Translating India

Rita Kothari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138162990
• eBook ISBN: 9781317642152
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The cultural universe of urban, English-speaking middle class in India shows signs of growing inclusiveness as far as English is concerned. This phenomenon manifests itself in increasing forms of bilingualism (combination of English and one Indian language) in everyday forms of speech - advertisement jingles, bilingual movies, signboards, and of course conversations. It is also evident in the startling prominence of Indian Writing in English and somewhat less visibly, but steadily rising, activity of English translation from Indian languages. Since the eighties this has led to a frenetic activity around English translation in India's academic and literary circles. Kothari makes this very current phenomenon her chief concern in Translating India.

The study covers aspects such as the production, reception and marketability of English translation. Through an unusually multi-disciplinary approach, this study situates English translation in India amidst local and global debates on translation, representation and authenticity. The case of Gujarati - a case study of a relatively marginalized language - is a unique addition that demonstrates the micro-issues involved in translation and the politics of language.

Rita Kothari teaches English at St. Xavier's College, Ahmedabad (Gujarat), where she runs a translation research centre on behalf of Katha. She has published widely on literary sociology, postcolonialism and translation issues. Kothari is one of the leading translators from Gujarat. Her first book (a collaboration with Suguna Ramanathan) was on English translation of Gujarati poetry (Modern Gujarati Poetry: A Selection, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1998). Her English translation of the path-breaking Gujarati Dalit novel Angaliyat is in press (The Stepchild, Oxford University Press). She is currently working on an English translation of Gujarati short stories by women of Gujarat, a study of the nineteenth-century narratives of Gujarat, and is also engaged in a project on the Sindhi identity in India.

1.
Introduction

How does a common ‘idea of India’ make itself available to a Bengali, a Kannadiga, or a speaker of Metei? Only through translation. (Nair, 2002:7)

There comes a point in time when words leap out of their conventional boundaries and embrace different shades of meaning. Something similar has happened to the word “translation”, which, long ago meant a linguistic substitution of meaning from a Source Language (SL) into a Target Language (TL) (Catford, 1965). Today it stands as a fundamental principle describing just about any interaction between two languages, cultures or objects. John Sturrock (1990:996) notes:

In some quarters, ethnography has come to be seen as specifically concerned, no longer with the disingenuous description of other cultures, but with their “translation” into a form comprehensible to our selves. As explicit “translation” of an alien society’s customs, rites and beliefs is no longer mistakable for the “real” thing, it is a version or account of another culture familiarized for us through the agency of a translator/ethnographer.

If Sturrock (1990) and Talal Asad (1986) see ethnography as an act of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) and Eric Cheyfitz (1991) employ it as a metaphor of the Empire. Their postcolonial writings focus on understanding inequalities and slippages in colonial relationships through translation. Homi Bhabha (1994) and Salman Rushdie (1991), on the other hand, seek to articulate hybrid intercultural spaces and identities through the term ‘translation’ – Rushdie refers to his tribe as “translated men”(1991: 17). Looking at this widening rubric, it is clear that “our perception of translation has changed profoundly in the last decade or so” (Holmstrom, 1997:4-5). What is now acknowledged is that the translation process is one in which we tentatively and precariously arrive at meanings of one cultural context and re-inscribe them, however inadequately, in another. If, as cultural theorists suggest, culture is the silent language that members of a specific ethnic, racial or cultural group understand, entering cultures involves translating this language along with its grammar, syntax and metaphors. It should also be noted that the terms ‘translation’ and ‘metaphor’ both share the similar connotation of ‘carrying across’ or ‘transferring’ through their etymology. Translation serves as any metaphor of understanding the ‘other’ and metaphor itself acquires a sense of translation. This synonymity between ‘metaphor’ and ‘translation’ takes the definition of translation into the realms of the infinite, hence the need to set a provisional limit on this term and clarify how it is being used in this book.

