‘Literature gives you something history can't': Editor Mini Krishnan on classic Indian stories

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24-05-2025

Mini Krishnan is a powerhouse of Indian translation. From her own translation work to her extensive editorial background, Krishnan has played a key role in shaping the publishing landscape of India by championing works written in regional languages (and by supporting translators). This year, Krishnan edited three anthologies, each highlighting the modern short story tradition in a regional language. While the editions in Kannada, Odia, and Malayalam are out on shelves, more are in the pipeline. The collections paint a sprawling and masterful landscape of the literary traditions of India across the 20th century.
In an interview with Scroll, Krishnan shared her thoughts on the nitty-gritty of translation in India while highlighting the value of translated literature as a source of history, comfort, and beauty. Excerpts from the conversation:
What is the relationship and editorial process between you and the translators across these three books?
First of all, I've known all three of them for a long time. The translators would send me gists of stories – on the phone or in short emails. I gave them a brief: Look at the themes of a time long gone. What was vital in those days? It might seem quaint now, but those layers of society shaped us.
I wanted them to explore how families and relationships have changed – not just in communities but in smaller groups, like friendships. I also asked them to consider the early influence of colonialism – English education, changes in religion, dress, jewellery and how communities interacted. It was about tracing how we got here, not just through a telescope, but also a closer look. They set to work, making selections from far and wide, each using their own networks. It was very collaborative. Although only two names appear on the cover, there are a lot of hidden names of people who helped behind the scenes, and they've all been acknowledged.
The selection and curation were done by the translators and their supporters. Of course, I was familiar with some of the names, so I'd occasionally ask, 'Have you looked at material by this person? Is there someone we've left out?' I had this bank of information that could be useful to the project. I'd share lists and say, 'Have you covered this? Can you find anything on that person?' Often, these suggestions came from past editors who specialised in short stories.
I also did my own research alongside theirs. Sometimes it overlapped with what the translators found, sometimes it didn't. But I gave them complete freedom to choose the writers and the stories. I just said, 'Let's aim for wonderful stories. Let's not include pieces that are too self-regarding or don't show enough.' My focus was on society. If it's just an experimental piece – a writer showing off their virtuosity – we don't want that.
How did you decide on these three languages? Why these – and not others? Are more coming?
Yes, that's actually in the pipeline. Next year, you'll see Telugu, Bengali, and Tamil, and the year after that, Urdu and Marathi. I'm still trying to persuade someone to take on Hindi. We hope to cover as many languages as possible.
These three were chosen simply because the translators said, 'In ten or 11 months, we can give you a draft.' So it was a matter of timing and who was ready.
What do you hope readers get out of these collections? In a piece for Scroll, you wrote that ' in translations lie the key to accessing and understanding our histories and identities.' How does that play out for readers?
Literature gives you something history often can't. Right now, we're in a time where alternative histories are everywhere – books, films, podcasts, and even angry messages on WhatsApp. As Ramachandra Guha said, 'History depends on the kind of research and where the historian did it, their slants and predilections.'
But fiction – especially translated fiction – may look like storytelling, but it's actually real lives being retold, expressed, interpreted imaginatively and vertically. And often, literature doesn't lie. Stories leave an impression. I don't think a document, however accurate, ever can. We need emotional understanding today – and I believe literature and translation give you that.
I also hope that some of this material – not just these books but any translation of our literature – reaches colleges, universities, and study centres. It perfectly supplements fields like sociology, the women's movement, and Dalit writing. These accounts give you a glimpse into those struggles and are crucial for understanding our society.
I hope that these works, in their own way, will enrich each of these subjects, sociology, environmentalism, and history, and help us understand ourselves better.
That's fascinating. Building on what you said, how much of the translation work is archival? These stories are introduced to a larger English audience and preserved through publishing and continued readership. How much of this work is about historical preservation rather than just pleasure?
I'd say at least 30 per cent of it is archival. Not all the stories will interest everyone – tastes have shifted. Today's readers tend to crave fast-moving stories and immediate sensation, so some readers might find these stories less exciting than contemporary fiction.
It's like watching a movie from 1962 – it might seem less immediate, but it still holds relevance. These stories existed in regional languages but weren't accessible to a larger readership, where all Indians could engage with them.
