1st Edition
Life Writing and Translation Indian Perspectives
List of Contributors x
Preface xv
Acknowledgements xvii
Introduction 1
Mukul Chaturvedi
PART I
Truth-telling, Re-imagining and Translation 19
1 Inscribing the True Self, Translating Masculinities: Experiments with Gender in Gandhi’s Writings and Life Narrations 21
Meenakshi Malhotra
2 Retelling as Translation: The Refashioning of Vaishnavite Hagiographies as Bio-fiction in Postcolonial Assam 35
Dhurjjati Sarma
3 “I saw a light”: Translation and the Question of Agency in the Lifewritings of Suryakant Tripathi Nirala 51
Ruchi Sharma
4 Truth Telling and Translation in Autobiographies of Maitreyi Pushpa 65
Shubhra Dubey
PART II
Translating Resistance and Revolution 77
5 Translating the Self in Ajitha’s Ormakkurippukal: Context, Concerns and Challenges 79
Sanju Thomas
6 Tek Nath Rizal’s Nirbasan as a Study of Translation at the Eastern Himalayan Border 96
Kritika Chettri
7 The Self and the Cell in Minakshi Sen’s Prison Writing 107
Shayantani Das
8 Translating the Revolutionary Self: Political Auto/biographies and Memoirs in Punjabi 120
Amandeep Kaur
PART III
Gender, Agency and/in Translation 137
9 Ḥayāt-e Ashraf as an Auto/biography: Translating Women’s Resistance and Agency 139
Mohammed Afzal
10 “Bepardahgi” amid Social Taboo: Radical Acts of Narration in Bilquis Jehan Khan’s Autobiography A Song of Hyderabad (2010) 153
Nazia Akhtar
11 Mary Kom’s Collaborative Autobiography: Negotiating Authorship 168
Natasa Thoudam
12 Translating Desire and Dissent: A Study of Rajbangsi Women’s Folksongs 183Sumadhura Roy
PART IV
Life Writing, Marginality and Translation 199
13 Dalit Writing and/in Translation: Analysing Dalit Women’s Life Narratives in Marathi 201
Tejaswini Deo
14 Translation of Dalit Victimhood and Difference: An Examination of Bhanwar Meghwanshi’s I Could Not Be Hindu 217
P. Krishnan Unni
15 Writing the Disabled Self: Gender, Sexuality, and Women with Disabilities 229
Reshma R. Jose
16 Translated Lives: Devadasis and the Anti-Nautch Movement 243
Paromita Bose
PART V
Memory, Migration and Translation 259
17 Uncanny Memory-scapes: The Recreated Pastoral in two contemporary Bangla Partition (1947) Memoirs 261
Debjani Sengupta
18 Privileging Non-Conformity, Itinerancy and Rationality: Self-Articulation as Resistance in Dilara Hashem’s Kaktaliyo 273
Shubhra Ray
19 Migrant Identities: Seeking Self and Subjectivity in Lily Halder’s Bhanga Berhar Panchali and Sanchita Roy’s Ongar 288
Paramita Purakayastha
Index 304
Biography
Mukul Chaturvedi is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. Her doctoral research is on women’s testimonial literature from, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of interest include postcolonial literatures, autobiography studies, life writing, testimonies from conflict zones, gender and/in translation. She has recently published an edited volume titled, Life Writing, Representation, and Identity: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2024) and is currently working on the second volume of life writing.
