Books
A MULTILINGUAL NATION: Translation and Language Dynamic in India
edited by Rita Kothari. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2019.INDIA IN TRANSLATION, TRANSLATION IN INDIA edited by G.J.V. Prasad. Bloomsbury Academic, Delhi, 2019.
IN TRANSLATION Positions and Paradigms by Anisur Rahman. Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2019.
FOR quite some time now, translation studies scholars have been probing the question: does or should India have a different approach to translation studies? Translation studies in India may still be considered a relatively new academic discipline. It was only in the 1990s along with the rise of postcolonial studies that translation studies found a place in university syllabi in India. Till then it was recognized, at the most, as an appendage of comparative studies. Though the discipline has been heavily influenced by western theoretical approaches since then, the doubt as to whether they are equally applicable in India was raised by many scholars time and again. The plurality of the Indian context being its most central character, translation theories that emerge out of monolingual, monocultural contexts seem to not fully appreciate or address the concerns that translators in India often face. The three books under review here are proof that translation studies scholars have been taking definite steps towards re-negotiating the way we approach translation studies in India.
The book A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamic in India edited by Rita Kothari is a collection of 16 essays, divided into four parts, followed by an epilogue. The book primarily calls into question what we understand as text and even language, forcing us to acknowledge the fluidity of both. This also complicates the very concept of translation as we understand it today since the core idea of the ‘original’ will have to then be interrogated. Kothari, in her introduction, problematizes the way India has been encouraged to imagine itself, as divided into neat linguistic states, and translation aiding the cause of unity in diversity. Probing the ‘particularities of this relationship’, she asks: ‘Is translation a testimony to the difference between languages, or constitutive of one?’ (p. 2). The first part of the book ‘Translating in times of devotion’ contains three essays that deal with ‘texts’ of the Bhakti tradition. The essay by Linda Hess discusses how songs of Kabir are performative texts translated and enriched by singers and listeners who actively participate in interpretation, translation and knowledge formation. The second essay by Francesca Orsini brilliantly highlights how languages in a multilingual scenario without the aid of translation create ‘parallel enjoyment’ through the circulation of expressions, ideas, tropes and tastes. She looks at one phrase ‘Na Turk Na Hindu’ used widely across different religious traditions of North India, though ‘reaccented’, and substantiates how language is intrinsically dialogical, thus questioning the ideas of ‘original’ or ‘belonging’. In the last essay, Neelima Shukla Bhatt writes about how Narsinha Mehta’s songs travelled to Rajasthan and how Mira found her voice in Gujarati both undergoing modifications through mixing while being performed, bringing about a cultural translation. Thus the first part of the book highlights the way culture and language flowed into one another in a spontaneous way in pre-modern India.
The second part, ‘Making and Breaking Boundaries in Colonial India and After’, has six essays that talk about the measures undertaken by the colonial rulers to classify, understand and administer a multilingual region which was difficult to grapple with, and the consequences that followed. The essay ‘Unfixing Multilingualism’ looks into how French travellers, steeped in their idea of linguistic purity, found India’s overlapping languages difficult to comprehend while Rita Kothari sheds light on the first linguistic survey of India undertaken by G.A. Grierson as an attempt to classify India’s many languages which ultimately led to a hierarchy of distinct languages and dialects. Kothari discusses the role of translation in this exercise, which interestingly was used to fix the boundaries of a society and culture that was intrinsically fluid.
The next essay points towards the language hierarchy getting more solidified with new power equations in place. Sowmya Dechamma investigates the relationship between Kodava, Kannada and English and concludes that by the early 20th century languages got entangled in a power structure that implied specific purposes for each language. In a similar vein, an essay by Madhumita Sengupta details how a vibrant Kamrupi lost out to a standardized Assamese in the wake of the cultural frenzy that marked the early 20th century. But colonial intervention in the language and educational policy also empowered non-Brahmin castes and social reformers such as Phule who benefitted from a missionary education and had a ‘canny and astute understanding of the hierarchical position of the languages, constituting the bilingual sphere’ (p. 158), according to Rohini Mokashi-Punekar. In the last essay of this section, Veena Naregal probes the relationship between colonial bilingualism and translation and its effect on Indian social-sciences to explain why we are still heavily dependent on what is produced in the English language.
