Book Review
By Dr Tania Saili Bakshi
THE MADHOUSE-PAGALKHANA
ISBN: 978-81-19626-27-4
PUBLISHER: NIYOGI BOOKS
The latest from Niyogi Books ‘The Mad House: Pagalkhana’ originally written in Hindi by well-known litterateur Gyan Chaturvedi has been translated into English by Punarvasu Joshi.
Not new to the world of translations, Punarvasu holds a PhD in nanotechnology from Arizona State University and decided to take Pagalkhana to a wider audience as he believed (uncannily true) that this allegorical satire holds a mirror to today’s society.
The translator has managed to beautifully capture the zeitgeist of today’s consumerist society in the four hundred odd page book which chronicles the jarring transformation that occurred in the psyche of Indian society by the onslaught of liberalisation.
The collection of stories are woven around two characters, the omnipresent character being ‘The Bazaar’, and then there is the hapless ‘Citizen’, continuously trapped in the vicious cycle of ‘The Bazaar’ where he is robbed off his dreams, aspirations, memories, where he is constantly trying to lock himself away from the prying eyes of the Bazaar – who is out to get him! He writes: ‘It was a flood. Life was surrounded by the Bazaar, everywhere.’ He goes on to further elaborate, ‘It was the Bazaar that was flowing everywhere. Laughter, conversation, day-to-day dealings among people, literature, culture…’
It is in this free-market economy and excessive consumption that nameless characters of The Madhouse find themselves trapped day in and day out, ‘The Bazaar kept expanding…. When it spreads, it swallows everything that comes in its way. The bazaar had spread so far and so fast…’
In this game of pursuit and escape between the Citizen and the Bazaar, author Dr Chaturvedi has done a fantastic job of showcasing the pain, the plight, the psyche, the belief, the pride, the breakdown and the dynamics churning within our society post the 1990s liberalisation. As he writes, ‘Personal relationships were the first to dissolve. Friendships found themselves neck-deep in the muddy waters.’
Punarva Joshi has done justice to the original, as it a tale that needs to be told, and retold. The translator’s love for both the languages, Hindi and English makes the book a reader’s delight. Light and breezy, the translator keeps his sentences short and crisp. The Madhouse is a befitting tribute to the original work and to the skill or passion or maybe both, of the translator who has brought it to a wider readership.
(Dr Tania Saili Bakshi is the Programme Director of Valley of Words, Arts and Literature Festival. She is also the Consultant Editor of Newspost, Uttarakhand’s oldest bilingual news web-portal)
