From Amargadh to the Front Rank of Gujarati Letters

Sharifa Kasambhai Vijaliwala was born on 4 August 1962 in Amargadh, a village in the Sihor area of Bhavnagar district in Saurashtra, to Kasambhai and Hajaraben. Nothing about that starting point predicted a Sahitya Akademi Award. She would become the most significant scholar of Partition literature writing in Gujarati, a translator who brought Manto, Intizar Hussain and Amrita Pritam into the language, and the head of a university department — having first qualified and worked as a pharmacist.

Her formal education began in the sciences. She took a Bachelor of Pharmacy degree in 1985 from the Faculty of Technology and Engineering at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and worked as a pharmacist for five years. Then she changed course entirely.

In 1990 she completed a Master of Arts in Gujarati literature, finishing first in her cohort and winning the Kantawala Gold Medal. She cleared the National Eligibility Test and held a Junior Research Fellowship, and in 1994 completed a doctorate under the critic Shirish Panchal. Her dissertation examined point of view in the short story, with particular attention to Gujarati practitioners of the form — a technical, close-reading study that set the pattern for everything she wrote afterwards.

She began teaching Gujarati literature at M. T. B. Arts College in Surat in 1991 and remained there until 2013, when she became Professor and Head of the Department of Gujarati at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University in Surat.

The Critic

Vijaliwala's criticism is collected in several volumes, among them Varatasandarbh, Sampratyay, Naval Vishv and Vibhajanni Vyatha. Her method is analytical rather than impressionistic: she is interested in how narratives are built, who is permitted to speak inside them, and what a chosen point of view conceals as well as reveals.

Vibhajanni Vyatha — The Anguish of Partition — is her major work. It is a collection of critical essays on the literature produced by the Partition of 1947 across Indian languages, and it won her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018. The book grew out of sustained research; she completed a University Grants Commission project on the analytical and comparative study of Partition-themed literature. Gujarati, a language whose own Partition experience is often overshadowed by the Punjab and Bengal narratives, had no comparable body of scholarship before her.

The Translator

Her translation work is at least as consequential as her criticism, and it is where her Partition scholarship becomes public service. She has rendered into Gujarati twenty-two stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, the writer whose unsparing Partition stories remain the form's high-water mark; eighteen stories of Intizar Hussain along with his novel Basti; Amrita Pritam's Pinjar; Rahi Masoom Raza's Adha Gaon; Bhisham Sahni's Kabira Khada Bazar Mein; and Asghar Wajahat's play Jene Lahor Nathi Joyu E Janmyo J Nathi, for which she received the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize in 2015.

She has also translated Mannu Bhandari's Mahabhoj and V. V. Shirvadkar's Marathi classic Natsamrat, and produced two collections of translated Western short fiction, Ananya and Anusang, along with Tran Katha, a set of Stefan Zweig stories. Taken together it amounts to a systematic project: making the major literature of Partition and of European modernism available to a Gujarati reader who cannot reach it otherwise.

Editor and Advocate

Vijaliwala has edited more than twenty volumes. These include collections on Partition writing, critical studies of individual authors such as Saroj Pathak, Himanshi Shelat and her own teacher Shirish Panchal, and Shatrupa, a 2005 anthology of feminist short fiction. The editing is of a piece with the rest — building the apparatus that a literature needs in order to read itself seriously.

Her awards have accumulated across all three activities. From the Gujarat Sahitya Akademi she has received honours for Ananya and Ba Ni Vatun in 2000, Varta Sandarbh in 2002, and both Sampratyay and her Manto translations in 2003. She won the Pranjivan Charitable Trust Prize in 1988, the Ramanlal Joshi Critic Award in 2002, a Best Research Paper award from the Bhaikaka Inter-University Trust, the Soham Award in 2016 and the Sadbhavana Puraskar in 2017.

Why It Matters

There is a particular significance to a Muslim woman from a Saurashtra village becoming Gujarati literature's principal interpreter of Partition. The subject is the most communally charged in modern South Asian writing, and the literature she has chosen to translate — Manto above all — is notable for refusing to allocate blame along religious lines, insisting instead on the shared degradation the violence produced. Bringing that body of work into Gujarati, and then writing the criticism that teaches readers how to approach it, is a contribution to public understanding as much as to literary scholarship.

She continues to teach and publish from Surat. Amargadh, the Bhavnagar village where she was born, produced a scholar whose work now sits on Sahitya Akademi shelves in every Indian language.