Birth—21 Jul, 1963

Education:
Graduated in English Literature from Miranda House, Delhi University.

Doctorate in Urdu Literature, wrote thesis on The Progressive Writers Movement, from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

Bibliography

• Lies: Half Told; translated by Rakshanda Jalil; Trandlation of Asghar Wajahat’s satirical sketches in Urdu (2002)

• A Winter’s Night And Other Stories: A collection of Premchand’s short stories for children (2007)

• Through The Closed Doorway: A Collection Of Nazms; Translation of Professor Sharyar Urdu poetry (2010)

• Invisible City: The Hidden Monument of Delhi (2008)

• Release & Other Stories (2011)

• Qurratulain Hyder and the River of Fire: The Meaning, Scope and Significance of Her Legacy (2011)

• Naked Voices: Stories And Sketches (2011)

• New Urdu Writings: From India and Pakistan (2013)

• A Rebel and Her Cause: The Life and Work of Rashid Jahan (2014)

• Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu (2014)

Author Rakhshanda Jalil, best known for her book ‘Invisible City: The hidden Monuments of India’, has been one of the frontrunners in the movement to create awareness for Hindi-Urdu literature in India. Having come to the field of writing as a translator in 1992, she had published a series of translated works before moving to the fray of critical writing and then increasingly veering towards academic pieces, biographies, historiographies and even English fiction.

Given this large oeuvre of works, what really interests Jalil are biographies and books that require rigorous amounts of research. She recently completed her book on Rashid Jahan, an Indian writer, a member of the Communist party and the Progressive Writers’ Association. “It was then I realised that this is what I enjoy doing. I like to locate writers in a certain context,” she says. At the moment, she is working on a biography on an Urdu poet, Sardar Jafri to be published by Oxford University Press.

At the recently concluded Bangalore Literature Festival, Jalil took part in a panel discussion that traced the roots of Urdu in India and Pakistan and also mapped its future. About the state of the language, she notes, “This whole business of script , going on for the past 60 or 80 years, where people are saying it has be written in Devanagari is contributing to its downfall. When we learn Japanese or Russian or Chinese, we take the trouble to learn their script. With Urdu, why do we want to take the easy way out? This is just doing more harm than good.”

Being a proponent of translating works from Urdu to English and making it available for the masses, she does feel that the essence of the language is most often lost in the process. “There is no way you can say that what you are translating is 100% right,” she says. In a language as disparate as Urdu and English or Hindi for that matter, not only the resonances or speech patterns differ but also the way of constructing sentences. Hence as a translator you have to work within these limitations and put out a work that is sincere and sensible, she says.

Childhood, they say, has a very strong impact on a writer’s psyche and it is true in Jalil’s case. Having grown up in a house filled with books, taught by a mother who retired as a librarian and having people who talked about books and gave books as birthday gifts, she was blessed. She adds,  “When I was in the eighth grade, I got a book called ‘The Exile’ by a French existentialist writer as a birthday gift. When most children got Enid Blyton books, I was encouraged to read books from different genres. That, in a way, drew me to writing and if I hadn’t been a writer I would have done something else in writing.”

Incidentally, Jalil started her career, first as a teacher and then as an editor in the publishing industry. She agrees, “I have felt words. I write them now. But I have known them all throughout.”

Her Ph. D. on the ‘Progressive Writers’ Movement as Reflected in Urdu Literature’ has been published by Oxford University Press as Liking Progress, Loving Change (2014). Another book, a biography of Urdu feminist writer Dr Rashid Jahan has been published by Women Unlimited under the title A Rebel and her Cause (2014). With over 15 books behind her and over 50 academic papers at seminars and conferences, at present she contributes regularly to national and international newspapers and magazines, writes book reviews, opinion pieces and travelogues, and appears on television to talk about issues of culture, literature and society. She also contributes regularly to Himal (Kathmandu), The Herald (Karachi) and The Friday Times (Lahore), apart from The Hindu, Biblio, The Literary Review, etc. in India.

She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu literature and culture and blogs at www.hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.com and another at IBN Live.

Her debut collection of fiction, Release & Other Stories, was published by Harper Collins in 2011, and received critical acclaim. At present, she is engaged in a study of Indian secularism.