Satire operates on the largest levels of social identification and social structure, and the smallest: the smallest detail is used to exemplify the social structure’s problems, or the oddness, or particularity, of a social formation—a custom, a manner, a rite, a ritual. In one way, you could say that cultural satire operates still on the rubric of premodern anthropology, but with the sizable difference that the writers of satire write from inside the culture and society being described and critiqued. The problem of translating satire—thought of as the problem of translating culture—is brought back to the colonial problem as identified in postcolonial times: cultural appropriation and cultural stereotyping.
The translator is an interpreter, as well as a publicist for the text being brought into a new cultural setting. It is one thing for a culture to laugh at itself, to critique itself, but it might be another thing for one culture to laugh across the borders of social division at another culture. This fraught tension of who is laughing at whom is sensed within Shrilal Shukla’s work: while Shukla paints amusing, critical portraits of middle-class, semi-Westernized individuals of Indian cities from the 1960s through the 2000s, his best-known satire concentrates on the Indian countryside and village life. In this case, is Shukla, a Brahmin from the city, laughing at the villagers, and so manifesting the city dweller’s prejudice against the villager’s backwardness, the villager’s primitiveness? (There is even an official social designation attached to some country dwellers in India called “other backward classes,” or OBCs.) Or is he laughing with them?
The question is complicated by the fact that Shukla also satirizes the city dwellers who go to the villages and small towns of the countryside through their activities in rural development or “village uplift” work. The history of independent India is in part the history of the interactions of the political and cultural elites of the cities, complete with their historical legacies reaching back into colonial times, with the political infrastructure of the villages and small towns, with its distinctly different hues. That Shukla satirizes both poles of the political structure in post-Independence India suggests that: 1) no one is ever above ridicule, and 2) the structure itself, with all its member parts, is the actual focus of his satirical depictions. Moreover, the distinction between the village and the city is never as clear-cut in India as it might seem. When I lived in Lucknow, the same city as Shukla did, the joke was that Lucknow was the biggest village in the world. This is the same joke told in every “mid-sized” Indian city (mid-sized means over a million people). Only a minuscule percentage of Indians can claim to be from “old money,” or claim to be from families who have lived for generations in cities. While there is a split in consciousness between the city and village, the reality is that city dwellers still have ties to the countryside. Yet, since the city is a social staging ground of mobility, city dwellers are constantly denying or repressing their village pasts (and presents). No doubt, this repression is part of the reason why village uplift movements have been so filled with corruption, doublespeak, and poor implementation. Someone higher on the chain of social mobility can strengthen their position by keeping those under them where they are. The city-dwelling do-gooder is not free from the desire (and pressure) of moving up on the social food chain.
Translating humor is thought to be among the most difficult forms of translation. In translating Shukla’s humor, I think it helps that I have spent time in the Indian countryside and that I identify strongly with the position of a country boy in the city. (I have to go back just two generations to get to my grandparents who left the farms, who left the countryside, for the big city. Moreover, some of my formative memories are wandering around in summer fields, turning over rocks, looking for ringneck snakes.) So, just as Shukla’s subject position is imbricated in the complex social interactions that he describes, and while the particular social makeup of the Indian countryside is unique to itself, I feel a sense of engagement and identification in the template of city and village that constitutes the core of Shukla’s satire. While translating, I feel as though I am laughing with the text, and laughing at myself. Looking at the first scene from “Several Days in Umraonagar,” you might say that it’s not just that I have experienced riding in buses full of livestock, but that, if you would allow me to admit it, I prefer it.
Translating texts that present exaggerated and humorous caricatures of Indian “types” isn’t necessarily a nefarious “colonial” activity. If the question of whether there is a sort of humor shared by all cultures is too difficult to address here, perhaps then the value of satire translations is the question that must be addressed to each reader who exists outside of the source text’s cultural ambit, namely, to what extent does the reader lay aside cultural prejudices and biases, to what extent does the reader allow an opening of worldview and subjectivity, in order to try to find the humor funny, and funny in the way of laughing with and not at.
- Matt Reeck
In general, satire is known to bear relation to politics, and Shrilal Shukla himself is best known as a political satirist. But, in fact, Fifty Years of Ignorance (1997) exemplifies the broad range of his style and subject matter. The form of these ranges from essays of direct socio-political commentary, to fake interviews, fake government reports, fake scholarly articles, as well as lightly fictionalized anecdotes about real people. For content, these pieces treat political matters, such as in “Interview with a Defeated Politician” and “More like a Swami than a Swami.” They treat the author himself as an object of self-satire, such as “One Happy Day.” They also treat literary matters, such as a piece on the Rushdie Affair. They also document one of Shukla’s favorite subject matters: the society of North Indian small towns and villages. While satire in European literature is most commonly thought to focus on changing society through revealing in an exaggerated fashion the social ills that are so commonplace as to escape unnoticed, satire in Hindi is a broad, umbrella genre; this volume demonstrates the breadth of the genre, from trenchant, strident objections to political and social ills, to self-deprecating and innocuous shows of wit about 1970s-1990s Indian society. With postcolonial India increasingly showing signs of slipping toward fascism, Shukla’s satire is overdue for a full consideration as one important chapter in the history of literary critique of governance and society.
- Matt Reeck
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).