post-colonial_translation

124 Vinay Dharwadker
translation of a single short poem by Allamaprabhu, a twelfthcentury
Virasaiva vacanakara in Kannada, which stands at the
very end of Speaking of Siva (SS, 168). She criticizes Ramanujan
for his rendering and interpretation of specific words, images,
concepts and structures, arguing that in the original they are not
what he, in the translation, misrepresents them to be. To
substantiate her assessments, Niranjana reproduces a Kannada
text in English transliteration, comments extensively on its
individual constitutive elements, and offers her own translation
of Allama’s vacana as a superior alternative to Ramanujan’s. At
the second level of critique, however, Niranjana refuses to engage
with the specifics of Ramanujan’s work and abandons any
pretence at documentation and demonstration. In effect, she
attributes to Ramanujan a ‘politics of translation’ that is at once
colonialist, orientalist, Christian, missionary, Utilitarian,
modernist, nationalist and nativist, evidently intending these not
just as individual terms of deprecation but as entire categories of
abuse. Given the seriousness of some of Niranjana’s charges – for
example, that Ramanujan’s representation of bhakti somehow
‘essentializes Hinduism’ and ‘condones communal violence’ – it is
necessary to question her method of arriving at such provocative
generalizations.
Niranjana manipulates the evidence skilfully. As the ‘original’
text of Allamaprabhu’s vacana she reproduces a modernized
Kannada version she finds in the Nandimath edition of the first
volume of the Sunyasampadane published in 1965. But for his
selection and arrangement of Allama’s poems in Speaking of Siva,
Ramanujan had used Basavaraju’s 1960 edition of Allamana
Vacana Candrike, a work different from, though related to, the
Sunyasampadane. Ramanujan mentioned the Nandimath edition
of the first volume of the Sunyasampadane, itself part of a larger
editorial project at Karnataka University, Dharwar, under ‘Further
Readings’ (SS, 12, 57), but when he actually quoted or summarized
from the Sunyasampadane, he used the Bhoosnurmath edition of
the second volume of 1968. As Ramanujan’s introductory note on
Allamaprabhu’s life and work explicitly states, he uses the
Basavaraju Candrike and the Bhoosnurmath volume of the
Sunyasampadane for his material, and not the Nandimath volume
(SS, 146, 148). 16
Niranjana conceals these elementary textual facts from her
readers. The suppressed difference between Ramanujan’s and