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North India had been a major participant in the Persian cosmopolis; the older parallel expansion and cultivation of literary production in Persian and various forms of the vernacular (in multiple scripts) persisted even as in the 19th century English gradually imposed itself as the new High language and as the model of literary modernity, and Hindi and Urdu codified their own historical narratives in competition with each other. Persian literature was subsequently marginalised and the old Persian-Hindi diglossia disavowed. Despite persistent low literacy, from the 1860s publishers in north India were multilingual and active in South Asia and beyond, and a heterogeneous print culture developed consisting of joint journal-and-book-publishers, theatre chapbooks and songbooks. The English colonial library also had a large lucrative market here, and early global writers like Kipling made north India part of the “significant geography” of English literature.
The MULOSIGE Readings from North India privilege the short story, translations and literary debates on world literature in Hindi, Urdu, and English journals; “readerly contacts” with English and other foreign and Indian literatures and transculturations; and on the inclusion/exclusion of orature from literary canons.
MULOSIGE also provides extensive translations of Progressive and Modernist Urdu Poetry, as well as translated Urdu Perspectives on World Literature.
Why do we read so few translations?
Statistics show that only between 3 - 5% of literary books published in the UK are translations. Ann Morgan in A Year of Reading the World writes about the difficulty in finding out about and getting hold of translations, even in the age of global publishing.
Qurratulain Hyder’s The Nautch Girl: A doubly multilingual text
What happens when a text from 17th century India passes through a double translation over the next two centuries? Qurratulain Hyder's translation of Hasan Shah's The Nautch Girl reveals some of the changes that occur when texts move across time and space.