Ādhī rāta kī santāneṃ
Salman Rushdie · 2007 · Hindi
Rushdie's Midnight's Children in Hindi — a novel about India's independence, written in English, read back into one of the languages it is about.
An editors' list
The world, in Indian languages
Translation is usually discussed as something that carries Indian books outward. Most of the traffic goes the other way: a reader in Hindi or Bengali has had the world available to them for a very long time, in editions nobody outside the language ever hears about. These are some of them.
6 books
Ajnabi
Albert Camus · 1998 · Hindi
Camus, in Hindi. A short book about a man who will not perform the grief expected of him, which loses nothing at all in the crossing.
Aparādha aura daṇḍa
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 1884 · Hindi
Crime and Punishment in Hindi. Dostoyevsky travels unusually well into Indian languages, and this is the one that everyone reads first.
Ātutaī aṇdhu
Margaret Atwood · 2004 · Bengali
Margaret Atwood in Bengali — proof that the traffic is contemporary and not only in the classics.
Anne Frank diary
Anne Frank · 1982 · Bengali
The diary, in Bengali. One of the most translated books in existence, and a reminder that a catalogue of a language is also a record of what that language chose to bring home.
Autobiography of a Yogi
Yogananda Paramahansa · 1975 · Hindi
Yogananda wrote in English for an American readership and was then translated back into the languages he came from — a strange round trip that says a lot about how Indian spiritual writing reached the world.
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