Translation Studies in India: A Brief Overview

Translation studies in India is an evolving discipline.  Historically, it was only in mid-nineteenth century that the translation became a significant intellectual issue in India when the question of ‘imagining a nation’ became problematic with the realization of multilingual and multiethnic nature of Indian society. While the idea of nation as a linguistic and cultural unit based on the Eurocentric model started appearing clearly inadequate, translation started to appear as an urgent cultural necessity for nationalistic, indologicial and orientalist projects. The earliest writings on translation in India emerged during this period of the rise of print capitalism and Vishnu Shastri Chiploonkar’s Nibandhmala in Marathi in 1874 can be seen as one of the earliest attempts to intellectually confront the issue of translation. 

 Practitioners and thinkers of this period like Romesh Chander Dutt, and Sri Aurobindo reflected on translation from nationalistic, indological and orientalistic perspectives. The source language, needless to say, was largely Sanskrit and the target language was very often English.

It was only in post- independence period, that the dissatisfaction with the nationalistic, indological and orientalist idea of culture and nation made Indian intellectuals to search for alternative models of theorizing and reflecting on nation and civilization. The questions of regional and linguistic identities became prominent during the processes of linguistic reorganization of states. The questions of caste and gender identities and the movements against discrimination and injustice started gaining ground. In such a context, the idea of nation as an elitist upper caste, upper class and patriarchal construct started being vigorously interrogated. The little magazine movements challenging the predominant formalist and idealist poetics also started questioning the political underpinnings of the established literary culture. It was against this politics of interrogation and revision that the questions of translation started being posed. The major practitioners and scholars of this period like AK Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, Sujit Mukherjee among many others approach the questions of translation in the context of this shift from nationalist, orientalist elitist framework to more regional/ local and demotic outlook towards culture and nation. This shift is clearly noticeable in their choice of source languages and texts which are very often from the marginalized oral, folk and ‘native’ traditions or from bhashas instead of Sanskrit. Their reflections on translation also reveal these re-visionary attitudes.

However, most of the thinking about translation practiced by academics in this period not just in India was around the ‘problems’ of translation very often in a normative way and limiting itself to viewing translation as a process. Internationally, the shift from this normative, process-oriented and hierarchic view of translation to more descriptive, product-based, ideological and subversive view of translation emerged only with the rise of ‘translation studies’ as a discipline in the nineteen seventies.

The late nineteen eighties and nineties was an exciting period for the discipline of translation studies in India. Seminal writings like GN Devy, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature (1993), Sujit Mukherjee’s Translation as Discovery and Other Essays on Indian Literature in English Translation (1994), Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context  (1995)  and invaluable anthologies like  Promod Talgeri, and Verma.  S.B.  eds. Literature in Translation from Cultural Transference to Metonymic Displacement (1988),   AK Singh ed. Translation: Its theory and Practice (1996) , Dingwaney,  Anuradha and Carol Maier.(eds.)  Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (1996)  S.Ramakrishna ed. Translation and Multilingualism.  PostColonial Contexts (1997), Tutun Mukherjee ed. Translation: From Periphery to Centrestage (1998) and Susan Bassnett and Trivedi eds. Post Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. (1999) burst upon the scene. Most of these writing build upon the reflections and practice of translator-scholars like A. K. Ramanujan. These writings are not only informed by the ‘ cultural’ turn in translation studies but also draw heavily upon theorization of postcolonial studies, gender studies, Dalit studies and post structuralism.

With the twenty-first century, globalization permeated nook and corner of Indian society forcing people to seriously rethink the questions of nation, cultural identities, languages and civilization. The explosive growth of digital technology in form of the internet, cellphones and social media in the beginning of the twenty first century has altered the way people communicate and process information and knowledge. The economic reforms from the nineteen nineties of liberalization and privatization intertwined with the processes of globalization producing a new urbanized middle-class and a distinctive landscape dominated by multi-storied complexes, mega-malls and proliferation of multiple types of automobiles. The economic growth was not without its catastrophic implications. The rise of religious fanaticism, terrorism, alarming development of farmers committing suicide and environmental disasters accompanied by growing criminalization and corruption of public life raised new questions before Indian society. The politics of electoral democracy in the post-Mandal period when there was a reconfiguration of politics of caste and reservations has undergone substantial shift. The questions of very existence of Indian languages, marginal identities, ethnic minorities, and natural environment have become more acute than ever. At this juncture it will be fruitful to think of how translators and translation scholars engage with these new questions. It will be interesting to find out how translation studies scholars extensively and intensively deliberate upon the complex emergent issues like:

