Is this an unhappy ending? Has Chammi indeed won? Will Aliya lead a depressing life alone with her unpleasant mother? All of these scenarios are possible, but at the same time, I would argue that Mastur is offering us an opportunity to embrace romantic ambivalence and grapple with the reality of Aliya’s life: as a woman, she is offered a buffet of poor choices. She chooses independence from the imprisoning influence of patriarchy but has not found a path to emotional contentment through companionship or friendship that will fill the gaping hole left behind by male control. Yet.
V. A Note on This Translation
The Women’s Courtyard has been translated before as The Inner Courtyard, by Neelam Hussain, and published by Kali for Women in 2001. Retranslation is still a rarity in the context of modern South Asian literature but the practice enriches the field of translation, offering readers different prisms through which to read a text. When I choose to retranslate a work, it is usually because I feel I have something substantially different to offer from the previous translator or translators. All the same, I draw comfort and inspiration from the work of previous translators, who may have seen things differently than I did and send me scurrying back to my dictionaries and expert friends for more information.
Khadija Mastur’s writing style is spare and elegant. Unlike many Urdu authors she does not favour heavily ornamented writing and turns of phrase full of literary allusions. I felt inspired to reproduce this clarity in English, after seeing that Hussain’s translation struggled with this quality, attempting to elevate the language to a more formal register of English than was used in Urdu. See, for example, Mastur’s description of Safdar Bhai, and the two contrasting translations, below:
Mastur: Safdar Bhai kitne vajiha magar kaisi maskin sūrat ke the.
Rockwell: Safdar looked so handsome, but so meek.
Hussain: How tall and well built Safdar Bhai had been and yet how diffident his mien.
Not only does Hussain divide descriptive adjectives into phrases, but in the case of the second phrase, maskin sūrat ke, she introduces a flowery and somewhat archaic-sounding descriptor, ‘how diffident his mien’.
These embroideries of the original, in which Hussain seeks to somehow augment the original text, stretch even to ordinary narrative sentences, such as the following:
Mastur: Dūr kahiñ se ghaṛiyāl ke gyārah bajāne ki āvāz ā rahi thi.
Rockwell: From somewhere far off came the sound of the bell striking eleven.
Hussain: A distant clock struck the hour. The sound of its measured strokes rolled over her. It was the eleventh hour of the night.
Here, Hussain’s rendition conveys a breathless dramatic tension that is absent from the original, which merely alerts us to the passage of time.
Hussain also occasionally inserts new ideas into the text, such as below, where she actually adds foreshadowing to the original sentence that describes Aliya worrying about her sister Tehmina Apa:
Mastur: Rāt kā qissā bār bār yād ātā aur voh anjām ke khauf se ek lafz bhi na paṛh sakti thi.
Rockwell: She kept thinking about what had occurred the night before, and was so fearful of what might happen she couldn’t read a single word.
Hussain: The inexorable end of Apa’s fated love was before her eyes and she was unable to concentrate on her work.
Mastur merely writes of Aliya’s ‘anjām kā khauf,’ her fear of the outcome, whereas Hussain announces to us that Tehmina’s ‘fated love’ is coming to an ‘inexorable end’. This embellishment on the original text both spoils the suspense of the story and romanticizes Tehmina’s love for Safdar by referring to it as a ‘fated love’.
Strangely—perhaps by accident—a pivotal passage is missing from Hussain’s translation. I can attest as a translator that it is far too easy to drop bits of a text in the course of translation. The phone rings, the dog must be let out, one’s attention is divided—and there goes a paragraph. Usually these mistakes can be rectified in editing, when one notices that something is missing or when a transition between paragraphs makes no sense. An extra set of eyes helps too. In this case, the passage in question is Jameel’s first physical assault on Aliya. Aliya has been reading about the horrors of Ghengis Khan and his army, when Jameel comes to speak with her. She tries to make him go away, or stick to the topic of her exams, when he grabs her and kisses her (or more—the text is not entirely clear on this point, but it reads clearly as sexual assault). After this she feels shaken and defiled.
Finally, language changes, cultural norms change and politics change. All great works deserve multiple translations, and English can only be enriched by multiple versions of classic South Asian texts. With this fresh translation, a new generation of readers will be introduced to The Women’s Courtyard, and perhaps a few who know some Urdu will take the plunge and try reading the book in the original.
Daisy Rockwell
Further Reading:
Hyder, Qurratulain. River of Fire. Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998. (Translated by the author.)
Manto, Sa’adat Hasan. My Name Is Radha: The Essential Manto. Delhi: Penguin, 2015. (Introduced and translated by Muhammad Umar Memon.)
Mastur, Khadija. Cool, Sweet Water. Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999. (Introduced and translated by Tahira Naqvi.)
Sahni, Bhisham. Tamas. Delhi: Penguin, 2016. (Introduced and translated by Daisy Rockwell.)
Sobti, Krishna. A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. Delhi: Penguin. (Introduced and translated by Daisy Rockwell.)
Yashpal. This Is Not That Dawn. Delhi: Penguin, 2010. (Translated by Anand.)
* See Bechdel’s discussion on her blog, http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/testy
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to my wonderful editor, Ambar Sahil Chatterjee, for agreeing to take on this project, and to Cibani Premkumar, my ingenious copy editor, for her rigorous editing. Thanks also to Ali Kamran of Sang-e-Meel Publications for granting me permission to translate this work. This has been my first full-length Urdu book translation and Aftab Ahmad, translator and Urdu scholar extraordinaire, has my eternal gratitude for meticulously going through every line of this translation and answering my constant barrage of questions. Naveed Tahir, Khadija Mastur’s niece, has been amazingly helpful in supplying me with beautiful photographs of Mastur and Hajira Masroor (Tahir’s mother), as well as a treasure trove of archival materials. Thanks are also due to Dr Asif Aslam Farrukhi for introducing me to Naveed Tahir. I am grateful to my husband and daughter for their patience through it all, and to my cats, who have quietly overseen the project from the sidelines. Last, but not least, I am very grateful to my friend Manan Ahmed for suggesting that I consider translating this novel and helping me through the proposal stage. To him I dedicate this translation.
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