The third part of the book deals with specific texts and contexts in a free India where languages are mostly considered to belong to specific states. In contemporary India, the presence of English with its colonial past has made the language matrix more complicated since English is also the language of aspiration and power. Mitra Phukan refers to this unique situation when she talks about how her English works are considered to be betrayals while her translation from Assamese into English is taken as a patriotic activity. She underlines how translation of an Indian text, with its multilingual backdrop, is never easy to be rendered into English but multiple translations ‘each valid in different ways’ could be the answer as ‘translations of a text are always a work in progress’ (p. 244). Krupa Shah writing on the narrative of the folk ballad Hothal that travelled across western India in multiple versions reiterates the same, while Mini Chandran discusses translations done through English as a pivot language, and quite poetically compares the translated text in multilingual India to ‘a dancer in a hall of mirrors’, again referring to the many versions of the text making it difficult to trace back an original.
While all these translated texts are not free from politics, Tridip Suhrud explores the specific politics behind not translating the canonical Gujarati text, Sarasvatichandra, into English. Taking the idea of translation from the linguistic and literary to the purely cultural sphere, Pooja Thomas examines the city of Ahmedabad as a zone of translation in the light of how Malayalis who migrated negotiated their everyday lives. The two essays in the last section probe some stimulating philosophical questions. Chippali and Sarukkai ask ‘What comes first? Languages, or the notion of translation?’ (p. 309). Taking up transliteration as a tool of translation, they demonstrate through Sanskrit and Kannada that words have ‘membership in multiple languages’ (p. 323). The last essay by G.N. Devy takes this thought further by proposing the concept of ‘non-temporal translation time’ where ‘neither script nor speech comes first, nor is either of them subsequent’ (p. 336). The epilogue by Supriya Chaudhuri makes a case for translation, with all its ills, to understand the language of the other speaker and to make it as plural as one can. The epilogue is titled Ficus Benghalensis after the metaphor used by the anthropologist Bernard Cohn to capture the language situation in British India which still seems to hold true to a large extent.
The theme of the second book India in Translation, Translation in India edited by G.J.V. Prasad is also plurality, though it leans more towards the plurality of India represented in translations. A collection of 18 essays, the book reiterates the role translation played in the literary and social realms of India from pre-colonial times. In the introduction Prasad points out to the role of translation in the very way we imagine India when in the Constitution it is stated that ‘…India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’ (p. xii). The book stays with this idea, and through the essays tries to deliver more clarity to the making of the Indian nation as we know it now. The first few essays belong to the medieval and colonial periods. Sachin Ketkar writes about the earliest Marathi commentary of the Bhagavat Gita, the Dnyaneshwari written by Dnyaneswar. Ketkar highlights the negotiation the text brings in with Sanskrit, creating a new idiom thus a new literary path for the successive commentators on the Gita.
The next essay by Gargi Bhattacharya points towards the role of translation in aiding social reforms in colonial India. She sheds light on how Vidyasagar’s English translation of his Bengali texts championing the cause of Hindu widow remarriage managed to get the support of the British rulers and the liberal Hindus alike. The third essay by Hiren J. Patel also set in the colonial times, however, illustrates how anti-colonial feelings came to be strengthened through the social and political commentary present in Lakshmi Natak, a Gujarati translation of the English version of Aristophanes’ Wealth. Tara Menon, in her essay ‘Forging Bhakti: Translation, Conversion and Fraud in the Ezourvedam’ details a desperate attempt to translate ‘Christianity into a Hindu idiom’ (p. 71). She elaborates how a false Veda circulated in the West as the fifth Veda which geared towards monotheism, and therefore came closer to Christianity. Soham Pain, while dealing with the English translation of Kashiramadasa’s Medieval Bengali Mahabharata delves into the politics of the hierarchy of languages which forced the translators to make modifications according to the taste of the readers.
