post-colonial_translation

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Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon
The Indian literatures today carry traces of their formation through
intense vectors of interaction, linguistic and cultural – from Sanskrit
and Persian, English and other Indian languages. Most Indian
languages initiated their respective literary traditions through
translations – either from Sanskrit or from other Indian languages. 2
And interaction between the pan-Indian ‘high’ literary traditions and
the regional ‘low’ forms, the reciprocal influences among epic, folktale
and other oral traditions have also stimulated the emergence of new
forms of Indian writing. 3 English literature, as well, continues to be a
strong presence on the Indian scene, in a ‘singular case’, according to
Sisir Kumar Das, of the ‘coexistence of literary systems’ in the modern
world. 4 Predictably, translation from and into English remains the
most vigorous, but also the most politically contested, area of literary
transactions in contemporary India.
It is impossible, therefore, to speak about Indian literature (or, the
Indian literatures) without taking into account the dynamics of
cultural interrelations within the various Indian languages and literary
traditions, with the former colonial power and, increasingly today,
with the literature produced by the Indian diaspora in Britain, North
America and elsewhere. These ongoing contacts and exchanges have
fostered a tradition of ‘creation through rewriting’ which is central
to the history of Indian writing practices. Does this mean, as G.N.
Devy suggests, that, unburdened by the negative Judaeo-Christian
implications of the Fall, translation carries a positive cultural,
historical and ethical charge in India 5 It is certainly true that for the
Western scholar, used to the literary monolingualism which prevails
in much of the West, the Indian situation provides a dramatic contrast.
Whereas in the European tradition, the commerce between languages
is an accessory function, becoming a part of the process of creation
only in exceptional cases (as in the great High Modernist writers
Pound, Beckett, Joyce and then Nabokov), in India this relationship
is foundational. Cases of literary bilingualism are common, rather
than exceptional. Both Srikantaiah and the poet-translator A.K.
Ramanujan (1929–1993), for instance, exemplify this polyvalence,
practising the full continuum of writing functions which include
Kannada poet, English writer and poet, scholar and translator.
These crucial interlinguistic dynamics have yet to be given sufficient
attention by theoreticians of post-colonial literary relations. Some recent
theoretical writing on translation in India has, however, begun this task.
On the one hand, there are the programmatic texts of Aijaz Ahmad and
Tejaswini Niranjana, which denounce the incapacity of Western theory