·         Translation in India and the Digital Revolution

·         Translation and the Fate of Indian Languages

·         Translation and the question of Literary Historiography of post-Independence Indian Literatures

·         Politics of Translation between the Bhashas

·         Teaching Translation Studies in Indian Universities

·         Poetics and Politics of Translation of translating marginal literary discourses like the Dalit literatures, the Adivasi literatures and LGBT writings into English and into Bhasha

·         Politics and Mechanics of Film and TV Adaptation and subtitling into Indian Languages

• Translation and Corpora Linguistics in India

Read More about Translation Studies Elsewhere on My Blog by clicking HERE
 Read my blog on using Semiotics of Culture as a Theoretical Framework for studying Indian literatures and cultures.

OF AERIEL ROOTS AND THE BANYAN CITY

In the scorching Baroda summer of 1993, a young man from a place called Valsad walks into a smallish room for his viva of MA entrance test. The room is packed with some of the most renowned professors from the Department of English, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.  He finds himself facing Prof. Ranu Vanikar, the then Head of Department, and Prof. G. N.Devy among others. In response to the standard question regarding his favourite writers, he has the audacity of an undergraduate to say, “Sri Aurobindo is one of my favourite writers and I have translated some portions from Savitri into Hindi.” This brings smile on the face of Prof Devy. It is one of those famous Devy smiles which no has managed to decipher till date- whether it is ironical or pleased or both or neither. For Prof Devy, a renowned Aurobindo scholar himself, it was probably all these things. He asked me further questions regarding his poetry and the only answer which I recall after twenty years is that his poetry was ‘metaphysical’ but not in the sense Donne’s or Marvell’s poetry is metaphysical. (I actually got away with it).

Two decades after that curious incident, I will be sitting in the same room listening to such audacious undergraduates appearing for their MA entrance viva in the scorching Baroda summer, this time as a teacher. It is a privilege and a humbling experience to be in the same place where the internationally renowned scholars like Prof Devy, Prof Kar, Prof Joneja, Prof VY Kantak, and Prof Birjepatil or giants like Sri Aurobindo and AK Ramanujan once “professed” literature. Sri Aurobindo and AK Ramanujan are some of the most important names in Indian literature; famous for their fabulous creative writing, translations, sharp and erudite criticism and philosophy. It is the legacy of multilingual creativity, translation, and comparative research which I inherit as a modest practitioner of same activities. I write poetry and criticism in Marathi and English and I translate into these languages. I translate from all four languages I know. I have guts to say this as I seem to have retained some of the audacity I had when I was an undergraduate student.

The person who walked into the MA program of the MS University in the year 1993 was not the same person who walked out of it in 1995. I did my Bachelors from J. P. Shroff Arts College, Valsad.  Valsad is a small non-metropolitan town, where English is not just spoken in Gujarati, but also taught in Gujarati.  What we studied was a standard and astonishingly outdated ‘English Literature’ canon, comprising of the usual suspects:  starting out with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Pope, Dryden, the Brontes, Blake, Austen, Shelley, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning and ending with T.S Eliot, with lots of whimper and no bang.  For literary criticism, we had books like English Literature: An Introduction for Foreign Readers by R. J. Rees (published in 1973) and a strange book called The Making of Literature by Scott James written in 1946. The books were in the syllabus ever since they were published or probably ever since Scott-James was born. The reason for their eternal recurrence was the fact that the professors of the affiliated colleges were so much in love with the notes on books which they had inherited ( or made) when they students, that they were unwilling to part with their treasure. The Scott-James book was not even meant as an introduction to literary criticism. It grappled with a specific and rather worthless issue of literary criticism, namely that of whether only writers can be good critics. However, the only thing that can reassure Mr. Scott-James (if he is dead and in his grave) is the fact that no one read it. Most of the students read bilingual ‘guides’ brought out by Popular publication, Surat only, and most of the teachers too did not read it. Most of the teachers and most of the students gave a damn about literature and fancy things like that.  The students selected English as a major subject for their bachelors because they thought it might improve their English, raise their social status, and add some glamour to the BA degree which was groveling at the lowest rung of the Varna-Jati system of higher education in India.

