The first English translation of the first novel in Angika, Abha Purbey’s Gulabiya, originally serialised in Nai Baat, a publication from Bhagalpur, Bihar, explores the lives of women in rural and semi-urban areas, and their struggles for self-determination in the face of limited access to resources and agency. Translated by Tejaswi Rawal and Shivangi, the story follows the titular farm labourer, inspired by a woman who had once worked for the author. Married off against her will, she was oppressed by her husband and in-laws before leaving them to reunite with her lover. She was never seen again. Her absence, and the circumstances that led to her actions, find literary expression here.
From the opening chapter: “Gulabiya is in the fields, but her mind is elsewhere; Balesar is not here yet.” This seemingly simple sentence should not be lost on readers. For one, there are few novels that centre the gendered labour in the fields. The second is the morally upright woman who continues to find purchase in the popular imagination. Gulabiya’s defiance towards the end, therefore, is a fitting pushback against such notions.
The upturned expectations are poetically laced with Gulabiya’s labour of love and Balesar’s longing for her, allowing this slim novel to pack quite a punch. Consider this: when Gulabiya’s friend, Paro, fails to convince her to leave the fields as it gets dark, she “takes her in her arms and leaves the field; two shadows walking in the dusk. It almost seems as if Balesar is carrying Gulabiya in her arms. Taking her far, far away.”
Seth Patel Singh, for whom both Gulabiya and Balesar work, is an authoritarian landowner. In his presence, people like Gulabiya and Balesar cannot prosper. But Balesar dares. In a way, Gulabiya is his story, too. “Freedom from all bondage” is what he desires. “A golden prison with great food is still a prison,” he thinks. “It sits on your heart like a weight. A bird likes to fly,” and Balesar, too, would, like a bird, be free.
But dreaming of freedom deserves a song, and Balesar hums a few. By choosing to retain the original text where required and evoking the songs of the Kosi river and its fertile regions that dance on the lips of its dwellers, the translators have managed to preserve the Angika affect in English. By ensuring that caste politics remains visible—the moment when Sumer Singh asks for Balesar’s father’s full name, for instance—and by footnoting the cultural practice of burying one’s umbilical cord in their birthplace in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the translators preserve a rich cultural history in their work.
Filled with purpose, when someone like Gulabiya frees herself, people talk behind her back. But when a novel like Gulabiya enters the English literary world, it is Gulabiya’s words that take centre stage. No whispers, just rock-solid words.