The most important news you'll hear about today

Several readers (including my mother) have now informed me of the passing of Bibek Debroy, who did the translation of the Mahabharata that I’ve been reading for the past six months. Most obituaries of Debroy barely mention his translation work—he was much more notable during his life for his work as an economist and government official. However, in my opinion he is extremely underrated as a literary figure—the work he’s done is far more impressive than that for which Emily Wilson has been feted and acclaimed.

When I started reading his translation of the Mahabharata, I felt a bit cynical about Debroy, because he’s associated with the Narendra Modi government, which I hate. But…you cannot read seven thousand pages of a man’s writing without feeling at least a little bit grateful to him. The man’s talents are immense! He translated the entire Mahabharata in five years! We are talking a work that is ten times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. I mean really sit with that. He translated that…in five years. And he did it whilst being an extremely eminent economist. He says he worked about two hours a day.

The scale of this accomplishment is beyond human reckoning. How is it possible that one man, in the course of about five years, sat down and translated about 200,000 lines of Sanskrit poetry into pretty readable English prose? There’ve been several outfits trying to do this in America for, like, thirty years. We’re talking major institutions like the Clay Sanskrit Library—it’s right in the name. They’ve been trying to do this for ages. They couldn’t. He did it on his own, in five, whilst working as an economist at the same time.

This is the kind of linguistic attainment that you read about in stories. I’m reminded of Montaigne, whose parents only spoke to him in Latin for the first three years of his life (or, rather, they hired people who only spoke to him in Latin) so he’d be the first person in a thousand years to speak Latin as their birth tongue. Bibek Debroy must’ve had that level of familiarity with Sanskrit. He must’ve just sat down with the text and started transcribing it into English, as easily as someone might do simultaneous translation at the UN.

You might ask if he used research assistants—even if he had, this translation would still be an achievement.¹ However, he has stated emphatically that he doesn’t use any help—and I am inclined to believe him, simply because it’d be very hard to find research assistants capable of really assisting in a work of this scope, and managing those assistants would ultimately take more time than just doing it yourself. ²

The degree to which his literary efforts have gone unremarked even in his various obituaries seems rather astonishing. For instance, look at this article! Hardly anyone mentions his translations! It’s mostly about his academic and government work. But seriously, his work as an economist is surely much less important than his work translating the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Puranas. The economics work seems like a fine addition to the existing literature, sure, whatever, but…India is a country where many of the most-educated people read much better English than they do Hindi or Tamil or whatever their birth tongue might be, and certainly know much better English than they do Sanskrit. Now those people can read the unabridged Mahabharata! Which…they kinda couldn’t do before. An edition of the 19th-century Ganguli translation exists online, and it seems pretty good (by which I mean it’s quite similar to the Debroy translation), but it had no footnotes and was quite hard to read—it looks like it’s basically hosted on a geocities page. Functionally, that translation did not exist! I tried to read it several times and couldn’t. Until these Debroy translations came out (which happened only in the last ten years), I basically could not read the Mahabharata!

That is insane! That is wild! That is amazing!

The scale of his achievement is such that it’s actually a bit scandalous that nobody in the academic Sanskritology world has written about these books. Debroy himself commented on this fact in an interview:

Criticism has usually been in the nature of [commenting on] typos.  I wish there was more serious criticism.  Wendy Doniger promised to do that.  She hasn't so far. Instead, she sent me an email saying the translation was "awfully good" and that she was using it in the course that she taught.

Wendy Doniger is the premier academic Sanskritologist in the English-speaking world. Bibek Debroy, like him or not, is the premier translator into English of Sanskrit-language works.

Because of him, English-speaking people can read these books in unabridged form, which is not something they could do before. It is not just improper that she hasn’t written about him, it’s also kind of strange! If he’d been at all associated with American academia, she would’ve written reams and reams about him—all the journals would’ve written about him.

