Saraladebi Chaudhurani

The Scattered Leaves of My Life: an Indian
nationalist remembers
By Saraladebi Chaudhurani,
Women Unlimited and Stree, Rs 500

In the memoirs of Saraladebi Chaudhurani, Swarnakumari Ghoshal’s daughter and Rabindranath Tagore’s niece, there is an inimitable passage describing the main kitchen in the bustling, crowded Jorasanko house of her childhood. On a clean cloth spread on the floor, cooked rice would be piled up before being distributed to each room in each mahal of the house. The pile of rice would almost touch the ceiling. It is an unforgettable image, as vivid and original as numerous others in Sarala’s unsystematic, at times disconcertingly honest, memoirs. But readers of what purports to be the translation of her Jibaner Jharapata, mysteriously renamed The Scattered Leaves of My Life: An Indian Nationalist Remembers — translated, edited and with an introduction by Sikata Banerjee — will not find it.

As they will not find much else. Banerjee came across this “vibrant voice of an audacious woman” when studying “gender and nation in India”. Banerjee’s confidence in her own research is awe-inspiring, since it has dictated a mint-new subtitle to a supposedly translated work. A brilliant and unusual woman, a singer, composer, poet, scholar, thinker, writer and editor apart from being an explorer of the many routes to personal and national freedom, has to be squeezed into the category of Indian nationalist because it suits her translator.

But no one can accuse Banerjee of not playing fair. “In the interests of readability,” she says in the preface, “I have edited freely, deleting portions of the text that offered what, I considered, only unnecessary details.” Since Banerjee leans on the impeccable authority of Gayatri Spivak with regard to the freedom of translation, the articulate Sarala, if invoked, could find herself struck dumb.

The extended introduction suggests that Banerjee finds readable only those portions of the text that relate directly to Sarala’s “muscular nationalism”, gender, independence, and the “provocative” conflict between these and allied paraphernalia. The rest can be deleted as “unnecessary”, since a researcher in the 21st century, naturally far in advance of a leading writer of the previous century, so considers it.

For example, almost a whole chapter has been dropped apart from its first few paragraphs. In it Sarala is quoting from an essay by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay — not a “speech” — in order to show how her ideas about the ethics of lying developed from her first youthful support of her Rabimama’s uncompromising championship of the truth towards Bankimchandra’s more nuanced approach. Banerjee also drops the first paragraph of the work, for the second paragraph makes the “better beginning”. It so happens that in the first paragraph Sarala says that she is remembering bits of her whole life, not just its “nationalist” portions.

Banerjee’s honesty, just like her confidence, is compelling. “I have selected and paraphrased,” she continues cheerfully in the preface, “avoiding verbatim translation, which had the potential of destroying the lively spirit of this work.” That spirit eludes us anyway, the editor has seen to that.

There is no law against paraphrase — the slight hitch is that it is not translation. Sarala was an extraordinary writer, precise and picturesque, modulating from the melancholy to the aggressive in the turn of a phrase, choosing — and coining — the most ravishing words in a still young language. The translator just has to listen. But Banerjee is tone deaf. And like the tone deaf, she does not know what she cannot hear.

Undoubtedly, Banerjee’s subject of research is exceedingly valuable, and Sarala is a significant figure in it. Selections from her memoirs and essays would have done thunderingly well in a book on gender and nationalism or whatever it is that Banerjee is interested in. Why pretend to translate her memoirs?