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
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)