Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Ghachar Ghochar
WORK NOTES: trans by Srinath Perur
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Bengaluru, Karnataka
STATE:
COUNTRY: India
NATIONALITY: Indian
https://granta.com/contributor/vivek-shanbhag/ * http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2136315/vivek-shanbhag * http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/literature-is-not-like-a-tennis-match-where-you-play-against-an-opponent-and-try-and-win-vivek-shanbhag/ * http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/many-things-come-together-for-a-story-to-be-born-vivek-shanbhag-on-ghachar-ghochar/story-ewfEGQOkk8O1wT8E7czaGI.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Iowa, International Writing Program, 2016.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Fiction writer and editor. Desha Kaala, publisher and editor, 2005-10; Hindustan Unilever, engineer.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction to publications, including Granta, Seminar, Indian Literature, and Out of Print.
SIDELIGHTS
Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag trained as an engineer but writes fiction in the South Indian language of Kannada. He published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala from 2005 to 2012, and in the fall 2016, he was a resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His fiction has appeared in various publications, including Granta, Seminar, Indian Literature, and Out of Print. His acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar is the first of his books to appear in English, translated by Srinath Perur, and was published in India in English translation in 2015. Shanbhag lives in Bangalore, India.
Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar traces a family that gains social status yet can’t escape the class of its origins. An unnamed young man in his twenties narrates the story. He and his family are poor and lived in a rundown rented house infested with ants. When his father is laid off from his coffee salesman job, he invests his life’s savings in his brother’s spice business. The business, called Sona Masala, actually only repackages and resells spices. But it is enough to catapult the family into instant success. The uncle hires his nephew, the narrator, and pays him handsomely, yet there is nothing really for the young man to do. He realizes he will receive a paycheck whether he works or not. The family has moved into a new modern home, yet the narrator’s mother feels out of place in the large kitchen. The narrator’s marriage was never stable, and his new wealth complicates their relationship. His sister now has money for a lavish wedding, yet she is unhappy with the groom.
In an interview in Hindustan Times, Shanbhag explained the inspiration for the book: “In the last twenty-five years, we have seen a sea change in Indian society due to globalisation. That has been a major inspiration.” Shanbhag has a full-time job working for Hindustan Unilever which sends around the world where he meets different races and cultures, which has helped him understand the world better.
Calling the concise novella mesmerizing, a writer in Publishers Weekly commented: “Absorbing, insightful, and altogether a wonderful read.” The book is “a compact novel that crackles with tension, tracing the tangled path of a family’s dissolution in their sudden rise to wealth,” according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who describes the characters’ travels through class “turbid and ominous.” According to Parul Sehgal in New York Times Book Review Online, “This spiny, scary story of moral decline, crisply plotted and no thicker than my thumb, has been heralded as the finest Indian novel in a decade, notable for a book in bhasha, one of India’s vernacular languages.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 2016, review of Ghachar Ghochar.
Publishers Weekly, October 10, 2016, review of Ghachar Ghochar, p. 54.
ONLINE
Hindustan Times, http://www.hindustantimes.com/ (January 23, 2017), author interview.
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (April 6, 2017), review of Ghachar Ghochar.*
Literature is not like a tennis match where you play against an opponent and try and win: Vivek Shanbhag
Vivek Shanbhag, 53, on the translation of his novella Ghachar Ghochar and the lessons he learnt from his father-in-law UR Ananthamurthy.
162
Shares
Facebook
Twitter
Google Plus
Written by Anushree Majumdar | New Delhi | Published:March 6, 2016 12:00 am
Top News
England beat Bangladesh by eight wickets in their ICC Champions Trophy 2017 opener
England beat Bangladesh by eight wickets in their ICC Champions Trophy 2017 opener
Baahubali The Conclusion actor Prabhas: I have been more Baahubali than myself in five years
Baahubali The Conclusion actor Prabhas: I have been more Baahubali than myself in five years
Kajol, daughter Nysa's beach vacation is providing Ajay Devgn Vitamin F. See their holiday photos
Kajol, daughter Nysa's beach vacation is providing Ajay Devgn Vitamin F. See their holiday photos
literature main
Where did you grow up? What were the early years like?
I grew up in Ankola, a small town in coastal Karnataka. I was in that part of the country for 17 years of my life. I think it has made an impact on my writing and the way I look at the world. Then I moved out to do my engineering in Mysore. It was there that I spent a lot of my time reading. It so happened that my campus was next to the Mysore University campus and I had lots of friends in the English and Kannada departments. At that time, the English department in Mysore was very rich and many writers, such as Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, used to visit. I had a lot of exposure to different discussions and readings.