Translating India is centred on the production of the body referred to as Indian Literature in English translation (hereafter ILET). It concerns itself with this industry and what goes into feeding it. It is also interested in the quarters that give this industry its present prominence and help sustain its energy. The frenetic activity of ILET in the last two decades, its unprecedented rise from being a marginal event to a pervasive trend begs attention. In fact, the existence of ILET as a body which is substantial and distinct is itself a recent phenomenon. ILET has been an ancillary activity of Indian Writing in English (hereafter IWE) confused with and being subsumed into the body of IWE.¹ For a long time, ILET was neither significant nor voluminous enough to draw attention to itself as a separate body. The first recognition of Indian literature in English translation as a body distinct from Indian Writing in English came when Gokak stated, “one of the befitting ways of honouring the message and significance of Gitanjali is to create a body of Indo-English writing, which will wear Gitanjali as a jewel in its crown” (1964:166). Later in the early eighties in a pioneering study Translation as Discovery, Sujit Mukherjee used Gokak’s taxonomy to map the scope of ‘Indo-English’ referring to what is now called Indian Literature in English translation or ‘regional’ literatures in translation.² This does not mean, however, that translating into English is a recent activity. The chapter titled “Recalling: English Translation in Colonial India” in this book shows how the origins of English translations in India go back to the nineteenth century. At the same time, translations in English were few and far between until almost the middle of the sixties. After India’s political independence in 1947, the ambiguous and controversial position of English did not provide an atmosphere conducive for both ‘original’ as well translated works in English. The independent state conveyed its first gesture of patronage towards creative writing in English by conferring the Sahitya Akademi award on R.K. Narayan in 1965. All was still not well with writing in English, however, creative writing in English continued amidst allegations and defences. Translation activity in English was particularly meagre, thanks to prejudices against translations in general and English translations of Indian literature in particular. Given this background of marginality, the dramatic rise of translations that are produced, read, absorbed in curricula today appears staggering. The contexts surrounding this shift are at the heart of Translating India. The six chapters of this book represent various quarters that provide consensus and fuel to ILET.

As was mentioned earlier, the first chapter “Recalling” provides a thematic overview of English translations as carried out by the East India officers and/or white Orientalists scholars of the nineteenth century. Once Indian subjects entered into polemical debates with the British on the latter’s version of Hinduism and of the Indian epics and conflicting perceptions of the past, for the first time we find English translations by Indians. The ideologies underlying both acts are of interest to us since as Indian translators we carry out a resistant and/or assimilative dialogue with the West through translation even today. The chapter “Two Worlds Theory” draws a map of India’s linguistic economy in the years after Independence and situates ‘modern’ Indian languages (as opposed to an elite and pan-Indian language like Sanskrit) and the English language in their emerging configurations.³ The English language remains a leitmotif all the way from the Nehruvian vision of the nation in the fifties and sixties to a post-liberalised India of the nineties so that despite conflicting political and economic ideologies, its position remains unchallenged. At the same time, English in postcolonial India is in a new avatar and different things are expected of it. The chapter “Two Worlds Theory” highlights English’s reconfigured relationship with the Indian languages and how it provides a condition for accommodating translation.

The Indian ‘middle class’ inhabits a bilingual space of language and world-view and translation is one of the manifestations of this phenomenon. Expressions, icons and symbols satisfying this need in the middle class to produce and receive ‘local’ and ‘global’ ways of living life sell easily in India today. The chapter “Outside the Discipline Machine” forges connections between the symbiotic relationship between the middle class and the English language and locates English translation there.

