Chronicles of the Untranslated: Bringing India’s Non-Fiction Voices to the Centre

The act of translation involves more than just finding equivalent words for a text in another language. It also asks whether tone, cadence, idiom, or even cultural context must be carried across language boundaries. Translating Indian regional writing into English heightens this challenge. The social realities embedded in regional works often resist smooth transfer, and the translator must decide how to preserve unfamiliar registers or adapt them for new readers.

India’s linguistic landscape influences how translators approach these questions, as well as how publishers and other stakeholders determine what gets translated and what does not. English occupies a unique position in India as the language of education and aspiration. It creates what writers describe as a diglossic situation. India’s many languages remain central to everyday life and cultural production, but English dominates visibility in public and literary spheres. This unevenness has meant that vast publishing output in regional languages, such as essays, memoirs, critical prose, and life-writing, rarely finds readers outside its immediate linguistic community. For English-language readers, Indian literature in translation has come to mean mostly fiction.

The absence of regional non-fiction from English translations is not always noticed. It sits just beneath the surface, shaped by practicalities dealing with what sells, what is teachable, and what seems legible across languages. Fiction can often be framed as narrative, something that publishers know how to package and sell as “storytelling” with a beginning, middle, and end. Whereas non-fiction in India’s regional languages often resists easy classification. It could encompass memoirs without tidy arcs, essays written in defiance of form, or political reflections that begin in the personal. It is not that these works lack resonance. In their original languages, these texts are often foundational in shaping public thought or offering personal witness to important events. They are passed from hand to hand, read in classrooms, and remembered in families. 

It is in this context that Chronicles arrives. A collaboration between The Ashoka Centre for Translation and Penguin Random House, Chronicles was introduced in April 2024 as a series of non-fiction translations “aimed at bringing creative-critical textual narratives from various Indian languages to English.” It also seeks to function as a living archive and resource as it gathers voices that might otherwise remain dispersed across India’s linguistic map. 

Much of what has historically been regarded as a national literary project in India, particularly in the realm of non-fiction, has relied on a familiar canon. Monumental works such as Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, or Nehru’s account of India’s historical development in The Discovery of India often foreground figures already central to the political narrative and offer a particular view of Indian modernity. Chronicles stakes its claim within a redefinition of this national project by expanding the frame. It brings to English a set of modern literary voices that shaped discourse within their own languages yet remain relatively unfamiliar to English readers. Chronicles proposes not to establish a single hierarchy of Indian literature.

“Reading these works is going to be a breath of fresh air,” said Arunava Sinha, co-director of The Ashoka Centre for Translation and a consulting editor on the series. “They are going to bring in perspectives that are normally not accessible to those who read in English.”

Rather than assembling a catalogue of works representative of a region or community, the editors of Chronicles approached ten well-known translators with one question: What is the one book of non-fiction you’ve always wanted to translate? The result is a series that wanders across literary geographies. It is led not by market logic, but by the personal urgencies of translators. By giving translators the freedom to choose texts that matter to them, Chronicles sidesteps the market logic of the publishing trade, where non-fiction translations are often passed over for fiction that can more easily be packaged as “stories from India.” Works in the series also diverge from trends to focus on translating “utilitarian” non-fiction texts, such as knowledge texts and textbooks. While knowledge texts have garnered wider readership from scholars and general audiences, translations of creative-critical texts remain elusive. 

What further emerges from this method is a reorientation of how “vernacular” non-fiction is read in English. Take Courtesy of Criticism: Selected Essays by Kirtinath Kurtakoti, translated from Kannada by Kamlakar Bhat. At first glance, it might appear to belong to the familiar genre of literary criticism. The texture of the writing and the translation, however, resist that expectation. These essays are not structured around argument or analytical defence like much of the familiar canon of English language literary criticism. They instead unfold with the ease and familiarity of someone thinking about literature rather than talking about it. “Kurtakoti wasn’t really writing the kind of criticism that I was familiar with, or as much as using the language for criticism that I had become familiar with,” Bhat notes. 

