NIRMALA TRANSLATED:

Premchand’s Heroine in English Dress

Rupert Snell

[Published (with new typos!) in Hindi: Language, Discourse, Writing, Volume 1 nos. 3-4, pp. 307-317.]

Is Premchand translatable? An English-medium journal dedicated to Hindi seems the

right place to ask such a question; and the existence of not one but two English
translations of Premchand’s 19271 novel Nirmala provides a comparative context for
an attempted answer. The first of these translations is the work of a well-established
American scholar of Hindi, David Rubin, and was published in 1988 by Orient
Paperbacks, Delhi; Rubin is best known in the Hindi world for his translations of
Premchand’s short stories under the title The World of Premchand published in 1969,
and in a revised edition entitled Deliverance and Other Stories in 1988; a further dozen
Premchand stories appeared as Widows, Wives and Other Heroines in 1998. A more
recent Nirmala in a translation by Alok Rai has appeared as handsome volume
published by O.U.P., Delhi, in 1999; and tedious as such introductions may be for the
individual concerned, it is worth noting that Alok Rai is the son of Premchand’s son
and biographer, the late and much lamented Amrit Rai.

Is Premchand translatable? In a word, no: the subtext of ‘purity’ borne by the

very title ‘Nirmala’ is denied to those who access this novel only through English. But
the question might be put in a rather less trite manner by asking: ‘Can English offer
access to the world of Premchand?’ Circumstantial evidence suggests again that it
cannot, because few readers who have to rely on translations alone seem to be much
moved by the writing of this ‘father of modern Hindi fiction’, as he is commonly
described. During his disdainful mapping of An Area of Darkness in 1964, V.S.
Naipaul recorded his disappointment at finding that Premchand ‘turned out to be a
minor fabulist, much preoccupied with the status of widows or daughters-in-law’;
and indeed the general standard of translations from Hindi into English may explain
Naipaul’s feeling that ‘what little I read of them [writers in Indian languages] in
translation did not encourage me to read more’2. Where V.S. Naipaul has trod, others,

1This is the date given by both translators; but the blurb on Alok Rai’s book contradicts this with a 1928
date.
2V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, London 1968, p. 215.
 2

such as S. Rushdie, have followed, inscribing a severe indictment of the work of those
of us who strive to bring Hindi literature to an English readership. The failure derives
from the difficulty in translating Hindi literature not just into the English language,
but into English literature – rendering it in a style of writing which conveys more
than the bland ‘and then..., and then..., and then...’ of ploddingly literal narrative.

An early casualty in the translation process is the individual voice of the original
author, which is all too easily lost in a lowest-common-denominator kind of multi-
purpose English style, whether in prose or verse. My own attempts at translating the
poetry of Kunwar Narain, Manglesh Dabral and others have foundered on precisely
this difficulty of finding an English voice that adequately matches (or impersonates)
the highly specialised and individual diction of the original poems; and an invitation
from a Delhi publisher to translate the recently televised (and hence saleable)
nineteenth-century novel Chandrakanta had to be turned down, because I could not
for the life of me find a style of comfortable English clothing for Devakinandan
Khatri’s fabulously gothic heroes and heroines that did not end up seeming
ridiculously un-Indian. Even writers who attempt to translate their own work (is this,
incidentally, a peculiarly Indian phenomenon?) often seem unable to recreate the
original style and flair of their own original text – Bhisham Sahni’s lacklustre
translation The Mansion (1998), for example, seems a distinctly rickety structure when
set alongside the fine original Mayyadas ki Marhi erected a decade earlier; and Ajneya’s
versions of his own poetry, even aided and abetted by the American poet Leonard
Nathan, fall curiously short of doing justice to the crisply articulate Hindi poems.
Other languages like Tamil, well served by such gifted translators as R.K. Ramanujan
and Lakshmi Holmström, seem to have fared so much better. But new hope for Hindi
has recently been shown in the sublime achievement of The Servant’s Shirt (1999), this
translated novel being worn just as comfortably by the translator Satti Khanna as was
its original Hindi Naukar ki Kameez (1979) by the novelist Vinod Kumar Shukla: the
engaging individuality of the Hindi survives intact in this astonishingly sympathetic
English version, with none of its essential quirkiness ironed out; and would-be
translators should study the processes that Khanna has used to such great effect.

