Ratno Dholi - The best stories of Dhumketu
(By Dhumketu)
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Ratno Dholi brings together the first substantial collection of Dhumketu’s work to be available in English. Beautifully translated for a wide new audience by Jenny Bhatt, these much-loved stories–like the finest literature–remain remarkable and relevant even today.
Translator's Note: To choose a ‘best of’ selection from a writer’s works when the oeuvre is as wide-ranging and vast as Dhumketu’s (with more than 600 short stories to choose from) is an impossible project. Beyond the question of how ‘best’ should be defined, we have the typical dilemma faced by all writers or translators of short-story collections or anthologies: of trying to make every story appeal to every reader.
For this project, I wanted to ensure the following: enable an understanding of Dhumketu’s chronological progression as a short-story writer; showcase his range and skills with different themes and styles; whet the reader’s appetite for more of his works. So it made sense to select at least one significant story from each of the twenty-four published volumes. There are also two additional stories and I've explained the rationale for including them in my Translator's Note in the book.
A majority of the stories are set in rural Gujarat, which Dhumketu felt was under-represented in Gujarati literature of the time. And a number of them are set in India’s northeast rather than Gujarat. These showcase not only how Dhumketu’s wanderlust and creativity fed off each other, but also his fascination with and close observation of the cultures of other regions. While more stories here have male protagonists, it’s the women protagonists who are more singularly memorable. Dhumketu was certainly not free of the gender biases of his time; however, he took care to portray his female protagonists as complex human beings in their own right.
Given that many of these stories are nearly a hundred years old and were written in the dialectical Gujarati of their time, it was tricky to carry across the musicality and cadences of the source language into contemporary English but I have tried to do so while staying true to the author's intention and meaning. The goal is never, for me, to make it seem like you're reading a book that was written in English but that you're reading a book translated from another language into English.”