An essay by Lav Kanoi discusses the colonial Bengali translation of Aenid by Henry Sargent who was a student of Fort William College. Kanoi reads this translation against the English translation of Aenid from Latin, which he had done with a co-translator and follows this up with his own Hindi translation of Okakura’s The Book of Tea, an anti-colonial text, and comments how each book connects with the translator in different ways. This thought is reiterated in an essay by Amitendu Bhattacharya on Tagore’s translation of One Hundred Poems of Kabir. He argues that to Tagore Kabir’s poems were a means to sharpen his ideologies of humanism and secularism, and it was not just an exercise to enhance his image in the West as a mystic poet.
There are a few essays in the book that look into India’s engagement with the outside world through translation. It is a known fact that the Panchatantra tales have travelled all over the world but Priyada Shridhar Padhye explores this further through a comparative lens looking at the Panchatantra and the Grimms Tales, while Subhandu Mund substantiates how some ancient Indian tales have been adapted and appropriated in different parts of the world. He highlights the role of translations in India’s cultural history and argues that translations of ancient Indian texts during the pre-medieval and medieval times need more research which might lead to astonishing results. Fatima Rizvi in her essay examines English translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz by various translators. She concludes that Faiz is a complex poet since his poetry poses many challenges to translators. But his popularity can also be attributed to the broad cultural base of his poetry and his essentially humanist approach.
In another essay on French literature in India, Nupun Nutan does a survey of French fiction that was translated into Hindi detailing the different reasons for these translations. Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi dwells on Naiyer Masud’s Urdu translations of Kafka arguing that both Kafka through his writings and Masud through his translations aspired to find meaning in the voice that is suspended between a ‘no-longer’ and ‘not yet’. Shinjini Basu in her essay on the Bengali translation of Gramsci reflects on the challenges present in translating Gramsci in the 1990s when communism weakened all over the world, but Gramsci remained relevant. Samudranil Gupta examines how Beckett’s self-translations are about highlighting the futility of words. He argues that this concept can very well be explored through Indian languages that belong to various language families. In her article, Runjhun Verma analyses the politics of language hierarchy and representation through an exploration of an anthology of Indian literature in French translations.
Another set of essays look into the role of translation as an empowering activity in contemporary India. Regiane Correade Oliveira Ramos elaborates on the immediate need to translate more texts dealing with transgender experiences while Someshwar Sati talks about how translation can be an enabling activity by disrupting dominant narratives around disability and retrieving texts from other marginalized discourses. Amrapali Saha discusses the Kannada novel Ghachar Ghochar as ‘many texts at once’ (p. 300). She points out that the popular English translation too has hybridity and not purity as its organizing principle and concludes that both the texts exist as separate entities but in a continuum. The last essay brilliantly sums up the theme of the book, the idea of many Indias, and the idea of many Indias in very many translations.
The book, In Translation: Positions and Paradigms, containing 10 essays by Anisur Rahman, looks closely at the translation theories and practices relevant to India. The book is divided into two parts of five essays each. The first essay in the book ‘Author, Text, Translator, Reader: The New Indian Context’, discusses the relationship amongst these four in a literary culture. It is a fact that many times when translation is involved there seems to be a power tussle between the writer and the translator that impacts the text and the reader. Rahman extensively discusses the significance of each of these entities and comes up with five models of empowerment that also comment on how these entities are dependent on each other. He observes that the present literary scenario in India is conducive to new discourses and multiple perspectives, and reiterates how an author, reader and translator can keep a text alive for the future. The second essay takes up the question of translatability in a multilingual, multicultural site like India. He argues that ‘all human expressions are putting a language in order, and finding ways to translate it by changing the order’ (p. 26). He discusses the many ways a translator might change this order, developing a conduit with the reader, thus tackling the issue of untranslatability. Rahman emphatically points towards the ‘fluidity and fantasy of experience and expression’ (p. 44) both in an original and a translation enabling subsequent/multiple versions of a text facilitating the growth of literary traditions. He takes this idea further in the next chapter, ‘Translation as Dialogue’ and investigates how writing and translating is a dialogic and collaborative process.