However, Debroy was clearly not an academic Sanskritologist. I don’t mean that as an insult—just a statement of fact. His abilities with Sanskrit surely exceeded those of any professor of Sanskrit in America, the UK, or Canada, but…he was not a professor of Sanskrit. And that was always going to be a mark against him.

He certainly intended that these books be used by academics (that’s why he translated the Critical edition of the Mahabharata, even though it excludes several popular episodes that an Indian audience might expect to see). But he did not study Sanskrit at a university—And he translated these books more out of a religious than a literary duty.

Then, of course, there’s his association with Hindu nationalism. Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, was challenged in court in India under an anti-blasphemy law and ultimately was recalled and pulped. She has taken a stand against Hindu nationalism, which is great. I have too. Most American academics who study or teach Hindu texts have to deal with complaints, which oftentimes turn into harassment, from Indian-American students. This means if you’re an American academic, you just try to avoid anything that even touches vaguely on the Hindu right-wing. Furthermore, you just don’t want to be charitable to the Hindu right-wing, because the way they’ve treated you is often so aggressive.

But…reading these books has honestly made me wonder if perhaps the Hindu nationalists have a point! Like…several hundred years of Western academic study of Sanskrit has obviously not served these texts very well. Attempts by American publishers to do complete translations of the Mahabharata have repeatedly foundered—you can say there were funding issues or that the translators died, but fundamentally the problem is disinterest. You have groups of people who’ve made a living by claiming to be experts in sacred texts, but they don’t really prioritize making those texts available to people to read!

And it’s a broader problem with our academic humanities. Where are the American Bibek Debroys? Our system does not produce people with his kind of facility in ancient languages. But you know what does? Religious nationalism. I guarantee you right now there is some kid at, I dunno, Hillsdale College, who translates Ancient Greek as easily as breathing. Like it or not, these classical Christian academies are gonna produce people at some point who can do what Debroy did.

And we need it! There are so many ancient Western texts that’re being ill-served by American and British publishing in exactly the same way the Mahabharata was ill-served. I’m talking about, for instance, Plutarch’s Lives. You might say, oh, why would some Christian nationalist translate those books? And, the thing is—it won’t be, like, J.D. Vance who does it. Instead it’ll be some Christian guy who graduated from Hillsdale, but who now works at the Council of Economic Advisors, and who just…loves ancient languages! For their own sake! Because he loves ancient wisdom and hungered to know it in the original.

And he will convince Regnery Publishing that the world needs, say, a complete new translation of Plutarch’s Lives—a book that for all its influence hasn’t been done in an accessible way in a very long time. The Penguin Classics tried to do it, but they spread it across six volumes, they left out the comparisons between Greek and Roman figures (the whole point of the text!) and they used different translators for each volume. It’s basically just selections from Plutarch—you can’t get the feel of the whole thing.³ Anyway, this guy, this Christian economist, he will do it, and all these other right-wing people will go wild for it! As they should, because it is an incredible work that is under-read and under-appreciated even amongst people who love the classics, and after this book comes out…nobody in the mainstream literary world will even talk about it! And why? Not just because it was right-wingers who did it, but because they did it in a quintessentially right-wing way. Because they did it outside the approved way of doing translations.

But the approved way…is bad. Like, everything about our current system seems so bad! You have these incredibly expensive academic translations that nobody reads, because they’re so forbidding and aren’t really meant for the general reader. Then you have these dumbed-down, chopped-up translations that feel like they don’t really do service to the text itself.

If a work is relatively short, then Penguin Classics are fine. But anything that spans multiple volumes is almost always done quite poorly. Theoretically it’s because publishers are worried sales will be low, but so what? Who cares if the book only sells a thousand copies! Who cares if it makes money at all! So many books come out that nobody gives a shit about—people would care much more about a good edition of Plutarch’s Lives than they do about…I dunno…whatever most academic books are about. The fact is that our libraries and academic publishers—our whole critical apparatus—just doesn’t consider it a priority to have readable, accessible volumes of the classics. If we did, then those things would exist.⁴

In the case of Bibek Debroy, it’s not that the Narendra Modi government suddenly decided to put out a great new translation of the Mahabharata! That’s not what happened at all. But…Hindu nationalism made it possible for a person with tremendous knowledge of Sanskrit to achieve high office. I am sure that the sales of these books do not necessarily justify the expense of putting them out. With the Mahabharata, there is a fair amount of interest, although even here the later books surely often go unread, but he was also in the process of putting out unabridged translations of the Puranas—there’s even less general interest in that. His political power was clearly a factor when it came to a publisher being willing to commit to this project.

