Carrying a World Across: On Translating Sandesh Bhandare's 'Wari'
- Ashutosh Potdar
- Aug 4
- 3 min read
We talk a great deal about translating fiction and poetry. The sound of a line. The turn of a metaphor. The freedom, or the fidelity, a translator chooses. Non-fiction rarely gets the same attention. We assume it is the easy one. As if facts simply move from one language into another on their own. As if they need no more than a competent hand. They don't. I translated Sandesh Bhandare's Marathi piece on the Wari for the first issue of Hyphen. It taught me, again, how much a work of non-fiction asks of its translator.
Bhandare writes about the Wari. It is the eight-hundred-year-old pilgrimage on foot to Pandharpur. His piece is part reportage, part memoir, part cultural history. And underneath all of it, he is a photographer. You feel the photographer's eye on every page. He notices what others walk past.
Early in the piece there is a scene. An elderly Warkari is being bathed in the Chandrabhaga, cared for by the people around him. His eyes are closed. His face holds the deep contentment of someone who has finished the long walk. Then Bhandare gives us the turn. The people bathing him were not his family. They did not know him. They had simply seen an old man alone and treated him as their own father. A bond that owes nothing to blood, offered freely on the road. To carry that moment into English, I had to keep more than the information. I had to keep the tenderness. The surprise. The ethics folded inside it.
That is the real labour of translating non-fiction. You are not moving facts. You are carrying a whole world across. And much of that world lives in words that have no equivalent on the other side.
Consider one sentence where Bhandare names the sants of the Warkari tradition. Namdev the tailor. Savata Mali the gardener. Gora Kumbhar the potter. Sena Nhavi the barber. In Marathi, those names do not merely identify people. They announce caste and craft in the same breath. That is precisely Bhandare's point. This was a devotion that made room for everyone. The tailor and the potter, the barber and the gardener. And this at a time when such inclusion was radical. In English, stripped of their context, these become just names. My task was to let them speak again. To help an English reader hear what a Marathi reader hears. And to do it without turning the sentence into a footnote.
The same holds for words like Warkari, kalas, dindi, abhang, Ashadhi Ekadashi. The temptation is to smooth them into something familiar. Or to bury each one under a paragraph of explanation. Both choices lose the piece. These words are not decoration. They are load-bearing. They hold the whole structure up. My aim was to let an English reader stand inside a Marathi world. Without making that world exotic. And without explaining it to death. Somewhere between those two failures lies the translation.
There is also a responsibility here that goes beyond craft. Bhandare has spent his life documenting people and traditions that usually get left out of the frame. The folk performers. The pilgrims. The communities at the margins of cultural attention. To translate him is to carry that work to new readers. It is to stay accountable to the people in his frame. Not just to write a graceful English sentence. But to be honest to the Warkaris and pilgrims whose lives he has watched so closely.
My translation appears in Hyphen's debut issue. It is a new translation-focused journal. It brings together seven languages, seventeen writers and eleven translators across seven languages, with Marathi as the language in focus. It is company I am glad to keep. My thanks to the editor, Deepa Ganesh. And to Sandesh Bhandare, for a piece that asked so much of me, and gave back more.
You can read the translation here: https://the-hyphen.in/article/bhakti-movement-for-social-change
And you can find the full issue, and order a copy, here: https://the-hyphen.in/issue/hyphen-01
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