Tejaswini Niranjana comes from a family where both her parents were accomplished writers. She is a highly respected academician with research focused on culture, feminism, translation and ethnomusicology. Continuing the family tradition of writing, she is the author of several books and an award-winning translator of Kannada books into English.
In an exclusive interview, Tejaswini talks about childhood in tranquil Bengaluru of the 1960s, her parents who supported and motivated her, her translation techniques and research interests.
I grew up in an environment with two writers at home and we had other writers visiting all the time. At a very young age, I also started writing. Initially I was more comfortable writing in English. When I first started writing, I tried to write some stories or imitate other writers. My parents advised me to write something of my own. Aside from all this, the best thing my parents did for us (my sister and myself) was to surround us with books as we were growing up and the books were extremely eclectic. Reading a wide variety of books helps enrich vocabulary and activate the imagination.
They also never stopped me from reading anything, even if it was way above my age group. So, I was reading random American crime thrillers alongside Steinbeck, Gorky, George Bernard Shaw and Hemingway. When I was about 6 years old, I read Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw. I probably did not understand it completely at the time but I still remember reading it till today. Growing up with books was the greatest blessing that I had.
When I was 12 or 13, I started writing poetry. My parents were surprised as neither of them had any background or expertise in it. They offered to send my work to other people for an unbiased review. My father contacted Sujit and Meenakshi Mukherjee, senior academics and respected writers, founders of Vagartha, a journal that published English translations of Indian literature, and P. Lal of Writers Workshop in Kolkata. He sent them some of my poems without mentioning my age. They wrote back complimenting my work and that convinced my father that I had the potential to be a writer. Both Vagartha and Writers’ Workshop published my early work. When I turned 16 and graduated from high school, my parents published my book of poems as a gift. That book Liquid Sapphire won a commendation at the Commonwealth Award for poetry.
I did read their books but not very consistently. Even as of today, I have not read everything they wrote, but I have talked to them about their writing. I sometimes read their manuscripts before they were published. They both passed away over 30 years ago, so I don’t have too many memories of that now.
We lived in Kathe only from around 1976 and I did not live there for very long. When I first moved to Bengaluru, my parents rented a home in Byrasandra near Madhavan Park, down the road just beyond the swimming pool. At that time, my mother set up her clinic in Jayanagar and my father was a freelance writer for India News and Feature Alliance or INFA founded in 1959 by Durga Das. Of course my father wrote copiously in Kannada as well.
He would take me sometimes to Koshy’s where journalists often got together. I remember sitting in the high chair for kids and eating my french fries. Since I had short hair, he used to take me to a Chinese hairdresser on Brigade Road.
Then, my parents built a home in Jayanagar 4th Block and the roof of the house was shaped like an open book. My grandmother lived with us, we had a pet dog and it was a typical middle- class home. We went together as a family to see Hindi or Kannada movies at Nanda theatre on the weekends. When it came to English films, they would see them first to make sure they were appropriate for us.
In his late 40s, my father suffered a stroke while he was at the Senate meeting of Mysore University. I was only in my 7th standard and we had to rush to Mysore. This upended our lives and family. He continued to work and edited Jnana Gangothri but he was not the same as before. As he could not climb the stairs, we decided to build a home on a site we purchased in Jayanagar 5th Block and named it ‘Kathe’. It cost Rs ₹1 lakh at the time and everyone thought it was very expensive.
If you look at it one way, the subjects may seem random and unrelated but if you look at it from a conceptual lens, there is a strong continuity. For me, these are all facets of exploring India’s modernity. My most recent book is Musicophilia in Mumbai and one of the key factors is the many languages that people speak in that city. The objective enquiry is different but the framework is the same. How India became a nation state, how we became modern, what are the many ways in which people engage with these kinds of questions – through music, cinema, literature.
The new book Mithun Number Two happened very rapidly. We have just started a PG Diploma in Translation and Creative Writing at Ahmedabad University in collaboration with the JCB Literature Foundation. I thought it would be very stimulating to teach students and do my translation work at the same time.
I have chosen all the stories in Mithun Number Two with Jayant’s help as with the earlier No Presents Please. The difference is that for the first one, the theme was around the city of Bombay or Mumbai. I did not want to repeat this again, so half the stories are transition or migration focused stories of people from Gokarna, Tadadi and other places in North Kanara coming to Mumbai. These stories are partly set in those places about Kannada or Konkani speaking migrants. I spent a lot of time reading all the stories before coming up with a short list. I shared this with Jayant for his feedback, but I made the final choice.
Coming to the process, I read each one a number of times, marking words that may pose some difficulty in translation. Sometimes I know the meaning but want to confirm how it should come across in English. I seek help from Jayant or other friends or a dictionary for those words and then start working on the story. I came up with multiple drafts before I shared them with Jayant. He has an offhand poetic way of writing that sometimes ends up making no sense in English, so we debate about it until I find an interpretation that will work.
Well, he has not complained about it, but you should really ask him. I think he is happy with the way we work and with the end result.
I take music very seriously but I just sing for my friends. Every morning I wake up at 5:45 am for a riyaaz session with my friend and teacher Bindhumalini. My aim is to really understand music and not just to be able to sing.
We were extremely close. She had an independent stature as a sociologist. Both she and her husband taught at Goa University and then moved to Hyderabad. She worked with Dastkar, an Indian non-government organisation working with craftspeople across India. Unfortunately, she passed away at the very young age of 44 due to cancer.
CSCS is currently having only an online presence. We were a private research foundation funded by Ford Foundation, Tatas and others from 1998 to 2014 until we closed down. About 30 students got their PhD at CSCS and they are doing very well. During the 1990s at the time of globalisation, we did a lot of interesting interdisciplinary research that was funded by these sponsors.
I head the Centre for Inter-Asian Research at Ahmedabad University, where the projects are focused on understanding the society and culture of Asian nations. We are about to wrap up Digital Intimacy: Young Women and Social Transformation in Asia, a study of young university-going women in four cities: Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Singapore, and Bengaluru. In 2016 I had done a similar project called Reorganisation of Desire: Cultural Lives of Young Women in Globalising India. Another project, Re-orienting Taste, is about the place of food in Indian and Chinese traditional medicine systems. We are working on a book on this topic which will also have recipes. Saath-Saath: Music Across the Waters is about Chinese and Indian music which has a long history of interaction. In the 7th century there were many South Asians in the emperor’s court during the Tang dynasty. They even changed musical scales in China to match the South Asian scale. The album RE/SEMBLANCE by Saath-Saath was released in 2021 and was nominated for the Grammy Award in the category of Best Global Music Album.
