition and religious ritual come up against the dramatic urgency of change.

The Hindu, Literary Review
(Sunday, 1 April, 2007)

THE 65-year-old writer Indira Goswami has a dedicated readership in her native Assam, where she is known as Mamoni Baideo. Renowned for her knowledge of the Ramayana literature, she has been a faculty member in the Department of Modern Indian Languages at the University of Delhi; she has won several awards, including the Jnanpith Award in 2001; and it is a mark of her position of respect in the Assamese community that she was also, until recently, involved in peace talks between the Government and the ULFA militants of Assam.

Goswami's classic novel Chinnamastar Manuhto (The Man from Chinnamasta) is set around the 2,000-year-old Kamakhya Temple of the Sakta cult. Legend has it that this Shakti Peeth marks the spot where Sati's sacred yoni fell to the earth. The novel tells the story of Chinnamasta Jatadhari, a hermit who leads the effort for change in the cruel ritual of animal sacrifice, and others around him — notably Ratnadhar, the sensitive youth who falls to the ground and sobs when he sees a buffalo being dragged for its slaughter, and Dorothy Brown, the estranged wife of the college principal who comes to the Jatadhari seeking peace of mind.

It is not hard to see why Goswami is so well loved by her readers. Her prose is marked by compassion and humanity. She weaves into her narrative the turbulent history of the State, including the bitter defeat of the Ahom king at the hands of the Mughals in the 17th century, and the confrontation between the English forces and the Burmese at the end of the 18th. And in the 1920s setting of the novel, we see the force with which the great weights of tradition and religious ritual come up against the dramatic urgency of change.

In this aspect, The Man from Chinnamasta is also a courageous novel — for, at its heart is an impassioned protest against the horror of animal sacrifice. As a child, Goswami saw animal sacrifices being performed at the temple. The anguish of Ratnadhar, which reappears in one of her poems, draws its force from her childhood experience of witnessing this cruelty.

Vivid imagery

The novel begins by invoking the great river of Assam, the Brahmaputra, as a beast moving its "mighty shanks" as it flows. Ever the dramatic storyteller, her opening images contain hints of disease ("leucoderma victim"); deprivation ("widowed mother"); and even menace, later, where the curve of the river is described as "a sacrificial machete". And then, suddenly, the prose bursts forth to describe the glorious natural profusion of seuli, kendur, outenga, ashoka and khokan in the Nilachal hills. The Jatadhari himself strides on to the scene, "an ancient landmass arising from the water". Goswami's sentences are drenched with the green beauty of the landscape.

This spirited translation from the Asomiya, by Prashant Goswami, conveys a sense of the novel's vivid imagery. The translation was nominated for the Hutch Crossword Book Award 2006 in the category of Indian writing in translation.

Commendable project

And finally a word about the commendable Katha project, which has been working in the areas of language, culture and translation for close to two decades. What a difference it has made to the world of Indian writing! The elegantly designed books, with cover paintings by contemporary Indian artists (the Tyeb Mehta painting on the cover of this volume depicts the violence of the struggle between man and animal); the statement that 10 per cent of the cover price will go to help a child in one of the 17 Katha schools; the reassurance that Katha regularly plants trees to replace the wood used in the making of the books — it's a rare project that has so much integrity. Katha's greatest contribution has been in bringing to us newer and newer voices from all over this diverse nation, helping us to understand each other and ourselves.

The Author

Indira Goswami

The Translator

Prashant Goswami

Publishers: Katha
Cover Design: Geeta Dharmarajan
Cover Painting: Tyeb Mehta
Category: Katha Asomiya Library
Statistics: 5.5" x 8" 200 pages
ISBN 81-89020-38-2 [PB]
Price: Rs 250 [India and the subcontinent only]

The Life and Times of Pratapa Mudaliar

Katha presents the first Tamil Novel, originally published more than 125 years ago.

The New Indian Express
(May 21, 2006)

It was 1879 when Samuel Vedanayagam Pillai, retired district magistrate of the South Indian town of Mayuram, wrote the first Tamil novel, Pratapa Mudaliar Charithiram: The life and adventures in Tamil of Pratapa Mudaliar. And though, over the past century, the book has proved to be a best-selling, enduring classic, it's only 140 years later that it has finally been fully translated into English.

This delay is one that the novel's translator Meenakshi Tyagarajan - great grand-daughter of famous writer and social reformer A Madhaviah - finds quite bewildering. "It's definitely very strange that it's not been translated so far. Ashokamritram said precisely this at the launch of the book. The first Telugu and Kannada novels' translations emerged immediately after they were written, in a few years. Also, it's not difficult to translate."

