post-colonial_translation

130 Vinay Dharwadker
Ramanujan’s eyes, then Derrida’s cannibalizing conception of
philosophical rigour seems at once immensely reductive of the
plurality of human understandings of such complex phenomena as
language and poetry, and presumptuous and misplaced in its
monologic will-to-knowledge outside the limited disciplinary
capabilities of philosophy. If philosophers are unable to construct a
philosophically satisfactory explanation of how or why languages
manage to differ so much from each other that ‘native speakers’ of
one are unable to ‘master’ another tongue even after a lifelong effort,
then the fact that each language has definite limits, in effect, reveals
only the limits and failures of philosophical reasoning. 26
In contrast to Ramanujan’s way of thinking, post-structuralist
thought is so context-centred (despite, in the case of
deconstruction, its self-professed textualism) that it divorces
theory from practice, makes practice on the basis of such
theorizing impossible (or, for Ramanujan at least, inconceivable),
and makes theory hostile to ‘mere’ practice. In most types of poststructuralist
theory, context invades, disrupts and mangles
whatever actual practice it finds, and theory itself usurps the
place conventionally given over to practice. The theorist’s
suspicion of the ‘theoretically naive’ practitioner, possibly still
grounded in the former’s unacknowledgeable envy of the latter, is
of course very old: as Wordsworth put it, alluding to Plato, the
true opposite of poetry is not prose but philosophy. 27 But in
conversations about post-structuralism Ramanujan chose to say
simply, ‘I don’t know what to do with it’. The statement is
disarmingly simple, but it carries a peculiar weight in
Ramanujan’s thought.
RAMANUJAN’S POLITICS OF TRANSLATION
Niranjana’s insinuations about Ramanujan’s politics of translation
appear, among other places, around her accusation that he
reproduces ‘the privileging of . . . “direct” experience’ that is
characteristic of ‘European Protestantism’ (ST, 181) in order to
‘produce a post-Romantic translation of Allama’s vacana that
presents it as a “quest for the unmediated vision”’ (ST, 182). The
innuendoes also surface in her suggestion that she is someone who
will ‘initiate here a practice of translation that is speculative,
provisional, and interventionist’ (ST, 173), and because of whom ‘a
retranslation of the vacanas can show, for example, that bhakti, or