The most significant novel about Partition is now available in Punjabi

By Arif Waqar

Jhoota Such
By Yashpal
Translated by: Javed Boota
Publisher: Suchet Kitaab Ghar, Lahore
Pages: 776
Price: Rs. 700

Yashpal's Hindi novel Jhoota Such has been declared by the Journal of South Asian Studies "the most significant novel about the partition of India." In another literary survey, the novel was placed among the ten best novels ever written in any language of the world.

Yashpal (1903-1976) was an anti-British activist and believed in armed struggle against the foreign occupation. As a young student in Lahore, he joined the revolutionary group of Bhagat Singh, Sukh Dev, Bhagvati Charun and Chandar Shekhar Azad who was killed in a shoot-out with the police. After Azad, Yashpal was elected the group leader, but on January 23, 1932, when the young revolutionary was trapped in a building and ambushed by the police, he ran out of ammunition and was arrested. He was sentenced to fourteen years? rigorous imprisonment.

When we look at Yashpal?s personal life we wonder if his own story is less intriguing than a thriller with well carved out characters and unexpected turning points. We even have a romantic track in the story. Some years before his arrest, a seventeen-year- old girl Prakashvati, from the same revolutionary group, fell in love with Yashpal. After his imprisonment he wrote to her that since there was no future of their relationship, she should feel free to plan her own life and forget about him. In response to this message, the young girl went straight to the British jail warden and declared that she wanted to marry the prisoner named Yashpal. As there was no clause against such a marriage in the jail manual, the jailer couldn't stop it and the marriage did take place -- the first of its kind in the whole history of Indian prisons.

After the Government of India Act was passed, a Congress government came to power in the United Provinces and subsequently all political prisoners were released. When Yashpal became a free man in 1938, he was quite a changed person. He had realised that a couple of bomb blasts or sporadic attacks on the British police officers won?t destabilise the British Raj; therefore he left the path of violence and devoted himself to literature. While in jail, he had also discovered the power of his pen, so he took to full time writing and decided to achieve his political goal through this medium. 

He started a Hindi magazine called Viplava (Revolution). His wife set up a publishing house in 1941 and a printing press in 1944. ?Prakashvati stood by him? writes their son Anand, ?not as a romantic muse but rather as a more sturdy and pragmatic partner who helped Yashpal find the creative and intellectual space for going on to write seventeen collections of short stories, twelve novels, and over twenty other books of essays, political analysis and travelogues?.

Out of these fifty books, one novel certainly stands apart, and that is none other than Jhoota Sach, which is rightly considered his magnum opus. It had been translated into Urdu long ago but that National Book Trust of India edition has long been out of print.

  "Translation is a tricky business"

The News on Sunday: How did it occur to you that you should translate a Hindi novel into Punjabi and then get it published in Pakistan?

Javed Boota: Well, first of all, translation is a tricky business. The more a text is language specific, the more difficult it is to translate. Poetry can be a case in point where the syntax becomes so important that you can not change the word order even within the original language, what to say of another language.

Narrative fiction seems comparatively easier to translate because you can play with the syntax without apparently tampering with the meaning. But this is a trap most translators unwittingly slip into. Khalid Hasan, for example, who is a superb translator of Manto, couldn?t sometimes resist the temptation to elaborate on the original text. He also didn?t hesitate to abbreviate or even completely skip a couple of lines that he thought were irrelevant for the target readers. This I think is criminal. A translator has no right to reveal, explain, expand, clarify, simplify, rationalise or in any other way ?refine? the original text.

When I used to read translated fiction in my free time, I felt very uncomfortable to note that some native translators tend to exoticise the text for the Western market, and by the same token, they try to domesticate the foreign texts for the local readers.

TNS: But what's wrong with that? They do it for better communication.

JB: No, not at all. It's purely a commercial consideration. And even if it?s done without any commercial intention, it?s immoral. I have seen enthusiasts of good causes who try to minoritise or feminise their translations but I don?t buy it, and it was just because of such aberrations that I decided to plunge into these deep and dark waters of translations.

TNS: And you brought out some real pearls from the bed of this ocean.

JB:  Well, I always tried to remain faithful to the original text. I started with Hindi short stories and got them published in the Punjabi magazine Pancham.

TNS: But why Hindi of all languages?

JB: There was a solid reason for it: people in Pakistan are totally ignorant of the great literary masterpieces being produced in their neighbourhood. Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada are doing wonders in fiction. It?s humanly impossible to learn all Indian languages; but very fortunately, all good Indian fiction is available in Hindi translations, thanks to the National Book Trust of India. I urge my fellow countrymen to learn Hindi to get access to all good regional literature.

TNS: In this perspective, where do you place Jhoota Such?

JB:  The region most affected by the partition of India was the province of Punjab and consequently the main body of the Partition Literature happens to be in Hindi, Urdu or Punjabi. In Urdu, we clearly know that from staunch Progressives like Krishan Chandar, Bedi and Qasmi to the so called Liberals like Ghulam Abbas, Manto and Intezar Hussain, everyone tried their hand on the theme of Partition, but the format they chose was the short story. In Hindi too, we have sporadic examples of longer fiction like Tamas by Bhisham Sahini and Pinjer by Amrita Preetam but again, the mainstay was the short story. In this background the epic work of Yashpal gains tremendous importance. This is a novel in two parts. The first part is set in Lahore and covers the turbulent period of 1942 to 1947, while the second part runs in Delhi during the first decade after the independence.

Since the Urdu translation of the National Book Trust is now out-of-print, it will be a great service to the Urdu reading public, if some official or private publishing house re-prints the Urdu version too. Meanwhile Lahorites can fully enjoy this Punjabi translation which has an edge over the original: the Lahori characters speak their own language !

-- Arif Waqar

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Some rare Pictures of Yashpal, courtesy Amarjit Chandan