What were you reading before you went to Mysore?
I was mainly reading Kannada works. But when I moved to Mysore, for those five years, I started reading different writers. I read Isaac Bashevis Singer for the first time and I kept reading him for the next 30 years. Then I read the Russians, the Europeans and it all happened because I would meet my friends and they would talk about these books. So it was like I did two degrees — one in literature and one in engineering. Needless to say, you know which I enjoyed more. I went into engineering because of a lack of exposure. I came from a small town, I got good marks in my 10th, so I went into the science stream like everybody else who got good marks. Then I got good marks again in 12th, and went for engineering. I did well there too. It was much later that I realised that I should have done something else, but, by then, I had become an engineer. I had a job with Hindustan Lever that took me to different places — Calcutta, where I lived for two years; then to the US, and to London. I travelled extensively because of my job.
You began writing very early.
I began writing in school — I was 16 when my first story got published; it won an award in a competition. It was about a person coming to a town from a small village and not liking the ways of life there. My first collection, Ankura, was published when I was 22, and it was well appreciated. The next one was published seven years later. I have written 10 books, not much, but I’ve got an excellent response. In the beginning, it was very challenging. In Kannada, you have an unbroken literary history of over 1,000 years. When I say unbroken, I mean that the works that were written 1,000 years ago are still accessible and people read them. Literature is not like a tennis match where you play against an opponent and try and win. Everybody from Shakespeare to the writers from those thousands of years ago are my contemporaries. We’re all writers and it is incidental that I write in Kannada, because we didn’t read only Kannada, we read everyone and everything; writers from other countries, languages, translations. I’m a Kannada writer, but I’m a writer first. My work will be compared to what people have read before.
You’ve once said that it’s important to get the tone of the translation right. And that you’re translating all the time. So how do you go about writing?
I have to hear and see things to write. Many a time it will happen in Konkani, or English. But Kannada is the only language in which I can write fiction. It’s not because I don’t want to (write in any other language), but because I can’t. Before I write, I think of the experience I’ve had. One understands one’s experiences through certain things, and for me, that medium is Kannada. My mother tongue is Konkani and many times you’ll find that a character’s dialogues translate perfectly into Konkani, but that’s the extent to which I can go. So this process of translation happens all the time in my mind.
Ghachar Ghochar has been likened to RK Narayan and Anton Chekov’s works. Like Singer, you’ve contained an entire universe in a household affected by their new-found wealth.
Take, for example, Singer’s story, Gimpel the Fool. It was translated into English for the first time by Saul Bellow. It’s a short story but it talks about religion, sin, human nature, society and people. Singer sees his entire world as one single entity. And I think it’s the right way of looking at one’s world. Writers are often tempted by the material world, to say things that have already been said. So if you see your entire body of work as one single thing, then you try and not repeat yourself. According to Singer, there is a reader who has read every word written by him. Having that idea of the reader stops him from repeating himself.
Ghachar Ghochar is not just about wealth but I feel that wealth is something that has impacted us in the last 25 years in India. Economic liberalisation has resulted in generating money that is more than necessary. Nobody thinks that what they have is enough but there is a line beyond which wealth is not necessary. If you don’t engage with that line closely and philosophically, something is going to happen which is not right. When you make more money than necessary, you lose the relationship you had with objects and people around you.
When did the story come to your mind?
The story was with me for nearly 10 years. I have many stories in my mind that keep growing; sometimes I make notes. Recently, I found the notes that I had made for this story and they were not more than half a page, and none of it was relevant.
Usually I write very fast, but I take a long time to edit. I stay with it a lot because I think it’s very important to get the structure right. Ghachar Ghochar was published three years ago as part of a collection of short stories.
Srinath Perur said that he got in touch with you to seek permission to translate Ghachar Ghochar because he’d never read anything like it. What did you say when he reached out to you?
In a translation, the most important thing is the tone, you have to get it right. What is a tone? It’s the position from which you see the story and some things are visible while others are not. It’s very crucial that a translator understands this.
Ads by ZINC
This has been a successful translation because Srinath, whom I have known for four-five years, understood the tone. He got it because he is a creative writer. The structure of the Kannada language is different from English. The verb comes in the end, one can easily move across tenses. We discussed the story at length, why a particular word is used and the relationship between words. It took us 18 months to get it done but it was easy because we both live in Bangalore. Now it will be the first Kannada book to be published in the US.
