Ashoka University

This event, the first Hyphen Connects programme outside Karnataka, was held with the support of the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University. The audience, composed of students and faculty from literature and adjacent backgrounds, participated in a conversation around K.V. Subbanna’s essay, “Shreshtateya Vyasana,” loosely translated for the day as “The Merit Monkey.”

Beyond the necessary translation of ideas from one language to another, there was also a translation of contexts, situating the essay in the concerns and questions of the audience, in a private, twenty-first century, liberal arts university.

The speakers teased out how the essay might interrupt the pedagogies of writing workshops today, or contribute to debates around meritocracy and caste-blind merit-based scholarships in private institutions across the country. The audience also prompted Hyphen itself to wonder with what other frameworks, if not excellence, literary magazines could work out a selection criteria? Everyone seemed to understand that a non-Anglophone literary essay could effortlessly add a useful perspective to canonical questions consigned to philosophy and the social sciences.

After discussions on a potential ‘Hyphen at Ashoka’ club, the audience volunteered on post-it notes a word from their languages that they thought, for whatever reason, captured what other languages could not. Somewhere in that act of sharing, text on paper for everyone to see and interpret, and despite the uniqueness and presumed untranslatability of the words submitted, many translations had already begun.