Kurtakoti’s essays treat literature as a set of conversations, intellectual and emotional. “So I think he was trying to find in his writing the same kind of intimate conversational communication,” Bhat adds. What enables that tone is Kurtakoti’s astonishing literary memory. As one reflection on his writing notes, Kurtakoti and other critics of his generation internalised a millennium of literary culture in the very bodily sense of knowing texts by tongue. Hence, Kurtakoti was not only deeply familiar with his contemporaries’ works but could also write confidently about poets belonging to a time much before his own. 

The reflection piece notes, “Such a mode of scholarship is rare, not only due to scholars being increasingly specialised, but also due to the loss of importance of knowing these poems by heart from a young age.” In bringing Kurtakoti’s essays to English, Bhat aimed to retain the looseness of form and the directness of address that define the original. Nowadays, neither the formal nor the informal educational systems encourage rote learning. In this landscape, the initiative to translate Kurtakoti is a reminder that the authority of works in the series comes not from institutional position, but from the kind of thinking they made possible—critical thought that is at once personal and literary.

The same can be said of Nij Jivan Ki Chhata (translated as A Glimpse of My Life), Ram Prasad Bismil’s autobiography.  The book was translated for the series by Awadhesh Kumar Tripathi. Ram Prasad Bismil lived during the first three decades of the twentieth century, when anti-imperialist ideas and Indian nationalism were gaining strength among the masses. Throughout his life, Bismil engaged in underground revolutionary movements and believed that acts of violence would unsettle British authority and hasten India’s freedom. His life was tragically cut short when he was arrested and eventually hanged for his involvement in the Kakori Dacoity case, which was an attempt to seize government funds by looting a train. Bismil began writing his autobiography while imprisoned and recorded his thoughts on pieces of paper that were smuggled out of jail and published only after his death.

Even in Bismil’s work, the form shifts away from conventional forms of writing. Vineet Gill, writer and senior copy editor at Penguin Random House, explained how, despite being autobiographical, Bismil’s writings and other works in the series set their focus beyond the personal. “It has a very strange tone throughout, where the self takes a backseat. Even though these books focus on the self, they are not enlisting the achievements of a particular individual or celebrating a perceived legacy of that individual,” Gill elaborated. 

Bismil uses the form not only to recount his life but also to reflect on broader questions of communalism, nation-building, and the limits of revolutionary activity. Gill noted on this blend of the personal and intellectual spheres, “A lot of writers were engaging with these experiments on a formal level, giving attention to writing that had a special kind of immediacy.”  Being the last words he wrote before his execution, this sense of urgency especially permeates Bismil’s writing. In his autobiography, the self is not heroic. It is restless, oscillating between reflection and agitation.

Bismil’s writing remains entangled with the questions of his moment— education, public morality, the efficacy of violence in mobilisation— and with the difficult task of reconciling personal conviction with social change. Too often, regional literature is framed in reductive terms: either as anthropological detail or rural nostalgia. The books in Chronicles complicate this view. “We tend to perceive regional or vernacular literature through a particular lens,” says Vineet Gill. “This is a misreading, where you see vernacular literature taking you away from contemporary concerns— political, social, or cultural— and giving you something from the backwaters.” 

Across works in the series, from Kurtakoti to Bismil, the willingness to engage the present remains key. In that sense, Chronicles is not just a series of translations, but also an editorial intervention to reorient English-speaking readers towards unconventional works that still speak to the present as much as they document the past.

With three of its books now in circulation and a second series already in the works, Chronicles is beginning to take shape as an archive in motion. “Any project we undertake is open-ended, simply because there’s such a wealth of books waiting to be translated out there,” reflects Arunava Sinha. Chronicles can be read as part of the Ashoka Centre for Translation’s broader effort. Conversations at the second Bhashavaad Conference, organised by the centre on 29th and 30th August 2025, also stressed translation not simply as linguistic transfer, but as a way of negotiating plurality, authority, and access in India’s public sphere.  

As Chronicles moves forward, the value of the series may lie less in how many languages or regions it eventually includes. Rather, its worth lies more in the methods it has already established, which allow translators to lead and resist canon-building or market-driven selection of works, instead relying on the richness of individual literary traditions.

(Edited by Teista Dwivedi and Giya Sood.)