By the middle of the year, I had finished work on a collection of essays on the reading and writing life, and had a jalebi-halwa problem with English.
Many of these essays are about stumbling across, and sometimes slowly falling in love with, the pioneers of Indian writing in English, from Dean Mahomet and Toru Dutt to Behram Malabari and a clutch of eccentric editors and printers. It was enjoyable work, if you can call something like this "work" at all. But reading Indian writers chiefly in English across three centuries was like living on a diet of jalebis and halwa - too much of the same kind of sweetness.
I began reading in Bengali and Hindi by way of dietary balance, and then started to read books in translation by Indian writers far more deliberately than before. It turned out to be pure pleasure. Even when I was restricted to the English version of a book because I didn't know the source language, it was still a relief to read outside the colourful but narrow circle of Indian writers in English.
Translations are often recommended in the same spirit as vaccinations, because they are good for you, though I cannot think of a more dour reason for reading a book. This list of novels, short stories, memoirs and essays includes books in translation from 2015 that were either enjoyable, or deeply interesting, or both.
Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (translated by Muhammad Umar Memon for Penguin India). A definitive collection of Mr Masud's stories was long overdue. This is a particularly carefully true translation because Mr Memon has been translating Mr Masud's haunting, visionary but strongly rooted fiction over decades. That relationship between translator and writer is one of the unexpected pleasures of this modern classic, which includes a set of intertwined and unforgettable stories grazing the occult world, Seemiya.
"Our villages have thirty-six variations of caste," says Phulwa, the protagonist in one of the stories in Thunderstorm: Dalit Stories by Ratan Kumar Sambharia (translated by Mridul Bhasin for Hachette). "In the city, however, there are only two castes - the rich and the poor."
Dr Sambharia grew up in Rewari, Haryana and spent many years working in Rajasthan; these stories range far across villages and small towns, mixing compassion with violence as they draw the fictional map of Dalits in modern India.
Dr Sambharia uses fiction to set down what he has experienced; in 1978, Daya Pawar wrote a powerful memoir, Baluta, in Marathi, of what it meant to become a writer from the Mahar community, what Mumbai looked like from his perspective. In Jerry Pinto's translation of Baluta for Speaking Tiger, Pawar's rich, bitter, poetic language finds new resonance in English.
Child widow, later the wife of Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, founder of the Maoist movement in Andhra Pradesh and a Communist worker in her own right, Kondapalli Koteswaramma decided to publish her life story when she was 94. The Sharp Knife of Memory, translated by Sowmya V B from Telugu for Zubaan Books, packs a lot of political and gender history into its 160 pages.
Krishna Bose's Lost Addresses (translated from Bengali by Sumantra Bose for Niyogi Books) covers a period of history that Indians forget at their own peril - the pre-Independence and post-1947 years, in
Ms Bose's case, focusing on the years between 1934 and 1955. In the 1940s alone, Ms Bose and her nationalist family lived through the tumult of World War II, the Quit India movement, the Bengal Famine, the terrible Great Calcutta riots of 1946 and the Partition that wreaked such violence on Bengal as well as Punjab and Delhi. Lost Addresses begins with an earthquake and ends with wedding shehnais, mixing political and personal memories deftly in between.
As with Jerry Pinto and Muhammad Umar Memon, the translator of Vivek Shanbhag's Ghachar Ghochar is a writer, the talented Srinath Perur, and this translation from Kannada for HarperCollins demonstrates that writers can often make the most sensitive translators. "Now what can I say about myself that is only about me and not tied up with the others?" This might be one of the best contemporary novels about Indian families, their tight knots and their dangerous unravelling, their loyalties, betrayals and messiness.
Benyamin's skilful, fast-paced Yellow Lights of Death (translated by Sajeev Kumarapuram for Penguin India) shows his fans another side of the author of Goat Days. Here he mixes murder with meta-fiction (characters in the novel discuss the book release with the author) and big themes of displacement with a satisfying splash of Nasrani documents.
Two classics, next: Upendranath Ashk's 1940s-50s series of novels have been translated by Daisy Rockwell for Penguin India. The first of these, Falling Walls, pulls off an impressive feat: Ashk's gender politics haven't dated well, but his portrait of a perpetually struggling writer in Jalandhar, Shimla and Lahore is timeless. No Hindi translator ever satisfies the purists, but
Ms Rockwell's translation flows well for non-Hindi speakers and preserves the rich khichdi of Ashk's original. Women Unlimited revived Ismat Chughtai's essays, as sharp and biting as her fiction, in My Friend, My Enemy, translated by Tahira Naqvi - Chughtai's strong and familiar voice is rendered beautifully audible again.
The poets are wise in any century, and the unknown, anonymous poet behind the Thirukkural received their due in a new, powerful and contemporary translation by the scholar Gopal Gandhi for Aleph, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who had translated these verses from Tamil Sangam literature decades ago. Here is a closing couplet for these times: "The base are like - who else - the gods/ They do as they please and when, and face no odds".
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