Naipaul’s facile dismissal of Premchand indicates, on the one hand, the

paradoxically self-assured failure of his touristic attempt to take the pulse of literary
India; on the other, it suggests that Premchand’s appeal has become so eroded by the
process of translation as to make the endeavour barely worth the candle. For the
Hindi reader, Premchand’s writing in the original is so seductive that even the
narrative inconsistencies that so obviously mar a novel such as Nirmala are readily
forgiven; when we read Premchand we willingly suspend our disbelief and urge him
 3

on. The reader of the original Hindi is seduced by Premchand’s ability to create an
entirely believable domestic world of infinitely subtle integration, in which one is led
into the thoughts and feelings of the characters by a subtle mechanics whose laws
seem to derive directly from the genius of the Hindi language itself; the power of his
writing is in the detail, and many of the small and large satisfactions offered by
Premchand’s prose are to do with its texture, suggestive at once of surface complexity
and rooted depth. The successful translator must therefore have a profound insight
into the workings of Premchand’s hair-spring artistic mechanics: literary translation
is the ultimate form of aesthetic analysis, and calls for much more than the obvious
basic requirements of proficiency in what the conventional mixed metaphor labels as
the ‘source’ and ‘target’ languages respectively.

That being said, it is of course true that one must understand the language of a
book before translating it: as the Braj poet Vrind laconically observed in another
context, you can’t have a boundary if you don’t first have a village. For someone
from across the black water to acquire real competence in, for example, Hindi, is a life-
long undertaking, and a translation free of howlers is the holy grail of the foreign
translator’s long and rock-strewn path. Foreign learners of Hindi are much tested
from the outset, for example, by the ambiguities inherent in the Devanagari script
because of its having no distinction of upper and lower case, and many a student
reader of Premchand’s classic novel Godaan has been thrown by the first few lines of
the opening chapter, wherein the word gobar appears both as the name of a
protagonist (Hori’s son) and in its earthier sense as ‘cowdung’; the teacher has to fill in
the etymological background of ‘govardhan’ in order to show in what sense Dhaniya’s
hands were full of gobar, and also to prevent students from wondering why a proud
north Indian farming family would seemingly name its firstborn son ‘Bullshit’. The
potential for such confusions is profligately abundant, and many of us have fallen
into the traps of ambiguity more often than we would like to admit; but as I silently
suppress the record of my own published howlers, I must also maintain silence on
those perpetrated by my peers and betters, even though the tally is a lavishly full
one.

While I hope to show that an accurate initial reading of the original is only part of
the recipe for a successful translation, it is very obvious that our two Nirmala
translators are unevenly matched in their mastery of Hindi.3 A list of the places where
Rubin has misread, misunderstood or misinterpreted the Hindi original would add

3Since neither translator tells us which edition of Nirmala he used, it is possible that discrepancies
noted here derive from differences in the originals. The edition used for this review article is that
published by the Saraswati Press of Allahabad, and is itself undated.
 4

unwelcome length to this article, without adding much to my attempted analysis of

