Working on Mahanayak was a vastly humbling experience. The enormous contribution made by so many nameless, faceless and forgotten thousands for India’s freedom. What stuff were those men and women made of? What was it about Netaji that drew people to his side, forgetting home, family, personal life, all for a greater nobler cause? And what was Netaji’s reward in the end? Inevitably one thinks, one only remembers the winner. No one thinks of the runner-up however well he may have fought. Not only does Patil present the character of Netaji in all its facets, he also shows us the other side of popular leaders whom we have held in high esteem. And leaves us to make our own judgments. Translating Mahanayak was a challenge on every level-the linguistic, the historical the cultural. Much reading and reference had to be done, which was an education in itself. It had its moments of glorious high, particular emotion came out as sincerely, description appeared as vividly, character evolved as credibly as in the original, and despairing lows when the power of the original stubbornly eluded his grasp. If the book Mahanayak comes to mean as much to the English reader as it has to the Marathi reader, it is because Mr Vishwas Patil believed fully in what he was writing about. If the readers feel there is something mission or not quite ringing true, he accepts responsibility for the lacunae.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Keerti Ramachandra
Keerti Ramachandra is a fiction editor, multilingual translator and teacher. With a Masters in literature and an M Phil inj linguistics she has been teaching in schools and colleges in India and abroad. She is currently teaching a course in Creative Non-Fiction and Structures in English at Xavier Institute of Communication, Mumbai. She can translate from Kannada, Marathi and Hindi and has been actively associated with Katha as a fiction editor. Her interests include art history and art appreciation, Hindustani classical music, dance, handicrafts and folk art. Besides Hindi, Marathi and Kannada, she is fluent in Konkani and Tamil and has a working knowledge of Gujarati and Bangla.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vishwas Patil
VISHWAS PATIL, recipient of the 1992 Sahitya Akademi Award, is a prominent novelist and playwright in Marathi. Born on 28th November, 1959 of farmer parents in the small village of Nerle in Maharashtra, Mr. Patil is today an I.A.S. officer in the Maharashtra cadre. Jhadazadati, the novel that fetched him the Sahitya Akademi Award is based on the life and plight of the people displaced by the construction of big dams. Widely translated into almost all languages in India, Mr. Patil’s social and historical novels have a mass as well as a class appeal. Mahanayak was the result of an extensive study and research for seven years during which Mr. Patil traveled through Japan, Germany, England and Burma, where Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army had created history. The novel, which came out of a long arduous research, was originally published in Marathi and went into six editions.
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