post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 137
In fact, in ‘Where mirrors are windows’, Ramanujan argued that he
‘would prefer the plural, “Indian literatures,” and would wonder if
something would remain the same if it is written in several languages,
knowing as I do that even in the same language, “a change of style is a
change of subject,” as Wallace Stevens would say’ (‘WM’, 188). He
criticized the dichotomy between the Great and Little Traditions in the
anthropology of South Asia, to which he himself had subscribed ‘for
many years, though somewhat uneasily’, rejecting it because ‘At its best,
it is a form of monism; at its worst, it is a form of cultural imperialism,
an upstairs/downstairs view of India’ (‘WM’, 189). He went on to
suggest that ‘cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural and often
conflicting but are organized through at least two principles, (a) contextsentivity
and (b) reflexivity of various sorts, both of which constantly
generate new forms out of the old ones’ (‘WM’, 189). And he was
particularly unambiguous when he stated that, in considering ‘What
we call Brahminism . . . and tribal traditions and folklore’ (‘WM’, 189),
we should include ‘Bhakti, Tantra, and other countertraditions, as well
as Buddhism, Jainism, and, for later times, Islam and Christianity . . . in
this web of intertextuality’ (‘WM’, 190). If Ramanujan repeatedly
dislodges like this the discourses of authenticity, purity and separatism
that drive the manipulative party-politics of communalism in
contemporary India, then where and how precisely does he ‘essentialize’
Hinduism or ‘condone communal violence’
Notes
1 In this chapter I have transliterated Indian-language words, including some
proper nouns, using standard diacritical notation. For Kannada, see the
notation system in A.K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (London: Penguin
Books, 1973), pp. 14–15; for Tamil, see A.K. Ramanujan, trans., The
Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 12–14; for Sanskrit and
Tamil, see G. Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. xiii–xiv.
2 An overview of the career of A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993) appears in my
‘A.K. Ramanujan: Author, translator, scholar’, World Literature Today 68
(2) (Spring 1994), 279–80. Quotations from seven of Ramanujan’s works
are cited in the text hereafter, with the abbreviations listed below.
IL A.K. Ramanujan, trans., The Interior Landscape: Love Poems
from a Classical Tamil Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1967).
SS A.K. Ramanujan, trans., Speaking of Siva (London: Penguin
Books, 1973).