In your works, you’re constantly looking for grains of truth, even in the most innocuous situations. How much of a conscious decision is that?
Any good literature does that — from the Russians, to Singer, to Jose Saramago. I am looking to do the same thing. I’m transporting my very personal experience into a story, and I don’t know who I am telling my story to. I am not writing for one person or five people. I am talking about life. When I was younger, my writing was more inward-looking, because that is the time you’re thinking about yourself more and wondering what life is about. Now, those are not the only things I write about.
You started a literary journal, Desh Kaala, in 2005. Why did you stop producing it after seven years?
I brought it out for other writers, not for myself. I’ve read writers who are being published for the first time and I felt so happy to be the first person to read them. Then I’m in a hurry to publish the magazine and tell everybody about them. One of them is Mounesh Badiger (who has also adapted of a short story of mine for a film), there’s Padmanabh Shevkar and Sunanda Kadame. What is important is to create that excitement about writing — being read, being discussed, and I managed to do that successfully for seven years. Unfortunately, I had to stop because my work demanded me to travel. I quit my day job last year, so let’s see.
You’ve known UR Ananthamurthy since you were 17. What would you say is his legacy to you?
When it came to reading, enjoying and talking about literature, he was absolutely objective. If he liked a piece, he’d want to talk to the writer, no matter where they were. He was always surrounded by people, 20-30 students, talking, and he maintained that sort of engagement till the end of his life. That kind of enthusiasm is necessary, even more so today. That’s something that I value. The other thing is that he never talked about anyone lightly, he never dismissed anyone. He was not judgemental and sought to see merit in everything. I first fell in love with him, and then his daughter. I met him when I was 17 and I got married to her when I was 28. The first five years, I knew her, but it was only after I left Mysore did I realise my feelings for her.
What are you working on now?
I have a novel and a play in mind. It takes me a long time to get down to writing — I am critical of my own work and I’m always thinking of what Singer has said.
Vivek Shanbhag is the author of eight works of fiction and two plays, all of which have been published to wide acclaim in the South Indian language Kannada. He was a Fall 2016 resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Ghachar Ghochar is the first of his books to appear in English.
Vivek Shanbhag writes in Kannada. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays, and has edited two anthologies, one of them in English. For 7 years from 2005 to 2012, he published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala. Vivek’s books are translated into many other Indian languages. His acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in India in English translation in 2015.
Vivek's writing has appeared in Granta, Seminar, Indian Literature and Out of Print.
He was a Fall 2016 resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
An engineer by training, Vivek Shanbhag lives in Bangalore, India.
Many things come together for a story to be born: Vivek Shanbhag on Ghachar Ghochar
Kannada writer Vivek Shanbagh has been writing for over three decades now. His first story was published when he was only 17, and his first collection came out five years later. He talks to HT about his novella, inspirations and how difficult it is to write alongside a full-time job.
Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 Updated: Jan 23, 2017 14:30 IST
Supriya Sharma
Supriya Sharma
Hindustan Times
Jaipur Literature Festival
Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar was among the most popular books to be published last year. (Saumya Khandelwal/HT Photo)
Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar was among the best books to come out in 2016. In a chat with Hindustan Times, the author talks about his novella, his inspirations and writing alongside a full-time job.
The original work in Kannada appeared in 2013 as part of a collection of short stories and the translation in 2015. Were you surprised by the sort of response the English version received?
The book was very well received in Kannada as well. I’m happy that it got a similar response in translation. Rarely does a book get translated so effectively and get appreciated in both languages.
Read more
JLF 2017: Storyteller Neelesh Misra on his Kahaani connection and more
I am ashamed by the kind of songs that are written today: Prasoon Joshi at JLF
What was the inspiration for this story?
This story has been with me for over a decade. It is very difficult to put my finger on a single incident as the inspiration for the book. Many things come together for a story to be born. Some experiences I had have found their way into the book. Like early in my career, I spent time with a salesman’s family and some details from that have appeared in the book. In the last 25 years, we have seen a sea change in Indian society due to globalisation. That has been a major inspiration.
How did the translation happen?
Srinath Perur (the translator) and I worked together for one-and-a-half years. It is important that the writer and translator discuss the work in detail and Srinath has done a fabulous job of translating the book. I am very happy with the translation.