what is genuinely and fundamentally untranslatable in Premchand; a few examples
will suffice to show the various levels of error involved. In a telling passage from
chapter six of the novel, Nirmala ponders her fraught relationship with her husband,
and expresses the delicate and intractable nature of the problem with the words “mE# ...
vh nhI# kr sktI; jo mere ikye nhI# ho skta” (p. 71). The complex phrasing of the Hindi is
accurately resolved by Rai (p.52) with ‘I cannot do that which I cannot do’ (even if the
awkward ‘that which’ construction pokes a bony elbow in the reader’s eye); but
Rubin, evidently reading liye for kiye, stands the sense on its head with his ‘I can’t do
what can’t be done for me’ (p. 52). Those who know the novel, and who agree with
the observation in Rai’s thoroughly engaging ‘Afterword’ (p. 207) that sexuality is
‘the unacknowledged but unmistakable subtext of Nirmala’, will see the extent to
which Rubin’s version is not just a linguistic slip but a fundamental misreading of
Nirmala’s marital situation. Less critically perhaps, earlier in the novel, Totaram’s
crony Nayansukh advises him on how to strike a rakishly attractive figure, and
includes the advice “sO-pcas gjle# yad kr lo” (p. 68); and while Rai bends over
backwards to capture the casual approximation of the hyphenated number with his
wording ‘Commit some hundred-odd ghazals to memory’ (p. 49), Rubin misreads the
mathematics with his stultifyingly literal (or rather, just plain wrong) ‘Memorise a
hundred and fifty ghazals’ (p. 49). Similarly in chapter seven, Premchand has Totaram
say ‘ivic§ ßvBav kI åOrt hE’ (p. 84), economically and even racily rendered by Rai as
‘She’s a strange woman’ (p. 66), but mistranslated by Rubin as ‘A woman’s character is
peculiar’ (p. 63); and in the important dramatic scene with which chapter eighteen
ends, Rubin crucially mistranslates sHdyta as ‘help’ (evidently reading shayta),
making nonsense of a fine closing paragraph.

There are many further examples of similar errors involve a straightforward

misinterpretation of the Hindi lexicon and/or syntax. But other varieties of
misreading suggest a more fundamental failure to engage with the deeper meanings of
the novel. Elsewhere in chapter seven, when Nirmala reacts to Totaram’s suggestion
that Nirmala may not be as unsullied as her name would suggest, Premchand voices
her perplexity in the first-person sentence “È≈vr hI ^s Gr me# laj rKe#” (p. 85). Rai’s
version ‘May God protect the honour of such a house’, (p. 67) captures the spirit of
the sentence very efficiently, even if it interprets the object of God’s protective power
as the family unit rather than the individual; but Rubin’s version is ‘Probably only
God might be above suspicion in this house’ (p. 64), a reading which involves a deep-
seated misunderstanding of the divine dimension in Premchand’s idiom.
 5

Thus it would seem that there are at least three different levels – literal misreading,
syntactic misinterpretation, and cultural confusion – at which the foreign translator
can betray his reader’s trust, and there is no doubt that in this sense at the very least,
Rai is the more reliable of the two translators, and by a long chalk. Only very
occasionally does Rai let his attention stray: rare examples include the mystifying
‘Chandar was Chandrabhanu Singh’s son’ (p.4), which inadvertently turns Nirmala’s
brother Chandar into his own father (Premchand, p. 27, reads straightforwardly
“c~dr ka pUra nam c~ªBanu isnha Ta”); a missed negative on p. 96 in which Rai’s ‘she was
always very fond of the jhoomar’ reverses Premchand’s intention of showing that
Nirmala routinely spurned fine jewellery; and a forgivable confusion between the
names of brothers Siyaram and Jiyaram on p. 149.

