After her widowed father marries a younger woman, Radhika's world falls apart. She feels betrayed the emotional and intellectual bond that she had forged with him since the early death of her mother breaks with that sudden marriage. To escape the unbearable situation at home- the growing rift between her and her father-Radhika moves to Chicago to pursue her masters in fine arts. She returns to India two years later, burdened by a sense of alienation and homesickness, only to realise that while nothing had changed in her country, everything had. The family that she had longed to be reunited with barely acknowledges her arrival. The sense of belonging is missing, leaving her in 'an emotional state of in- between-ness, of universal unbelonging.' As days pass, Radhika is paralyzed with ennui, which tinges all her relationships-romantic or filial. So she lies on her takht, bored, immobile, uninspired...
An extraordinary chronicler of the inner lives of the urban Indian woman, Usha Priyamvada is a pioneering figure in modern Hindi literature. Won't You Stay. Radhika?, first published in 1967, expertly explores the stifling and narrow-minded social ideals that continue to trap so many Indian women in the complex web of individual freedom, and social and familial obligation. Daisy Rockwell's sensitive and skilful translation brings this poignant Hindi novel to a new set of readers.
When think of ennui, we laugh. Trust the French, we think, to privilege boredom as an emotion. We think of old French movies with very little plot, of people in black turtlenecks chain smoking in cafes, and symbolist poets so wracked by boredom, it brings them close to death. When we say, in English, 'to die of boredom,' it's hyperbolic, even humorous, but in French 'c'est à mourir d'ennui,' the same phrase, really, it is a more serious statement. We know ennui to be something greater than boredom: one of those special words that must be imported wholesale into English, like schadenfreude or dharma or hara-kiri. Just look at Emma Bovary! Flaubert's famous heroine suffers an ennui so stifling, she tries to stamp it out first with romance novels, then getting married, and finally, a series of disastrous affairs.
Nothing fits the bill and eventually (spoiler!) she poisons herself, literally dying of boredom.
Part of the divergence between the English word, boredom, and the French word, ennui, is that ennui actually means more than just boredom. In the plural, for example, it means troubles: 'j'ai des ennuis' means 'I've got problems, not 'I have more than one thing that's boring me.' Ennui carries with it the sense of something weightier than boredom. In fact, ennui can be a serious affliction. In another quintessentially ennui-drenched French novel, Bonjour Tristesse (1954) by Françoise Sagan, the narrator, Cécile, explains, 'A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow.' Melancholy, a close kin to sorrow or depression, is another valence to the experience of ennui.
Why, you may be wondering, is this translator writing about a French concept to introduce her translation of a Hindi novel? A good question! This is because, as I was translating Won't You Stay, Radhika?, I was struck by how much the mood of ennui dominated the book. In Usha Priyamvada's slight novel, our heroine, Radhika, is afflicted with ennui in the truly French sense of the word. Yes, her sheer motionlessness and inaction could be interpreted as a clinical depression, but her mood lacks the heaviness or sorrow of that emotion and is reminiscent of Cécilie's strange melancholy or Emma Bovary's spidery ennui.
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