Voices from the Margins

Voices from the Margins　focuses on marginalized and less visible literary texts and traditions of India. It seeks to present anthologies of such texts in English translation buttressed by critical matter. The series aims to thereby challenge the invisibilisation that keeps certain texts and traditions outside the popular gaze.

The true potential of translation for a multilingual country like India perhaps remains to be realized fully even today. This means that the idea of India, and of Indian literature, often remains a partial one as it is based on exposure to only what is written in English, or to the little that is available in English translation. And there is, of course, a complicated politics that shapes what becomes available in translation.

This series will identify key Indian bhasha literary texts that can problematize and/or enrich our current understanding of Indian Literature when available in English translation. It will include a focus on marginalized languages, and themes of marginalization on the basis of caste (Dalit literature), language, gender, genre and region. The titles in this series will focus on individual authors and attempt to (a) create an archive of their key writings in English translation, and (b) create a critical perspective on this archive. The latter, it would try to do through the use of critical introductions and a focus on intensive interviews/ oral narratives. This series will thus arm the readers with an alternative and more inclusive notion of ‘Indian Literature’ and empower them to challenge the existing hierarchies and exclusions currently pertaining to our idea of ‘Indian Literature’; it will also hopefully open up new possibilities for rendering these texts and writers more visible within our critical discourse. We hope that Voices from the Margins　will bring on stage what has largely remained out of popular vision, and that it will force us, readers and academics, to confront our own aporias vis-à-vis our reading.