Untouchables Castes in India by Shyamlal

I also translated Osho’s “Tantrik Sex”, besides a series of articles on Jawaharlal Nehru by Chalapathi Rau. Subsequently, I translated an article by Dr Dharamvir Bharati, published in the Illustrated Weekly, into Hindi.

That gave me some courage and I began trying to read and understand English. “Well, word-to-word translations are boring,” he would quip. Mahendraji smiled while spotting my creative liberties. Where I could not understand, I improvised. I bought a bulky dictionary to help me with the translation. My inferiority complex again came in my way, for my job required translating stories from the Northern India Patrika, which arrived by post, into Hindi for publication in the weekly. Its proprietor Mahendra Gupta was a well-known English-language journalist. My second job was with Sahkari Yug, a Hindi weekly published from Rampur. I was so weak in English that after High School, I stopped opting for it. I studied English up to High School and was grateful to get a pass mark. Those days, English was taught from sixth grade onwards in government schools. The story of my initiation into English-to-Hindi translation is more interesting. Thus, my work as a translator began with rendering text in Urdu into Hindi. It was there that I learnt the art of translating into readable Hindi. I was supposed to translate the Urdu text published in Noor into Hindi for Haadi. Two children’s publications were brought out by the publisher – Haadi in Hindi and Noor in Urdu. I agreed to Maulana’s offer, leading to my appointment as an Urdu-Hindi translator at Maktaba Anhasnath, an Islamic publisher in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh.

A black-bearded Maulana, who used to pass by my house often, saw me read Urdu and asked, “Do you want to work?” At the time I was a first-year Intermediate student. One fine day, standing outside my home in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, I was reading the Urdu newspaper Nazim. It just so happened that my first job was as a translator. One, that translating is not my hobby and two, that I never wanted to become a translator. Keay’s book titled ‘Kabir and His Followers’) on 20 August 2022Īt the outset, I want to make two things clear. This is the expanded version of the author’s address to a webinar titled ‘What has been the importance of the critical gaze of outsiders (non-Indians) on Indian society?’ organized by Forward Press on the occasion of the release of the book ‘Kabir Aur Kabirpanth’ (Kanwal Bharti’s translation of F.E.

Untouchables Castes in India by Shyamlal