post-colonial_translation

132 Vinay Dharwadker
him, he is the Nothing without names. Yet we must not forget
that this fierce rebellion against petrification was a rebellion
only against contemporary Hindu practice; the rebellion was a
call to return to experience. Like European Protestants, the
Virasaivas returned to what they felt was the original
inspiration of the ancient traditions no different from true and
present experience.
(SS, 31–3)
Predictably enough, when Niranjana brushes aside Ramanujan’s
commentary for being complicit with Eurocentric Christian-missionary
and Utilitarian discourses on India, and offers instead her own
representations of Virasaivism and Allamaprabhu, she cannot escape
the vocabulary of ‘experience’ which, in her case, does not even claim
to translate the Sanskrit-Kannada terms anubhava and anubhava: ‘The
fragment we read belongs to Allama’s “spiritual autobiography.” It is
part of a dialogue with a saint-to-be in which Allama tries to convey a
sense of the “ultimate” experience, the experience of the “void,” or
sunya’ (ST, 178); ‘The traces left by Allama’s experience are always
already there in the conception of this kind of experience in the bhakti
or devotional tradition’ (ST, 179). Apparently Ramanujan’s account
of precisely this phenomenon using the word ‘experience’ is inadmissible
because it is supposedly part of ‘a project deconstructed so skilfully in
Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality”’ (ST, 182), whereas
Niranjan’s own interpretation, almost suspiciously intertextual with
Ramanujan’s, is somehow exempt from the same, otherwise universally
applicable criticism.
Niranjana also conceals the fact that Ramanujan adapts the
concepts of ‘quest’ from European romance narratives and of the
‘pilgrim’s progress’ from Puritan allegories in order to translate as
efficiently as possible the concept in Vira saivism of a satsthala
siddhanta, a doctrine of six phases, stages, or stations, which
constitutes ‘one of the many “contexts” of these texts’ (SS, 169). As a
matter of fact, he discusses the six-phase system in a dense,
informative appendix of six pages at the end of the book – which
Niranjana ought to have noticed, since it begins on the page facing
Ramanujan’s translation of Allama’s poem under discussion – where
he says:
The vacanas and later Virasaiva texts in Kannada and Sanskrit
speak of the mystical process as a succession of stages, a ladder