Non Emotionalism In The Angry Young Men

Then, ‘...I came out and started walking along the corners of the footpath. The street passed through the houses with muddy courtyards and thatched roofs’. (3) Do footpaths have corners? Does a street ever ‘pass through’ houses? Yet, despite these shortfalls of phrasing, the translation, on the whole, invokes the feel of socio-literary realities not native to the translating language – or target language, to use the formal term. And from this factor of an underlying disconnect between the language and the narrative substance, rises a compelling urge within the reader to visualise the non-English original, transcribe it, and thereby show the continuities between the writing and the

The point is of the credibility, of the easy acceptivity and absorption by the English top coat of Neeraj Sharma, the English translator, of the tone of the non-English fibre/ temper of the original: of a prose-tone risen from a deliberate, studied stance of un-emotionalism – a dramatic un-emotionalism, one can say-- which makes a dramatic emotional impact. The voice of this un-emotionalism is not dour, as it is in some English writings –say, in those of the Angry Young Men-- of deliberate un-dramatising. The late Nirmal Verma, as I said, seems to be the progenitor of this stance. I find in the word ‘uchchaalee’ the essence and temper of this stance. The word gives tether to the urgent, action-filled, forward-moving quality of the sentence: it unifies the many motor actions described in it. There is ‘balla uththaanaa’ (raising the bat) to begin with: next, there is the fine-tuned action of taking aim and

The reader gets the invoking. And, along with the narrating protagonist, the ‘I’ of the story, the writer’s alter ego, the reader comes alive to the full force, ethos and ascriptions of the tie. The make- up and chemistry of the protagonist’s involvement with socio-human ties, his simultaneous feelings of desire for and wariness of close ties with fellow humans assume a cultural ground support and applicability in the reader’s mind. They become typified. And once this generalising occurs, the reader can stand in for the narrator. The two can speak in mutually synonym-ising