In 1958, a Presidency College student sat for an English literature paper at Calcutta University and did something slightly unusual. Writing about poetry, she reached for Jibanananda Das. Amrita surya , she rendered: Nectar sun. She took a record mark. The essay went into Srikumar Banerjee’s undergraduate textbook. And Ketaki Kushari Dyson, 18-year-old, had already assembled the method she would spend the next 67 years refining. Enter another language. Do not leave your own at the door. “Nectar sun” does not tame Jibanananda into something an English reader can swallow without noticing. Nor does it strand amrita in italics with a footnote, a specimen behind glass. It stands in both at once, a little strange in each, and makes the reader walk out to meet it. That is not a translation strategy. It is a way of living, and she picked it early. We have a poor word for people who live this way. Between. We use it to mean not-quite: Between jobs, between homes, between flights. The word smells faintly of the departure lounge. For Kushari Dyson, between was not a waiting room. It was an address. She was Born in Kolkata on June 26, 1940, into a household where Buddhadeva Bose, Bishnu Dey, Ajit Dutta and Sudhindranath Dutta were Abani Mohan Kushari’s friends and literature was what the adults were doing in the next room. She never had to be taught that books mattered. She saw what English was doing to the languages around it. She called it cultural politics, and she was sharp about the Bengali version of the affliction: The accomplished English speaker proud of being bad at Bengali. Her response was to learn Spanish . While writing In Your Blossoming Flower Garden, she taught herself Spanish, and found that Sanskrit was unexpectedly useful for it. “The more languages you know,” she said, “the more enjoyable the game becomes.” Game. Not battle, not defence, not heritage preservation. Game. When languages are handled mainly as flags, that noun is nearly seditious. The same refusal runs through her fiction. Noton Noton Payraguli takes up the inheritance of the 1970s women’s movement through women by turns vulnerable, funny, independent, compromised and mutinous. Margaret Thatcher’s Britain is in it, and students moving from the Middle East into Europe. The intimate and the international share a room, because in her experience they always had. Her scholarship did the same by other means. Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampo-r Sandhane is a long look at what two cultures can do when neither is required to kneel. With Sushobhan Adhikari she went into Tagore’s paintings and traced how his colour changed. She was always drawn to the seam where one form gives way to another. Ten years ago, at the Kolkata Literary Meet, she said there was no reason not to accept Indian English as a distinct variety. We are having that argument again, louder. English is the language of the interview and the visa; the mother tongue is produced as evidence of authenticity. Cultural confidence, she demonstrated over six decades, does not require quarantine. You can know English to its bones and not lose Bengali. You can live in Britain without becoming stateless in the head. You can go a long way into another culture and come back with your own intact, possibly improved. Somewhere there is an examination script with two English words on it, put down by a teenager who had worked out that the alternative to being colonised by a language is not a barricade. It is curiosity. It is translation. It is conversation. The writer is assistant professor, Sikkim Manipal University