But the story does not end there: mere freedom from fundamental errors is no
guarantee of a successful translation. Unquestionably the crux of the matter lies
rather with register and style, and the safe transfer of these factors from Hindi into
English. Though not always faithful to his own theoretical statements on the use of
language, Premchand has a remarkable facility with a wide range of stylistic registers
in Hindi, and the conventions of Hindi narrative (perhaps to some extent actually
determined by him through his fiction, as implied in his alleged paternity of this
genre) allow him to move seamlessly in and out of the dialogic voice that is his forte.
Whereas conventional English style requires the introduction of direct speech to be
marked with quotation marks, such tight-fitting restrictions are felt to be
uncomfortable and unnecessary in the freer-flowing composition of Hindi narrative;
and Premchand exploits this licence to the full, commuting easily between the voice of
a detached narrator on the one hand and the ‘first-person’ inner thoughts of an
individual character on the other. This facility is ideally suited to Premchand, since it
is in the first-person voice that we find him at his most engaging. But here too lies the
translator’s main problem, because the supple and idiomatic voice that integrates so
organically with the whole fictional world of Premchand’s creation is absolutely of a
piece with the Hindi language: to attempt to render it in English, with its radically
different perspectives, tastes, intimacies, sensibilities and cultural allusions, is like
trying to translate a plate of Diwali laddus into a Christmas pudding. This is the
reason for the quality of banal ‘sameness’ that so frequently hampers translations
from Hindi: though working from a stylistically marked original, translators tend to
opt for a safe, middle-of-the-road English voice, which may avoid the raucous chaos
of anachronism, but which equally fails to preserve the true quality of the original.

In translating a novel such as Nirmala, one has to determine an appropriate English

voice for each of the various characters. This involves a recognition that the
 6

translation is not only reaching across space (between two very different languages)
but also across time (between two very different historical periods, separated by the
best part of a century). Can Premchand’s characters be made to speak a stylistically
marked English, or should their voices be culturally neutral? While overlooking the
fact that today’s Mansaram would probably speak a banal ‘Hinglish’ khichari picked
up from the globalising media, the translator has to respect the fact of Mansaram’s
integration into his U.P. college world, and to present him through a fluent colloquial
style of language that does not seem out of place for the time and setting. The same
applies, of course, for all the characters, and, to a lesser degree, to the voice of the
remote narrator. The use of Sanskritised vocabulary is conventionally acceptable in
Hindi prose (even if too much distance between high-register wording and humdrum
events may recall Shrilal Shukla’s lampooning description of an anguished villager as
‘suffering from self-pity, acerbity and several other such literary characteristics’!4). At
every turn the translator has to maintain a sensibility to the inferences and
implications of the translation register, since alien imports will upset the delicate
literary eco-system of the original. Anything as obtrusive as American stylistic
features (such as Rubin’s ‘A snake’s gotten into my room’, p. 51, and ‘who all do I
have to make up to’, p. 70) seem ludicrous in the Indian context and must be avoided.
Indian English, on the other hand, raises no eyebrows in the translator’s recreation of
the early twentieth-century United Provinces, and Rai frequently allows himself such
usages as ‘Say, why don’t you ask Buwan once?’ (p. 25), ‘I’ll deal with her today itself’
(p. 41), ‘Mansaram wasn’t keen on shifting to the hostel’ (p. 57), ‘family members’ (p.
68), ‘She kept on tormenting Nirmala in this fashion for long’ (p. 68), ‘Where shall I
keep these sweets?’ (p. 90), and ‘he must be plying the charkha too’ (p. 126).

While some of these Indian English expressions may not be authentically

contemporary to the early decades of this century (the novel first appeared in serial
form between 1925 and 1926, and presumably draws on situations and experiences of
some years earlier), they ring true to the general north Indian scene of modern times,
and seem wholly in keeping with the spirit of the novel. It is easy to imagine that
Premchand himself (whose encounter with English began at the age of ten5) would
have been entirely happy with these versions, as indeed with the overall tone, tenor
and achievement of his grandson’s translation. The use of Indian English (or the
retention of Hindi features in the translated English) is more risky in the narrator’s
voice than in the speech of the characters themselves: Rubin’s ‘At this very moment
Totaram came into the room and stood’ (p. 63) is much too close to the Hindi “¨sI smy

4Shrilal Shukla, Rag Darbari, 2nd edition, Delhi 1985, p, 285.

