The problem

Ganesh N. Devy once said to me in his characteristic aphoristic manner, ‘Because we see with eyes, we can’t see the eyes.’ The pair of eyes that become the object are not the ones that we see with. Language is like that. We live in it, and look out through the walls, windows and jarokhas to what it enables us to see. But on some days we also build new walls, and break down some old ones. In that relation of being inside the language and also intervening in it, lies something called translation. We grasp and gasp at the full range of its meanings, and because the task is daunting, we simplify our job by evacuating the concept, and processing it as an activity, and not as an act of knowledge-making. How else do we make sense of translation ‘service’ at 30 rupees a page done outside a city civil court by a lawyer-turned-notary officer and translation as a constitutive form of South Asian Buddhism or Islam? From skill to epistemology, translation is an inadequate word to carry the burden of such a range of meanings. As a concept, the English word ‘translation’ does not translate well, not if we consider it a quotidian and everyday form of negotiating life in South Asia.

Therefore, we also don’t know what to do with translators, and words like ‘yeoman service’ short change the intervention they make in archives – breaking, modifying, adding, relativizing. Philosophical traditions in the West engage with the paradox of what Derrida calls the ‘insolvent duty and debt’ of translation. In India, we need to look into the theories of language, which surprisingly say very little about translation. And one might ask if translation was so insignificant, so as to miss the sophisticated tradition put in place by Panini and Bhartrhari? Rather it inhabited the interiority of language so deeply that it did not turn into an object for the eyes? Another possibility is that the idea of a linguistic ‘other’ did not exist in the world forged and imagined through Sanskrit.

The present moment and with a building vocabulary around translation, we can undertake new queries. A productive inquiry into the practices of translation may lead us somewhere. For instance, gendered bodies that translate and the bodies in translation, consist of a complex relationship. When #Metoo campaign was written about in columns in Gujarati, the tenor was one of externalizing the phenomenon as something that happens elsewhere – Delhi, New York or in the English language. Men and women have to live with understanding instead of being petulant and saying Metoo, Metoo. The English phrase in Gujarati meant a demand, an entitlement, rather than a speaking out of an unjust situation.

Stubborn structures of power barricade a translation act from happening, and insist on investing only meanings in language convenient to hegemonic sections. The right wing interpretation of secularism is another practice of a similar kind, suggestive not of principled distance from religion or an invitation to religion. Rather a linguistic stripping of the noun into an adjective; that is a label for all those who need to be cohered in a cluster and mistranslated as outsiders. Concepts overlapping and distinct such as biradari, jaati, gotra, aukaat get blunted in the either/or of caste and class. Thus we are faced with excesses and inadequacies of language, and translation is a reminder of this ubiquitous truth.

This deep underlying condition gets muted in the specificities of a text, a language, an experience – making translation a highly empirical and confessional field. But the little stories also provide located and situated understanding of multilingualism-in-action, of the futility of thinking of languages and contexts as discrete and independent of other contexts and languages that shape them. Translation is not only a product, but a mode of ‘seeing’, and/or the lens that helps us see how forms of otherness are embodied. Words and meaning, people and places, texts and originals, songs and reproductions, caste and its textual avatars – the scope is staggering. In doing so, it makes us live with the paradox of both producing and curtailing democracy.

RITA KOTHARI