post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 131
Virasaivism, was neither monolithic nor homogeneous’ (ST, 176).
Her unambiguous implications are that the Virasaiva vacanakaras
themselves, in their Kannada texts, do not valorize a direct
experience or an unmediated vision of their chosen god; that
Ramanujan’s practice as a translator was neither exploratory nor
open-ended, and passively or perfidiously collaborated with
colonial, orientalist and other dominant representations of India;
and that he sought to represent bhakti and Virasaivism as uniform,
single-valued phenomena.
What Niranjana elides is the fact that Ramanujan consistently
uses ‘experience’ to translate two complex, frequently used quasitechnical
terms in Virasaiva discourse in premodern Kannada,
anubhava and anubhava. The former word (from which the latter
is derived) is Sanskrit in origin, is at least 2,500 years old, and
passed morphologically unaltered into most of the Indo-Aryan and
Dravidian languages around the beginning of this millennium. In
the last two centuries of constant effort at English translation, no
one has yet discovered or invented an equivalent for anubhava
other than ‘experience’, since the multiple meanings of the two
coincide to a remarkable degree. Niranjana does not remind her
readers that Ramanujan explains his sense of the Virasaiva
concepts of anubhava and anubhava at length in the Introduction
to Speaking of Siva, in the section entitled ‘The “Unmediated
Vision”’, where he self-consciously places quotation marks around
his various renderings:
[For the Virasaiva saints] all true experience of god is krpa,
grace that cannot be called, recalled, or commanded. The
vacanas distinguish anubhava ‘experience’, and anubhava ‘the
Experience’. The latter is a search for the ‘unmediated vision’
the unconditioned act, the unpredictable experience. Living in
history, time and cliché, one lives in a world of the preestablished,
through the received (sruti) and the remembered
(smrti). But the Experience when it comes, comes like a storm
to all such husks and labels . . . .
A mystical opportunist can only wait for it, be prepared to
catch It as It passes. The grace of the Lord is nothing he can
invoke or wheedle by prayer, rule, ritual, magical word or
sacrificial offering. In anubhava he needs nothing, he is
Nothing; for to be someone, or something, is to be
differentiated and separate from God. When he is one with