Translating India straddles the specialized and the general sphere of English translation in India. It is interested in a hypothetical situation of why a nameless, faceless, English-reading person in middle-town visits a bookshop and picks up a work in translation. It is equally interested in why students or teachers of sociology or ‘English literature’ read works in translation and the uses they put them to. These questions are concerned with readerships and layered segments within Indian readerships. Although they appear tenuously linked with the subject of translation, they throw light on the literary as well as paraliterary forces that make translations work in ways that have never worked before. Both “Within Academia” and “Outside the Discipline Machine” are reflections on these forces, the canons that absorb texts in translation and the social needs that translation implicitly professes to fulfill. In short, the twin chapters address the issue of socio-cultural viability of English translation in India. The word ‘viability’ is very crucial in economic contexts and a text in translation is a literary as well as an economic product that must sell by the end of the day. Of course this commercial concern shifts in emphases from publisher to publisher, and takes almost tertiary place with institutions of ‘nation-building’ such as the Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust. The chapter “Publishers’ Perspective” examines the role of the publishing industry, its perception of the translation activity and the small and big ways in which it impacts the body of ILET. The publication of slow-moving books (as opposed to ‘bestsellers’ or even textbooks), especially translations, is far from lucrative in business terms. At the same time, translation titles now seem to find a place in the publishing lists of most commercial and non-commercial publishers. It is useful to inquire into the perceptions of translation activity that lead publishers to invest time and money in this activity; and the criteria and philosophy governing the choice of texts. Has the publication of texts in translation become economically viable now? Does it also mean that there are better and more competent translators in the country than before? Is the publishing industry responding to a latent market that always existed, or is it by making resources available, creating a market? There are no clear-cut answers to these questions. However, through interviews with publishers or editors directly involved in this activity, I have explored some of these areas.

I have offered historical, disciplinary, economic and sociological contexts that may ‘explain’ the rise of the English translation, without implying, of course, a cause-and-effect relationship. The contexts impinging, affecting and governing ILET at the ‘national’ level have slightly different enactments in the ‘regional’ arenas. Hence when we examine the production of a specific ‘regional’ literature in English translation, the focus shifts from the general to the particular and throws light on both processes. In order to substantiate, I have, in the final chapter , taken the case of Gujarati literature in English translation. The history of Gujarat’s relationship with the English language has been a chequered one, a phenomenon reflected in the near-total absence of English writing as well as translations by Gujaratis until recently. The long-standing Gandhian tradition, which mitigated an anglicized outlook, combined with a mercantile outlook of the community to make Gujarat’s response to colonialism and the colonial language an interesting one. Furthermore, Gujarat is also one of the most urbanized states in the country and its language figures as one of the ‘major’ languages in the Constitution. The lack of translations from Gujarat not only reflect Gujarati’s inability or unwillingness to translate or trade with English, but also reflects the politics of translation activity at large. What self-perceptions underlie a community’s decision to translate its literature and ‘represent’? What is representation all about and has Gujarat also finally been scrambling for one? Translation is a site of a community’s unspoken desires and anxieties, and different languages in India have different narratives of translation to tell. This is only one such narrative.

“We are poised at an interesting point. There is a ferment; when it subsides, we’ll have to take stock of what’s left” (Davidar in Paranjpe:1992). Although these words refer to the Indian English novel, they hold relevance for Indian literature (especially fiction) in translation also. The production, reception and canonization of English texts in translation are fledgling and nebulous activities. In my attempt to capture this flux, and confine it within academic bounds many things remain unattended to which I shall turn later. For the moment, a few words about the methodology of this book are in order. The six chapters in this book derive unity by proceeding from the same premise of why translating into English appears to be a possible, desirable, or even a necessary activity? The first chapter highlights ideologies that underlay translation in the past and it engages in a thematic overview for its purposes. The second chapter takes recourse to historical and socio linguistics to point out an increasing condition of bilingualism and biculturalism. The twin chapters on literary/academic and para-literary contexts draw parallels with audio and visual phenomena and make use of newspaper articles, reviews, prefaces and blurbs to show how translations are ‘framed’ by publishers and reader consumers. The chapter on the publishing industry and the case-study of Gujarati rely heavily on oral interviews with publishers and editors in the former and Gujarati teachers and intellectuals in the latter.

Finally, it must be stated that Translating India is not about the act, but the activity of translation and the conditions under which it gains momentum and unanimous approval. Styles of translation are not unrelated to the central argument of this book, but they do not enjoy as much premium as they do in traditional scholarship on translation. This book takes issue with a view that literary products ‘reflect’ or ‘mirror’ external reality and establishes that literary products are tethered to material realities in many mundane ways and that it is impossible to disconnect literary from the para-literary.

Notes

¹ See my “The Elephant and the Ant: Indian Literature in English/Translation” for an analysis of the historical and contested relationship between literature produced in English and literature translated into English in India. Critical Practice, January 2003, Issue No. 17.

