A book project – an amazing artist, his anecdotes and our translation skills (put to test!)

Those of you who may know me beyond this blog will find this repetitive, but here it goes any ways. Whenever people ask me – “Where are you from?” – I reply with some pride. I say, “I am from Baroda, India.”

My town, like many towns in India is known for many things. We have a beautiful palace (The Lakshmi Vilas palace), one of the most vibrant garba festival, a World UNESCO heritage site (Champaner) in close vicinity…

But what makes Baroda truly special is its unique artist community. Home to so many renowned artists, Baroda or Vadodara is also known for the development of the celebrated ‘Baroda Group of Artists,’ which was formed in 1957.

When I started out as a young feature writer with The Times of India in 2002, I got an opportunity to experience Baroda’s thriving art scene and its artist community. I would interview artists (we ran a very engaging column called My Space), visit their studios and watch (in a very fascinated manner) as they went about their work. I would also go to the art galleries where their work was exhibited, and take notes and ‘quotes’ for my article/s.

Most artists, even some of the biggest names in the art world were very humble and simple. I remember going to their homes where I would often share a cup of tea as they talked about what inspired them, what they were working on, and sometimes we would talk about a flower, a leaf and the significance it held in their creative process.

So, imagine my delight when I got to work on a project that involved translating Jyoti Bhatt’s anecdotes and stories from Gujarati to English, and to edit them in a manner that would reflect the style, spirit and essence of what the famed artist was trying to convey.

Jyoti Bhatt may need no introduction to many connoisseurs and devotees of art. A founder member of the Baroda Group of Artists, he also joined the artistic initiative, Group 1890. He has received several national and international awards. The TATE website describes him as thus: “Jyoti Bhatt, is an Indian artist best known for his modernist work in painting and printmaking and also his photographic documentation of rural Indian culture. He studied painting under N. S. Bendre and K.G. Subramanyan at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University (M.S.U.), Baroda. Later he studied fresco and mural painting at Banasthali Vidyapith in Rajasthan, and in the early 1960s went on to study at the Academia di Belle Arti in Naples, Italy, as well the Pratt Institute in New York. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2019 and elected as a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 2022.”

I had met Bhatt (sir) several times as a journalist, and when Zaida Jacob, an artist and sculptor herself, asked me if I would be a part of this project, I considered it a privilege. It happened in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic. I was in Baroda, cooped up within the four walls (of an albeit very spacious penthouse) of my in-laws.

I accepted Jacob’s offer with some trepidation and some amount of excitement, and dived into the project. I had only done one previous translation work before. I had previously assisted Jacob with translating a book on art from Gujarati to English. She needed an English equivalent for her students, and we worked on the text together.

There were, however, many complex challenges to the translation project pertaining to sir’s work. For one, I moved back to Ireland. Secondly, Jacob could not meet sir personally because it wasn’t still safe to come into close contact and put him at any Covid related risk. Also, sir couldn’t convey a lot over the telephone and needed help of (other) people when he had to read what we had translated – not because he wasn’t an ardent reader himself but because of issues related to age and such. Also, sir lost Jyotsna Bhatt – his wife and acclaimed artist herself – in 2020.

But in spite of it all, we continued working. There are many things that both Jacob and I might have wished we could have done better, but the book is here nevertheless.

It was an absolute honour to be a part of this project, and this was also because I got to work with Jacob whose attention to detail and resolve to get every Gujarati word its rightful and accurate equivalent in English was inspiring. Working on the project and with Jacob taught me how important it is to maintain an author’s unique and distinctive style as well as the ‘voice’ whilst translating a piece of text.

Where? When? Why? Photologue by Jyoti Bhatt took me on a journey across the length and breadth of India. From Poshina, Santiniketan, Bhopal, Mandu, Orissa, Kutch and Kashmir to many other places, hillocks, homes, and tribal belts – Photologue is an exploration of India and its people, its art, artists and artisans, beliefs, traditions and some truly unique encounters as seen through Bhatt’s photographs and the stories behind them.

It is a beautiful piece of work in which you are at once a spectator, and also a fellow traveller with Bhatt.

If you want to buy the book, here’s the Amazon link – https://amzn.to/3PFhVJd

Just to be clear, I do not earn any commission via the sale of this book. I am just happy that I got an opportunity to work on this project, and this is one byline that I will treasure forever.

(The photographs accompanying this post are by Zaida Jacob.)