Disrupting the canon

There are subversive, wayward words that often keep up their workaday face and dodge attention. I caught one at the recent festival of Indian languages, Samanvay, at the India Habitat Centre (IHC) in Delhi. Pratilipi , which means a copy, commonly a photocopy, is a routine word in the daily Hindi world of the government, commerce and education. But on the masthead of a literary magazine, it comes alive in its many disruptive hues.

Pratilipi is a unique bilingual online literary magazine, which is also available in print on demand. Its founder and editor, Giriraj Kiradoo, is a creative director of Samanvay, which the IHC organises every year. Samanvay looks like an offline twin of Partilipi since both promote Indian languages and literatures.

The juxtaposing of Hindi and English on the masthead of the Pratilipi website reminds me of a notorious book by a rogue philosopher. Jacques Derrida wrote an anti-book, Glas , which runs in two parallel columns of text in different type. The left column is on German philosopher Hegel and the right on the writings of French kleptomaniac playwright and novelist Jean Genet. Between these columns is a medley of comments, quotations and other marginalia. By juxtaposing literature and philosophy, Derrida tries to expose each to the other’s assumptions and possibilities. More than a book, it is a confounding collage of interplaying ideas and impressions.

Pratilipi isn’t as crazy as Glas and has none of its frustrating complexity. It’s an accessible magazine true to its title. It provides a lot of translation in several directions: from Norwegian into Hindi and Assamese into English, for instance. Its latest issue, titled Freedom , features more than 50 writers in about a dozen languages. But the magazine does share the book’s disruptive zeal. While it seems to give you a transcript of the maddening variety of Indian literatures, it also gives a full play to other meanings hidden in the word: representation and duplication. As it places side by side various national and international literatures, they gaze at one another and raise uncomfortable questions. Is fiction in Hindi or any other regional language a truer copy of Indian reality than fiction in English? Is literature a transcript of the society and class in which it emerges or can it transcend its context? Can Hindi provide a truer copy of Oriya poetry than English? Is Scandinavian literature in Hindi as much a transcript of colonial politics as the British literature we read in classrooms? As Pratilipi spreads itself across languages, cultures and politics, it confounds readers who are used to neat categories.

The variety of Pratilipi isn’t merely a product of editorial inventiveness; the magazine was birthed in hybridity. Kiradoo publishes it from Bikaner in Rajasthan, not the best location for a national literary arbiter. He is a PhD in English literature, writes prose, poetry and fiction in Hindi, and has no true love for his Rajasthani origins. “Six years ago, I was fed up with Hindi literary journals, which were either Left or Right. The formalist school was anti-Left and evaded contemporary issues. The problem with the Left was a focus on issues and very little emphasis on literariness. We lived in the long shadow of cold war,” he says. As the internet blurred boundaries and demolished borders, they could dream of publishing a literary magazine they wanted to read. With his friend Rahul Soni, who shared his hybridity, and designer Shiv Kumar Gandhi, Kiradoo set up the online magazine and named it Pratilipi , indicating the translated lives we live in the age of the internet, which brings together diverse people and cultures from around the world. “We wanted to disrupt the centre-periphery binary in the literary world and do away with the hierarchy of languages and writers. We even publish writers in alphabetical order,” he says.

Pratilipi is a long way off from the times when it seemed English and regional languages were two worlds that could never meet. English writers came from upper middle-class urban backgrounds, while regional writers lived in small towns. Big writers like Salman Rushdie could get away by declaring that Indian writing in English was far more valuable than all that has been written in regional languages. Pratilipi is at the front of a new literary movement that mixes the metropolitan with the mofussil and ‘contaminates’ the canon. But Kiradoo says they aren’t trying to bridge any divides. “We just disrupt the old order. We bring writing from different regions, languages and cultures together and let these writings look at each other the way they want,” he says. In Pratilipi , English and Hindi are not necessarily adversaries; each can find in the other its own pratilipi.

Kiradoo can’t write fluently in English though he has been an English lecturer. He says creative writing comes to him only in Hindi. He lives a life in constant translation, which shows in his magazine: only in Partilipi can you find both the reclusive Urdu writer Naiyer Masud and Norwegian writer Ingrid Storholmen side by side.

(Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist)