Other subaltern histories

Like the Dalit texts, another genre that has erupted on the regional Indian literary scene is that of the memoir or autobiography of members of the underprivileged classes of society . People who hitherto had no faces or names, are putting down their experiences in black and white, asserting to the world that they have an existence that is worthy of being noticed. These memoirs were translated into English, catapulting their authors to national and sometimes international, attention. The most prominent of these was Baby Halder’s A Life less Ordinary, the memoir of a maid in Delhi. Written in Bengali, it was first published in Hindi translation in 2002, and the English translation was that of the Hindi version. The Bengali original was published only in 2004, after the huge success of the Hindi version. Baby Halder became an international literary celebrity after this, and was one of the crowd pullers at the Jaipur literary festival.
Tales of subaltern or downtrodden existences soon made their way to the publishing field. Nalini Jameela wrote of her experiences as a prostitute in Malayalam which was translated into English as Autobiography of a Sex Worker. This described without sleaze, Jameela’s initiation into such a life and the ways in which she coped with the exigencies she faced.

The translations of such texts ensured that they were heard and recognized along with ‘respectable’ literary voices. The decision to translate and give visibility to such texts was no doubt a radically subversive move, one that still has not been appreciated by a few purists who think that these semi-literate people have no right to be called authors. Translations of subaltern texts have gone a long way in interrogating the power hierarchy that exists in Indian literature and pulling down the barriers that had been erected around less privileged sections of society.