NE EDUCATION BUREAU
AHMEDABAD, OCT 22
Professor Tejaswini Niranjana, Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, Ahmedabad University has been selected for the 2021 National Translation Award in prose by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). She has received the award for ‘No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories’, her translation of Kannada author Jayant Kaikini’s anthology of short stories.
One of the most prestigious literary awards for translations into English, The National Translation Award (NTA) is the only prize to include an evaluation of the source language text. It recognises outstanding contribution to literature in English by ‘masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality’.
Jayant Kaikini’s short stories trace the ordinary lives of people living on the fringes of Mumbai city. Niranjana’s English translation of the Kannada stories was described by judges Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Annie Janusch as “virtuoso” and enabling a reading experience that is at once rooted to the city of Mumbai and also profoundly universal.
Niranjana has received accolades before for her exemplary work in translation. She was the recipient of the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for the translation of MK Indira’s Phaniyamma (1989), the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award for her translation of Niranjana’s Mrityunjaya (1996), and the JCB Prize for South Asian Literature for her translations from Kannada into English. She has also translated Pablo Neruda’s poetry and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Kannada.
Professor Niranjana is a cultural theorist specialising in culture studies, gender studies, translation and ethnomusicology. She has authored Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Duke UP, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, 2020) and two edited volumes Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015) co-authored with Wang Xiaoming; and Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford University Press, 2020).
She is the co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. Currently, she curates the Saath-Saath Project, a musical collaboration between Indian and Chinese performers. The research is also the subject of three documentary films that she produced.
