Book review: L. Somi Roy,Maharaj Kumari Binodini,The Princess and the Political Agent

The significance of L. Somi Roy’s English translation of his mother Binodini’s book Boro Sahib Ongbi Sanatombi (The Princess and the Political Agent) lies in the fact that it is a necessary step in making an under- and misrepresented region called India’s Northeast and its literature known to the world through the more globally accessible English language. It is equally important to understand the literary and the political contexts from within which this translation emerges. Since the end of the British rule, Manipur has had a certain ambiguity towards India that dates back to 1949, when this princely state was, according to Meitei nationalists, ‘forcefully’ merged into the Indian Union.

Moreover, Manipur’s literary circle is dominated by the ‘dominant’ and the majority Meitei community, and this circle is equally gendered: an overview of women’s literary writing on Manipur indicates that this circle is still dominated by Meitei women, Binodini being one among them. This, however, does not discount the fact that the Meiteilon ¹ literary circle is still marginal and unattended to vis-à-vis India and its Northeast.

Published in 1976 and written in Meiteilon with the Bengali script, the book has gained much critical attention. Central to its plot is the love story of Binodini’s aunt Maharaja Kumari Sanatombi ² (Sanatombi henceforth) and Lieutenant Colonel H. St. P. Maxwell, ³ the first Political Agent of ‘British-occupied’ Meitei Kingdom of Manipur. In 24 chapters with a Preface and an Afterword, this love story is told in the context of rising ‘national’ consciousness among the Meiteis marked by two historical events: the first Anglo-Manipur conflict/war and the first women’s movement—Nupi-lan or Nupi-lal or Nupilal. The book provides a textured unease and critique that nationalism assigns to the ‘self’ from a gendered position. The hegemonic majoritarianism of Meitei nationalism is critiqued from within in Binodini’s version of memories of her ‘subaltern’ aunt Sanatombi. Sanatombi is Binodini’s imagined ‘other’ subject of Meitei nationalism who is ‘unlike the female protagonists most dominant in nationalist narratives’ as ‘[s]he inhabits an “in-between” space, between “traditional” Meitei society and “modern” British rule’ (Thoudam, 2016, pp. 360–361). She was a rebellious child and ‘of strong birth’ whose disciplining was ‘a major headache’ for her mother, as her great grandmother, father and even Maxwell claim that ‘had she been a boy’, she ‘would have been king’. ⁴ The strength of her character emerges in her interactions with her half-brother Lukhoi, the role she played in negotiations with the British rulers after the annexation, and her determination to consort with Maxwell against all odds.

The translation includes a section on chronology and a list of important characters to aid the readers to navigate through the plethora of descriptions of people, places and events. The translator’s note comprehensively explains its historical context. The book is ‘very personal’ for Binodini with her own father Churachand as ‘a major character’ (Sanatombi’s cousin). Roy also ponders upon the form of this book: on whether to consider it as ‘a biography’, ‘history’ or ‘a work of fiction’. However, he already refers to it as ‘Binodini’s historical novel’. For him, ‘the essential framework’ of this book is ‘a series of flashbacks’ with a narration in ‘non-chronological order’, mimicking ‘memory and oral storytelling’. In his note, he also explains Binodini’s expertise as a conversationalist, a storyteller, an essayist and an artist, as well as compares her technique with Woolf’s ‘stream-of-consciousness’. Yet, in spite of the flashback method, an attentive reader could find traces of a semblance of chronology in the narration that began with Sanatombi’s rebellious childhood, her early marriage to a trader—Manikchand, the British annexation of Manipur that made her acquainted with Maxwell, the growing romance with Maxwell and, finally, ending with his departure, while the present in each flashback remains to her last days.

The strength of this translation lies in its descriptions of general and much-publicised political intrigues, Meitei social customs and their religious festivals, as well as of personal and private relationships between its various characters, both major and minor. The translation is faithful in the sense that Roy had paid special attention to Binodini’s unique use of a graphic literary device characterised by the ‘liberal use of ellipses’, the ‘insertion of additional spacing between paragraphs’ and ‘the elimination of conventional line spacing’.

Nonetheless, there is one shortcoming that pertains not to the content but rather to the technicalities of translation. In other words, the problems of translation that arise due to linguistic differences, which, in turn, relates to differences in cultures and world views as much as this has to do with the politics of translation. To illustrate, I look at the translation of the term phamen. This term is used to name the space Sanatombi occupies in the house. Roy translates it as ‘master bedroom’, while its dictionary meaning is ‘the front side of a veranda’ (Singh, 2004, p. 247). The term veranda appears more appropriate as it highlights Sanatombi’s in-between status. This placement of Sanatombi symbolically alludes to the Meitei practice of the mangba-sengba or the purity rules ⁵ illustrated through Sanatombi’s outcasting. The veranda is also an in-between space between a home and its outside—further re-enforcing her status. Roy’s (mis)translation loses out on demonstrating this politics of difference. Moreover, it seems that Roy has used ‘Meiteilon’ and ‘Manipuri’ synonymously to mean the language spoken by the Meiteis, and hence, conceding to the politics of Indian statist organisations that saw Manipur as synonymous with Meitei. He also inconsistently translates names of minor Meitei characters (Landriba is translated as Not Guilty, while Mitlao [wide eyes] is not), places (Khundon [a village entrance] remains untranslated) and events (Bor day [Day of Blessing] is unchanged, but Kwak-tanba becomes Procession of Crow).

While Roy has been able to retain the humour of linguistic miscommunications between Sanatombi and Maxwell that arise because they ‘don’t speak the same tongue’ in expression such as ‘Do you eat the pond?’ to mean ‘Do you drink the pond water?’; his expertise lies in free-form translation, ⁶ a limitation of which is the failure to pay attention to linguistic nuances of tense/time. As a result, this translation does not attend to the absence of tense system in Meiteilon verbs, wherein, the same verb form is used to indicate both present and past tenses, and an adverbial marker indicates the time of the event (see Nongthombam, 2007, p. 25). For instance, on page 4 of the original, a sentence reads as: ‘Ngarang dinner lakpa young man, pakhang ubara Mainu?’ (The young man at dinner yesterday; did you see the bachelor, Mainu? Binodini, 1976, p. 4, words in English are in the original, while emphasis has been added). Here, the verb ‘lakpa’ (come as well as came) is used for an event in the past marked by the adverb ‘Ngarang’ (yesterday). The same verb form is used to indicate present, on page 6: ‘Khurai Khundonda nowna semba konungdagi lakpa topki makholne’. (The sound comes from the cannonballs being fired at the newly built palace located near the entrance of the Khurai village.) ⁷ Roy translates them, respectively, as: ‘The handsome young man, did you not see him, that captain from Assam Rifles?’, and ‘It is the sound of cannons being fired at the new palace in Khurai Khundon’. In both, he did not retain the main verb used in the original. If done so, Binodini’s text and its translation could have been seen as a linguistic illustration of the absence of tense in Meiteilon in a literary text. However, this linguistic shortcoming coupled with the silences and absences attributed to Sanatombi’s subaltern past in the gendered Meitei nationalist and official statist histories fails to overshadow the strengths of these texts in the reimagining as well as rewriting a gendered past.