Watch: Vivek Shanbhag on his book Ghachar Ghochar
You are an engineer by profession and a writer by choice. How has your work shaped your writing?
I was working with Hindustan Unilever and my job helped me travel around the world and meet people of different races and cultures. It has helped me understand this world better. I have no regrets about my choice of career, In fact it has been complementary to my writing.
How did you balance a full-time job with a writing career?
What is uppermost in your heart is important and for me it was literature. I had a full-time job and it was inevitable because it was not enough to earn full-time from my writing. I had to have some discipline and create my own space to write. I used to get up at 4.30am and work till 7.30am. If you do this three hours a day every day, it is a lot of time. And that is how I managed it.
Shanbhag says that his first story was published when he was 17. His first collection was published five years later. (Saumya Khandelwal/HT Photo)
At what age did you start writing?
My first story was published when I was 17 and my first collection was published when I was 22. So I have been writing for over 30 years now.
Shanbhag, Vivek: GHACHAR GHOCHAR
(Dec. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Shanbhag, Vivek GHACHAR GHOCHAR Penguin (Adult Fiction) $16.00 2, 7 ISBN: 978-0-14-311168-9
Shanbhag, in his English-language debut, seamlessly translated from the Kannada by Perur, explores the turbid and ominous undercurrents running beneath a family's newfound success and the society from which it sprang.In his native city of Bangalore, the narrator, a young married man, sits in an elegant cafe with the incongruously functional name Coffee House, desperate to speak with the waiter, Vincent. The man, a regular customer, has such faith in Vincent's oracular wisdom that his wife will sometimes ask him, "Did you visit your temple today?" But now he fears what Vincent might have to say, and, while he vacillates over whether to seek Vincent's counsel, he recounts what it is that brought him here: the story of his family. Once living on the razor's edge of financial ruin, the young man's family is catapulted to a life of plenty and idleness when his father is let go from his job as a coffee salesman and invests his pension in his uncle's new business, Sona Masala, the sole service of which is purported to be repackaging spices. The young man is made director in the company but soon finds that he has no say in, no insight into, and no work to do within the company, and he comes to his office only to nap on his couch and collect a generous salary. While some family members sink into feckless denial of their uncle's questionable morality, others savor the power it brings them. As the family once took cold pleasure in destroying the ants that invaded the run-down rented house of their poorer past, they exult in using intimidation and occasional violence to ward off anyone they view as a potential threat to their way of life. A compact novel that crackles with tension, tracing the tangled path of a family's dissolution in their sudden rise to wealth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Shanbhag, Vivek: GHACHAR GHOCHAR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471902031&it=r&asid=ca22769393849d78fa889de59fe88e7e. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471902031
Ghachar Ghochar
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Ghachar Ghochar
Vivek Shanbhag, trans. from the Kannada by Srinath Perur. Penguin, $16 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-14-311168-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"It is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable." For the unnamed narrator at the heart of this concise and mesmerizing novel, what is unavoidable for his family is their fraught commitment to one another, remaining together even though (or because) it's this very solidarity that sends everyone else away. Set in Bangalore, the family members' situation reflects that of 21st-century India itself, as they are intoxicated by and slightly unprepared for the surge of wealth in which they find themselves. The narrator is a tenuously married young man, whose uncle has started a spice business, altering almost overnight what had been the modest, hand-to-mouth existence their family had previously known. And yet when the family moves to a new home, the narrator's mother is unnerved by the size of the kitchen, his sister rushes into a ridiculously opulent wedding only to find herself miserable with the groom, and the narrator himself becomes aimless, spending his days at a coffee shop, once he realizes that he earns the same salary whether he accomplishes anything or not. Day-to-day, the family members drink tea, share meals, and watch one another's every move. Shanbhag has been a prolific writer in his native South Indian language of Kannada for decades, but this firecracker of a novel is the first of his work to be translated into English. Absorbing, insightful, and altogether a wonderful read. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ghachar Ghochar." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616141&it=r&asid=630fce4b7039b312edea2f0dc71c24dd. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466616141
'Ghachar Ghochar' Presents A Fretful Vision Of Indian Class Anxiety
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13
To listen to this broadcast, click here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=513904303
BYLINE: MAUREEN CORRIGAN
HOST: TERRY GROSS
TERRY GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag has been hailed as an Indian Chekhov for his precision and the quiet power of his stories. Shanbhag writes in his native South Indian language, but now one of his novels called "Ghachar Ghochar" has been translated into English and published as a paperback original. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: It's been almost 20 years since Barbara Ehrenreich published "Fear Of Falling," her brilliant book on the anxious inner life of the American middle class. The book's title, "Fear Of Falling," has become a catch phrase to refer to the cosmic jitters that afflict anyone whose lifestyle and sense of identity can be wiped out by the loss of a job or a plunge in the stock market. In this era of globalization, fear of falling is also a phrase that resonates in other places. Take the Southern Indian city of Bangalore, for instance. That's where acclaimed Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag has set his novella called "Ghachar Ghochar," a story whose every page is soaked through with the sweaty fear of falling into economic and moral ruin.