5 Geetanjali Pandey, Between Two Worlds: an Intellectual Biography of Premchand. Delhi, 1989, p. 12.
 7

totaram kmre me# åa kr KÂ\e ho gye” (p. 83), and Rai is on safer ground with his neutral
‘Just then, Totaram walked into the room’ (p. 65). Much depends, of course, on the
intended readership, since subcontinental readers will find nothing remarkable in
these Indian-English usages; but such habits as assimilating the sense of ‘to put’ to
that of ‘to keep’ (both translating the Hindi verb rKna ) strike a discordant note for
those of us who find ourselves stuck on Blighty. Also to be avoided are those cases
where the Indian English actually differs importantly in meaning from standard usage;
here the syntax of the Hindi shows through all too clearly as a determinant of the
English construction, as in ‘Till the time I thought it was my job, I did it’ (Rai p. 63).

Premchand’s prose abounds with allusions to Indian cosmology, religion, and

mythic narrative, and translators have to negotiate a path between the two extremes
of leaving the reader to battle with obscurities on the one hand, and either over-
explaining or reducing the text on the other.6 The commonplace equation of the
goddess Lakshmi with wealth is a case in point, and when Premchand has Totaram
say to Nirmala, “BaÈ, åatI huÈ l∑mI to nhI# QukrayI jatI” (p. 73), Rai’s neat
deconstruction of the sentence as ‘But one can hardly turn away the goddess of
wealth’ (p. 54) is a clear winner over Rubin’s bizarre ‘My dear, one doesn’t spurn the
incoming Lakshmi’ (p. 54) – which somehow manages to mean very little at all. This
Hindi sentence is in fact a kind of translator’s shibboleth. In addition to the Lakshmi
reference, it contains, firstly, a vocative (bhai) of the kind that cannot be rendered
literally (Rubin’s ‘my dear’ deals with it nicely; Rai drops it, substituting the
conjunction ‘but’ as a colloquial lubricant to initiate the speech); and secondly a use of
the passive voice of the Hindi verb for an impersonal statement – for which both
translators adopt the appropriately dated English ‘one’, which sits well with the early
twentieth-century period. Nirmala lived in a world so far removed from our own that
a ‘period’ tone is fully justified on many occasions – though fogeyism has to be
avoided, and when Rai indulges in such phrasing as ‘there was that love between
them that reckons not a whit the lack of lucre’ (p. 109) he sails much too close to the
wind of self-parody.

Even more problematic are such cruxes as the concept of determinism enshrined in
the word sanskar – “kdaict pUvR sMßkaro# kw karN yhaÅ å~y ånaTo# se hmarI dxa kuC åçCI hE ,
pr hE# ånaT hI” soliloquises Mansaram (pp. 87-88). Here Rai assimilates the text to a
modernising idiom, ‘It’s possible that, out of old habit, our condition here is better

6In this context it is worth mentioning the now infamous introduction to Nandiny Nopany and P. Lal’s
Twenty Four Stories by Premchand (Delhi, 1980), where a discussion of the problems of translating
Premchand cites examples from various published translations, tacitly recommending the Nopany-Lal
versions as victors in the competition. Unfortunately, the reader reaches other conclusions.
 8

than that of the general run of orphans – but orphans is what we are’ (p. 70, emphasis
added); Rubin is more doggedly faithful to the Indian metaphysics in his ‘May be as a
result of earlier incarnations their state was better than that of other orphans, but still
– they were orphans’, (p. 67) but his ‘earlier incarnations’ is not only too stolidly
Indological but also too lofty and quite wrong in register, ‘incarnation’ surely being
the preserve of deities, not ordinary mortals. It is, admittedly, a particularly tricky
sentence to get right – a sentence which makes one glad of the critic’s prerogative of
criticising without suggesting alternatives.

