Vijaydan Detha: The Nobel contender from Rajasthan

Short story writer Vijaydan Detha, known popularly as ‘the Shakespeare of Rajasthan’, created a flutter of excitement earlier this week when he was spoken of as one of the contenders for the 2011 Nobel prize for literature. He may not have won this year, but for readers, this is as good a time as any to get more familiar with this colossus of Indian literature, writes his translator Christi A Merrill.

I first met Vijaydan Detha in the late 1980s, through the students at Digantar School in Jaipur where I volunteer-taught. The students adored his Hindi collection of Rajasthani folktales AnokhaPer (A Singular Tree). It was such a pleasure to read the stories out loud to them that I decided to include one — about a spirited louse who leaves her husband because he doesn’t treat her properly —in an article on Rajasthani oral traditions I owed a US magazine.  I knew my friends in Jaipur talked about him with great respect and even awe, but I was young then and so it felt like a relevation to me that writing could really be this good.

Defying stereotypes
I also assumed then that it would be a fairly straightforward task to render his prose into acceptable English. It was only after traveling with him to his village that I discovered he had volumes and volumes of stories, nearly all of them based on oral versions he heard in his village (from aunts, bonded laborers, hard-core thieves, and itinerant holy men), and nearly all of them on themes like spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or same-sex marriage — themes that were decidedly not for children. They defied the stereotype I had of the quaint folk tale. The more I worked with him the more I suspected he relied so much on local oral sources in part because he enjoyed how much these stories defied the stereotype of ‘colourful, backward’ Rajasthan. He was greatly inspired by the culture he had grown up with, deeply proud of it, and also committed to protecting and nurturing it.

Those days he travelled a lot, and usually by bus. He seemed perfectly at ease, sitting upright in his seat towards the middle of the bus, book in hand, reading to himself as we bounced along together. It didn’t surprise me to hear a few years later that UntoldHitlers was based on a heated moral discussion by fellow villagers Vijaydan-ji overheard while riding the bus between Jodhpur and his village, Borunda. His life-long friend Komal Kothari once told me Bijji (as he was fondly called by his close associates) could hear the same exact story recounted, and then turn it into a real work of art, when any of us would not even remember the barest details.

The writer as reader
That first time I traveled with him from Jaipur to Borunda we rode over the dramatic crest into Pushkar, past wind-carved rocks, and as we got further into the desert I noticed too that the outfit that seemed so distinctive in glittery Jaipur — a long white cotton kurta with pens in the breast pockets, a quilted vest of hand block printed fabric, white cotton dhoti down to his ankles, hand-crafted leather shoes with a slight curl to the toes — seemed more and more ordinary the closer we got to his home. Over the years I noticed that he never seemed fazed to be out of step with others on the street. Komal-da used to tease him about his “monkey caps” in particular, especially for the way he would wind his wool scarf around the cap to keep the chill from his head, even on days the rest of us were still running coolers. I heard he wore the same outfit on his trips abroad to Moscow and elsewhere.

The year I met him he talked mostly of Premchand and Anton Chekhov, but on that bus trip was reading The Executioner’s Song in English. Sitting next to him I could hear how avidly he read, because he murmured every word quietly to himself, replete with gentle grunts of surprise or admiration, repeating phrases he particularly liked. He seemed to take pleasure in the feel of the words against his tongue, like they were an especially finely-made, extra-sticky sweet. Even on the bus he read with pencil in hand, underlining phrases he found noteworthy, marking checks or stars in the margins next to phrases he might want to return to later. I noticed when he put the book down that every line was underlined, and that there were checks,  double checks and sometimes stars too at the end of every line. When we reached Borunda, I saw every book in his library was similarly filled with checks, stars and underlined sentences.

I was immediately taken with him, not only because of his writing, but also because of his approach to his writing, and to the world. He cared so deeply and sincerely about the kinds of issues that affected all of us on a day-to-day basis, and really felt the stories he was writing had lessons to teach all of us.  The tale of the snake and the dove was a warning to the powerful not to be consumed by greed, and Straw Epic showed how easy it was to believe the mortal violence of revenge was justified. That first evening at his home he asked me polite but guarded questions about what brought me to India, as his grandchildren ran in with plate after plate of thick chappatis, spicy mustard greens, and garlicky dal that his daughters-in-law had prepared fresh for us, and the more specific my answers grew about my dissatisfaction with the pervasive sense of American superiority, the historical connection between the lawlessness of multinational corporations and the logic of colonialism, the more pointed his questions grew, until suddenly his questions became exclamations and I realised I had passed some sort of test. He then pointed down at our clean plates as further evidence of our larger point of commonality, remarking, “You’re the first person I’ve ever met who eats as fast as I do!”

The impetuous ‘Bijji’
In those first interviews he described his excitement over hearing new versions of a story and immediately writing them down by fountain pen. He told me the printer would have to carry his handwritten sheets of paper carefully between thumb and forefinger to the press because the ink had not had time to dry. On my next visit, however, such enthusiasm did not seem quite as infectious at 3.30am. We had decided to collaborate on a few of his overtly “political” stories (he used the English word), and he had already been up, impatient for me to join him. When he could wait no longer he climbed up to the roof where I lay asleep on my charpoy between his daughters-in-law, and tried to shake me awake. I said something in my half-asleep state that I fear was not as coherent nor as polite as I would have wished. I tried explaining to him later in the way of an apology that I was not an early morning person. Fortunately I knew enough then not to share with him my mother’s nickname for me as a child: “my little night owl.”

His family seemed amused by the incident and shared with me a much-repeated remark an aunt had made about the impetuous Bijji as a boy: How did you manage to wait nine months?

I wish now that his aunt could see how Bijji has managed to funnel that irrepressible energy into writing down story after story, volume after volume, year after year to create an oeuvre so many in Rajasthan feel showcases the best parts of their culture, and that now Indians around the world feel proud to have represent them. It took me many years of earnest reflection (earning me  an MFA in Translation and a PhD in Comparative Literature) to formulate a strategy for translating that would allow readers of English some idea of his playfulness and complexity, and would reveal the deep engagement with all stratas of Rajasthani society.

— Christi A Merrill teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan

Vijaydan Detha: Drawing inspiration from folklore
Detha, 85, fondly called Bijji, was named among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. A recipient of the Padmashri, Sahitya Akademi and Sahitya Chudamani Awards, Detha has written more than 800 short stories in Hindi and Rajasthani, most of which have been translated into English.

His most well-known works include Bataan Ri Phulwari (Garden Of Tales), a fourteen volume collection of stories that draws on folklore and spoken dialects of Rajasthan, and Bapu Ke Teen Hatyare, a book criticising the works of Harivanshrai Bachchan, Sumitra Nandan Pant and Narendra Sharma, who released books on Mahatma Gandhi two months after his death. His short story ‘Duvidha’ was first made into a film by Mani Kaul in 1973 and later remade as Paheli in 2005.

Detha’s father Sabaldan and grandfather Jugtidan were well-known Rajasthani poets. In the 1950s, after having written 1,300 poems and 300 short stories, Detha was inspired by 19th century Russian literature and he “learnt to love his mother tongue (Rajasthani) even more”. His favourite authors include Sarat Chandra Chattopadhya, Anton Chekhov and Rabindranath Tagore.
He co-founded Rupayan Sansthan, an institute that documents Rajasthani folk-lore, arts and music.