Someday soon, the same thing will happen here in America. The fact that we have so many overt right-wingers very interested in the classics—this is going to influence what kinds of classics get translated and published, and it’ll influence how they are published. I am both happy and sorry to say that I think the influence is going to be good! In the case of these Mahabharata volumes, there is nothing overtly political in how they’re presented, and there’s a reason for that—Debroy wanted them to be accepted and used by academic Sanskritologists. Which they have been! Wendy Doniger told him that she assigned them herself when she taught. They might not like it, but there’s simply nothing else to use.⁵

Anyway, Debroy wrote an obituary for himself that’s very despairing—more fatalist than Stoic. I could quote from it, but I’d rather not. Instead I’d like to close with a quote from the eighth volume of the Mahabharata—the part I read just this morning—which is largely about people trying to deal with the aftermath of this terrible Kurukshetra war. In the following passage, Gandhari is castigating Krishna for the war that he has fomented and allowed to happen (remember, we know from the Bhagavad Gita that Arjuna didn’t even want to fight this fucking war! Krishna persuaded him that it needed to happen).

The following is a very long quote. That is the point. It is the kind of thing that American publishing has a very difficult time translating—this is the sort of passage that is almost always left out, either because it’s cut entirely or because it’s at the very end of the work, right around the time the original translator tends to die or the funding gets cut. I know most of you won’t read or be able to appreciate this passage—it’s something you can only understand after you’ve read seven thousand pages of this work! You need to know all these stories. You need to know who Abhimanyu is. You need to know Krishna’s different names (by which Gandhari refers to him throughout the passage). It is so fantastic that I have this to read! And the existence of this book is thanks mostly to Bibek Debroy. This is an amazing legacy—one that deserves to be celebrated.

The context is that Gandhari, the mother of Duryodhana (the villain of the epic) is on the battlefield, and she’s looking at the fallen body of Abhimanyu and talking to Krishna about him.⁶ The performance is even more remarkable because halfway through the passage she starts ventriloquizing Abhimanyu’s wife, imagining what she might be saying to the corpse of her husband.

O Pundarikaksha! This one had eyes like yours and has been brought down. O unblemished one! He was your equal in strength, valour and energy. He was your equal in beauty. But he has been brought down and is lying down on the ground. He was extremely delicate and was used to lying down on the skins of ranku deer. His body is on the ground now. Does it not cause torment? With armlets, his hands are like the trunks of elephants, hardened from bowstrings. As he is lying down, with golden bracelets, those large arms are outstretched. He is certainly sleeping happily, tired out through many kinds of exertion. As I am lamenting in grief, he is not speaking to me at all. Where has the noble one gone, abandoning the noble Subhadra, his fathers, who are like the gods, and the grief-stricken me?’ She has placed his head on her lap, as if he is still alive, and is removing the blood-smeared hair with her hands. She is asking, ‘You are Vasudeva’s sister’s son. You are the son of the wielder of Gandiva. In the midst of the battle, how could those maharathas slay you? Shame on the perpetrators of that cruel deed—Kripa, Karna, Jayadratha, Drona and Dronayani. They have caused this hardship. Did all those bulls among rathas not possess hearts? They surrounded a child and killed him and brought me this sorrow. The Pandavas and the Panchalas were looking. Though he possessed protectors, how was that brave one killed, as if he had no protectors? On seeing that he was killed by many, as if he had no protector, how is the brave Pandava, tiger among men, still alive? Without the lotus-eyed one, how will the Parthas obtain any delight from getting this large kingdom or from the defeat of their enemies? You have earned worlds through your weapons, your dharma and your self-control. Let me swiftly follow you there and protect me there. It is always extremely difficult to die before one’s time has come. I am extremely unfortunate. Despite seeing you slain in the battle, I am still alive.