For example, in the Kannada volume, there's a shocking story ('The Battered Heart') from the 1930s, written by a woman, about what happens in an ashram. It completely exposes the hypocrisy in a secretive society. It was shocking that a woman would write such a piece at that time, and even more so that the editor agreed to publish it. I can only imagine the electric shock the readers must have felt when they first read it.
It's funny that you brought up that story because I was also thinking about it. Towards the end, after the shockwaves of the revelation of a corrupt, sexually predatory priest, there's this dream sequence about what happens when the woman he assaulted dies. I didn't quite know how to read that.
I felt like I was struggling too. On one hand, it almost felt like editorial resistance.
Because it's so wildly different to the rest of the story. It's heartbreaking that she envisions them being together in death because it's entirely at odds with what the rest of the story is trying to say. It's such a product of its time that it was included, and now, reading it, it feels tragic.
Sometimes, I even wondered if the editor asked the writer to rewrite the ending – put some plaster on it because it might be too much for the audience to handle. A bit of whitewash, don't you think? The 'terrible' editor must have said, 'Do something!' That was fascinating.
Yes, and that just makes me think back to how I see the Odia collection. For me, it's centred squarely in the village – there's starvation, the seeds of urbanisation, but it's really rooted in rural life. On the other hand, the Malayalam collection feels largely urban. You have degrees, law and order, the written word, letter writing, and epistolary short stories. But with the Kannada collection, I found it hard to categorise thematically – it feels sprawling in a way. How do you envision these three collections?
I never really had a categori s ation like that in mind, but now that you bring it up, in an interview last week, someone asked me how I made my selections. It's not just about these books but my general work. I mentioned that rural India has always been left out of mainstream publishing. Publishing is an urban phenomenon, and the same goes for translation.
Even regional language writers – those who were close to publishers in bigger cities got their break. But very few from outside those circles ever made it. So when I started working on translations a long time ago, one of my goals was to bring rural India into the fold and work with novels set in small towns or villages. I was interested in seeing the connections between how people lived in these places and how their lives changed when they moved to urban areas, and the mix that came about when they went back to their villages.
That was a preoccupation of mine, and it continues to be. I haven't always succeeded in selecting that kind of novel or getting translators to agree to work with that kind of novel. So, to answer your question, no, I didn't impose a specific base or theme. It just so happened that when the translators of the Odia collection looked back at the writing from that time, the focus in Odisha was on village life. Most of the prominent writers were from well-established, educated families, but they were still strongly rooted in their hometowns or villages, their places of origin. That must have influenced the focus on rural life in those stories, especially considering that it was a comparatively less developed region of India at the time.
In what ways do you think the translational landscape in India has changed over the past couple of years? How has that been for you in the middle of it?
When I started publishing translations in the 90s, it was a very depressed industry. I could never have done anything at all if my friends who ran a big trust hadn't funded the Macmillan translations then. Early translations were a sort of formal, official, very stiff English set in place by Englishmen who studied our languages and made the translations. So, of course, they had regional language experts to help them, Indian experts. But when the Indians took over, they felt they had to use that same kind of stiff, formal English.
So for a long time, I would say translations done in the 40s to 60s suffered from incorrect grammar and stiffness. Let's face it, an uneducated person in a household wouldn't use the same language as an educated person would. So there was that very stilted language. Then came the shift between the '70s and the '90s when translators started to take risks. And then that voice appealed to the Indian reader because that was their own voice. And that's how, I think, part of the popularity of translations began.
For a long time, Indian writers in English completely blanketed the landscape, and translations were not held in any kind of regard. Translators' names were even kept off the cover! I think I was the first to insist on equal rights and equal payment also for authors and translators at Macmillan. I had the translators' names on the cover, their pictures in their brochures, royalties, and advances. Many publishers, I think, even today, don't give translators the same royalty. It's less than what they give authors. So the recognition of translation as an important, and not a secondary, as a significant original and creative work in its own right has only come very slowly and recently.
Luckily, 20 years ago, awards were set up: the Crossword Book Award, the Hindu Literature Award, and the JCB Prize for Literature. There were so many other local prizes for translation. Many things came together in a very diverse market like ours, where people, where books are not the most important things that people go for, and the library movement also helped. All those things came together to give translation a certain profile, which it didn't have for many decades before. And that has happened very recently.
Earlier, you had to fight and campaign to get a space for a translator to talk about a particular item. Now, writers are invited to school, to colleges, to universities. That's a very exciting thing because translators and writers speak together and talk to audiences and students. These things make a very big difference.