"Ghachar Ghochar" is a nonsense phrase made up by one of the characters in this story. It loosely translates from the South Indian language Kannada as tangled up beyond repair. The tense fun of reading this vivid, fretful story lies in watching the main characters grab hold of what they think will be rescue ropes, but instead turn out to be slip knots.
Our narrator, who is unnamed, is a young man whose family consisting of his parents, uncle and sister has hauled itself up from lower-class subsistence living in Bangalore. The narrator's father used to be a spice salesman whose earnings barely kept his family housed in an ant-infested shack. In a white-knuckle flashback scene here, the father comes home one night from collecting his weekly payments from customers and realizes he's short 800 rupees. The panic in the family shack is palpable. Over and over, the father adds columns of numbers as the narrator's mother interrogates him. (Reading) Where did you go today? She frantically asks. Did someone who was supposed to pay not do so? Could you have put some of the cash in a different compartment of your bag?
After a sleepless night, a mathematical error is discovered and the family breathes again over a celebratory breakfast. All is saved, then all is lost that very same day when the father loses his job anyway because the spice company has been bought out.
Desperate, the father gambles his retirement benefits on a scheme his younger brother proposes to start their own spice company. At the opening of this novella which jumps around in time, that gamble has paid off and made the family wealthy. But it's also cost them in ways that are hard to quantify. To our sentimental and somewhat unreliable narrator, life seemed to be richer emotionally back in the bad, old days when, as he says, (reading) the whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances.
"Ghachar Ghochar" is filled with wry, poetic lines like that one where Vivek Shanbhag and his translator Srinath Perur have rendered emotions and even random thoughts in language that's as pungent as those spices the family is marketing. Within the tight confines of a hundred pages or so, Shanbhag presents as densely layered a social vision of Bangalore as Edith Wharton did of New York in "The House Of Mirth." Shanbhag's Bangalore is packed with anonymous laborers and the leisure classes and teachers and other brain workers who are sandwiched in the middle.
When our narrator marries, his wife whose name is Anita and her family belong in that last category, and that's a problem. Anita questions the family's setup too much. She disdains her husband's and in-laws' dependence on that somewhat crooked uncle who runs the family spice empire. Challenging that uncle could cost our narrator his fortune. That's when "Ghachar Ghochar" shifts from a powerful novella about class anxieties to an Edgar Allan Poe tale of terror. "Ghachar Ghochar" is the first of Vivek Shanbhag's fiction to be published in English, but I expect it won't be the last. He's one of those special writers who can bring a fully realized world to life in a few pages and also manages to work in smart social commentary about fears that don't require much translation.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Ghachar Ghochar" by Vivek Shanbhag. If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like our interview about how retailers digitally track you when you shop or our interview with the director of the new James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" and an excerpt from my 1986 interview with Baldwin, check out our podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Mooj Zadie and Thea Chaloner. John Sheehan directed today's show. I'm Terry Gross.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"'Ghachar Ghochar' Presents A Fretful Vision Of Indian Class Anxiety." Fresh Air, 16 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481791882&it=r&asid=300aaff431868b256f5d074cb9cb2a06. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481791882
A Great Indian Novel Reaches American Shores
By PARUL SEHGALAPRIL 6, 2017
Continue reading the main story
Share This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Credit Maëlle Doliveux
Troubles — like ants — seldom walk alone. In GHACHAR GHOCHAR (Penguin, $15, paper), a new novella by the Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag, translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur, a family is besieged by both and develops a taste for responding with imaginative cruelty. Sudden wealth only makes them more ruthless. “It’s true what they say — it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us,” the nameless narrator realizes, a little late in the day. “When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind.”
