post-colonial_translation

Chapter 2
Writing translation
The strange case of the Indian
English novel
G.J.V. Prasad
I
In 1982, Salman Rushdie, having shown the way to a whole generation
of Indian English writers, set down the challenges to the Indian English
writer and reiterated that ‘all of us share the view that we can’t simply
use the language the way the British did; and that it needs remaking for
our own purposes’ (Rushdie 1991: 17). He quickly answered the
(unasked) question as to why Indians should then choose to write in
English (assuming that they are creatively bilingual or that they could
choose not to write), stating that the Indians who do, write ‘in spite of
our ambiguity towards it, or because of that, perhaps because we find
in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in
the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the
influences at work upon our societies’ (ibid.). Rushdie’s interest is
particularly in the Indo-British writer who cannot reject English, who
must, in fact, embrace it. He added in a famous aside that British Indians
are ‘translated men’ and opposed the commonly held view ‘that
something gets lost in translation’, believing ‘something can also be
gained’ (ibid.). This gain is mirrored in the pollinated and enriched
language (and culture) that results from the act of translation – this act
not just of bearing across but of fertile coming together. Thus it is not
only in the case of Indo-British writers but in that of all Indian English
writers that the texts they create are ‘translated’, the very act of their
writing being one of translation.
Raja Rao recognized and articulated this fifty-four years before
Rushdie, in the foreword to his first novel, Kanthapura (1938). The
basic problem in writing in English, he says, is that ‘[O]ne has to convey
in a language not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own’ (Rao 1971: 5).