Burning Ground :Singed Souls

            Coal tarnishes not only the soul of the contractors, bureaucrats and labour union leaders but also turns them into inhuman tyrants. The unholy trinity of these three groups dictates and decides the fates of roofless, penniless villagers who have no alternative but to yield and live a precarious life - always on the precipice of doom and destruction.

         Interwoven in the text is the conspiracy to convert an accident case into a ‘missing’ case to evade compensation claims. Rahmat Mians ‘disappearance’ leaves its tragic impact on the aged father, wife and a child who are waiting in vain for the missing person to arrive. Interunion rivalries and feuds have also been authentically described. Gaddi brings us a world where idealism is swallowed by realities of day-to-day survival. Majumdar's idealism triumphs after taking the toll of his own life. He dies without surrendering his soul.

            The blurb brings to our notice Jai Ratan's credentials as a translator. One of the finest and the most prolific of translators from Urdu to English, a Sahitya Akademi awarded translator, it says, who has been credited with several works. The translator uses several colloquial expressions in italics such as sala, dhora, pahalwans, qur, qilli-danda, basti in the body of the text and provides their meanings in the form of footnotes wherever these expressions occur in the text.

            He uses the distorted nativised expression of the word ‘theatre’ viz. thater to show how foreign expressions get assimilated in vernacular languages. Yet, at the same time his explanations are not satisfactory, are even incorrect. For example, jethji (193) is an expression that a woman uses exclusively for her husband's elder brother. The footnote shows it as ‘elder brother’ (here brother-in-law). Now both of these explanations are misleading. Can a husband call his wife's elder brother as jethji? The correct expression in fact should have been ‘husband's elder brother’. The same slip is evident in the expression de^-war (199), which translates allegedly as ‘brother-in-law’. This also should have been glossed as ‘husband's younger brother’. If one is using the vernacular expression sala [a mild term of abuse - meaning ‘brother-in-law (wife's brother)’], one should use the plural form sale and not salas.  This becomes a hybrid expression. On page 84 Khatunia, a Muslim woman says, Alif Zabra which does not seem to be appropriate even if she is an illiterate - it should be Alif jabar – aa. A child might be parodying Alif-be-pe (97) but the later half Ma Mufgi Lade is unintelligible. The country-made revolver has been described as phatpatu (p 265), which seems to be slang.

          Jai Ratan has tried to retain the colloquial touch while translating. 'How you joke, Ansari Saheb” (p 21) may not be a totally appropriate translation of "Kyoun majak karte hain”?.

The Hindi/Urdu proverb "paani me rehkar magar se bair" loses its implication in the "one who wants to live in the river should not fall foul of the crocodile” (p 33).

            These are academic nuances. These intricate oddities notwithstanding, Jai Ratan's translation is an honest, convincing and engrossing rendering of the original text.

A.G. KHAN PhD