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{ FINE PRINT } THE ASHOKA DATABASE OF INDIAN TRANSLATIONS

- Sukanya Datta

There are certain things that feel distinctly Indian.

The way we weave through traffic as pedestrians. Nod our heads and jog our shoulders to indicate yes, no and who knows? Leap effortlessly from one language to another and another, often in a single day, sometimes in a single sentence.

Within our spectacular diversity, these are the kinds of things that unite us.

Let’s stay with that last one. A land of this many tongues (about 19,000, including dialects), could have been riven by the variations. Instead, we learnt long ago to share.

Most of us have, at some point, read at least a bit of Sant Tukaram and Maithilisharan Gupt, Premchand and Amrita Pritam, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Perumal Murugan.

We have at some point been read the Panchatantra, which makes for a great example, because its delightful fables have journeyed, over about 1,500 years, from the original Sanskrit into dozens of Indian languages (and an array of foreign ones).

And yet... so much remains hidden. Translations exist, but not in enough languages. Treasures exist, but in libraries and archives invisible to the mainstream.

Now, an effort led by Ashoka University’s Ashoka Centre for Translation, in collaboration with the literature-and-research-centric New India Foundation, is working to spotlight as many of those treasures as possible on a single platform.