In a translation, collaboration is not just at the level of individual texts but also at the level of author, literary cultures, fellow translators and reader and even with the publisher and the market. Much might be lost and gained in this process. Rahman thus underlines the idea that ‘every text is, in a major way, an unfinished text’ (p. 55). He argues that any Indian text must be appreciated in this continuum, in view of this collaboration or dialogue with the multiplicity of languages, philosophies, cultures and sub-cultures that happens through centuries. The fourth chapter reasons that translation and discourse are similar in that both ‘unmask the word’ and are dialogic. A translator helps to situate a discourse in a community of new discourses, and sometimes problematizes and even rewrites a discourse. In chapter five, ‘Broadening the Frontier: Towards a Poetics of Painting and Architecture’, Rahman draws a parallel between translation and other arts such as painting and architecture. Taking up the idea of pattern language he argues that a translator is a writer of pattern language and demonstrates this with some interesting examples.
The second section titled ‘Paradigms’ talks about some specific translational activity and texts. In a well researched and interesting essay, ‘Translation as Empowerment’, Rahman elaborates the activities of The College of Fort William in colonial India. While the colonial power did get to extend their knowledge and grip over India through some of the translations undertaken, it is also important to note that the colonized also got empowered in more ways than one. The next essay ‘Translating Representation: The Problematic of Indian Literature’ starts with the argument that any literature is a representation, while its translation is a re-representation. This again brings forth the possibility of multiple representations at the level of the message and at the level of the medium. Rahman, before coming back to the concept of translation, broadly sketches the myriad ways of representation in Indian literature in translation from the Vedic time to the postcolonial period. The kind of texts that were translated and the method of translation often betrayed a desire to impress the West. This of course has changed in today. Rahman argues that ‘translating India has ever been (a) a historical necessity (b) a political inevitability (c) an administrative exigency and (d) a cultural imperative’ (p. 154). He posits much hope in the fact that academics and theorists are now engaged more meaningfully with the translation of Indian texts.
The last three chapters are devoted to Urdu poetry which is Anisur Rahman’s forte; he himself being a translator of Urdu poetry. The chapter ‘Translating the Urdu Ghazal: The Classical Contexts of Meer and Ghalib’ takes up the specific challenges a translator might come across in translating the ghazal since as a form it is alien to the English language. He puts forward the idea of primary translation – as the translation of ideas into words – and secondary translation as the translation into a different language. He highlights the many layered meanings and therefore the ambiguity that could surround each line, making the translation of the ghazal a real trial for the translator.
The next essay, ‘Translating Modern Urdu Poetry: Creating Canons in Translation’, first outlines the trajectory of modernism in Urdu poetry and takes up some important works in English translation for detailed discussion. He rues the fact that more engagement is required from translators of Urdu poetry so that it gains from and gives to other literary traditions and canons. The last essay in the book, ‘Translating a Form: The Possible/Impossible Ghazal in English’, Rahman explores the question of form through the specific context of the ghazal before discussing attempts by various poets at writing ghazals in English. This proves that the form is still vibrant but that it is also inevitable the ghazal in English is different. This has to be appreciated as it brings in a new order of composition and a new readership.
While the 1990s were more concerned with colonial translation as a site of encounter, it is remarkable that many writers in these volumes have tried to move away from an East-West polarity and have looked at these interactions more as engaging and even empowering activities. However, the need to recognize India as a different translational zone while apprising translational activities in India is underscored. Interestingly, the books approach the field from different angles – from the language perspective; from the focus on the idea of India; and through the lens of translation as a cultural and literary concept. All of them highlight that the plurality of India, constituted of its many languages, cultures, philosophies, and encounters with the outside world, is intrinsic to understand the translation activities here. This plurality needs to be extended to the idea of translation too. What is more important is to appreciate the context and politics of each translated text, so that each version of the translated text can contribute towards an understanding of the larger literary and cultural history. In the current political scenario surrounding authenticity about citizenship and nationalism, these books send out a very strong message.
Sanju Thomas
School of Letters, Ambedkar University Delhi
DAY AND DASTAN: Two Novellas by Intizar Husain. Translated by Nishat Zaidi and Alok Bhalla. Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2018.