² It is important to clarify here the connotations of loaded terms like ‘Indian literature’ and ‘regional literature. The two are not interchangeable. The assumption behind ‘regional literature’ is that it represents a region, a space and only some languages in India have ‘regions’. I have, however, included within the ambit of ‘regional literature’ even those languages which are not defined by ‘regions’ and which have therefore considerably less infrastructural support. The much-contested baggy term ‘Indian literature’ justifies its inclusion in this study because it facilitates discussions which would otherwise be bogged down by the minutiae of clarifications.

³ E.V. Ramakrishnan (1997) provides a succinct summation of the “tripartite language system” of India with its three layers of pan-Indian traditional elite language like Sanskrit; pan-Indian modern language like English and other Indian languages. According to him, the three are assumed to represent the ethos of tradition, modernity and everydayness.

2.
Recalling: English Translations in Colonial India

Translation is stigmatized as a form of writing, discouraged by copyright law, depreciated by the academy, exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organizations. (Venuti, 1998:1)

The Sahitya Akademi (a semi-government publishing house) which had not included English as one of its scheduled languages until the sixties, awarded a Translation Prize for English in the eighties. In the nineties, Katha (a non-profit private publishing house) began as an organization solely concerned with translation and instituted the A.K. Ramanujan Award for translation. In 2000, the Crossword chain of bookshops in India included English translations in their short-list. In the last few years there have been on an average at least five national seminars on translation in India. Courses on translation studies and Indian literature in English translation are taught in about twenty universities. Both Penguin and Picador India launched their operations in India with a decision to tap the Indian market for books written in, and translated into English. The rise in the institutionalization through awards and courses in India has also coincided with energetic and radical debates on translation in India and the West. These debates stridently question the very assumption of the ‘original’ let alone its superiority over a translation. Given this nature of hectic activity, Venuti’s stern conclusion about the state of translation seems paradoxical, especially when we look at the Indian situation. Yet what needs to be noted is that the degree of attention and glamour that the developments enumerated above suggest, are unique only to English translation activity in India. The rise in the visibility and acceptance of ILET in the last two decades begs attention. I have tried to identify the quarters from which it has received consensus and study the interconnections.

When compared with translations from Indian languages into other Indian languages (intra-Indian), a much older activity, the importance attached to English translation appears quite disproportionate. At the same time, when certain literary forms acquire prominence at specific points in history, there is a range of tangible and intangible determinants at work. The issues surrounding the privileged position of English translation in India will be explored later. For now, we turn briefly to the scenario of intra-Indian translations.

Phenomenon: Old and New

Given India’s multilingualism, most Indians straddle at least two languages in their everyday lives. This is an informal and unstudied part of daily life in India. A historical perspective of Indian translation activity in general requires consideration in terms of three stages: oral, written and printed. There is, of course, no mechanism for tracing the oral tradition of translation. The written tradition, on the other hand, is rooted in medieval India, around the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, when excerpts from the Sanskrit scriptures began to travel into the ‘regional’ languages. Jnaneshwara’s translation of the Bhagawad-Gita (called Jnaneswari in Marathi) and the various (sub)versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in different languages are a part of this written tradition. The journey made from the exalted Sanskrit scriptures to the more humble ‘desi’ languages was symptomatic of a quiet spiritual revolution made possible through translation, as the previously inaccessible scriptures became available to the unprivileged, lower classes. This phenomenon is to be found in languages as geographically distant as Gujarati and Assamese, Malayalam and Hindi. In that sense, the nature of outflow from Sanskrit into Indian languages is analogous to the West’s movement from Latin to Vulgate. It was an attempt to release scriptures “from the monopolist custody of Sanskrit pundits” (Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999:10) and move towards greater secularization and vernacularism. The analogy of translation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Recalling: English Translations in Colonial India
• 3 The Two Worlds Theory
• 4 Within Academia
• 5 Outside the Discipline Machine
• 6 Publishers’ Perspective
• 7 The Case of Gujarati
• 8 Summing Up
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Works Cited
• Index