Saadat Hasan Manto, "Yes Master"; Kala Sajeevan, "How to Overcome a Bad Day"

Abstract

In the translation section of the current issue of Sanglap we are publishing a short story and a poem. Translating from different languages is an important political act, particularly when it comes from different languages of a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic country like India. India, apart from housing cultural and linguistic diversities, contains various forms of inequalities across class, caste, or gender. However, translations may indicate certain recurrent and analogous patterns of violation and suffering, especially for people from the margins. One of the translated works here is a short story by the celebrated Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Manto has been a master storyteller of people from the lowest rung of society. In the Urdu story “Yes Master” the childlike simplicity of Manto’s language has been translated effectively by Asma Rafiq which relates to the protagonist Qasim – a ten year old boy serving as a domestic help in a household. The title of the original story was Qasim, after the protagonist. But the translator chooses to rename it, holding up the irony in pronouncing the agreement “Yes Master.” The agreement, it is obvious, has been extorted from the boy, who we see in the story, is overworked and has no respite. The story depicts the performative possibility of denial through repeated forceful affirmation. The only way to get freedom from relentless service, we see in the story, is in having a wound. The accidental wound makes the boy realize the path of freedom. Not having his fingers perhaps becomes a form of resistance to his condition of relentless enslavement. “Yes Master” – becomes the voice of affirmation as well as denial in a condition, where saying “no” was impossible.