GLOBALLY renowned for his famous work Basti, Intizar Husain’s prolific genius needs no introduction. His Urdu fiction is a seamless blending of labyrinthian fantastical mindscape with mundane reality. His works are being rediscovered by the present generation via translations, giving them a glimpse into the post-Partition era and idioms of the past. Memory and nostalgia are placed within the template of a slippery timeline encapsulated in a cultural context. The two novellas Day and Dastan reflect the intermeshing of spatio-temporality with the human conscious and subconscious.
The novella Day paints a microscopic picture of the sense of decay, displacement and dilapidation that was all pervasive in the post-Partition period. The crumbling feudal structure of the haveli, physically and metaphorically, ties up with the transition in the lives of the characters. The gravitas of the tone of the story, weariness of the characters and the impending sense of doomsday, is an attempt to create the anticipation of bloodshed and violence. Therefore, this tale of decaying feudalism is a manifestation of the identity crisis which migration entails. The hovering absent presence of Abba Mian and his glorious past, clashes with the new age ‘shamelessness’ of Tahsina and becomes symptomatic of the cultural displacement and negotiation between past and present in the post-Partition period.
The meandering thoughts of Zamir and his wanderings are constantly juxtaposed with the silent, deathly wait of the ladies of the house. The oppressive suffocation which engulfs the house is an extension of the crisis stemming from physical and mental displacement. The caravan-like movement of luggage from haveli to kothi, again reveals the author’s preoccupation with the idea of migration such that it redefines the cultural landscape and mindscape of his characters. The sense of nostalgia and belonging never shifts with the spatio-temporal displacement, and is exemplified by the incomplete mental transfer of the characters into the new kothi. The oppressive atmosphere which dampens the blossoming love affair and the incomplete dissociation from the narratives of the past creates a haunting sense of collapse of an ancestral past with the precarious half-hearted acceptance of the new. The domesticity of the novella Day offers the macrocosmic view of the chaos that the post-Partition world offered.
Husain’s Partition narratives preserve the traditional landscape and cultural ethos, where he treats nature and landscape as characters with their own stories to narrate. The tragedy of Partition is not just a collective memory of people and the trauma of violence and displacement. He rather treats it as a series of multiple tragedies at a political and domestic level which transform the cultural moorings of history and the geographical landscapes. The novella Dastan offers the rushed flow of multiple tragedies and a slippery timeline. The historical timeline is dotted with tragic moments of displacement and violence, Dastan takes up the moments and alters the spatio-temporal specificity. From Sher Shah Suri to Tipu Sultan and to the first war of independence, the landscape of Dastan is interspersed with moments of tragic separation and violence narrated in a fanciful manner. The distinct demarcation between reality, fiction and fantasy is dissolved in the novella however, keeping the theme of migration, violence and trauma intact.
In the story Hakim Ali takes his audience into a historical fantastical journey where the timeline, the characters and their trajectory, become secondary to the representation of the multiple tragedies and the location of human beings within it. The past and the present are intermeshed in a way that the primary theme of displacement, migration and separation is deftly etched into multi-layered interconnected storylines. The vague sense of bloodshed and violence is always present in the story, but the specific details are undermined to highlight the ever pervasive intangibility of the pain of displacement.
Intizar Husain’s preoccupation with Partition narratives reflects his indepth insight into the transformation of the cultural and social landscape. The fact that displacement and the subsequent crisis it entails, are deeply rooted in the human subconscious, is amply reflected through the wanderings of Zamir and the different characters and heroes in Dastan. The fact that the Intizar Husain’s works are being rediscovered through English translation, reflects the undying relevance of analyzing Partition in the post-Partition era.
This English translation of the two novellas by Nishat Zaidi and Alok Bhalla brilliantly capture the cultural and linguistic flavours of the original without losing the grip and tonality of the narrative. The deftness of the translation would make the reintroduction and rediscovering of Intizar Husain palatable and an enthralling experience.
Alka Lakhera
Graduate student, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi
THE TALE OF THE MISSING MAN by Manzoor Ahtesham. Translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2018 (1995).
