Zafri Mudasser Nofil
(Kolkata, Jan 30, 2019) Awards are not new to Jayant Kaikini but the Kannada author and dramatist says such recognitions are like a cheering pat on the back of a marathon runner, whose aim is to finish the race and not take selfies.
Kaikini was on Friday adjudged the winner of the USD 25,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2018 for his work No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories.
The award was given to him and translator Tejaswini Niranjana along with a trophy at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet here.
He says the award means a lot for the short story form and for translations.
“These awards are good because publishers will come forward for translations. Awards do not mean much to writers because these give a wrong signal as people will think the aim of a writer is to get an award.
“An award is like a pat on the back while you are running a marathon race. You are also given nimbu pani (lemon juice) during the race but the aim is to keep running and cross the finishing line and not take selfies,” Kaikini told PTI.
He is happy that his book is reaching new minds.
“This is good as each mind gives its own life to a book.”
Kaikini, who stayed in Mumbai for 24 years, wrote these stories in the ’80s and the ’90s.
“These are stories written in the pre-smartphone era. After being translated into English, the response is very heartening. The stories have reached new readers,” he says.
It was Niranjana’s idea to pick up stories based in Mumbai and they jointly chose 16 stories.
There was a collective mindset and that’s how the book started, says the author, who has six short-story volumes, five poetry collections, three collections of non-fiction, and three plays to his credit.
He has won the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award four times for his short-story collections. He has also received the Dinakar Desai Award for poetry, the B H Sridhar award for fiction, the Katha National Award and the Karnataka State Award for best dialogue and lyrics, and the Filmfare Award for best lyrics in Kannada four times.
He describes his book as a bunch of metaphors and images of Mumbai.
“Mumbai is a very spiritual space because of its minimalistic living. Mumbai liberates everyone from caste, creed, bio data and everything,” Kaikini says.
He is quite satisfied with the translations. Niranjana is a poet and translation is very safe in the hands of a poet, he says.
He is now working on another book in Kannada.
According to jury chair Rudrangshu Mukherjee, the judges were deeply impressed by the quiet voice of Kaikini through which he presented vignettes of life in Mumbai and made the city the protagonist of a coherent narrative.
“The Mumbai that came across through the pen of Kaikini was the city of ordinary people who inhabit the bustling metropolis. It is a view from the margins and all the more poignant because of it.”
For Niranjana, undertaking this translation was coming to terms with the ruse of the ordinary that Kaikini has mastered.
“The language of Kaikini’s fiction – as well as the characters who populate the stories – exceed the post-Independence dynamic that ties language to identity,” she says.
No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories is about what Mumbai enables. Here is a city where two young people decide to elope and then start nursing dreams of different futures, where film posters start talking to each other, where epiphanies are found in keychains and thermos-flasks.
From Irani cafes to chawls, old cinema houses to reform homes, Kaikini seeks out and illuminates moments of existential anxiety and of tenderness in the book, published by HarperCollins India.
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