What ‘The Desire for Mischief’ can lead you to do

When words are woven into your life and working with them comprises a major part of the day, and you come home to a flat full of books to pursue personal writing projects, you can be sure that doesn’t leave much time for mischief. And yet, that’s just what my mother and I found ourselves doing as we translated a short story titled The Desire for Mischief, from Malayalam to English, last year.

I’m a professional editor and enjoy the magic that words can create on a page. While my parents are from Kerala, I’ve spent my childhood in many places in India, since my father — a police officer — was regularly transferred every few years. While my schooling may have been interrupted — just as it is for the children of many civil servants and defence services officers — it also taught me many life lessons, such as to be adaptable and to treat each new challenge as an opportunity. It also taught me to feel truly pan-Indian. What it did not teach me was how to read and write my mother tongue, Malayalam, since I had never studied in a school in the state to which I trace my roots. While I can speak Malayalam fairly well, as we speak it at home, along with English and Hindi, reading the Malayalam script and learning how to write it became a personal project to which I devoted some time during summer vacations in college and — once I started working — after work hours, even taking an online class a couple of years ago. I wanted to stay connected with my mother tongue, for unless one stays in touch with the sound and the feel of a language, one can feel it slipping away.

As part of my conscious effort to stay in touch with my mother tongue, I co-translated some Malayalam short stories with my mother. Some were published and received the Katha Award for Translation. Reading up on the history of Kerala, reading Malayalam literature in translation, and watching Malayalam cinema, are other ways in which I try to stay in touch with the culture of Kerala and its mellifluous language.

Last year, while reading about the history of Malabar, the northern part of Kerala where I’m from, I came across the name of writer and social critic VK Nayanar. The article mentioned that he is credited with writing the first Malayalam short story. This aroused my curiosity. I tried to find the story online and discovered that the Malayalam original is freely available on the Internet. Since it was written in 1891, it is now out of copyright in India, as more than 100 years have passed since its composition.

I took a printout of the story and gave it to my mother to read, thinking “I’ll get around to reading it later, since it will take me a little time to go through the text. After all, it was written more than a century ago”. My mother read it immediately and when I asked her the next day what she thought of it, she laughed and replied that it was an amusing story about Ekandakuruppu, a petty thief who gets himself into trouble because of his overconfidence but eventually learns his lesson. This sounded intriguing and I thought, “I must read it now”, but with many demands on my time, I put it on my to-be-read list and thought, “Let me find an English translation and read that first”. An initial online search produced no results. More in-depth searches followed but, to my surprise, with no success. Could it be possible that this story had not been translated? With many eminent people translating major Malayalam novels, could this short story have passed them by? “And yet, it is the first short story in Malayalam — surely it deserves to be translated into English and read by a wider audience,” I thought. “It’s possible many readers of Malayalam in translation may like to read this first story in our language. After all, it has both literary and historical relevance.” So, I asked my mother the obvious logical question: ‘Why not translate it ourselves, since we have translated some Malayalam short stories before. Those were more contemporary stories, but why not give this a shot?” She was willing to try and so we agreed to get started on the project even though we were in a midst of a major home renovation project at the time. But what better distraction after a day spent following-up with contractors and plasterers than to immerse yourself in a good story? With this happy thought in mind, one weekend, we made a start on our translation.

The challenges of translation

The process of translation requires the crossing of several mental hurdles. To begin with, one needs to know both the source and target languages well, and possibly, the target language better than the original. For it is only when you know a language well that you can begin to play with its words, and weave them into a story that engages the attention of the reader, while retaining the essence of the original. Then come the more complex challenges, such as cultural terms or concepts which may have no direct equivalent in English. To explain a word in Malayalam, you might require a sentence in English, but that would interrupt the flow of the narrative. One could use footnotes, but that can seem too academic. A glossary at the end might be suitable for a novel or a collection of stories, but for one story, it seems too much. So we decided to retain certain words, such as kinship terms, by transliterating them into English and providing the meaning in brackets immediately after, for example: naalamacchan (great-great-grandfather). This did not interrupt the flow of the story and was easily integrated into a sentence. There were also more complex terms, for instance, related to methods of hunting that the crooked narrator of the story compared to his profession of stealing, which we were able to weave into the sentences in a way that contemporary readers have appreciated as these terms were not so easy to understand in the original.

