An editors' list
Books written in English by Indian writers, translated into Indian languages. The round trip is easy to miss and says something uncomfortable and interesting: for a lot of readers, the English original was never the accessible version.
5 books
Arundhati Roy · 1997 · Hindi
The God of Small Things in Hindi. Arundhati Roy's novel is set in Kerala, written in English, and read here in a third language — which is a reasonable description of how Indian publishing actually works.
Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayan · 2003 · Hindi
R. K. Narayan's Malgudi in Hindi. Narayan invented a South Indian town in English so completely that it has been re-imported into most of the languages the town would have spoken.
Salman Rushdie · 2007 · Hindi
Midnight's Children, in Hindi — a novel about India's independence, read back into one of the languages it is about.
Amish Tripathi · 2015 · Hindi
Amish Tripathi retells the Ramayana in English for a mass readership, and it is promptly translated into the languages the epic already lived in. The circularity is the point.
Amish Tripathi · 2015 · Malayalam
The same author in Malayalam. Contemporary Indian English fiction now gets translated across the country as a matter of course, which was not true a generation ago.
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