Rewriting India’s Republic of Letters

It didn’t happen with thunder. There was no canon fire. No flags raised, no anthems sung. Just a woman with quiet eyes and stories wrapped like wet clothes in her arms, stepping into a literary ceremony in Europe, carrying the scent of the coast and the grief of inland prayers. And suddenly, a language, Kannada, so rarely found in the international imagination, stood tall, translated and listened to.

Banu Mushtaq, with her Heart Lamp: Selected Stories translated by Deepa Bhasthi, won the International Booker Prize in 2025. But to reduce that moment to a literary award is to miss the forest and its bleeding trees. It was more than a win, it was a punctuation mark in a long and unfinished sentence. The kind of sentence that begins in the back lanes of Bhatkal and doesn’t end even in Rotterdam.

Her stories are not exotic. They are not dressed in peacock feathers. They are damp with the breath of real life. Muslim women in Karnataka’s coastal villages, speaking in silences, folding grief into rotis, resisting through presence. There are no heroes. No revolutions. Only what be called the politics of the smallest things. A child’s fever. A grandmother’s unresolved prayer. The sudden loneliness of a courtyard once filled with voices.

Mushtaq does not ask to be celebrated. She asks to be heard. That, in a country still unwilling to hear from its many tongues, is revolutionary.

And one of those standing beside her, not in competition, but in a quiet, cosmic fellowship of language, is Perumal Murugan. The man who once declared himself dead as a writer. Not by illness or exhaustion, but by mobs. By institutions. By the cold, unforgiving silence of a country that often punishes those who speak too plainly about caste, desire, and divinity.

In January 2015, Murugan posted a stark farewell on Facebook: ‘Perumal Murugan the writer is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself. He also has no faith in rebirth. An ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone.’

This was not just a personal abdication, it was an obituary for the right to imagine freely in a world quick to take offense and slow to listen. And yet, through ash and outrage, he returned. Quietly. Writing again. Not with anger, but with a deeper, earthbound clarity, as if having walked through fire, he now knew how to describe even smoke with tenderness.

Perumal Murugan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ Sreejithkoiloth CC BY-SA 4.0

In Sandalwood Soap and Other Stories, a man remembers a lost lover not by photograph, but by essence, each bar of soap a vessel of memory. In Poonachi, it is a goat, small, black and unnamed, that bears witness to the intimate violence and unexpected tenderness of rural life. In Pyre, love defies caste, but the village doesn’t. The couple burns. So does the reader. And in Fire Bird (Aalanda Patchi), the novel that won him the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature, Murugan writes not with rage, but with the slow insistence of survival, charting a life trying to take flight amid the soot of caste and the weight of inherited sorrow.

Both Mushtaq and Murugan write from geographies that Delhi doesn’t know how to locate. They write in tongues that Mumbai bookstores don’t stock. But their stories are crossing oceans. Not because they are universal in the tired, exportable sense. But because they are unapologetically specific. Granular. Rooted like banyan trees in the earth of caste, gender, religion and memory.

This is not just literature. This is reclamation.

The polyphonic republic

India has 22 official languages. But only two or three are treated like they matter. For decades, English has been our literary passport to the world. Within India, Hindi has become the language of state, cinema, and spectacle. Everything else – Assamese, Maithili, Odia, Bangla, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu – has been asked to wait. Wait for recognition. Wait for translation. Wait to matter.

But the waiting is over.

Mushtaq’s win. Murugan’s return. Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. Khalid Jawed’s The Paradise of Food. The emergence of Dalit and tribal voices that do not ask for space, they claim it. All of this points to something seismic: the decentralisation of literary capital. The centre is not merely shifting. It is crumbling. And what rises in its place is not a new centre. It is a constellation. Multiple tongues. Multiple textures. Multiple truths.

Translation is the bridge. But it is also the battlefield.

To translate Mushtaq is not simply to carry Kannada into English. It is to carry a people’s rhythm. The tremble in a woman’s voice as she bids goodbye to her son leaving for the Gulf. The quiet politics of a silence that would go unnoticed in a metropolitan café. It is not about accuracy. It is about fidelity, to pain, to pauses, to pulse.

