An editor, a bookseller and a writer walked into a Mediterranean restaurant – one that also served biriyani, most curiously – the other day. Over plates of lamb-something, semi-delicious hummus, some pita and fried halloumi, the serving washed down with olive lemonade, they talked about books, writing, female experiences plus gaze and such other essentials.
By the end of the long evening in sultry, humid Bangalore, I wondered what an eavesdropper – not that there were any, I must add – might have made of a table of women dipping in and out of this and that topic. Us women fascinate me in a way that a roomful of men, even if, or perhaps especially if they are discussing the state of affairs of home, country or world could never. It isn’t that women don’t care for or talk about grander affairs around us. (Although, really, what could be more historically fraught, regularly violent, unhinged, even, and deeply political than one’s family?) But the idea that we do it in a language that is gendered is one of my great current interests.
It is also what fuels a deepening interest in translating the feminine, whether it shows up as stories foregrounding the female experience in my own writing practice or in translating works by women writers.
Linguists have long toyed with the idea that a woman’s language is a different language, that there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences in tone, grammar, intonations, in phrasing, even in pronunciation and several other parts that make up a language. But research to objectively prove the gendered nature of language is often riddled with the inability to arrive at the same results consistently across time and place, and is supported mostly only by anecdotal material. Yet, any woman speaking any language anywhere in the world will be privy to, and admit to using gestures, movements, instincts, words and other linguistic tools that are designed to keep her communication outside of male attention and understanding.
Keep the scientists aside; I don’t think anyone thinks as deeply about how language/s and sociolinguistics work in defining worlds as much as translators do. It is an odd feeling, to think simultaneously in two (or more) languages, playing with the grammar, syntax and unique idiosyncrasies of two distinct language cultures: Kannada, my mother tongue, and English, in my case. It is not until very recently that I began to consciously think about what it means to train language to work for and use it from a female gaze. Perhaps it is that such exercises make up so much of our interiority that we don’t see it as another thing to insert into the multiple listicles going on in our overworked minds.
The female language manifests like a quiet tremor throughout two of the three books I’ve published in translation: Kodagina Gouramma’s Fate’s Game and Other Stories and Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, which is currently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Both are set in the interior worlds of women, although the stories couldn’t be more different from one another in terms of the social and religious identities of the writers, the community the women they wrote live in, even the time periods. Where Gouramma worked in the 1930s and died at just 27 when she was starting to build a writing career, Mushtaq’s stories are deeply informed by her decades of work in social movements and her career as a lawyer. The stories in Heart Lamp are selections from work published between 1990 and 2023.
Yet, one realises that all the women in each of these stories could, with minor changes, obviously, shift into the other’s world and still, to the reader, make absolute sense. This is, in fact, a damning treatise on how little the women’s position in a patriarchal society has changed, that even though they are over half a century apart, attempts to control and tame the female continue, just as women’s resistance and dissent and rage against these methods carry on as well.
In “Vani’s Puzzle”, perhaps the best known of Gouramma’s short stories, there is a strong female friendship between Indu, a young widow and Vani, a neighbour she befriends and the wife of the busy doctor she develops a crush on. The two women are often doing things together, keeping house, cooking, ironing the man’s shirts – one sees everything as annoying chores, the other, Indu, is house-proud, happy to potter about. Gestures, but mostly instinct, guide the way they adjust their friendship around the routine of the man. When two women, as close as they can be, speak, a lot is said, although not necessarily in words.
Likewise, in Mushtaq’s stories, what remains unsaid is often more than the thoughts, dialogues and instinctual reactions that make it to words on the page. Food – the making of, usually – features prominently in many of the stories in Heart Lamp, it is when women do their thinking, analysing, berating (usually men). Biriyani, parottas “as light as flowers,” watermelon, fried fish from the Kaka’s Hotel, a glass of milk from an old kitchen with a dirty, worn-out floor, chicken soup and the grand generosity of a packet of cheap biscuits bestowed on a poor person – these set the stories within the architecture of female-hood.
There is, however, little actual architecture in either Gouramma’s or Mushtaq’s stories, nothing much to orient the reader spatially, save for in a story here or a setting there. Perhaps this too is intentional, subconscious. For a woman rarely has ownership over her surroundings. In patriarchy, she first lives in her father’s house, then her husband’s, and if a lifetime of self-sacrifice brings her luck, ends her life at her son’s. What she owns is emotional weight, access to a life-giving sisterhood and her own interior landscape, none worth all that much, if patriarchy had its way.
As a translator, relaying these layers of the unspoken and the felt is immensely gratifying. It feels like love to convey just how complex, how nuanced, how exquisite a woman’s world is. Yet, it feels also like a betrayal, as if videotaping a secret handshake for the whole world to see.
Will men, even some women, understand better now? Do we want them to? What I do know is that us women, with our sense of humour, our resilience, our everyday dissent and the undeniable truth that we mostly get each other, these change living, breathing things like language all the time. When one has another language, one has another way to be in the world. Goodness knows that women need their own rooms in their own worlds. And perhaps that is the moral of the story.