This spiny, scary story of moral decline, crisply plotted and no thicker than my thumb, has been heralded as the finest Indian novel in a decade, notable for a book in bhasha, one of India’s vernacular languages. The Great Indian Novel has almost always referred to a particular kind of book: big, baggy, polyphonic and, crucially, written in English — “Midnight’s Children,” say, or “The God of Small Things.” Admirers of this austere little tale, who include Suketu Mehta and Katherine Boo, have compared Shanbhag to Chekhov. Folded into the compressed, densely psychological portrait of this family is a whole universe: a parable of rising India, an indictment of domestic violence, a taxonomy of ants and a sly commentary on translation itself.
The title is a nonsense phrase, meaning tangled beyond repair. Our narrator (who, with his excellent intentions and total lack of initiative, recalls Nick Carraway) hears it for the first time on his honeymoon. He has pounced on his new wife, Anita, in their hotel room, but can’t untie the drawstring of her sari’s petticoat. It’s all knotted up — ghachar ghochar, she says, reaching for a word from her childhood, a word invented by her little brother to describe a snarled kite string. The narrator is thrilled by this intimacy, to be welcomed into her secret language. In the morning, he gestures at the disheveled bedsheets, their entwined legs: ghachar ghochar.
All families are their own countries, with their own idioms, rites and taboos. Anita is not the only character who has grown up within the borders of a particular culture, yet when the narrator tries to share something of his own world, as new lovers will, Anita is understandably less charmed. To survive years of privation, his peculiar family has learned to move as one. The narrator can scarcely extricate himself in his own mind: “What can I say of myself that is only about me and not tied up with the others? Wherever I try to start, I quickly run into one of three women . . . each more fearsome than the other.” Everyone has a specific role. His uncle runs the family business, a spice packaging company. His fearsome mother and sister fight the family’s battles and keep his father, a co-owner of the business, appeased until he makes a will. The narrator’s job is to stay out of the way, mainly, “killing time with great dedication.”
Continue reading the main story
Ghachar Ghochar Vivek Sanbhag
We earn an affiliate commission with each book purchase, which helps support our journalism at The New York Times.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
Anita is repulsed by her new husband’s passivity and the family’s brutal, bullying tactics. “She would need to have lived through those earlier days with us,” the narrator laments. “When the whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances. Without that reality behind her, it’s all a matter of empty principle.”
Photo
Shanbhag is excellent on the inner logic of families, and of language, how even the most innocent phrases come freighted with history. In the book’s funniest set piece, the narrator’s mother tells him she’s cooking him a special breakfast. He recognizes her announcement for what it is — a declaration of war — and flees the house. His mother has chosen to make this particular dish because the smell of it nauseates Anita. Anita takes the bait, the narrator’s sister is drawn into the quarrel, then his father. The powder keg explodes.
“Ghachar Ghochar” is one of the first books written in Kannada — a language with around 40 million speakers — to be published in America. And much about its provenance and its passage into English is distinct — it’s the product of a true collaboration between Shanbhag and Perur, a first-time translator whose interest in this kind of work came not from his closeness to the language but his distance. He felt divorced from his mother tongue, he told me, and hoped translation would help him find his way back. For 18 months, author and translator worked on the 119-page book, taking it apart in Kannada and putting it back together in English — lightly editing it here and there, even adding a scene or two.
The actual translation wasn’t the tricky part, even though Kannada is a very different language — looser, more permissive about repetition. In fact, the translation brought certain elements into sharper focus. To establish the past tense in Kannada requires some elaborate grammatical framing. But English is efficient and allows the action of the book to move as a mind moves, to leap between present and past. If anything, translating the book from Kannada into Indian English (for a version published in India last year) proved less complicated than the subsequent jump from Indian to American English; small turns of phrase evocative to the Indian reader — “washing vessels” for washing dishes, “iron box” for iron — had to be tweaked. Perur did retain one lovely local detail. The family is accused of using umbrellas to shelter them from moonlight. In the village, where no one can afford umbrellas or knows what they are, the nouveau riche put them to absurd uses.
Newsletter Sign Up
Continue reading the main story
Book Review
Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
See Sample Privacy Policy
Opt out or contact us anytime
The real work of translation is always in carrying over the unsaid — never more important than in a book like “Ghachar Ghochar,” where the characters are impelled by forces within themselves, their families and their communities that feel so furtive, even unspeakable. For Perur it was a matter of establishing a voice that could be convincingly savvy and blind. He wrote and rewrote the early pages until he settled on a tone he believed could carry the novel.