But it's an interest that caught her only six decades after she first read the book. "I first read it in my early teens, but if you read anything for an exam, it kills your enthusiasm," she explains. "But now, after I translated Padmavati (by A Madhaviah), this seemed to be the logical thing to do."

The novel is a humorous and satirical account of the escapades of its lead character, Pratapa Mudaliar, (and, since Pillai was an impassioned believer in women's rights, Mudaliar's wiser wife, Gnanambal). It can't really be considered an authentic, realistic account of the times in which it was produced; it is more in the tradition of escapist folk tales, anecdotes and parables, with its homespun wisdom and humour, and is similarly studded with morals.

This was due to Vedanayagam Pillai's intention of using his prose work as a medium for advocating and bringing about social reform. Far from being a straightforward storyteller, Pillai was rather more concerned with moral precepts, such as his conviction in women's emancipation, since he regarded the "degradation" and "slavery" to which he saw they were subject was one of the "crying evils of the land."

What Pillai also pioneered in his prose (and previous works of poetry, also in a moralistic vein) was a simpler, more colloquial idiom, which the public easily understood. This was a far cry from the high-flown, elevated verse in praise of divinity to which they were accustomed. And though this verse had a certain rarefied beauty, Pillai thought that its arcane vocabulary was one that wasn't even to be found in dictionaries, nor held any practical value to the common public. This was why his novel employed the tale-within-a-tale format "with large chunks of lecturing," says Thyagarajan. "He tuned it to appeal to the public, and it combined his passion for the Tamil language with his desire to entertain and teach."

So, with Pillai's penchant for proselytising, it's understandable why, as Thyagarajan says, "Modern readers would like this book only as a curiosity, or light entertainment." Though she does concede that "there is contemporary applicability of some of his ideas, such as on the judiciary and welfare state."

The Hindu
(1885)

"The book has ... rare merits and its popularity has been so great that the first edition of a large number of copies ran out in a few months ..."

The author

Mayuram Vedanayagam Pillai

The translator

Meenakshi Tyagarajan

Publishers: Katha
Cover Design: Netra Shyam
Cover Painting: Vijay Belgave
Category: Katha Tamil Library/Novel
Statistics: 5.5" x 8" 272 pages
ISBN 81-89020-42-0 [PB]
Price: Rs 295 [India and the subcontinent only]

Water!

A modern classic, Water, set in the summer of 1969 in the middle of the worst drought seen in Chennai, portrays the daily struggle of ordinary people trying to survive the crisis. Water, or the lack of it, is the recurrent metaphor in this realist-impressionist novella. An entire landscape of thirst is masterfully conjured up by the story’s locus on a single street whose very existence (and near destruction) revolves around the everyday quest for water.

The Indian Express
(January 20, 2002)

“It is a simple story, told simply, written simply and woven as a simple yarn. Yet Water holds one’s attention in the first few lines itself.”

- Prarthana Gahilote

First City Magazine
(February, 2002)

“The writer has been described as someone ‘who can bring out the strength of simplicity, who can make the everydayness of life speak’. The novel is well written, Ashokamitran has an interesting narrative style and water is a recommended read.”

The Sunday Statesman
(20 January, 2002)

The vision of women’s empowerment which emerges in Water is nothing short of remarkable, advocating as it does, freedom of choice, the mark of liberation in the true sense of the term. Were it not for Holmstrom’s translation of this work into English from the original in Tamil, Water would have remained confined to a select readership. We owe her however, a greater debt of gratitude for the quality of her translation. The transition from the source to the target language is so effortlessly achieved as to make us forget that the English version of Water is not the original one.

Nepalnews.com
(Kathmandu, Sunday, February 24, 2002)

“Water is a lyrical novella, and the best kind of literary translation: it gives readers a chance to enter the imaginative world of another language while also enjoying themselves. It also lets readers re-discover the novella form, which is common in regional language literature, but unusual in English. This book is so refreshing, it almost tempts me to re-read my collection of Katha Prize Stories anthologies."

The author

Ashokamitran

The translator

Lakshmi Holmstrom

Publishers: Katha
Category: Katha Trailblazer Series/Novel
Cover Painting: Shamshad Hussain
Statistics: 5.25" x 7.5", 160 pages
ISBN 81-87649-13-5 [HB]
Price: Rs 150 [only in India and the subcontinent]