What has not been translated

Almost none of modern Punjabi literature is available in English. Amrita Pritam, Gurdial Singh, some Manto in Urdu translation, a scattering of poems, and after that the record thins to nothing.

The classical material is better served: Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and Baba Farid Ji all have English versions, several of them old, several of them bad.

Translation between Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi is now technically trivial and institutionally almost non-existent. There is no funded programme on either side to put the other side's twentieth-century literature into the reader's own script.

A hundred years of short stories, novels and poetry written by a hundred and forty million people's writers is inaccessible to almost everyone outside the language, including to half the people inside it.

This is a solvable problem. It costs money and nobody has decided to spend it.

Anyone looking for a useful thing to do for Punjabi could pick one Shahmukhi book a year and transliterate it, and the total output of everyone doing that would exceed what all the institutions have managed.

The Punjabi classics exist in English in a small number of academic translations and the modern Punjabi literature almost not at all.

What crosses is what wins a national prize and is then translated into English through Hindi, which is a route that loses the language twice.

The Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi transliteration is the cheaper and more urgent gap. A century of Punjabi writing from Pakistan could be made readable in India by software and an editor.

What we don't know

  • A complete list of what has been transliterated between the scripts. There is no register.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Bibliographies of Punjabi literature in English translation.
  • Punjabi University transliteration project records.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 220 accounts in When the Water Went, the chapter of this site covering Punjab since 1947: land, water, debt and everything after.