I was obviously an odd man in this set up. I had completed my higher secondary schooling in the science stream, and much to the annoyance of many of our family friends and acquaintances, selected Arts stream with English Major. My dad, a steno-typist and literature lover himself believed that a person who knows English and has a degree in English and knows steno-typing will never die of hunger. So much for parental expectations. When Dr. Madhurita Choudhary, a young, freshly appointed lecturer asked us why you have opted for English major, I bluffed that I wanted to go for journalism. Actually I did not have guts to give the real answer. The real answer was I had scored 53% in my HSC and doing BA with English and doing stenography side by side would ensure that I don’t starve. And yeah, I wrote poetry and yeah, I loved literature and yeah, I loved English literature. But then I loved English and Biology as subjects in my higher secondary education and when the board results were out, I had barely managed to pass in these subjects! I remember scoring 41 out of 50 in English in my internal examination and in the board examination, I retained the score of 41, but this time out of hundred! By then I had fallen in love with Lewis Carroll, Jerome K Jerome,  William Blake,  TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens( whose poems did not make any sense when I had read it then and do not make any sense even today for me, but then who cares for silly things like meaning these days?) in my higher secondary English text books. Come to think of it, my school curriculum was in fact more exciting than my college one! However. The damage had already been done. I was beyond repair.

So when the undergrad college started, I loved Keats and was smitten by Macbeth and Julius Caesar. I even loved Milton. (Imagine!) (While doing my MA, Prof Devy had asked us to read Paradise Lost Book I and was convinced no one would read it. It so happened that I read it and told Devy about it. His comments were typical Devy comments: “Milton has found a reader, at last.”). 

I was so much in thrall of Macbeth that I tried to translate some portions into Hindi! It was the devastating magic of literature and its overwhelming power that turned me into translator.  I translated into Hindi because it was the only Indian language which I could write more or less properly and because I loved Hindi at school too. Yes, I loved literary criticism and actually found Scott-James interesting, because he was looking at the relationship between the creative writer and the critic-the question which was staring me as a writer and wannabe scholar in face. 

When I joined the MS University Department, I was in a strange and exciting world.  Prof Kar was lecturing on Deconstruction and Derrida, almost as if on an auto-pilot.  Prof Joneja was talking about his Greek inheritance while teaching Aristophanes. I distinctly remember him mentioning in the class that his nose showed his Greek ancestry.

 Prof Devy had won Sahitya Akademi prize for his polemical nativist book After Amnesia and was a celebrity. It was the aftermath of the Age of Theory and it was the Age of ‘Crisis in English Studies’ studies debates in our country.  A wide array of theories like Feminism (didn’t hear much of Gender studies much in those days), Deconstruction, structuralism, culture studies and what have you.

The Department had a paper called ‘Politics and Ideology of Teaching English’ in those days,-probably modeled on something similar in the JN University. I read a “radically heterogeneous” canon comprising of writers as dissimilar as Kafka, Holderlin, Faulkner, Stevens, Brecht, Namdeo Dhasal, Ravji Patel, Eliot, Stevens (Yea! Stevens once again, and this time too he made no sense but made me love him even more), Shakespeare and Basheer. And equally “heterogeneous” array of critics and theorists like Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Poulet, Iser, Stanley Fish and the rest of them. The leap from Scott- James to Lacan was indeed a quantum one. The seminars and discussions in the Department were exciting. I listened to the internationally renowned faculties digress from the topics they were supposed to teach with fascination and awe. The juicy digressions and debates opened up a wealth of insights which have shaped me as a researcher and creative writer today. 

Yes, I also realized that plays are meant to be performed on the stage rather than just read in classrooms. The Shakespeare Society staged plays often in those days and I remember watching Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Mahesh Elchunchwar’s Reflection. I remember enjoying Dr Arvind Macwan strumming on his guitar and Dr. Rani Dharkar, who is a noted novelist today, teaching us Girish Karnad. The program liberated me intellectually and creatively. All these things would not have been possible had I stayed in Valsad. 

I taught Lacan, Fish and Derrida for many years in Baroda. Whether I lived up to the levels of Prof Kar or Prof Devy, I simply don’t know. But what I do know, is the profound impact these teachers and texts have made on me is the one that has made me who I am today as a teacher. Obviously, the two years I spent doing MA are unforgettable not just because of the teachers and the texts, but also due to great friends I made- and yes most of them are on Facebook today. Someday I will write another entry about these things. 

So when the college reopens, I will be sitting in probably the same room where I had faced my MA interviews as a student, and when yet another youngster from some god-knows-which place will walk into the room, I will wonder  about what influence this department will leave on her when she goes out. Frankly, I am scared. I am excited.