When it came to the source and target languages, my mother is far more well-versed in Malayalam than I am, while she is also very conversant with English. I relied on her to translate the slightly archaic Malayalam of the story into the simpler Malayalam of the present day. My part was to translate what I heard into English. We sat beside each other while she read the original, sentence by sentence, in our mother tongue. I tapped away on my laptop, we paused and discussed each line. I read out what I had written in English and we went back and forth as we tried to understand what the narrator was saying, as the story has touches of humour, sarcasm and social commentary, which we needed to translate accurately. One such example of humour is where the narrator, Ekandakuruppu, the thief, describes the dexterity required to commit a theft as needing to be as skilled as Arjuna, who was called Savyasachi because he was ambidextrous. Here, the thief has to carry out a pickpocketing using his left hand. A naughty comparison indeed!

The original story is six pages long. It took us about a week to get a rough first draft, translating a page at a time. I found the process very fulfilling as I also learnt new Malayalam words while listening to the story being read aloud, such as the hunting techniques of thelinayat and thendinayat which mean hunting in a group, or hunting solo, where the narrator prefers the latter, as he gets to keep the rewards for himself. I then worked on the draft for a week, after work, smoothening out sentences, trying to make it flow in English, while staying true to the essence of the original. The next weekend, once I had a readable draft, I read it aloud to my mother as she compared it with the Malayalam text, to ensure our translation had not deviated from the original. It took another couple of weeks, and further drafts and revisions before we were both satisfied that we had a story we could think of submitting for publication. My mother and I were delighted when it was published several months later in Indian Literature, the journal of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi in its July–August 2024 issue. The story is now available online on JSTOR.

Some historical background about the author and the magazine in which it was published

VK Nayanar (Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar (1860–1914) was an essayist and short story writer known for criticising the social inequalities of his time. His short story, Vasanavikruti (The Desire for Mischief), is considered to be the first Malayalam short story, and was published in Vidyavinodini magazine in February 1891. Born in Malabar district (in present-day Kerala), in British-ruled India, Nayanar became a member of the Malabar District Board in 1904, and was elected to the Madras Legislative Assembly in 1914. He passed away while serving as a member there, aged just 54.

Vidyavinodini was a monthly Malayalam literary magazine published from Thrissur, then in the Princely State of Cochin. Published from November 1889 to March 1902, it contributed to the growth of literary, cultural, and scientific temper in Kerala. Vidyavinodini Press was established in 1886 by V Sundarayyar and his son Viswanathayyar. They started the Vidyavinodini magazine in 1889.

Vasanavikruti, may have been written to illustrate the principle that crime does not pay, but the author’s humorous style expressed through the narrator’s voice, ensures that the story conveys its message without being preachy.

The scientist, and science communicator, Carl Sagan describes a book as, “a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person… an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs… proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

While VK Nayanar died in 1914, my mother and I are glad that we have been able to bring his story to contemporary readers, and to those interested in translation. Now, I can’t help wondering about the first published short story in each of the major Indian languages. Have they all been translated? It sounds like a project for the Sahitya Akademi or the National Book Trust, or a publisher of translations to bring forth a collection of our nation’s first short stories. I would certainly look forward to reading it.

My mother and I hope to work on more translations, as there is such a wealth of literature in Malayalam that is yet to be translated. For now, we are happy to have contributed in a small way to literature from Malayalam translated into English, by making the first short story in our mother tongue accessible to a worldwide readership. Who knew The Desire for Mischief could have such a happy outcome!