Cobalt Blue

For the longest time, I have had a mental block against novels written by Indian writers in English. One of my complaints was that Indians writing in English appeared to feel the need to prove that they knew the language well. The result was stilted and overwrought prose. This might be still true of some Indian writers writing in English. But, it is certainly not true of the best writing, if it ever was. Indians have made English their own and, as the protests against Hindi hegemony show, it is the only language that is widely spoken and acceptable to people across the length and breadth of India. I don’t want to paint an overly optimistic picture of English’s place in Indian society—fluency in English is a marker of class (and, hence, caste) status. But, that is a discussion for another blog post. Despite all this, I haven’t managed to overcome my reluctance towards reading Indian novels in English. The novels feel like they are set in a foreign land, and I struggle to conjure up the sights and sounds of the India I know from the writing. I say this as someone who is much more fluent in English than in the two Indian languages I know, so it’s a good thing I have no ambitions of writing a novel. Today, I just finished a novel titled Cobalt Blue, originally written in Marathi, which is the Indian language I am less fluent, even though it is my “mother tongue” (I am one of the few Indians of my generation who has a different mother and father tongue). I would have struggled to read the original, and I would have given up before I realized what an amazing novel it is. I read the English translation, and found myself translating some sentences back into imperfect Marathi.  It is a searing story about love, loneliness and loss set in Pune, my favourite Indian city. It spoke to me in a way that no book has in a long time, and I can’t recommend it enough, especially to people familiar with Pune and/or Maharashtrians. It has also spurred to seek out more translated works from India.