The book in our hands is elegant, lean, balletic — but how can we know if the essence of the original has been communicated? When this question has been put to Vivek Shanbhag, who has himself also worked as a translator, he has recalled one particular passage from the novel. It is, notably, one of the scenes he added specifically for the translation. The narrator’s wife has gone out of town and he is idly rifling through her closet, touching her clothes, her jewelry. He catches scent of her suddenly. He presses his face into her saris to smell more, but the closer he gets, the more the smell retreats. “Whatever fragrance the whole wardrobe had was missing in the individual clothes it held. The more keenly I sought it, the further it receded. A strange mixture of feelings I could not quite grasp — love, fear, entitlement, desire, frustration — flooded through me until it seemed like I would break.”
The essence of a novel, Shanbhag seems to imply, floats like fragrance through the book. It is the emanation of the sum of its parts and cannot be isolated. And perhaps any attempt to single it out is beside the point. Translation isn’t merely an act of transportation, after all, of carrying something over. It’s asymptotic (“the more keenly I sought it, the further it receded”), a kind of contented yearning and act of ardor every bit as mysterious as the narrator’s efforts to find his beloved among her belongings.
Correction: April 23, 2017
The Roving Eye feature on April 9 attributed an erroneous distinction to “Ghachar Ghochar,” a novella by Vivek Shanbhag. It is one of the first books originally written in the Kannada language to be published in America, but not the first. There has been at least one earlier, “Samskara,” by U.R. Anantha Murthy, first published here by Oxford University Press in 1976.
Parul Sehgal is senior editor of the Book Review.
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag review – a masterful English-language debut
This stunning Bangalore-set family drama underlines the necessity of reading beyond our borders
Vivek Shanbhag … everything in his novel becomes ‘ghachar ghochar’, nonsense words denoting irrevocable entanglement.
Vivek Shanbhag … everything in his novel becomes ‘ghachar ghochar’, nonsense words denoting irrevocable entanglement. Photograph: Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Deborah Smith
Thursday 27 April 2017 12.00 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 18.20 BST
Ghachar Ghochar is the English-language debut of a writer already established as a leading figure in both the pan-Indian and Kannada-language literary scenes. Once again, reading beyond our tiny borders shows us what we’ve been missing, and proves the necessity of translation for a dynamic literary culture: Ghachar Ghochar is both fascinatingly different from much Indian writing in English, and provides a masterclass in crafting, particularly on the power of leaving things unsaid. In fewer than 28,000 words, Vivek Shanbhag weaves a web of suggestion and implication, to be read with a sense of mounting unease.
The opening chapter demonstrates how the short novel is the perfect form for Shanbhag’s particular talents: precise observations, accumulation of detail, narrative progression by way of oblique tangents. It opens in a Bangalore coffee shop, whose name hasn’t changed in a hundred years, andwhere the unnamed narrator unburdens himself to laconic waiter Vincent. The latter is splendidly outfitted in cummerbund and turban, and Coffee House’s tasteful oak-panelled walls are decorated with old photographs showing “just how beautiful this city was a century ago”. The narrator has no reason to be there, he confesses, “but who can admit to doing something for no reason in times like these, in a city as busy as this one?”
The subtle art of translating foreign fiction
Read more
In a handful of deftly drawn strokes, we learn that Coffee House is his refuge from contemporary life, harking back as it does to a time before the bourgeois concerns of money-making had taken root. Vincent features prominently in the opening chapter, only to fade into the background; the same goes for the narrator’s former lover Chitra, who worked for a women’s welfare organisation. Her accounts of domestic abuse arouse a curious response: “I knew that tea shouldn’t lead to a broken arm, or a forgotten key to murder. It wasn’t about the tea or the key: the last strands of a relationship can snap from a single glance or a moment of silence.” And there it is, the telltale hint that all is not well; far less obtrusive than Chekhov’s gun, but equally ominous.
We pass from one enclosed interior space to another: the family home, where the narrator lives with his older sister Malati, his wife Anita, his parents and his father’s younger brother or “Chikkappa”, whose successful spice company has raised the family into middle-class comfort. Chikkappa, and by extension the money he brings in, are now the centre around which the rest of the family orbits, eagerly catering to his every whim. Each relative is introduced with a reference to their financial contributions, a bit like Jane Austen’s eligible bachelors being ranked by income, but while Shanbhag’s observations are as meticulous and true to life as Austen’s, and notwithstanding his wry wit, something far darker is going on here.