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Translators like Daisy Rockwell, Arunava Sinha, Deepa Bhasthi, Aniruddhan Vasudevan, V. Ramaswamy, Rakhshanda Jalil, Rahul Soni, Lalit Kumar, Baran Farooqi, Sayari Debnath, Gautam Choubey, Priyanka Sarkar, Kalyan Raman, Mahua Sen and Kavitha Muralidharan are the unsung architects of this literary resurgence. They are not decorators. They do not simplify. They carry, intact, unflinching and with breath and bruise, the full weight of another world into ours.

From the rice fields of Assam to the alleyways of Bhubaneswar, from the Sahyadri forests to the Gangetic plains, literary fires are burning in many tongues. In Assamese, writers like Indira Goswami (Mamoni Raisom Goswami), Nilmani Phookan, Arupa Kalita Patangia, and Harekrishna Deka have long sung of dislocation, desire and death. Their voices, carried into English by translators like Pradipta Borgohain and Gayatri Bhattacharyya, speak of floods, insurgency, and the quiet rebellion of women. In Bangla, the moral lineage of Mahasweta Devi, Shankar, Bani Basu, Ashapurna Devi, Bimal Mitra and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay endures, translated with care by Arunava Sinha, Nivedita Sen, Ipshita Chanda. Konkani’s Damodar Mauzo and Pundalik Naik, often translated by Xavier Cota and Paul Melo e Castro, write of a Goa far from beach postcards, one shaped by caste, memory and Portuguese ghosts.

And from the Odia coast, Fakir Mohan Senapati, the sly chronicler of early Indian realism, wrote of colonised minds and corrupted babus. Gopinath Mohanty etched tribal anguish and existential ache in prose that still stings. Pratibha Ray gave voice to women caught in quiet tyrannies. Sitakanta Mahapatra wove Odisha’s sacred topography and folk cosmology into lyrical modernity. Translators like Jatindra Kumar Nayak, Himansu Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre have brought these works into English with a touch that remembers manuscripts, salt air and untranslatable prayers.

Maithili breathes through Harimohan Jha, Yatri, Rajkamal Choudhary, Lily Ray, Rajmohan Jha, Usha Kiran Khan, Kathakar Ashok, Shivshankar Srinivas, Gaurinath and Taranand Viyogi. Their voices are slowly entering English.

Marathi has long brought clarity through writers like Baburao Bagul, Shanta Gokhale, Bhalchandra Nemade and Namdeo Dhasal. Dalit literature in Marathi isn’t a footnote, it is the mirror India is still afraid to look into.

Malayalam refuses to be quiet. Writers like Paul Zacharia, Sarah Joseph and Benyamin speak across geographies, from Gulf kingdoms to Kerala kitchens, with a syntax that won’t surrender. Translators like Ministhy S. and C.S. Venkiteswaran ensure that these voices cross borders unbetrayed.

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In Assam, Rongmei tribal songs are being translated for the first time. In Madhubani, Maithili stories of domestic violence and agricultural protest are being anthologised. In Kerala, Dalit women poets are writing about menstruation and gods, often in the same breath. Across the country, what was once spoken in whispers is now entering print. And not just through global publishing giants like Penguin, HarperCollins, and Westland. Small, independent presses, Blaft, Zubaan, Eka, Antika, Navarambh, Tyrant Books, are risking everything to publish books that don’t promise sales but do promise truth.

Each language is a history. Each writer a witness. Each translator a bridge across silence. And this republic of stories, no longer waiting in the margins, is now writing itself into the centre. Not to replace the dominant. But to dismantle its claim of being the only.

India was always a chorus. We just forgot how to listen.

Now the echoes are returning, layered, discordant, beautiful.

What we are witnessing is not a trend. It is a movement. And like all movements, it began quietly. It is rising from the periphery. And the centre, if it has any sense of survival, will listen.

Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bengaluru-based management professional, literary critic, and curator. His essays explore the intersections of literature, translation, identity, and regional imagination. He can be reached at ashutoshbthakur@gmail.com.

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