This summer, I've been working with a graduate student collaborator, Srishti Raj, on a new digital project, called Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature.
Here's the project summary:
This site aims to be an educational resource for Adivasi writing, helping to share South Asia's indigenous literature with the broader world. For those who are unfamiliar, Adivasis are South Asian indigenous communities, subject to a long history of marginalization and displacement going back to the colonial era and continuing in the present. There are more than 100 million Adivasi people in India alone, located throughout the country, with particular concentrations in central India as well as in the northeast region. For generations, Adivasis were written about rather than subjects of their own story. This site aims to help change that by centering Adivasi voices directly in a decolonial framework, and making their writings accessible to a broad readership.
I got interested in this project in part through engaging with decolonial theory focused primarily on Latin America and indigenous literatures of the Americas. Shouldn't we be talking about these ideas in South Asia as well? Unfortunately, despite many years of teaching and writing about Anglophone South Asian literature, my own knowledge on the topic of indigenous communities in South Asia was limited to people writing about Adivasis, not writing by people from those communities themselves. And my hunch was that this would likely be true for most of my peers as well: not many papers on Adivasi literature are given at conferences like the South Asian Literature Association (SALA) conference, and I don't see too many in U.S.-based journals either. (Journals published in India, like the Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, do a little better.)
Overall, this seemed like another gap in the archive -- perhaps something that could be addressed if one were willing to do some digging!
As I first conceived of this project in 2023, my basic knowledge of those Adivasi communities was itself pretty thin. I knew about Santhals and the Ho community from reading Mahashweta Devi's work, but little about the others (and there are hundreds of officially recognized Scheduled Tribes in India, with a population of more than 100 million people!). An early experiment entailed looking for maps of Adivasi communities. I wrote about my results with that research in 2023 here.
In short, our summer research process followed three stages.
- First, we quickly learned we had to be looking beyond English-language materials. By default, this summer, we have been looking at a fair amount of materials in Hindi.
- We did discover a number of helpful resources online to help us with our research.
- We have been experimentally trying to translate some key materials we've been encountering, often using generative AI translation engines.
Here's more about those stages in some detail:
1) You have to go beyond Anglophone literature. Most Adivasi literature has not yet been translated into English.
We started out looking at exclusively materials in English, only to discover that there wasn't that much there. We encountered Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar as well as Temsula Ao, Easterine Kire Iralu, and Avinuo Kire -- but not a whole lot more.
The English Wikipedia list for Adivasi writers was pretty thin (only 22 writers when we started): more gaps!
Very quickly, however, we realized that a much larger array of materials existed in Hindi and other South Asian languages, most of it untranslated. The Hindi language Wikipedia list was better -- around 50 writers at the time we started -- but oddly, the two lists didn't line up perfectly. And many of the writers were represented by extremely brief blurbs, and in some cases just blank entries -- nothing more than a name.
With a lot of digging and sleuthing, we compiled a much better long list of Adivasi writers here; it now up to about 100 names. Rather than simply listing names, we made an effort to learn a little bit about each author, including their language, their community identity, and any links or titles we could discover. For authors who seemed especially important, we also wrote in-depth profiles.
We also looked at as many anthologies of Adivasi literature as we could get our hands on. Some of these might be available digitally (i.e., I bought the Kindle version of Popular Adivasi Poetry), others were only in print. Srishti spent a couple of days at the University of Michigan, and was able to scan quite a number of helpful documents from their South Asian language collection. I myself have made a couple of trips to Van Pelt Library at U-Penn, which also has an impressive array of printed texts in South Asian languages.
2) Online resources related to Adivasi writers.
The 'meta' scholarship on Adivasi writers is thinner than one would hope. Scholarly treatments might focus on a small handful of well-known writers, so to produce an inclusive list like the one I mentioned above we had to do our own research and digging.
A few years ago, Caravan Magazine had a story called Ten Voices from Adivasi Literature, which was a helpful place to start. Another helpful list appeared in a 2017 piece on Words Without Borders called "Voices Unheard: Tribal Literature to Read Now."
There are fairly robust collections of short stories and poetry on sites like Hindi Kavita and Hindvi.org. These may contain writings by Adivasi writers, though they aren't labeled as such -- so you have to have the names and search for them.
Bhasha Research Center also has a collection of ebooks available related to Adivasi issues, in English, Hindi, as well as Adivasi languages.
And we came across some interesting digital journalism projects, including Forward Press and the People's Archive of Rural India.
3) Can we translate some of this writing ourselves? Can we use generative AI to help?
I can read Hindi but not well enough to professionally translate. Srishti, who was raised in India, reads and translates much better, but also prefers English. Needless to say, machine translation via Google Translate is not great.
So early in the summer, I started exploring some limited translation using generative AI platforms, always comparing the results against the originals. In many cases, I have been making small adjustments on my own to improve quality.
Here is a poem by Mahadev Toppo we came across from an internet posting, called simply "Poem."
'कविता'
मैं जंगल का कवि
पेड़ भी रोपूँगा, कविता भी
इस जंगल, पहाड़ में उगा रहा हूँ
कुछ कवि, कुछ कविता, कुछ कहानी,
कुछ उपन्यास, कुछ नाटक, कुछ कलाकार
कुछ छेनी, कुछ हथौड़ी, कुछ रंग, कुछ कूँची
और जीवन को बेहतर बनाने के लिए
कुछ चिन्तक, कुछ वैज्ञानिक
और निश्चय ही कुछ आलोचक,
कुछ आन्दोलनकारी
हाँ मैं जंगल, पहाड़, नदी,
पेड़-पौधे बचाता एक कवि
बना रहा हूँ पहाड़ के चट्टानी व्याकरण से,
हरी होती भाषा की, हरियाली से
कलम के कैमरे से
कविता पर एक फिल्म ।
And here is ChatGPT's rendition:
Poem
I Am the Poet of the Forest
I will plant trees, and poetry too—
In this forest, on these mountains,
I am making things grow.
Some poets, some poems, some stories,
Some novels, some plays, some artists,
Some chisels, some hammers, some colors, some brushes,
And to make life better—
Some thinkers, some scientists,
And certainly some critics,
Some revolutionaries too.
Yes, I am a poet saving the forests, mountains, rivers,
trees and plants—
Crafting from the rocky grammar of the mountains.
A film on poetry—
Of the greening language, with greenery itself,
Through the camera of the pen.
Pretty good, no? Here, ChatGPT did a pretty literal translation, though not 100% literal.
To my eye, the most interesting choice the AI made was to give a whole line to "I am making things grow." Based on the original, that should have been part of the third line. But giving it its own line adds a nice weight to the idea being expressed.
ChatGPT also created logical stanzas where the original Hindi (at least the version I came across online) didn't have any.
Admittedly, using generative AI this way is controversial -- from online postings, I gather professional translators aren't happy about it. Ideally, if we get a grant in the future to continue this work, we would want to pay humans to do these translations. However, in absence of that funding, I believe the benefits of making some of this important writing accessible outweigh the ethical downsides of using commercial generative AI platforms like ChatGPT.
We have a small collection of primary texts and translations by Adivasi writers here.