An editors' list
Written in one Indian language and read in another. Translation is the least-credited job in publishing and the reason most of this list is reachable by most of the people reading it — so where we know the translator, the book page names them.
5 books
Kalki Kirushnamoorthy · 2008 · Tamil
Kalki's Tamil historical epic, serialised in a weekly magazine and read aloud in instalments to people who could not read it themselves. Still being newly translated, which is the surest sign a book has not finished.
Bibhūtibhūshaṇa Bandyopādhyāẏa · 1985 · Bengali
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Bengali novel of a village childhood — and then, through Ray's film, the book that carried Bengali fiction to people who would never read a word of it.
Benyamin · 2008 · Malayalam
Malayalam into English as Goat Days, and onward into Tamil, Hindi and Kannada. One of the clearest recent cases of an Indian-language novel travelling on its own strength.
Ramesh Menon, Anant Pai, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Manmatha Nath Dutt, S.K. Ratcliffe, Vālmīki, C. Rajagopalachari · 1975 · Bengali
Ramesh Menon's retelling of Valmiki, filed here in Bengali. The Ramayana is the extreme case of a text that has crossed every language it has met and been changed by each one.
Krupabai Satthianadhan · 1895 · Tamil
Krupabai Satthianadhan was among the first Indian women to publish a novel, writing about a Christian girlhood at a time when almost nobody was writing about girlhood at all.
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