Afterword

I had a whole other post that was scheduled to go today, about…I dunno, literary taste or something. I think I talked about Ben Lerner. Totally unimportant thoughts (which I will probably post next week). But I was unexpectedly very moved to hear about the death of Bibek Debroy. I hope it’s not disrespectful to use this post to write a bit about Hindu nationalism—I do think pre-existing negative perceptions of Hindutva are inevitably going to affect the critical reputation of a figure like this amongst the very small portion of the American literary establishment that actually cares about the Mahabharata.

However, his literary work certainly deserves more attention than it’s gotten! I mean Carole Satyamurti got an obituary in the Guardian. And why? Because of her Mahabharata retelling. But Debroy translated the whole thing and he doesn’t get a mention. I’m willing to bet he garners zero obituaries or retrospectives in any Western literary section or literary journal, even though he is actually a major literary figure! It’s true that our literary culture can be very parochial, but in America we cover literary happenings in Canada or the UK much more readily than we cover those in India. There’s really no excuse for this—India has the second-largest number of English speakers in the world, after America.

Yes, it’s true that Indian writers get a lot of coverage, but they are usually diasporic writers. The thirty million people of the Indian Diaspora have produced a lot of work that’s good and worth reading, but the two hundred and twenty million English-speaking people in India are also doing some things that deserve our attention. Not as charity, but because they will ultimately have a huge impact on the future of the English language.

It’s something that’s hard to write about, because almost no Indians speak English as their birth language. But educated Indians use English very fluently, and often they’re more comfortable reading English than they are their birth languages. If you’ve been educated mostly in English-medium schools, then you probably don’t have the linguistic attainment in Hindi to really be able to read a Hindi translation of the Mahabharata. Certainly you’d feel much more comfortable reading an English translation of it versus a Hindi one. There are definitely strong vernacular language literary traditions: Bengalis are famous for their literary culture. English will never displace Hindi or Tamil or Gujurati or Bengali, but…a lot of India’s literary life is carried on in English, simply for reasons of convenience.

Anyway, I’m pondering pitching the NYRB or LRB with an idea for an article about Debroy and about the Mahabharata, with a focus on the ways that western academics have failed these classic texts. I think the reason he’s been covered so little is that very few literary critics have actually read any of the translations he’s done. That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re not important. Since in a month or two I’ll have completed his Mahabharata, I’m probably the only person who is legible to the mainstream American or British literary establishment who is capable of writing about Debroy. If you have any contacts at the New Yorker, NYRB, LRB, Harper’s, The Atlantic, etc, please feel free to put me in touch—otherwise I’ll do the usual thing and just try to guess peoples’ emails. It’d be a major piece to write, and it’d involve a lot of reaching out and talking both to people in India and to academic Sanskritologists here in the States and UK, so it’s not worth doing except for a major paper.

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On the reception of my novella

Thank you so much to everyone who’s read my novella, Money Matters. People have definitely said nice things. If anyone wants to review it on their Substack (or even in a real journal!), that would also be nice! I have more thoughts about the experience of publishing a novel-like work on Substack, but I’ll save them for a paid post. Short answer, it’s been a good experience!

I mean that genuinely! Like…I would’ve said I felt good about it regardless, because that’s what you always say when you try something new. But in this case…it’s been, what, three or four days, and I actually do feel good!

This experience feels very…honest. I don’t know how to explain it better than that. Anyone who is interested in what I’m doing—they can read it. Anyone who doesn’t feel interested? They don’t have to read it. I’m not holding out the hope that BookTok influencers or review pages or awards committees are somehow gonna convince people that my work is the next hot thing to read. I would obviously love if that happens, but with my other books I really needed that to happen. Like, I needed to break out, if I was going to have a career.

