Transcreation and Postcolonial Knowledge

In 1998, Qurratulain Hyder published an English version of her Urdu novel Ag ka Darya, which had come out forty years before in 1959. She called this English version a “transcreation,” a term she rather pointedly took from Puroshattam Lal, professor of English literature and a translator of Hindu sacred texts such as the Mahabharata and Shakuntala.1 Its title, River of Fire, was a literal rendering into English of the Urdu version, which was itself from a ghazal by the Indian poet Jigar Moradabadi: Although she had not used the term “transcreation” to describe it, she had conducted a somewhat striking operation of rewriting and elaboration on her 1979 novel Akhir-i-Shab ke humsafar, which she had translated in 1994 as Fireflies in the Mist. The Urdu novel’s title, literally Fellow Travelers of the End of the Night, was taken from the great Communist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem “Sham e firaaq ab na pooch” (“Don’t ask now of the evening of parting”). With characteristic irony, Hyder called the Urdu text Akhir-i-Shab an “abridged” version.2