Priyamvada Ramkumar

Priyamvada Ramkumar will translate B. Jeyamohan’s White Elephant [Vellai Yaanai] from Tamil.

Priyamvada Ramkumar is a translator and an impact investor, based in Chennai, India. Kindled by an urge to engage more deeply with the literature of her native tongue, Tamil, she began translating a few years ago.

Her first book-length project, Stories of the True (Aram), a translation of a collection of twelve stories written by Jeyamohan, a pre-eminent writer in contemporary Tamil literature, was selected under the South Asia Speaks Mentorship Programme’s inaugural cohort. She was mentored by Arunava Sinha under the programme. The book has been acquired by Juggernaut Books, and is expected to be published in 2022.

Priyamvada was also selected into “Translation Contexts,” a course of seminars run by Deborah Smith, dealing with the craft of literary translation as well as contemporary issues in translation. She has also attended the One-Day Literary Translation Workshop with Daniel Hahn.

Priyamvada is drawn to translation not only as an art form and an interplay between languages, but also for the agency it offers her in acting as a curator of ideas to be transmitted across cultures. She strongly believes that translation, at its very core, is a powerful act of sharing.

Her endeavours in translation are sustained by her work as an impact investment professional, through which she invests in socially responsible businesses that promote financial inclusion, democratise access to healthcare, and improve farm-based livelihoods in India.

Outside of literature and translation, she enjoys trekking in the Himalayas and has successfully completed three high altitude treks, as well as a course in basic mountaineering.

Priyamvada is thrilled and grateful to have been awarded this year’s ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship. Under the guidance of Kareem James Abu-Zeid, she looks forward to completing a translation of Jeyamohan’s Vellai Yaanai (White Elephant), a historical novel. Set in the late 1800s, against the backdrop of the great famines in British India, the book presents a fictionalised account of an early Dalit uprising in the country. Though a short-lived strike that was quashed within two days, it galvanised three hundred, otherwise mute labourers into a unified action of protest. It records the story of the “first fist raised by the slave against the annals of oppression” in India, as the author says in his preface, making it an important work and a landmark novel.

Image description:

Priyamvada, a brown-skinned woman with wavy shoulder length hair, is seated on a cane chair against a peach wall. She is smiling at the camera. She wears a deep blue saree with gold stripes and a cream-coloured blouse. She also wears a bindi on her forehead, hoop earrings and a leaf pendant around her neck.