'People learnt Punjabi so that they could read his novels': Former Indian ambassador to the UAE on his grandfather's legacy

How do the young look at the Indian independence movement? Sure, the stories of that hard-won freedom have been played on our TV screens, in films and books, but it is the literature of the time that offers a more visceral account of what life under colonial rule was truly like. Nanak Singh had been one of the most respected voices in the intelligentsia of the time. His novels hold a mirror to what the partition of India truly entailed.

In 1919, he was present at Jallianwala Bagh where the British troops, under orders from General Dyer, shot indiscriminately at a crowd that had gathered to protest against the Rowlatt Act; he even lost two friends to the massacre. Imagine the kind of writing that can come out of a mind that has witnessed the horror of all horrors, the fiction that deep dives into not just the political but the personal cost of partition. Nanak Singh’s writing encapsulated the incisiveness of the times. A reason why it becomes an important reading for those trying to make sense of partition.

His grandson, career diplomat and former Indian ambassador to the UAE Navdeep Suri, first began to translate his works in the early 2000s in an attempt to take them to a wider, global audience. At the recently held India By The Creek festival, a new translation of his grandfather’s epic novel, A Game of Fire, was released by Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Tolerance and Coexistence. In an interview with wknd., Suri spoke of the challenges of translating his grandfather’s monumental works and why retelling these stories matter, especially to the young generation. Edited excerpts from an interview:

As a career diplomat, what made you translate these novels written by your grandfather eight decades ago?

I did not discover it myself, I was driven to it by my mother. My mother was a professor of Punjabi at Khalsa College for Women in Amritsar. She had said that apart from being the daughter-in-law of Nanak Singh, she had been an admirer of his writings. He was obviously a genius storyteller. She had wished that his writing reached a wider audience. Unfortunately, he wrote in Gurmukhi, which is a shrinking universe. She urged me to take up translation. I translated the first book 15 years ago, which was a novel called Pavitra Paapi. Then I worked on his second novel, which was called A Life Incomplete. That was the beginning of the journey. After fiction, I turned my gaze towards one of his long poems, Khooni Vaisakhi, which he’d written after surviving the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, to time it with the centenary of the event in 2019.

That was a new challenge because translating poetry is a different ballgame altogether. When you are translating poetry, you are not only carrying the meaning, you also want to carry the cadence, the rhyme and the metre into the new language. That was very well received. I was wondering what was next, and that’s when I thought of these two novels that my grandfather wrote in 1947-48. Both were published in 1948 and were themed on partition of India. This was a time when we were celebrating Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav in India (75th anniversary of Indian independence) and I felt it was important to reflect on the price paid in Punjab, Bengal for partition. These two novels (Hymns in Blood, and A Game of Fire) were taken up as projects for this reason.

You are conversant in both languages, so what are the challenges of translating a work that is already deemed a classic?

There are two or three specific challenges. One, these books were written 75 years ago; some were written almost 100 years ago in a different context and geography. Today, the audience is different. You run into challenges pertaining to the vocabulary of that place, particularly the idioms that are rooted in the soil. Sometimes, one proverb can say so much, but you cannot translate it without going into too much detail. So, I have to keep in mind what I am translating should be accessible to someone in America, Canada or somewhere else, who does not have any cultural context. There is also a balance that a translator has to maintain — you don’t want to over-translate, but you want to throw enough hint to make sure a reader in a different geographical or cultural context is also able to understand or relate to it.

In your view, how does fiction help us understand partition in a way non-fiction does not?

Very good question. Fiction has its own role and history has its own. Human beings remember stories. You might remember a story your grandmother told you instead of a chapter in history. The way the stories are told have a profound impact on our subconscious. My grandfather saw himself as a social reformer and he wanted to do so through his writings. He was deeply influenced by Munshi Premchand’s writings. In this book, he leaves us with a very clear message—beware of the dangers of unleashing communal passions, beware of leaders who may just inflame those passions in you. He talks about the tendency of the media to exaggerate on stories that inflame your passions further. He wanted us to be mindful. His enduring message book after book is : “Yes, I am a devout Sikh, but my religion is my personal matter. My commitment to humanity is my universal message.” That was his creed.

You were 12 when your grandfather passed away. At which stage of your life did you truly understand the robustness of his literary works?

The wake-up call was when I was posted at our embassy in Washington in 1997. This was the year of his birth centenary. India, at that time, had a Punjabi prime minister I.K. Gujral, who happened to be a great fan of my grandfather’s writings. He announced major celebrations and released a postal stamp. Suddenly, the news spread that Nanak Singh’s birth centenary was being celebrated. I was receiving invitations in Washington, not as a diplomat but as Nanak Singh’s grandson. There were events in Chicago, New Jersey and other places. Some people who attended those events would walk up to me and say, “We learnt Punjabi so that we could read his novels.” That brought alive to me a family legacy I had been complacent about. That, combined with my mother urging me to carry his works forward, was the reason I took this up.

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