post-colonial_translation

Srikantaiah and Kannada translation 165
to take into account the dynamics and values of multilingualism in India.
For Niranjana, Western translation theory is impervious to the power
relations which drive cultural relations between unequal partners,
particularly in the case of the orientalist project. Ahmad castigates Western
scholarship for its insensitivity to the ‘civilizational complexity’ of India,
which cannot be ‘lived or thought through in terms of the centralizing
imperatives of the nation-state we have inherited from the European
bourgeoisie’ – or from the perspective of a tradition privileging only ‘High
Textuality’ (Ahmad, 1992, p. 74). He reminds us of the paradox that
English has become in some sense the only truly ‘national’ literary
language in India, all other languages relegated to ‘regional’ status (p.
78) and that English will become ‘the language in which knowledge of
Indian literature is produced’ when the fundamental nature of much of
this work is polyglot (ibid., pp. 245–52). 6
The writings of Sujit Mukherjee, Harish Trivedi and G.N. Devy, on
the other hand, focus on investigations into the actual practices and
contexts of translation in India. While they share many of the
assumptions of Niranjana and Ahmad, they attempt to expose the
ambiguity of values which emerge through cultural transactions.
Showing how translation was used by Indians to shape a response to
orientalism, Trivedi documents the cultural work of translation through
extensive studies of translations by Indian writers. These case studies
root the work of literary exchange firmly in the ‘cultural grounds’
(Trivedi, 1993, p. 63) from which it emerged. Mukherjee and Devy
show how the intents and effects of translation in India must be
understood within the long tradition of rewriting, which gives
translations the authority and legitimacy of original texts. Their studies
of authors and literary movements construct a complex architecture
of pressures and counterpressures, revealing the ways in which literary
exchanges have moved through a variety of phases, each dictated by
specific goals and readership, all the while actively nourishing the literary
potential of many of the Indian languages (Devy, 1993, pp. 117–25).
Far from being a tool exclusive to the singular goals of missionaries,
orientalist scholars and administrators, translation has served a variety
of uses, as complex and ambiguous as the cultural context from which
they emerged. 7 The study of these linguistic and cultural relations
remains, however, fragmentary. We turn now to the translational
relations between Kannada and English, a rich terrain for such
investigation.
The particular situation of the Kannada language within the Indian
mosaic is as follows. Kannada is one of the four Dravidian languages