Now I don’t, and it feels great. Seems like a very glib thing to say, which is why I won’t dwell too much on it.

Anyways, here’s a sampling of nice things people have said:

• sympathetic opposition
  wrote: I read it twice. This is great, readable, well observed, morally interesting. Also experimenting w short story form -- & here experimental does not mean, like, ‘that style that gets called experimental but which is in fact an established style of its own, tending towards overwritten.’ Now you read it

• Catherine Liu
  wrote: I couldn’t stop reading this novella. It’s so good.

• The Ivy Exile
  wrote: I am not ordinarily a fiction person but this novella by

  Naomi Kanakia is really excellent, and you don’t have to be a lost San Francisco addict to appreciate how evocatively it captures that 20-something malaise.

• And

  Rose White
  wrote: Money Matters, to me, is an extension of the 19th century social drama, updated to the 21st century without the baggage of modern moralizing. It’s SO refreshing.

If you want to read my novella for yourself, here’s a link.

1. Other complete translations of the Mahabharata have had much more questionable authorship histories. As this Indian newsmagazine notes:

Debroy’s feat mirrors a similar single-handed effort by the 19th-century Kolkata writer, Babu Kisari Mohan Ganguli, whose publisher and printer, Pratap Chandra Roy, walked away with the credit for the translation that was published under his name between 1883 and 1896. Ironically, it was Roy’s premature death after the publication of the ninth volume that brought to light Ganguli’s role in the entire exercise, after the real translator revealed his existence in the 11th volume.

A similar translation exercise was carried out by Manmatha Nath Gupta between 1895 and 1905, but, as Debroy points out, it was clearly plagiarised from Ganguli’s pioneering work. Gupta’s translation, in fact, has passages that have no equivalents in the Sanskrit original.

2. One of the few interviews I could find with him about this work was dug up for me by

James Rutherford

. In it, Debroy states:

Yes.  It is a solitary effort.  I don't think I would have accepted assistance.  That is true for other work too.  It is very difficult to get research assistants who are good and whom you can trust.  In the last resort, the buck stops with you.  I don't trust research assistants and wouldn't have, in this case too.  Had there been a research assistant, we would probably have had an index and done the cross-referencing better.  But not for the translation proper.

3. When I read Plutarch’s Lives I was very into Project Gutenberg free translations, and I read this one online. This 19th-century translator, George Long, is very good, but he died before doing the fourth volume—so I had to rely on a different translator for that volume (I think it was Arthur Clough), and the experience was noticeably worse. A while back I looked around to see if there was a modern version that was any good—I bought all those Penguin Classics versions, and I was very disappointed. They are each meant to be read as standalones—there is no recognition that someone might just want to read the entire work!

4. If you want to see how niche texts can be done well, look at the Middle English Text Series. Everything about their books (several of which I own) is perfect. They’ve made so many wonderful Middle English texts available to the general reader: the books are usually free to read online, and the paperback volumes are usually only forty or fifty dollars. This is an example of people in America who have a genuine love for ancient languages and who’re committed to bringing them to the average reader.

5. Several people have recommended to me the Carole Satyamurti re-telling of the Mahabharata. But I looked into it, and…that book is not a translation! The author went back and re-read the Ganguli edition and used that for her iambic pentameter retelling. That’s a great performance, I am sure, but it’s not really a translation at all. Carole Satyamurti is also not Indian—she was married to an Indian guy and she took his name. So, I dunno, for me the trust isn’t really there.

6. Some additional context here is that Abhimanyu is actually the son of Arjuna, who was on the other side of this war. But Gandhari never wanted this war! Fundamentally, it was Krishna who wanted and fomented this war—which is to say, the war was caused by fate. It’s something we’ve been told repeatedly from the other side—we’re always being told oh this war is due to dharma—well now Gandhari is taking the opportunity to take fate to task!