Manzoor Ahtesham is one of the most prominent figures in the array of Hindi literature. He is the writer of modern classics such as Sukha Bargad (1986), translated in English by Kuldeep Singh as A Dying Banyan in 2005 and four other novels, several short stories and a play.
In a speech given to an audience in Delhi more than a decade ago, Ahtesham made a curious remark: ‘I do not know Hindi, Urdu or English, to the extent that I could talk meaningfully and fluently, fully convinced that I am able to reach you.’ It is an uncharacteristic admission from a writer of his stature, leaving the audience wrestling with the writer’s desire to deny his own authority. Those familiar with the works of Ahtesham can find the deep philosophical import behind this self-effacing gesture.
In The Tale of the Missing Man, Ahtesham’s desire to efface his own authority reaches a self-reflexive crescendo. In one such instance, the main character, Zamir Ahmad Khan, while waiting for his doctor, meanders into his own thoughts marvelling at the vastly improving riches of the Doctor. He wonders, ‘even the waiting room looked like a five-star hotel lobby’, but then quickly admonishes himself for making that comparison. He has been to a five-star hotel only once and cannot fathom, ‘what gave him the right to compare anything to a luxury hotel?’
Zamir’s self-reflection is not a gift, it is the bane of his life and more importantly, of those related to him. He trudges in and out of the doors of Doctor Crocodile’s clinic for ten years, only to hear the doctor’s refrain – ‘you are the picture of health.’ He lapses into the void of his thoughts that momentarily seizes him away from consciousness. His ‘illness’ has no medical cure and it defies a diagnosis, leaving Zamir to wonder if his problem is yet to be discovered by medical science. Zamir is healthy in every aspect of physiology, yet he cannot move himself to find work, much to his wife’s chagrin.
Zamir is caught between the old and the new world, the world of his father and his – between the madarsa and the English medium school. Ahtesham’s emphasis on his inability to communicate originates from the in-between space of undecidability that marks the plight of the Muslim man. It is this Muslim man at the crossroads of history that searches for a representation without being drawn either as a skullcap wearing Muslim or the one who has dropped it for modernity.
David Attwell, writing about J.M. Coetzee’s ability to mask himself in his fiction notes: ‘The desire for self-actualization is a function of needing to bear witness to one’s existence in a situation in which one is in danger of culturally disappearing… one has to remind the dominant culture that its representations are representations. Self-consciousness about language is often related to the problem of not belonging.’
In The Tale of the Missing Man, the desire for self-actualization spills over the narratological divide between the character and the author and consumes them. Zamir’s isolation in the ‘underground’ of his first floor room in search of a language to articulate the cause of his illness is mirrored in Ahtesham’s search for representational authenticity. It is therefore necessary to emphasise the importance of the translation of the title. The use of the article ‘the’ before ‘Missing Man’ points towards the uniqueness of his absence. He is not just any missing man but a man that is exceedingly lost to himself. The novel is a playful meditation on the changing landscape of the city of Bhopal, in the aftermath of the gas tragedy, juxtaposed with a more serious account of a man slowly spiralling into despair. Moving against the grain of social realism, the novel converges into the legacy of Manto and Kafka, as writer Amit Chaudhuri argues.
Translating the novel from Hindi, translators Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark acknowledge the difficulty of their task at hand, translating a writer that blurs the boundaries between Hindi and Urdu. The translation is done keeping in mind the non-South Asian reader, yet Grunebaum and Stark make a concession for the readers in Delhi by striking a fine balance between finding the closest meaning and sounding right. It is done, as they say, to not let ‘the reader in Delhi feel that they are being served tasteless flat bread instead of piping hot roti.’ The translators’ single greatest achievement is bringing forward an important Muslim voice in contemporary Hindi literature to English readers across the world and also leading those unaware of Ahtesham’s formidable presence in Indian literature to the threshold of his oeuvre.
Aishwarya Kumar
Guest teacher, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi
References:
‘Manzoor Ahtesham’, Indian Literature, vol. 51, no. 5(241), JSTOR, 2007, pp. 136-141. www.jstor.org/stable/23340370.
David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time.Penguin Viking, New York, 2015.
