Confessions of a Marathi Writer

By VILAS SARANG

I have been asked to write
about myself as a Marathi
writer. That's the slot for
me, apparently. However, I happen to be a ques-
tionable sort of Marathi writer. I wrote my first ma-
ture story, "Flies," in the summer (Indian) of 1963,
between the two years of the M.A. in English litera-
ture I was then reading for. As it happens, I wrote
this story in English. Dilip Chitre was editing a spe-
cial issue of a renowned Marathi magazine, Abhi-
ruchi, run by his father, and I made a hasty crib, to
my mind unsatisfactory and lacking the style of the
original, for the issue. The Marathi "Flies" ap-
peared in Abhiruchi in 1965; the original English
text appeared in The London Magazine in 1981. (I
felt flattered that Alan Ross in 1981 thought of a
story written in 1963 as new and significant.) As by
then my other, later stories written in Marathi had
appeared in English as translations, I allowed this
story to appear in LM as Translated from the
Marathi, and that is how it stands in my 1990 col-
lection, Fair Tree of the Void (Penguin India). Well,
there's a "Marathi" writer for you!¹

Even the stories et cetera first written in Marathi
by me are often covertly English. I remember com-
posing the long final sentence of "The Terrorist"
(which I wrote first, and then worked toward it from
the beginning) in Marathi, mentally translating, la-
boriously over an entire day in my tiny apartment in
the benighted city of Basra, a complex English syn-
tax into my native tongue: still, the long, rolling
rhythms of that final sentence in the English version
are but a shadow in the "original" Marathi. The al-
lusions to Kafka and Eliot in "Testimony of an Indi-
an Vulture" sit uneasily in the Marathi text but
come into their own in the English. Numerous ex-
amples of this sort could be given. The rhythms in
my head are the rhythms of English, and they come
into their own only when I do the "original"
Marathi text into English. As a matter of fact, I re-
gard the English versions of my stories as the defini-
tive text, and the "original" Marathi as only a stage
toward the final casting.

This might sound like a strange admission from a
"Marathi" writer, and I anticipate the inevitable
question: why, then, do I write in Marathi? The an-
swer is that I cannot, and do not wish to, spurn my
roots in the Marathi language. Till the age of six-
teen, I read only Marathi. At sixteen, I read my first
full-length book in English ( Jim Corbett, The Man-
Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag), and thereafter it
was almost exclusively English, English, and En-
glish. For most of my adult life, my stream of con-
sciousness has flowed in English, and it is in a way
odd that, when I sit down to write, I switch to
thinking in Marathi. My conscious mind may func-
tion through English, but my unconscious is rooted
in Marathi; and to draw upon the resources of my
unconscious, I must go through the initial rites of
passage in my native tongue. However, the con-
scious part of my mind being situated in English, it
still remains necessary to re-create the text in En-
glish. To write first in Marathi, then to redo the text
in English, is thus a means of reconciling the two
halves of my divided psyche.

A more down-to-earth explanation is that, writing
in Marathi, I do not have to worry over prepositions
and articles. I feel I can be more freely inventive and
innovative working in Marathi. Sort of, do your
devil-may-care experiments in your backyard, and
then bring them before the world.

At the same time, I have always thought of myself
as belonging, in my own small ways, to an--admit-
tedly somewhat nebulous--international modernist
tradition. It is also, should I say inevitably, a West-
ern/European tradition. I have imagined myself as
working in the context of writers I have admired
most: Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, Beckett, et alii.
Marathi literature is so hopelessly mired in the stick-
in-the-mud middle-class ethos and reflexes, with its
peculiar literary style (laden with exclamation
marks!) that would appear antediluvian in English,
that, from the beginning, I refused to have any truck
with the sensibility it represented. The narrow, and
subtly ...