Chikkappa’s success, the narrator tells us, has delivered them from the early days “when the whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances”, but blood is still thicker than water: the family responds with unwarranted violence when “thrown off balance” (a repeated phrase) by an unknown woman turning up at their door, claiming a connection with Chikkappa. In the ensuing showdown, Anita’s failure to demonstrate unquestioning solidarity is the first sign that everything is soon to become “ghachar ghochar”, nonsense words invented by Shanbhag to denote something irrevocably entangled.
The overriding impression produced by this focus on interiors and the close-knit family unit is one of claustrophobia. Every attempt to establish a relationship outside of this immediate group ultimately ends in failure, as when Malati divorces her husband and returns to the family home. And then there are the ants: foreign bodies invading their space, disrupting their stiflingly organised world, and in whose destruction the family take growing pleasure.
Amos Oz and Ismail Kadare named on Man Booker international prize longlist
Read more
Srinath Perur’s excellent translation presents a wonderfully measured, sometimes mannered diction, using words such as “compunction” and phrasing such as “took to creating a moat around the food”, as opposed to the more obvious, less stately “would create”, “created” or even just “made”.
Having first encountered the book in its HarperCollins India edition, I was excited to hear of it being published by Faber – which is to be praised for retaining that foreign-sounding title and for stamping Srinath’s name on the cover – and surprised not to see it on the Man Booker international longlist. Such prizes can be invaluable in getting attention for international writing, especially from little-represented languages such as Kannada, but there is no doubt that this deceptively unassuming book will find its readership.
• Deborah Smith is the translator of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Ghachar Ghochar is published by Faber. To order a copy go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, book review: This novella packs a punch
The novel written by Shanbhag, who has been compared to Chekhov, is the first of his works to translated into English
Lucy Scholes
Wednesday 19 April 2017 12:45 BST
0 comments
178
Click to follow
The Independent Culture
ghachar-1.jpg
Think of great Indian novels since Salman Rushdie set a certain tone with Midnight’s Children back in 1981 – Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things or, most recently, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland – they tend towards large tomes, written in English.
Now, however, the arrival of a new work has shaken up the status quo: Vivek Shanbhag’s gripping Ghachar Ghochar. This slim volume – at just over 100 pages, it’s more novella than novel – nimbly translated by Srinath Perur from the south Indian language of Kannada, tells a story that packs a powerful punch, both in terms of the precision of its portrait of one Bangalore-based family, and, by extension, what this tells us about modern India.
The first of Shanbhag’s works to be translated into English, his perceptive commentary regarding class anxieties and social ambition has won him comparisons to Chekhov and, yes, the astuteness of his depiction of the various tensions and alliances between family members echo the concerns explored in 19th-century Russian literature.
Shanbhag’s protagonists are a “joint family”: the unnamed narrator, his wife, his parents, his uncle and his sister. “It is natural to wonder, I suppose, why the six of us should want to live together,” the narrator muses. “What can I say – it is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable.” So perfectly put is this last line, it belongs up there with the now infamous opening of Anna Karenina, the clipped, exact prose of Perur’s translation nevertheless ably conveying the rich depth of meaning therein.
Central to Shanbhag’s story is the family’s recent change in fortunes (a metaphor, of course, for the broader economic boom recently experienced by India on a larger scale). Previously they were living day-to-day in a four-room, ant-infested house in a “teeming lower-middle-class area”: “The whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances.” Their newfound wealth, derived from the narrator’s uncle’s successful spice company, brings with it obvious material changes to their lives, but it’s the psychological vicissitudes it engenders that Shanbhag’s really interested in. In order to protect their new circumstances, the family closes ranks with a ruthlessness that, although born of past desperation, is still shockingly brutal and cold-hearted.
Brevity serves Shanbhag’s storytelling to great effect, not least because much of what makes the narrative so gripping lies in what he leaves unsaid. As such, with the twist of a single sentence the narrative transforms from an innocuous tale of social mobility to a horror story of a bourgeois family the members of which, regardless of external forces, are ghachar ghochar – a nonsense term used to refer to something tangled beyond repair. Made up to describe a child’s knotted kite string, it ultimately comes to refer to something much darker and all the more snarled. Shanbhag is the real deal, this gem of a novel resounding with chilling truths.
'Ghachar Ghochar' by Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, is published by Faber, £10.00