About a hundred years ago, Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A hundred years later, India is still waiting for its second honour in this category.

The country, happily, came close to winning one this year.  Good.

Days before the actual announcement of the literature prize, online bookmaker Ladbrokes placed a 25/1 odds on Kerala’s poet and critic K Sachidanandan. He shared the same odds with perennial Nobel hopefuls, such as Don DeLillo and Philip Roth.

Surprise, surprise, there was another Indian writer in the race this season: Vijaydan Detha. He was from as unlikely a region as Rajasthan.

Translations better than originals?

Admittedly, in these hundreds years that have gone by after Tagore’s Nobel victory, a few Indians have figured, though in what is described as unofficial Nobel shortlist.

Sachidanandan (photo) told the media that an important reason for India being unable to garner Nobel literary recognition was bad translation from the vernacular to English.

Sachidanandan, who writes in Malayalam (the language of Kerala), is himself a very good translator. He has translated the poems of this year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, Tomas Transtromer from Sweden.

However, Salman Rushdie and VS Naipul have said at different times that “Indian literature minus Indo-Anglican writing amounted to mere sentimentalism and superstition”. Of course, Sachidanandan would disagree with this, because he feels that Indian vernacular writing matches some of the world’s best prose or poetry. Read more.

See: Free Malaysia Today