Both our translators have interesting things to say, outside the frame of the novel
itself, about its reception in a world which has generally turned its back on
melodrama as a narrative mode. The possibility of toning down some of the purple
excesses of Premchand’s writing seems to underlie several choices of English
expression, reminding us that a translator is, amongst other things, an editor in
disguise. Chapter thirteen begins with the death of Mansaram, and its opening
paragraph ends with the narrative voice lamenting that Munshi ji has realised
Nirmala’s innocence too late in the proceedings. Premchand ends his paragraph with
an autonomous sentence consisting of a double image couched in paired relative
clauses: jb haT se tIr inkl cuka Ta -- jb musaiPr ne rkab me# paÅv \al ilya Ta (p. 124).
Rubin renders this as ‘... only when the arrow had left the bow, when the traveller
had already set [sic] on his journey’ (p. 98), while Rai has ‘... but only now, when it
was already too late, when the traveller had already set his foot in the stirrup and was
ready to depart’ (p. 108). Both translators append their respective versions to the end
of the previous sentence, thereby toning down the stand-alone (but too purple?)
drama of the autonomous sentence carefully chosen by the author. Both, too, have
seen fit to alter the imagery in subtle or substantial ways: Rubin helpfully corrects
Premchand’s archery image by changing ‘hand’ to ‘bow’, but feels the need to
substitute the ‘foot in stirrup’ image by a more generalising reference to departure on
a journey; conversely, Rai throws away the bow and arrow in favour of the
generalising gloss ‘when it was already too late’; he then maintains the foot in the
stirrup, only to lose his nerve at the last minute, throwing in ‘and was ready to
depart’ for good measure anyway.

Grammatical, stylistic and metaphorical cruxes of this kind throng every page of
the novel, and both translators struggle valiantly for appropriate solutions. Less
obviously intrusive, but sometimes no less problematic, is Hindi’s fondness for
rhetorical questions. Ever since Tulsidas asked ko kZpal sMkr sirs – ‘Who is generous
like Shankar?’ – Hindi writers have exploited the power of rhetorical questions for all
they were worth; but when they come in flocks, do they not pall, are they not
 9

tedious, and should the translator not reduce them in the English version? Rai allows
a sequence of five in a dialogue on p. 59, where the conversation begins to resemble
that children’s game in which two speakers must converse entirely through
interrogatives. Just as obtrusive is any structural patterning that repeats a formulaic
cadence: five out of a consecutive six sentences on Rai’s p. 57 end with the word
‘there’. Such stylistic features have as much to do with English style as they do with
the process of translation per se, but they all form part of the overall effect of the
translated text, and hence bear directly on the reception likely to be afforded to
Nirmala in her English clothing.

I would like to end with a final example of the difficulty of capturing the essential
genius of Premchand’s style. In a rather awkwardly constructed passage just before
the ‘Lakshmi’ reference, Premchand attempts a kind of split-screen parallel vision of
Nirmala’s beautiful face and Totaram’s ageing reflection in a mirror. For all the
modernity of the apparent camera angles, the language itself is timeless if not actually
‘classical’ in tone: ¨skI yh ånupm Civ ¨nkw Hdy ka xUl bn gyI (p. 73). The imagery of a
‘sharp pain in the heart’, typifying Premchand’s fondness for physical imagery and
concrete metaphor, has a pedigree that reaches back to the medieval world of the
bhakti poets, as does the entire lexicon for this sentence; but this very antiquity does
not led itself to modern dress in English, and our two translators feel the need to tone
the image down by substituting a more everyday register. Rubin has ‘this matchless
beauty of hers had become a sore in her heart’ (p.54), blunting the agony somewhat,
while Rai surgically removes the heart with his ‘Her very beauty had become a cause
of pain and suffering to him’ (p. 54). These are both safe readings, but their very
safety makes them staid, and robs the original of some of its allusive potency. The
reader is denied that sense of an integration with layers of metaphor which have
accumulated gradually over the several centuries of what we may justly call ‘the Hindi
tradition’. For if it is true that Premchand is the ‘father’ of a modern genre, it is
equally true that he is also the product of a literary tradition that reaches back to the
medieval period.

Dr Rupert Snell
Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
London WC1H OXG