Phoolsunghi

"A bit about the Bhojpuri language. For a long time, it was considered a dialect of Hindi even though it has always had its own script, grammar, literature, and even a sizeable cinema industry. It’s a recognized minority language in former British and Portuguese colonies like Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, South Africa, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. I understand that it’s a recognized national language in Nepal. Taking India and the diaspora together, apparently, there are some 200 million speakers worldwide now. Bhojpuri literature can be traced back to the 8th century. So, calling it a dialect of Hindi is like Professor Sitanshu Yashaschandra has written in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia : “When we consider the more familiar case of India’s new national language, Hindi, in relation to its so-called dialects such as Avadhi, Brajbhasha, and Maithili, we are confronted with the curious image of a thirty-year-old mother combing the hair of her sixty-year-old daughters . . .” This novel is the first-ever translation into English from Bhojpuri. Pandey Kapil was a lifelong activist with respect to the language and its literature. He championed these even when it meant relative anonymity for himself because he wasn’t writing in Hindi, which was more accessible to and popular with readers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Based on real-life characters and set over a period of 90 years (from the 1840s to 1931), the story is well-plotted and has everything: love, music, poetry, the opium trade, feudalism, colonialism, nationalism, modernism, tragedy. And it gives a beautifully rich and real depiction of a particular culture, society, and time. The Bihari legend about the poet, Mahendar, and the courtesan, Dhelabai, has been written about in at least three other novels but Kapil’s version is the most well-known. The translator, Gautam Choubey, tells us what the title means: “The phoolsunghi or flowerpecker that gives the novel its name is a tiny bird known for its noisy bustle around flower plants. However, if trapped in a cage, it loses its liveliness and withers away quickly. Phoolsunghi, therefore, is a metaphor for free-spirited creatures, striving for survival and meaning beyond their respective cages.” Choubey’s introduction alone is worth the price of the book because he gives us a decent history of the language, its literatures, the author, and the known politics around the real-life story. And Choubey’s translation is in a contemporary register while retaining some of the original lyricism so the book is both an aesthetic and immersive pleasure."