Motherwit Budhini Breast Stories Women Translation

This year’s selection brings together works translated from Marathi, Bengali and Malayalam. The books move across forms and concerns, from Dalit women’s lives and caste to memory, incompleteness, state violence, displacement and modernisation. Together, they show how translation can widen not only the range of books we read, but also the histories and perspectives through which we understand the world.

Urmila Pawar’s Motherwit is a collection of 14 short stories, translated from Marathi by Veena Deo and published by Zubaan in 2013. Pawar, who describes herself as Dalit, Buddhist and feminist, writes about women confronting caste oppression, family pressures, humiliation and misogyny. Her stories are rooted in everyday life, but their concerns are political: caste and gender remain present even in ordinary encounters. The collection includes ‘Mother’, ‘Sixth Finger’, ‘Woman as Caste’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘The Cycle of Dhamma’. Pawar’s sharp, sometimes deliberately abrasive language unsettles the stereotype of the soft-spoken woman writer. Her protagonists can be angry, humorous, vulnerable or defiant, often moving between these registers. Deo’s translation carries this force into English while retaining the texture of her short fiction.

Mahasweta Devi needs no introduction. Breast Stories brings together three stories, ‘Draupadi’, ‘Breast-Giver’ and ‘Behold the Bodice’, translated by scholar and feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. First published in English by Seagull Books in 1997, the collection takes the breast beyond associations with beauty, sexuality and motherhood, turning it into a site of labour, exploitation, violence and resistance. In ‘Draupadi’, tribal revolutionary Dopdi Mejhen transforms her violated body into an act of defiance against state power. ‘Breast-Giver’ follows Jashoda, whose body becomes her livelihood as a wet nurse, while ‘Behold the Bodice’ traces the violence unleashed around the body of migrant labourer Gangor. Spivak’s translation and introduction place Devi’s fiction within questions of gender, class, caste and the representation of marginalised women.

Sarah Joseph’s Budhini revisits the life of Budhini Mejhan, a fifteen year old Santal girl whose life changed after she welcomed Jawaharlal Nehru at the inauguration of the Panchet Dam in 1959. Her ceremonial gesture was interpreted as marriage, leading to her ostracisation and dismissal from her job as a construction worker. Joseph retells this history through Rupi Murmu, a journalist determined to recover Budhini’s story. The novel questions the human costs hidden within narratives of development and modernisation, while foregrounding displacement, indigenous identity and ecological concerns. Translated by Joseph’s daughter, novelist Sangeetha Sreenivasan, Budhini becomes an act of literary recovery: a woman’s life brought back from the margins of history.

(The author is an intern with The Indian Express)