SOURCE: MID-DAY.COM

IMPORTANT POINTS:

*A talk at the Asiatic Society of Mumbai offers a deep-dive into four noteworthy Gujarati texts including two by Parsi scholars, their distinct writing styles, tone and treatment, and relevance

- With 456 spoken languages, India ranks fourth in the list of world’s most linguistically diverse nations. So, it comes as no surprise that the country has rich literature in several languages. Shining a light on Gujarati books are Tulsi Vatsal, an independent researcher, writer, and editor, and Aban Mukherji, a freelance writer and translator.

-Four books — Dukhi Dadiba and the Irony of Fate by Dadi Edulji Taraporewala, Karan Ghelo by Nandashankar Mehta and Relating to Dahigauri by Narmada Shankar Dave and Travels in Iran by Kavasji Dinshaw Keasna; which have been co-translated by Tulsi Vatsal and Aban Mukherji.

-Vatsal points out that Indian writers, in the 19th century, had begun to move away from traditional religious themes, and had begun experimenting with the form of the modern novel. “In Karan Ghelo, we can see the influence of writers like Sir Walter Scott, while Dukhi Dadiba reads like a Victorian romance. Both texts reflect the great unease generated by Western ideas regarding the condition of women,” she shares, adding that the threat to patriarchal norms is evident in Narmada Shankar Dave’s text Relating to Dahigauri. Interestingly, Karan Ghelo, which is the first literary novel written in Gujarati, has not been out of print since 1866.

-Elaborating about the part of the talk that mentions ‘two cultures, one language’, they explain that though the medium of language is Gujarati for these books, Kavasji Dinshaw Keasna and Dadi Edulji Taraporewala belonged to the Parsi community. Which meant that they brought in their own cultural nuances to the story they told, which were different from how the storytelling progresses in the text written by Nandashankar Mehta and Narmada Shankar Dave, who were Gujaratis.