ABSTRACT
In his story “Mai Dukh Ki Lambi Raat” Bharat Sasne presents stigma resulting from disease, disability and marginalized existence on the edges of modern urban India in unflinching detail. This paper attempts to analyze the challenges involved in recuperating the subjectivity of the disabled person and the material reality of her life on the one hand and translating stigma and destitution into an elite linguistic register such as English on the other. In representing an urban context Sasne deploys multiple registers of several languages through characters who code-switch and code-mix fluidly. What are the strategies that a translator must adopt in order not to flatten and sanitize the multilingual vibrancy that marks anonymous interactions in modern public spaces. How do these registers refer to disability? My paper makes use of theoretical perspectives emerging from disciplinary domains such as Disability Studies, Urban Geography and Translation Studies to examine these issues.
