Meet the 2024 Mentees: Aditya Vikram Shrivastava (Hindi)

Aditya Vikram is translating a book of short stories by a Hindi author and playwright. 

(Image Description: Aditya, a brown-skinned person with curly hair, faces the camera and gazes intently at something outside the frame, to the left. They are wearing a sweater with patterns in blue and green, and a denim jacket.)

Writer, translator, and (barely) scholar, Aditya is currently a teaching fellow at the Department of English in Ashoka University. They are interested in questions of language, regionality, postcolonialism, performance, and gender. They translate from Hindi and Bhojpuri into English.

Translation came easier to them as a (strange) child—it was that thing growing under their tongue as they moved between small towns in Northern India, along with their family, changing dialects and sometimes languages. This was not literary translation, but rather the act of translating everyday banter for their grandmother, who thought and imagined in Bhojpuri, and spoke only broken, terrible Hindi. Literary translation from Hindi and Bhojpuri into English is only an inversion of what translation meant to Aditya earlier. What was a necessity then is now a method of exploration, of going back to those corners of languages and contexts they never knew, or perhaps lost long ago. Translation, for them, is about the promise of elsewhere(s), and therefore a method of democracy.

Aditya began to do literary translation after a deep engagement with translated literature and multilingual contexts from across India, under the guidance of Professor Rita Kothari during their master’s program. A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, written by the eminent writer Krishna Sobti and translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, became the center of their graduate thesis on the memory of partition and how it was embedded in the act of translation. Aditya went on to build a huge archive of the translated literatures of India, consisting of thousands of books originally written in various Indian languages and later translated into English. The Hindi writer and playwright they hope to translate during the course of the mentorship writes short, acerbic questions in the utterance of a few words.  

Aditya is also working on several literary projects, both creative and critical. Their work has been published by the Goethe Institute, British Council, Agents of Ishq, and Gulmohur Quarterly, among others. They spend their days teaching or writing, and evenings dancing on the terrace of their old, brittle, rented apartment in New Delhi. On holidays, they can often be found mutilating history books with markers of all colors.

They are honored to be awarded the ALTA Mentorship Program, and very excited to work with Daisy Rockwell, the Hindi translator they admire the most.