In Freedom's Shade

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 05:29:11 +0000

When I wrote up a proposal to the New India Foundation for a fellowship to translate Anis Kidwai’s Azādi ki Chhaon Mein in English, I never expected to be even invited for an interview. I had never translated into English before, and my academic credentials were in a completely unrelated field—formal linguistics—not literature or history. What I did have was three chapters translated, and some inchoate thoughts about communal violence, the activism of ‘ordinary’ women in the face of Partition violence, and the intimacies and distances between two sister languages, Hindi and Urdu.