Before reviewing Poonam Saxena’s English translation of Dharamvir Bharati’s novel Gunahon ka Devta, I decided to re-read the Hindi original, which I had last read in college. What I remembered was a hyper-romantic story about thwarted love, one so melodramatic that I had trouble believing any of it, even as a gullible undergraduate. More than 20 years older now, I expected to find that Bharati’s masterpiece is the anti-romantic Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda, and Gunahon ka Devta an early work with flashes of brilliance that heralded the writer he would become.
But the book surprised me, both with the quality of its writing as well as the radiance of its nostalgia: Bharati had me at his first paragraph, with an invocation to the Allahabad that once was, a city that now exists only in monochromatic prints in family albums. In these photographs, people who are now 80 or 90 years old are very young. They pose in starched saris, kurta-pajama or “shirt-pant” — out for a picnic on the banks of the Ganga, or in the botanical gardens. They live in a world in which maharajins clatter around in rasoighars, and hot summer nights are slept away in charpais on rooftops. It’s sometime around the late 1940s, India is about to, or has just become independent, and it all seems long ago and far away.
Chander, Sudha, Pammi, Binti and Gesu are the youthful characters of Gunahon ka Devta. Dharamvir Bharati, their creator, was only 23 himself when the book was published in 1949. The novel has not been out of print since then, and is generally considered the best-selling Hindi novel of all time. Because the particular impact of the original title is untranslatable (“The God of Sins” in English, which conveys nothing of the irony of the Hindi title), Poonam Saxena has gone with Chander & Sudha: A Passionate Tale of Star-Crossed Lovers. This is a wise choice: Chander and Sudha are the two main characters, and fate — in the form of arranged marriage — collides with the inevitability of their falling in love with each other.
Chander is a young student, one who is determined to be nothing less than a saint, especially if being a saint involves great personal sacrifice. Sudha, the daughter of his supervisor and mentor, loves him enough to agree to be that sacrifice even though she knows it will destroy her. Chander, indebted to Sudha’s father and treated like a son by him, forces Sudha to agree to marry a man her father chooses. He considers that anything else would be betrayal of Sudha’s father.
There is nothing special about the plot, except that Bharati’s flawed characters are memorable in their innocence. They declaim about ideal love, quite confident that they are right, until life teaches them how wrong they were. The collisions and dramas of youthful love, friendship and desire in this novel are played out in Edenic gardens and decorous drawing rooms. After the first exploration of Allahabad, we leave it outside, experiencing rather the insular world of female life, lived within the confines of the family home.
Because of Bharati’s modernist genius, the ugly oppressiveness of female life breaks through the shell of high romance. What struck me was the rage that he allows his female characters to own. Sudha, for example, is sketched as an ideal heroine might be — fragile, vulnerable and playful — but nothing remains of that after she is forced into marriage and (by implication) marital rape. In a letter to him, she writes, “There is so much hatred in me, I feel my blood will boil over.” And in one memorable scene, Chander is rushing to meet Sudha on one of her rare visits home and finds the woman of his dreams crouching in the train bathroom, being very sick. Later she tells him about her anorexia, how much she hates sex, and why she has turned to ritual prayer — she says it’s the only way Hindu women survive their husbands and sons.
Although the story is ostensibly about Chander’s high-minded struggles to reconcile sex and love, what happens is that the women on whose bodies he tries to resolve his conflicts, break out and destroy the façade of his idealism. It isn’t so much that he is wrong but that he is a mixed-up young man of his own time. The other characters, too, could seem somewhat dated to modern readers: Pammi, a free-spirited Anglo Indian woman, who tries to own Chander by giving him what Sudha can’t — sex; Gesu, Sudha’s Muslim college friend who writes a lot of Urdu poetry and keeps purdah; Buaji, Sudha’s horrible aunt who is determined to crush her daughter Binti’s spirit. All of these people are described in sometimes formal and classical Hindi, or the robust idioms of dehat, or the stately romance of Urdu. The collage of Bharati’s literary style works very naturally in the original — but how to bring all this over into English, and transpose these characters for a readership that is so far removed from their world? All books are probably difficult to translate, but Gunahon ka Devta must have posed a special challenge for Saxena.
I have to say that I loved Saxena’s translation. She has not tried to force the Hindi into perfect English, but has used an English that sounds very much like the one that Bharati’s characters might have spoken themselves. She doesn’t translate many simple Hindi words for which English equivalents could have been found — odhni, devta, rishta, samdhi, katahal, jungli, for example. As a result of this, Indian readers read an English that sounds like an Indian language. And this serves very well to familiarise us with the long-lost world of this novel. Not only that, it’s quite delightful to find literary English invaded by the high-flown sentiments of Hindi romance:
“And my soul floundered like a dry leaf in a storm, only to land in a morass of mud and dirt. You are my Sudha’s love… On this perfect morning, as pure as Vedic mantras, you have come once again to bathe my sin-coated body with your nectar… I will offer all my sins at her feet and ask for her forgiveness.”
I had been prepared to do some quibbling over the translation, but instead started wondering whether I had not in fact enjoyed the English version more than the Hindi. This was because, having picked up Chander & Sudha right after finishing Gunahon ka Devta, I had been expecting to be bored. Instead, I read breathlessly through the translation, as if I was reading the story for the first time. And even though I knew very well what was coming at the end, the English version made me cry all over again.
Anupama Chandra is a film editor and bibliophile
